^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
<w
THOMAS STARR KING,
Ztys Volume
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED.
PREFACE,
The essays in tho present volume were writ-
ten at various times, and without any view to
their connected publication ; but they all more
or less illustrate one idea of the nature, growth,
and influence of character. With the exception
of those on Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Agassiz,
they were ail originally delivered as lectures or
addresses, and the style doubtless exhibits that
perpetual scepticism as to the patience of au-
diences which torments the lecturer during the
brief hour in which he attempts to hold their
attention. The first six of the essays, with the
exception of that on Intellectual Character, were
published in Harper's Magazine, between July
and November, 1857, and the paper on Agassi*
was also contributed to that periodical. As most
of the essays were written before the Rebellion,
VI PREFACE.
some of the opinions expressed in them look an-
tiquated as seen in the light of recent events.
This is particularly true of the discourse on the
American Mind, which is only now reprinted be-
cause it contains some remarks on national char*
acter that could not well be omitted.
Boston, July, 1866.
CONTENTS.
♦ ■
Pas
L Character J
II. Eccentric Character .... 35
ILL Intellectual Character ... 66
IV. Heroic Character .... 96
V. The American Mind . . .129
VI. The English Mind .... 165
VII. Thackeray 197
Vm. Nathaniel Hawthorne . . . 218
IX. Edward Everett 243
X. Thomas Starr Kino .... 258
XI. Agassiz 266
xh washington and the principles of the
Revolution . , 291
CHARACTER.
IT is impossible to cast the most superficial glanc*
over the community, without being impressed by
the predominance of associated over individual action,
and of people over persons. Few dare to announce un-
welcome truth, or even to defend enthusiastic error,
without being backed by some sect, party, association,
or clique ; and, thus sustained, the effort is in danger
of subsiding from a duty into a pleasure or passion. It
might be supposed that this companionable thinking,—
this moral or religious power owned in joint stock, —
would at least operate against egotism and the vices of
capricious individualism ; but, practically, it is apt to
result in self-admiration through mutual admiration;
to pamper personal pride without always developing a
personality to be proud of; and to raise the market
price of mediocrity by making genius and heroism
imall and cheap. Formerly, to attack a community
intrenched in laws, customs, institutions, and beliefs, re-
quired dauntless courage a soul sublimed by an idea
2 CHARACTER.
above the region of vanity and conceit; a character
resolutely facing responsibilities it clearly realized ; and
especially a penetrating vision into the spirit and heart
of the objects assailed. T'lis last characteristic is in-
sisted upon by all the authorities. " There is nothing
so terrible as activity without insight," says Goethe.
" I would open every one of Argus's hundred eyes be-
fore I used one of Briareus's hundred hands," says
Lord Bacon. " Look before you leap," says John
Smith, all over the world. But it is too much the
mistake of many hopeful people of our day to consider
organized institutions, which had their origin in the
vices or necessities of human nature, to possess no
authority over the understanding if they happen to
contradict certain abstract truisms, and a still greater
mistake to suppose that these institutions will yield to a
proclamation of opinions or a bombardment of words.
It being then evident that institutions can be success-
fully attacked only by forces kindred in nature to those
by which they were originally organized, the question
arises, What is it that really forms and reforms insti-
tutions, communicates life and movement to society,
and embodies thoughts in substantial facts? The an-
swer is, in one word, Character ; and this conducts us
at once beneath the sphere of associated and merely
mechanical contrivances into the region of personal an<7
CHARACTER. 8
vital forces. It is character which gives authority to
opinions, puts virile meaning into words, and burns its
way through impediments insurmountable to the large
in brain who are weak in heart ; for character indicates
the degree in which a man possesses creative spiritual
energy ; is the exact measure of his real ability ; is, in
Bhort, the expression, and the only expression, of the
man, — the person. His understanding and sensibility
may play with thoughts and coquet with sentiments,
and his conscience flirt with beautiful ideals of good-
ness, and this amateur trifling he may call by some fine
name or other ; but it is the centre and heart of his
being, the source whence spring living ideas and living
deeds, which ever determines his place when we esti-
mate him as a power. The great danger of the con-
servative is his temptation to surrender character and
trust in habits ; the great danger of the radical is his
temptation to discard habits without forming character.
One is liable to mental apathy, the other to mental an-
archy ; and apathy and anarchy are equally destitute
>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 <A every
foung man who has passed through that <y* rse of
INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 69
nstruction ironically styled education, " What do you
intend to be, and what do you intend to do ? Do
you purpose to play at living, or do you purpose to
live ? — to be a memory, a word-cistern, a feeble
prater on illustrious themes, one of the world's thou-
sand chatterers, or a will, a power, a man ? No
varnish and veneer of scholarship, no command of
the tricks of logic and rhetoric, can ever make you
a positive force in the world. Look around you in
the community of educated men, and see how many,
who started on their career with minds as bright and
eager, and hearts as hopeful as yours, have been
mysteriously arrested in their growth, — have lost all
the kindling sentiments which glorified their youthful
gtudies, and dwindled into complacent echoes of sur-
rounding mediocrity, — have begun, indeed, to die on
the very threshold of manhood, and stand in society
as tombs rather than temples of immortal souls. See,
too, the wide disconnection between knowledge and
life; heaps of information piled upon little heads;
everybody speaking, — few who have earned the
right to speak ; maxims enough to regenerate a uni-
verse, — a woful lack of great hearts, in which rea-
son, right, and truth, regal and militant, are fortified
Mid encamped ! Now this disposition to skulk the
Austere requirements of intellectual growth in an in
70 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER.
dolent surrender of the mind's power of self direction
must be overcome at the outset, or, in spite cf your
grand generalities, you will be at the mercy of every
bullying lie, and strike your colors to every mean
truism, and shape your life in accordance with every
low motive, which the strength of genuine wickedness
or genuine stupidity can bring to bear upon you ! "
There is no escape from slavery, or the mere pre-
tence of freedom, but in radical individual power ;
and all solid intellectual culture is simply the right
development of individuality into its true intellectual
form.
And first, at the risk of being considered meta-
physical, — though we fear no metaphysician would
indorse the charge, — let us define what we mean by
individuality; for the word is commonly made to sig-
nify some peculiarity or eccentricity, some unreason-
able twist, of mind or disposition. An individual,
then, in the sense in which we use the term, is a
causative spiritual force, whose root and being are in
eternity, but who lives, grows, and builds up his na-
ture in time. All the objects of sense and thought
all facts and ideas, all things, are external to his
essential personality. But he has, bound up in hi«
personal being, sympathies and capacities which ally
him with external objects, and enable him to trans-
INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 71
mute their inner spirit and substance into his own
personal life. The process of his growth, therefore,
is a development of power from within to assimilate
objects from without, the power increasing with every
vital exercise of it. The result of this assimilation
is character. Character is the spiritual body of the
person, and represents the individualization of vital
experience, the conversion of unconscious things into
self-conscious men. Sir Thomas Browne, in quaint
reference to the building up of our physical frame
through the food we eat. declares that we have all
been on our own trenchers ; and so, on the same
principle, our spiritual faculties can be analyzed into
impersonal facts and ideas, whose life and substance
we have converted into personal reason, imagination,
and passion. The fundamental characteristic of man
is spiritual hunger ; the universe of thought and mat-
ter is spiritual food. He feeds on Nature ; he feeds
on ideas ; he feeds, through art, science, literature,
and history, on the acts and thoughts of other minds ;
and could we take the mightiest thinker that ever
awed and controlled the world, and unravel his pow-
ers, and return their constituent particles to the mul-
titudinous objects whence they were derived, the last
probe of our analysis, after we had stripped him of
all his faculties, would touch that unquenchable fiery
72 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER.
atom of personality which had organized round itseil
such a colossal body of mind, and which, in its sim-
ple naked energy, would still be capable of rehabili"
iating itself in the powers and passions of which it
had been shorn.
It results from this doctrine of the mind's growth,
that success in all the departments of life, over which
intellect holds dominion, depends, not merely on an
or-tside knowledge of the facts and laws connected
with each department, but on the assimilation of that
knowledge into instinctive intelligence and active
power. Take the good farmer, and you will find that
ideas in him are endowed with will, and can work.
Take the good general, and you will find that the
principles of his profession are inwrought into the
substance of his nature, and act with the velocity of
instincts. Take the good judge, and in him jurispru-
dence seems impersonated, and his opinions are au-
thorities. Take the good merchant, and you will find
that commerce, in its facts and laws, seems in him
embodied, and that his sagacity appears identical with
the objects on which it is exercised. Take the great
Statesman, take Webster, and note how, by thorough-
ly individualizing his comprehensive experience, he
geems to carry a nation in his brain ; how, in all
that relates *o the matter in hand, he has in him at
INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 73
'acidly what is out of him in fact ; how between the
man and the thing there occurs that subtile free-ma'
Bonry of recognition which we call the mind's in-
tuitive glance ; and how conflicting principles and
statements, mixed and mingling in fierce confusion
and with deafening war-cries, fall into order and re-
lation and move in the direction of one inexorable
controlling idea, the moment they are grasped by
an intellect which is in the secret of their combina-
tion : —
" Confusion hears his voice, and the wild uproar stills."
Mark, too, how, in the productions of his mind, the
presence and pressure of his whole nature, in each
intellectual act, keep his opinions on the level of his
character, and stamps every weighty paragraph with
" Daniel Webster, his mark." The characteristic of
all his great speeches is, that the statements, argu-
ments, and images have what we should call a posi-
tive being of their own, — stand out as plainly to the
sight as a ledge of rocks or chain of hills, — and, like
the works of Nature herself, need no other justifica-
tion of their right to exist than the fact of their ex-
istence. We may dislike tbsir object, but we cannot
deny their solidity of organization. This power of
piving a substantial body, an undeniable external
74 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER.
shape and form, to his thoughts and perceptions, M
that the toiling mind does not so much oeei» to pass
from one sentence to another, unfolding ito leading
idea, as to make each sentence a soHd woik in a
Torres -Vedras line of fortifications, — tl?is prodigious
constructive faculty, wielded with the strength of a
huge Samson-like artificer in the materfal of mind,
and welding together the substances it may not be
able to fuse, puzzled all opponents who understood
it not, and baffled the efforts of all who understood
it well. He rarely took a position on any political
question, which did not draw down upon him a whole
battalion of adversaries, with ingenious array of ar-
gument and infinite noise of declamation ; but after
the smoke and dust and clamor of the combat were
over, the speech loomed up perfect and whole, a per-
manent thing in history or literature, while the loud
thunders of opposition had too often died away into
low mutterings, audible only to the adventurous anti
quary who gropes in the " still air " of stale " Con
gressional Debates." The rhetoric of sentences how
ever melodious, of aphorisms however pointed, of ah
6tractions however true, cannot stand in the storm of
affairs against this true rhetoric, in which thought i«
jonsubstantiated with things.
Now in men of this stamp, who have so organized
INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 75
knowledge into faculty that they have attained the
power of giving Thought the character of Fact, we
notice no distinction between power of intellect and
power of will, but an indissoluble union and fusion
of force and insight. Facts and laws are so blended
with their personal being, that we can hardly decide
whether it is thought that wills, or will that thinks.
Their actions display the intensest intelligence ; their
thoughts come from them clothed in the thews and
sinews of energetic volition. Their force, being pro-
portioned to their intelligence, never issues in that
wild and anarchical impulse, or that tough, obstinate,
narrow wilfulness, which many take to be the char-
acteristic of individualized power. They may, in fact,
exhibit no striking individual traits which stand im-
pertinently prominent, and yet from this very cause
be all the more potent and influential individualities.
Indeed, in the highest efforts of ecstatic action, when
the person is mightiest, and amazes us by the giant
leaps of his intuition, the mere peculiarities of his
personality are unseen and unfelt. This is the case
with Homer, Shakespeare, and Goethe, in poetry, —
with Plato and Bacon, in philosophy, — with Nowton,
jn science, — with Caesar, in war. Such men doubt-
k e*l had peculiarities and caprices, but they were
* «rnt and purged away " by the fire of their geniua,
79 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER.
when its action was intensest. Then their whole
natures were melted down into pure force and insight,
and the impression they leave upon the mind is the
impression of marvellous force and weight and reach
af thought.
If it be objected, that these high examples are fit-
-ted to provoke despair rather than stimulate emulation,
the answer is, that they contain, exemplify, and em-
phasize the principles, and flash subtile hints of the
processes, of all mental growth and production. How
comes it that these men's thoughts radiate from them
as a _i s, endowed not only with an illuminating, but
a penetrating and animating power ? The answer to
this is a statement of the genesis, not merely of gen-
ius, but of every form of intellectual manhood ; for
such thoughts do not leap, a la Minerva, full-grown
from the head, but are struck off in those moments
when the whole nature of the thinker is alive and
aglow with an inspiration kindled long before in re-
mote recesses of consciousness from one spark of im-
mortal lire, and unweariedly burning, burning, burning,
until it lit up the whole inert mass of surrounding
mind in flame.
To show, indeed, how little there is of the off-
hand, the haphazard, the hit-or-miss, in the charactei
tf creative thought, and how completely the gladdest
INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 77
nsjwration Li earned, let us glance at the psychologi-
cal history of one of those imperial ideas which
measure the power, test the quality, and convey the
life, of the minds that conceive them. The progress
of such an idea is from film to form. It has its
origin in an atmosphere of feeling ; for the first vital
movement of the mind is emotional, and is expressed
in a dim tendency, a feeble feeling after the object,
or the class of objects, related to the peculiar consti-
tution and latent affinities of its individual being.
This tendency gradually condenses and deepens into
a sentiment, pervading the man with a love of those
objects, — by a sweet compulsion ordering his ener-
gies in their direction, — and by slow degrees invest-
ing them, through a process of imagination, with the
attribute of beauty, and, through a process of reason,
investing the purpose with which he pursues them
with the attribute of intelligence. The object dilates
as the mind assimilates and the nature moves, so that
every step in this advance from mere emotion to
vivid insight is a building up of the faculties which
each onward mo\ jinent evokes and exercises, — sen-
timent, imagination, reason increasing their power and
enlarging their scope with each impetus that speeds
them on to their bright and beckoning goal. Then,
•Then the individual has reached his full mental stat-
78 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER.
are, and come in direct contact with the object, then,
only then, does he " pluck out the heart of its mys-
tery" in one of those lightning-like acts of thought
which we call combination, invention, discovery. There
is no luck, no accident, in all this. Nature does not
rapriciously scatter her secrets as golden gifts to lazy
pets and luxurious darlings, but imposes tasks when
she presents opportunities, and uplifts him whom sho
would inform. The apple that she drops at the feet
of Newton is but a coy invitation to follow her to
the stars.
Now this living process of developing manhood and
building up mind, while the person is on the trail of
a definite object of intelligence, is in continual dan-
ger of being devitalized into a formal process of mere
acquisition,- which, though it may make students
prodigies of memory, will be sure to leave them lit-
tle men. Their thoughts will be the attaches, not the
offspring, of their minds. They will have a bowing
acquaintance with many truths, without being admitted
to the familiarity of embracing or shaking hands with
one. If they have native stamina of animal consti-
tution, they may become men of passions and opinions,
b it they never will become men of sentiments and
ideas; they may know the truth as it is about a thing,
wd support it with acrid and wrangling dogmatism
INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 79
but they rmwr will know the truth as it is in the
thing, and support it with faith and insight. And the
moment they come into collision with a really live
man. they will find their souls inwardly wither, and
their boasted acquisitions fall away, before one glance
of his irradiating intelligence and one stroke of his
emiting will. If, on the contrary, they are gu.dei
by good or great sentiments, which are the souls of
good or great ideas, these sentiments will be sure to
organize all the capacity there is in them into posi-
tive intellectual character; but let them once divorce
love from their occupations in life, and they will find
that labor will degenerate into drudgery, and drudg-
ery will weaken the power to labor, and weakness, as
a last resort, will intrench itself in pretence and de-
ception. If they are in the learned professions, they
will become tricksters in law, quacks in medicine, for-
malists in divinity, though regular practitioners in all;
s.nd clients will be cheated, and patients will be poi-
Boned, and parishioners will be — we dare not say
what ! — though all the colleges in the universe had
showered on them their diplomas. " To be weak is
miserable " : Milton wrested that secret from Ihe Devil
Himself! — but what shall we say of those whose
Weakness has subsided from misery into complacency
and wh| feel all the morai might of their being houn
80 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER.
Iy rust and decay, with the most amiable indifference
Mid lazy content with dissolution ?
Now this weakness is a mental and moral sickness,
pointing the way to mental and moral death. It has
its source in a violation of that law which makes the
health of the mind depend on its activity being di-
rected to an object. When directed on itself, it be-
comes fitful and moody ; and moodiness generates
morbidness, and morbidness misanthropy, and misan-
thropy self-contempt, and self-contempt begins the
work of self-dissolution. Why, every sensible man
will despise himself, if he concentrates his attention
on that important personage ! The joy and confi-
dence of activity come from its being fixed and fast-
ened on things external to itself. " The human
heart," says Luther, — and we can apply the remark
as well to the human mind, — " is like a millstone in
a mill ; when you put wheat under it, it turns, and
grinds, and bruises the wheat into flour ; if you put
no wheat in, it still grinds on, but then it is itself it
grinds, and slowly wears away." Now activity for
an object, which is an activity that constantly in-
creases the power of acting, and keeps the mind glad,
fresh, vigorous, and young, has three deadly enemies
— intellectual indolence* intellectual conceit, and in
s ellectual fear. We will say a few words on the
iperation ol this triad of mali^nrnita
INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER 81
Montaigne relates, that, while once walking in the
fields, he was accosted by a beggar of Herculean
frame, who solicited alms. " Are you not ashamed
to beg ? " said the philosopher, with a frown, —
K you who are so palpably able to work ? " " O,
Bir," was the sturdy knave's drawling rejoinder, " if
you only knew how lazy I am ! " Herein is the whole
philosophy of idleness ; and we are afraid that many
a student of good natural capacity slips and slides
from thought into revery, and from re very into ap-
athy, and from apathy into incurable indisposition to
think, with as much sweet unconsciousness of degra-
dation as Montaigne's mendicant evinced ; and at last
hides from himself the fact of his imbecility of action,
Bomewhat as Sir James Herring accounted for the
fact that he could not rise early in the morning:
he could, he said, make up his mind to it, but could
not make up his body.
" He who eats with the Devil," says the proverb,
"has need of a long spoon"; and he who domesti-
cates this pleasant vice of indolence, and allows it to
nestle near his will, has need of a long head. Or-
dinary minds may well be waichful of its insidious
approaches when great ones have mourned over its
enfeebling effects ; and the subtle indolence that stole
»ver the powers of Mackintosh, and gradually im-
4* *
82 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER.
paired the productiveness even of Goethe, may well
scare intellects of less natural grasp, and imagination!
of less instinctive creativeness. Every step, indeed,
of the student's progress calls for energy and effort,
and every step is beset by some soft temptation to
abandon the task of developing power for the de-
light of following impulse. The appetites, for exam-
ple, instead of being bitted, and bridled, and trained
into passions, and sent through the intellect to quick
en, sharpen, and intensify its activity, are allowed to
take their way unmolested to their own objects of
sense, and drag the mind down to their own sensual
level. Sentiment decays, thu vision fades, faith in
principles departs, the moment that appetite rules.
On the closing doors of that " sensual stye," as over
the gate of Dante's hell, be it written : " Let those
who erter here leave hope behind."
But a more refined operation of this pestilent in-
dolence is its way of infusing into the mind the delu-
sive belief that it can attain the objects of activity
without its exercise. Under this illusion, men expect
o grow wise, as men who gamble in stocks expect
io grow rich, — by chance, and not by work. They
tivest in mediocrity in the confident hope that it
will go many hundred per cent above par ; and m
•hocking has been the inflation of the intellectual
INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 83
tt/Tiriticy oi late years, that this speculation of indo-
lence s >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
<aws and proper ways, and which seem to cast om-
inous conjecture on the sanity of their minds, cannot
blind us to the fact that it is we and not they who
are unnatural; that nature, obstructed in common men
wisted into unnatural distortions, and only now am)
then stuttering into ideas, comes out in them freely
HEROIC CHARACTER. 97
harmoniously, sublimely, all hinderances burnt away
by the hot human heart and flaming human sou]
which glow unconsumed within them. They are, in-
deed, so filled with the wine of life, so charged with
the electricity of mind, — they have, in Fletcher's fine
extravagance, "so much man thrust into them," — that
manhood must force its way out, and demonstrate if
innate grandeur and power.
This indestructible manhood, which thus makes for
itself a clear and clean path through all impediments,
is commonly called Heroism, or genius in action, —
genius that creatively clothes its ascending thoughts
in tough thews and sinews, uplifts character to the
level of ideas, and impassionates soaring imagination
into settled purpose. The hero, therefore, with his
intelligence all condensed into will, — compelled to
think in deeds, and find his language in events, —
his creative energy spending itself, not in making ep-
ics, but in making history, — and who thus brings
his own fiery nature into immediate, invigorating
contact with the nature of others, without the medi-
ation of the mist of words, — is, of course, the object
both of heartier love and of fiercer hatred than those
men of genius whose threatening thought is removed
to the safe ideal distance of Art. The mean-minded,
the little-hearted, and the pusillanimous of soul io
5 •
98 HEROIC CHARACTER
Btinctively recognize him as their personal enemy j
are scared and cowed by the swift sweep of his dar«
' ^g will, and wither inwardly as they feel the ominous
glance of his accusing eyes ; and they accordingly
intrench themselves and their kind in economic max-
ims and small bits of detraction, in sneers, suspicions,
cavils, scandals, in all the defences by which malice
and stupidity shut out from themselves, and strive to
shut out from others, the light that streams from a
great and emancipating nature. We must clear away
all this brushwood and undergrowth before the hero
can be seen in his full proportions ; and this will
compel us to sacrifice remorselessly to him that type
of human character which goes under the name of
the Sneak.
The fundamental peculiarity of this antithesis and
antagonist of the hero is his tendency to skulk and
evade the requirements of every generous, kindling,
and exalting sentiment which the human heart con-
tains. He has, to be sure, a feeble glimmer of
thought, a hesitating movement of conscience, a sick
ly perception that he exists as a soul, and his claim
to be considered a man must therefore be reluctantly
admitted ; but his soul is so puny, so famine- wasted
by fasting from the soul's appropriate diet, that he
knows of its existence only as an invalid knows of
HEROIC CHARACTER. 99
»he eristen^e of his stomach, — by its qualms. This
»oul, however, is still essentially the soul of a sneak,
and its chief office appears to be to give malignity to
his littleness, by weakly urging him to hate all who
have more. This rancor of his has an inexpressible
felicity of meanness, which analysis toils after in vain.
His patriotism, his morality, his religion, his philan-
thropy, if he pretend to have any of these fine things,
are all infected with it, lose their nature in its pres-
ence, and dwindle into petty tributaries of its snarling
venom and spleen. It is compounded of envy, fear,
folly, obstinacy, malice, — all of them bad qualities.
but so modified in him by the extreme limitation of
his conceptions and the utter poltroonery of his char
acter, that we may well hesitate to call them bad.
He is, indeed, too small a creature to reach even tha
elevation of vice; and.no general term designating j>
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
|n<l retired. The treaty was signed the next day.
But perhaps the grandest example in modern hi*
HEROIC CHARACTER. 109
tory of that audacity which combines all the physical,
tivie, and mental elements of courage is found in
Napoleon's return from Elba, and triumphant pro-
gress to Paris. The world then beheld the whole
organization of a monarchy melt away like a piece
of frost-work in the sun, before a person and a name.
Every incident in that march is an epical stroke.
He throws himself unhesitatingly on the Napoleon
in every man and mass of men he meets, and Napo-
leonism instinctively recognizes and obeys its master.
On approaching the regiment at Grenoble, the officers
in command gave the order to fire. Advancing con-
fidently, within ten steps of the levelled muskets,
and baring his breast, he uttered the well-known
words, •' Soldiers of the Fifth Regiment, if there is
one among you who would kill his Emperor, let him
do it ! here I am ! " The whole march was worthy
such a commencement, profound as intelligence, irre-
sistible as destiny.
But the test of ascension in heroism is not found
in faculty, but in the sentiment which directs the
faculty; the love of glory, therefore, must yield the
palm in disinterestedness of sentiment to the love of
country, and the hero as a patriot take precedence
5>f 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
<wift Norman energy and solid Saxon sense the child
who had drained honesty, intelligence, and imperious
pride from her own arrogant breast. It thus requires
t greai people to bear a brood of great men ; for
great men require strong incitements ; a field for ac-
tion ; courage, power, glory, and virtue around as
well as within tnem ; and if powerful natures do not
itart naturally up, to meet any terrible emergency of
a nation's life, we may be sure that the National
Mind has become weak and corrupt, has " lost the
breed of noble bloods," and that external enemies,
like empirics dealing with consumptive patients, only
accelerate a death already doomed by interioi de-
lay.
Thus, when we would comprehend in one inclusive
term the intellect and individuality of Greece, or
Rome, or England, we speak of the Greek, or Ro-
man, or English mind. A national mind implies a
aatiou, not a mere aggregation of individuals oi
THE AMERICAN MIND. 131
itates ; and we propose now to consider the question,
Whether or not there is such a thing as an Amer-
ican Mind ; and if so, what are its characteristics
and tendencies; what is the inspiration, and what
the direction it gives to the individual man in
America?
In treating this subject, it is important that we
avoid all that blatant and bragging tone in which
American conceit thinly veils its self-distrust ; that
a deaf ear be presented to the exulting dissonance
of the American chanticleer ; that the Pilgrim Fathers
be disturbed as little as possible in their well-earned
graves ; and that the different parts of the discourse
be not found, like the compositions of certain em-
inent musicians, to be but symphonious variations
on the one tune of " Yankee Doodle," or " Hail
Columbia."
And, first, in view of the varieties of races and in-
terests included under our government, can we assert
the existence of an American Mind ? We certainly
cannot do this in the sense in which we say there
was a Greek mind, whose birth, growth, maturity, and
decay we can take in at one grasp of generalization ;
or in the sense in whicn we say there is an English
mind, full-grown and thoroughly organized in man-
Mrs, institutions, and literature. All *.hat we can a»
132 THE AMERICAN MIND.
iert is, that the thoughts, acts, and characteis of
Plvmouth Puritan and Virginia Cavalier, through
two centuries of active existence, have been fused
into a mass of national thought, character, and life ;
and that this national life has sufficient energy and
pliancy to assimilate the foreign natures incessantly
pouring into it, and to grow, through this process of
assimilation, into a comprehensive national mind. At
present we can discern little more than tendencies,
and the clash and conflict of the various elements ;
but the strongest force — the force to which the oth-
er elements gravitate, and by which they will all
eventually be absorbed — is the Saxon-English ele-
ment in its modified American form. The Celt, the
German, the Englishman, the Dane, can exist here
only by parting with his national individuality; for
he is placed in a current of influences which inevi-
tably melts him down into the mass of American life.
But, while this absorption changes his character, it
modifies also the character of the absorbing force ;
for the American Mind, with every infusion of for-
eign mind, adds to its being an element which does
not lie as a mere novelty on its surface, but pene-
trates into its flexible and fluid substance, mixes with
its vital blood, and enriches or impoverishes, elevate*
»r depraves, its inmost nature ; and so organic in it*
THE AMERICAN MIND. 133
lhaiacter is this seeming abstraction jf a nation, that,
for every such infusion of a foreign element, each
citizen is either injured or benefited, and finds that
he acts and thinks the better or the worse for it
The balm or the poison steals mysteriously into him
from all surrounding circumstances : from the press,
from politics, from trade, from social communion, from
the very air he breathes, come the currents of a new
life to warm or to chill, to invigorate or deaden, his
individual heart and brain. This fact goes under the
name of a change in public sentiment; and have we
not often witnessed its miracles of apostasy or con-
version wrought on men whose characters we fondly
thought fixed as fate ?
The American Mind thus promises to be a com-
posite mind, — composite in the sense of assimilation,
not of mere aggregation. Its two original elements
were the Englishman who came here to found, repair,
or increase his estate, and the Englishman who was
driven here by political and ecclesiastical oppression.
Of these, the stronger of the two is undoubtedly
the latter; and the last probe of historical and criti-
cal analysis touches him at the nation's centre and
heart. This Puritan Englishman was all character :
strong in the energy, courage, practical skill and
liard persistency of character : with a characteristic
134 THE AMERICAN MIND.
religion, morality, and temper of mind ; at once the
most forcible and the most exclusive man that the
seventeenth century produced. Yet from this bigoted,
austere, iron-willed, resisting, and persisting Saxon
religionist — intolerant of other natures, from the very
solidity and lowering might of his own — has sprung
the flexible, assimilative, compromising, all-accom
plished Yankee, who is neither Puritan nor Cavalier,
Englishman, Irishman, Frenchman, nor German, but
seems to have a touch of them all, and is ready to
receive and absorb them all. A Protean personage,
he can accommodate himself to any circumstances, to
all forms of society, government, and religion. He
is the staid, sensible farmer, merchant, or mechanic
of New England, with his restlessness subdued into
inveterate industry and power of rigid application ;
but he is also Sam Slick in the Provinces, and Nim-
rod Wildfire in Kentucky, and Jefferson Brick on
the frontier. Through all disguises, and in every
clime visited by sin and trade, peep the shrewd
twinkle of his knowing eyes and the multiform move-
ments of his cunning lingers ! Let him drop down
in Siberia or Japan, in England or Italy, in a South
era plantation or "Western settlement, and he seems
to say, " Gentlemen, behold the smartest man in all
creation ! one who will put your brain into his head
THE AMERICAN MIND. 135
get at your secret, and beat you in the art of being
yourselves ; so please fall into rank, deliver up your
purses, acknowledge your born lord and king ! "
We have not time to discuss here the question,
how a national mind, which is distinguished above
all others for mental hospitality and general availa-
bleness, had its root in a Puritanism as unaccommo-
dating as it was powerful. It is, perhaps, sufficient
to say, in explanation, that the Puritan, narrow and
isolated as he seems, had one side of his nature wide
open to liberal influences. His religious creed, it
is true, was authoritative ; he submitted to it him-
self, he enforced it upon others ; but in political
speculation he was audaciously independent. In the
art and science of government he had no European
equal either among statesmen or philosophers, and his
politics, constantly connected as they were with his
industrial enterprise, eventually undermined his des-
potic theology. But our business here is with the
American Mind as it now is, and as it promises to
be hereafter. This mind we must consider as having
its expression in the nation's life ; and certainly the
first survey of it reveals a confusion of qualities
which apparently elude analysis and defy geueraliz-
Htion. This confusion results, as in the individual
Hind, from the variety of unassimilated element* in
136 THE AMERICAN MIND.
contact or collision with the national personality ; and
accordingly its harmony is disturbed by a mob of
noisy opinions, which never have, and some of which,
we trust, never will, become living ideas and active
forces. The consequence of this juxtaposition of
mental organization with mental anarchy, in a na
tional mind hospitable to everything, and now onh
visible to us in its fierce, swift, devouring growth, if.
a lack of solidity, depth, and tenacity in comparison
with its nimbleness, and a disposition to combine »
superficial enthusiasm for theories with a shrewd hold
upon things throughout the broad field of its restless,
curious, inventive, appropriative, scheming, plausible,
glorious, and vainglorious activity. But the two
grand leading characteristics of its essential nature
are energy and impressibility, — an impressibility all
alive to the most various objects, and receptive of
elements conflicting with each other, and a primitive,
inherent energy, too quick, fiery, and buoyant to be
submerged by the wealth of life which its impressi-
bility pours into it ; an energy which whelms in its
stream all slower and feebler natures with which it
comes in contact, and rushes onward with the force
of fate and the intelligence of direction.
In estimating the quantity and quality of this men-
tal energy, we must ascertain the different channel*
THE AMERICAN MIND. 137
if work and production into which it is poured.
Work of some kind is the measure of its power and
the test of its quality ; but we must avoid the fallacy
of supposing that art and literature are the only ex-
pressions of a nation's intellect. It would, indeed, be
a grotesque libel on some ten millions of educated
people to declare that American literature represented
more than a fraction of American intelligence. That
intelligence has received a practical direction, and is
expressed, not in Iliads and .ZEneids, not in Principias
and Cartoons, but in commerce, in manufactures, in the
liberal professions, in the mechanic arts, in the arts of
government and legislation, in all those fields of labor
where man grapples directly with nature, or with so-
cial problems which perplex his practical activity.
To describe the miracles which American energy has
wrought in these departments would be to invade a
domain sacred to caucus speeches and all kinds of
Btarred-and-striped bravado, and perhaps they speak
for themselves with far more emphasis than orators
can speak for them, having hieroglyphed, as Carlyle
would say, " America, her mark," over a whole con-
tinent but it is not generally admitted that mind
— analytical, assimilative, constructive, creative mtad
— is as much implied in these practical directions of
btellijrence as in abstract sciance and the fine art*
138 THE AMERICAN MIND.
so that, if a sudden upward ideal turn were given tc
the national sentiment, the intellectual energy which
would leave contriving railroads, calculating markets,
and creating capital, and rush into epics, lyrics, and
pastorals, would make Wall Street stare and totter,
and our present generation of poets strangle them-
selves with their own lines. Indeed, observation,
reason, and imagination are powers which do not lose
their nature in their application to widely different
objects. Thus Sir William Hamilton, the acutest
analyst of Aristotle's mental processes, declares that
abstruse and seemingly juiceless metaphysician to
have had as great an imagination as Homer ; and
though we are prone to associate imagination with
some elevation of sentiment, Shakespeare has given
more of it to Iago, and Goethe has given more of it
to Mephistopheles, than Nature gave to Bishop Heber,
the purest of England's minor poets. Applying this
principle to business, we shall find much to disturb
the self-content of second-rate litterateurs and savans,
who are accustomed to congratulate themselves that,
if others have the money, they at least have the brains,
if we should sharply scrutinize the mental processes
of a first-rate merchant. Is it observation you de-
mand ? Behold with what keen accuracy he perceives
and discriminates facts. Is it understanding ? Lock
THE AMERICAN MIND. 139
ftt the long trains of reasoning, — the conclusion of
each argument forming the premise of the next, — •
by which he moves, step by step, to an induction on
whose soundness he risks character and fortune. Is
it will ? Mark him when a financial hurricane sweeps
over the money-market, and observe how firm is his
grasp of principles, and how intelligently his cold eye
surveys che future, while croakers all around him are
selling and sacrificing their property in paroxysms of
imbecile apprehension. Is it imagination ? See how
to him, in his dingy counting-house, the past becomes
present, and the distant, near ; his mind speeding from
St. Petersburg to London, from Smyrna to Calcutta,
on wings which mock the swiftness of steamers and
telegraphs ; or, bridging over the spaces which divide
Bensible realities from ideal possibilities, see how he
blends in one consistent idea and purpose stray
thoughts and separate facts, whose hidden analogies
the eye alone of imagination could divine. Is it, in
short, general force and refinement of mind ? Behold
bow comprehensive and how cautious is his glance over
that sensitive, quivering, ever-shifting sea of commer-
cial phenomena, — so wide as to belt the globe, and
so intimately connected that a jar in any part sends
» thrill through the whole, — and note with what
lubtle certaintj of insighf he penetrates beneath the
*40 THE AMERICAN MIND.
leeming anarchy, and clutches the slippery and elu«
Bive but unvarying laws. There is, indeed, a com-
mercial genius, as well as a poetical and metaphysi-
cal genius, — the faculties the same, the sentiments
and the direction different. Wealth may be, if you
please, often insolent and unfeeling ; may scorn, aa
visionary, things more important than wealth ; but still
it is less frequently blundered into than artists and
philosophers are inclined to believe.
But though we can thus trace the same radical
mental energy in industrial as in artistical labors*
the force and durability of a nation's mind still de-
mand not only diversity in its industrial occupations,
but a diversity in the direction of the mind itself,
which shall answer to the various sentiments and ca-
pacities of the soul. It is in this comprehensive-
ness that most nations fail, their activity being nar-
rowed by the dominion of one impulse and tendency,
which leads them to the summit of some special
excellence, and then surely precipitates them into
decay and ruin. Such narrowness is the death of
mind, and national exclusiveness is national suicide.
Thus the genius and capital of Italy were dispropor-
tionately directed to the fine arts ; its wealth is now,
accordingly, too much in palaces and cathedrals, in
pictures and statues ; and its worship of beauty, and
THE AMERICAN MIND. 141
Jisdain of the practical, have resulted in an idle and
impoverished people, deficient in persistency, in en-
ergy, even in artistical creativeness, and the easy
prey of insolent French and Austrian arms and
diplomacy. Such a country cannot be made free by
introducing acres of rant on the rights of man, but
by establishing commerce, manufactures, and a living
industry. Again, the higher philosophy of Germany
has been directed too exclusively to abstract specu-
lation, altogether removed from actual life ; and the
reason is not to be sought in the assertion that the
German mind lacks solidity, but in the fact that an
arbitrary government has heretofore refused all free-
dom to German thought, unless it were exercised in
a region above the earth and beyond politics, and
there it may be the chartered libertine of chaos or
atheism. By thus denying citizenship to the thinker,
the state has made him licentious in speculation.
lie may theorize matter out of existence, Christ out
of the Scriptures, and God out of the universe
and the government nods in the very sleepiness of
toleration; but the moment he doubts the wisdom 01
some brazen and nonsensical lie embodied in a law,
or whispers aught against the meanest official under-
ling, he does it w'th the dungeon or the scaffold star-
\Dg him in the face ; and the grim headsman perhaps
142 THE AMERICAN MIND.
reminds h'm that he lives under a paternal govern-
ment, wl dre he is free to blaspheme God, but not to
insult the House of Hapsburg. Now, as the German's
metaphysics have been vitiated by his lack of politi-
cal rights, and as the Italian's exclusive devotion to
art has extinguished even the energy by which art
is produced, so there is danger that our extreme
practical and political turn will vulgarize and debase
our national mind to that low point where the ener-
gy and the motive to industrial production are lost.
There can be no reasonable fear that the beautiful
in art or the transcendental in thought will over-
whelm our faculty of making bargains ; but there ia
danger that the nation's worship of labors whose
worth is measured by money will give a sordid char-
acter to its mightiest exertions of power, eliminate
heroism from its motives, destroy all taste for lofty
Speculation and all love for ideal beauty, and inflame
individuals with a devouring self-seeking, corrupting
the very core of the national life. The safety of the
American from this gulf of selfishness and avarice is
to be looked for, partly in the prodigious moral,
mental, and benevolent agencies he has established
nil around him, and partly in that not unamiable
ranity by which he is impelled, not only to make
money, but to do something great or "smart" in hit
>\ay of making it
THE AMERICAN MIND. 143
This living and restless mass of being which forma
the organic body of American life, — decent, orderly,
respectable, intelligent, and productive, — with Eco-
nomics as the watchword of its onward movement, has,
from the intensity of its practical direction, roused
the diseased opposition of two classes on the vanish-
ing extremes of its solid substance ; namely, a class
of violent reformers who scorn economics on the
ground of morality, and a class of violent radicals
who scorn economics on the ground of glory ; and
these are in irreconcilable enmity with each other, as
well as in distempered antagonism to the nation.
The first class, commonly passing under the name of
" Come-outers," have almost carried the principle of
free-will and personal responsibility to the extent of
converting themselves from individuals into individu-
alisms, and they brand every man who consents to
stay in a wicked community like ours as a partici-
pant in the guilt and profits of its sins. The Come-
outer, when he thoroughly comes out, protests against
the whole life of society, condemning, from certain
abstract propositions, all its concrete laws, customs,
morality, and religion, and strives to separate himself
rrom the national mind, and live morally and men-
tally apart from it. But this last is a hopeless effort.
To the community he is vitally bound, and he can
1 44 THE AMERICAN MIND.
no more escape from it than he can escape from the
grasp of the earth's attraction should he leap into the
air for the purpose of establishing himself away off
in space. The earth would say to him, as she
hauled him back, " If you dislike my forests, fell them ;
if my mountains trouble you, blast through them ; plant
in me what you will, and, climate permitting, it shall
grow ; but as for your leaving me, and speeding off
into infinite space on a vagabond excursion round the
sun on your own account, that you shall not do, so
help me — gravitation ! "
It is needless to say that the Come-outer, in his
zeal for abstract morality, glories in a heroic indif-
ference to consequences, and a conscientious blindness
to the mutual relations of rights and duties. In-
trenched in some passionate proposition, he exhibits
a perfect mastery of that logic of anarchy }y which
single virtues, detached from their relations, are
pushed into fanaticism and almost take the form of
vices. Virtue consists in the harmony of virtues ;
but, divorcing moral insight from moral sentiment,
he ignores the complexity of the world's practical
affairs, and would go, in the spirit of Schiller's zealot,
" Right onward like the lightning and
The cannon-ball, opening with murderous crash.
His way to blast and ruin."
THE AMERICAN MIND. 14S
Indeed, he sometimes brings to mind the story of
that wise man who, when he desired to make a cup
of tea, could hit upon no happier contrivance for
boiling the kettle than by placing it in the kitchen
and setting his house on fire. Again, he is some-
times raised to such a height of feverish indignation
as to mistake his raptures of moral rage for prophet-
ic fury, and anticipates the stern, sure, silent march
of avenging laws with a blast that splits the brazen
throats of denunciation's hundred trumpets. In view
of the evils of the world he seems hungry for a fire
from heaven to smite and consume iniquity. His
prayer seems continually to be, " Lord, why so
Blow?" and, though this discontent may be termed by
some enthusiasts a divine impatience, it appears to be
rather an impatience with Divinity. It is the exact
opposite of that sublime repose in the purposes of
Providence expressed by the philosophical historian,
that " God moves through history as the giants of
Homer through space : he takes a step, — and agea
have rolled away ! "
Doubtless, in this class of extreme social Protest-
ants, — a class whose peculiarities we have almost
heightened to caricature, in attempting to individu-
alize its ideal, — there is much talent, much disinter-
estedness, much unflinching courage ; and, if thej
' 4
146 THE AMERICAN MIND.
would make a modest contribution of these to tho
nation's moral life, they and society would botli be
gainers ; but they are " self-withdrawn into such a won™
Erous depth " of hostile seclusion, that they are only
visible in their occasional incursions, or when they
encamp in the community during Anniversary Week.
They are not, in fact, more narrow, more ridden by
their one idea of morals, than many of our practical
men, who are ridden by their one idea of money ;
but their extravagance of phrase, almost annihilating,
as it does, the meaning of words considered as signs
of things, prevents their influencing the people they
attack ; and, after beginning with a resounding prom-
ise to reform the world, they too often end in a
desperate emulation among themselves to bear off the
palm in vehemence of execration, launched against all
those organized institutions by which society is pro-
tected from the worst consequences of its worldliness,
Belfi-hness, sensuality, and crime.
As the class of persons to which we have just re-
ferred push the principle of individualism to the ex-
tent of forswearing allegiance to the community, sc
there is another class, on the opposite extreme, who
carry the doctrine of a Providence in human affairs
lo a fatalistic conclusion, which they are pleased tc
tall Manifest Destiny ; a doctrine which baptizes rob
THE AMERICAN MIND. 147
bery and murder as providential phenomena, — what
kind and condescending patrons of Providence these
blackguards are, to be sure ! — of inherent national
tendencies ; considers national sins simply as neces-
Bary events in the nation's progress to glory ; and, by
treating every direction given to the public mind as
inevitable, is sure to inflame and pamper the worst.
This dogma — the coinage of rogues, who find it
very convenient to call man's guilt by the name of
God's providence — mostly obtains on the southern
frontier of our country, where the settlers, amidst
their forests and swamps, have a delectable view of
the land flowing with milk and honey, which destiny
manifestly intends they shall occupy, on the clearest
principles of the argumentation of rapine. It must
be admitted that this class of our fellow-sinners and
citizens, by holding up endless war and hectic glory
in the faces of our shrewd and prudent worldlings,
scare them much more than the hottest and hearti-
est invectives of the reformers. We bear, it seems,
with bland composure the charge of being robbers
and murderers, tyrants and liberticides ; but our blood
runs cold at the vision of a bomb descending into
Boston or xsew York, or the awful calamity in-
volved \n the idea of United States sixes going
telow par'
148 THE AMERICAN MIND.
Manifest Destiny is, of course, a tempestuously,
furious patriot, whose speech — ever under a high
pressure of bombast — is plentifully bedizened with
metaphors of his country's stars and stripes, and rap-
turous anticipations of the rascal's " good time com-
ing." Among other Satanic fallacies he has one,
conned out of the Devil's prayer-book, called, " Our
country, right or wrong!" a stupid fallacy at the best,
when we consider that the activity of every nation
is bounded by inexorable moral laws as by walls of
fire, to pass which is to be withered up and con-
sumed; but especially fallacious from his lips, when
we reflect that, practically, he inverts the maxim,
and really means, " Our country, wrong or right, with
a decided preference for the former." Spite of all
professions, we must doubt the fidelity of that sailor
who, in a hurricane, shows his devotion to his ship
by assisting her tendency downward ; and, on the same
principle, we may doubt Mr. Manifest Destiny's all-
for-glory, nothing-for-money patriotism.
The fallacy, indeed, of the fatalistic scheme, as
applied to nations, is the same as when applied tr
individuals ; and its doctrine of inevitable tendencies
comes from considering mind as a blind force, not a»
tn intelligent, responsible, self-directing energy. A
plastic, fluid, impressible national mind. ):ke the
THE AMERICAN MIND. I4fi
American, receives a new impulse and direction few
every grand sentiment, every great thought, every
heroic act, every honest life, contributed to it ; and
that philosophy which screams out to reasonable citi-
zens, " The tendency of the nation is toward the
edge of the bottomless pit, therefore, patriotically as-
sist the movement," is the insane climax of the non
tequitur in political logic. Why, we can shield our-
selves from such a conclusion, with no better reason-
ing than that employed by the grave-digger in Hamlet,
in discussing the question of suicide : " Here lies the
water ; here stands the man : if the man go to the
water and drown himself, it is — will he, nill he — he
goes ; but if the water come to him, and drown him,
he drowns not himself: argal, he that is not guilty
of his own death shortens not his own life." We
may be sure that no nation, which goes not to the
fire, will ever have the fire come to it. Heaven is
liberal of its blessings and benignities, but it prac-
tises a rigid economy in dispensing its smiting curses,
and lets loose its reluctant angels of calamity and
death only as they are drawn down by the impious
prayers of folly and crime !
If the too exclusive direction, of the American
tnind to industrial production has not been much
checked by the two antagonistic extremes of radical*
150 THE AMEKICAN MIND.
*sm its money-ocracy has provoked, and for whose
excesses it is to a great degree responsible, we must
look for a healthier opposition to it in the various
classes of moderate dissentients and reformers, who
are not so much disgusted with the community as to
lose all power of influencing it, and who are steadily
infusing into their own and the national character
loftier ideas and more liberalizing tastes. Our church-
es, collegiate institutions, and numerous societies es-
tablished for moral and benevolent ends, are connected
with the national mind, and at the same time are
inspired by influences apart from it ; but still, we
must admit that just in proportion as the nation's
life circulates through them is their tendency to tem-
porize with Mammon. The Church, for instance, ex-
ercises a vast and beneficent influence in spreading
moral and religious ideas ; but do we not often hear
sermons in which industrial prosperity is uncon-
sciously baptized with great pomp of sacred rhetoric ?
and prayers, in which railroads and manufactories
hold a place among Divine favors altogether different
from the estimate in which they are held above?
Do >\e, mad as we all are after riches, hear often
enough from the pulpit the spirit of those words i«
which Dean Swift, in his epitaph on the afiluent ami
piodigate Colonel Chartres, announces the small es-
THE AMERICAN MIND. 151
teem of wealth in the eyes of God, from the fact of
his thus lavishing it upon the meanest and basest of
his creatures?
Our theology is closer to the public mind, both to
act and to be acted upon, than our literature. In-
deed, if we take the representative men of those
classes whose productions, ethical, poetical, and artis-
tical, we call American literature and art, we shall
find that the national life is not so much their inspi-
ration as it is the object they would inspire. Chan-
ning and Allston, for instance, have a purified deli-
cacy and refinement of nature, a constant reference
to the universal in morals and taste, and a want of
ruddy and robust strength, indicating that they have
not risen genially out of the national mind, and be-
traying, in all their words and colors, that surround-
ing influences were hostile rather than sustaining to
their genius. Their works, accordingly, have neither
the exclusiveness nor the raciness and gusto charac-
teristic of genius which is national. The same prin-
ciple applies to our poetical literature, which worships
Beauty, but not beautiful America. If you observe
the long line of the English poets, Chaucer, Shake-
speare, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Byron, with hardly
the exceptions of Spenser and Miiton, you will find
that, however heaven-high some <-i them are in ele-
152 THE AMERICAN MIND.
ration, they all rest on the solid base of Englisfc
character; idealize, realize, or satirize English histor)
customs, or scenery, English modes of thought and
forms of society, English manners or want of manners,
English life and English men, — are full, in short,
of English blood. But our most eminent poets —
Dana, Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell — are
more or less idealists, from the necessity of their
position. Though they may represent the woods and
streams of American nature, they commonly avoid
the passions and thoughts of American human nature.
The " haunt and main region of their song " is man
rather than men ; humanity in its simple elements,
rather than complex combinations ; and their mission
»s to stand somewhat apart from the rushing stream
of American industrial life, and, assimilating new ele-
ments from other literatures, or directly from visible
nature, to pour into that stream, as rills into a river,
ihoughtfulness, and melody, and beauty. Their pro-
ductions being thus contributions to the national
mind, rather than offsprings of it, are contempla-
tive rather than lyrical, didactic lather than dra-
matic.
Perhaps the fairest and least flattering expression
of our whole national life may be found in our poli-
tics ; fo" in limited monarchies and in democracies \\
TEE AMERICAN MIND. 158
is in politics that all that there is in the public mind
of servility, stupidity, ferocity, and unreasoning pre-
judice is sure to come glaringly out ; and certainly
our politics will compare favorably with those of
Greece and Rome, of France and England, in re-
spect eithe.. to intelligence or morality. In no coun-
try is the government more narrowly watched ; in no
country do large parties, bound together by an inter-
est, more readily fall apart on a principle ; and when
we consider that, in practical politics, force and pas-
Bion, not reason and judgment, are predominant, —
that men vote with a storm of excitement hurrying
them on, — this fact indicates that the minor morali'
ties have to a great extent become instincts with th(.
people. It would be impossible to give here even a
scanty view of this political expression of our national
mind with its sectional contests, its struggles of free-
dom with slavery, its war of abstract philosophies ou
concrete interests, its impassioned moralities, and no
less impassioned immoralities ; but perhaps a few
remarks on three great statesmen, who are marked
by unmistakable local and national traits, and who
were genuine products of American life, may not be
out of placa even here. We .efer to Webster, Clay,
and Calhoun. These, though "dead, yet speak",
and we shall allude to them as if they still occupied
7*
154 THE AMERICAN MIND.
bodily that position in our politics which they in*
questionably occupy mentally. Sucb men can only die
with the movements they originated.
Of these three eminences of our politics, of late
years, Webster may be called the most comprehend
8ive statesman, Clay the most accomplished politician,
and Calhoun the nimblest and most tenacious sec-
tional partisan. Webster, on the first view, seems a
kind of Roman-Englishman, — a sort of cross between
Cincinnatus and Burke ; but, examined more closely,
he is found to be a natural elevation in the progress
of American life, a man such as New Hampshire
bore him, and such as Winthrop and Standish,
Washington and Jay, Hamilton and Madison, have
made him ; a man who drew the nutriment of char-
acter altogether from American influences ; and, es-
pecially, a man representing the iron of the national
character as distinguished from its quicksilver. The
principal wealth of New Hampshire is great men and
water-po" er ; but, instead of keeping them to herself,
she squanders them on Massachusetts, and Webster
was one of these free gifts.
If we compare Webster with Calhoun, we shall find
in both the same firm mental grasp of principles, the
game oversight of the means of popularity, and the
lame ungraceful and almost sullen self-assertion, a)
THE AMERICAN MIND. 155
periods when policy would have dictated a more fa*
eile accommodativeness. Their intellects, though both
in some degree entangled by local interests and
opinions, have inherent differences, visible at a glance.
Webster's mind has more massiveness than Calhoun's,
is richer in culture and variety of faculty, and is
gifted with a wider sweep of argumentation ; but it
is not so completely compacted with character, and
has, accordingly, less inflexible and untiring persist-
ence toward an object. Both are comparatively un-
impressible, but Webster's understanding recognizes
nnd includes facts which his imagination may refuse
to assimilate ; while Calhoun arrogantly ignores every-
thing which contradicts his favorite opinions. The
mind of Webster, weighty, solid, and capacious, looks
before and after ; by its insight reads principles in
events, by its foresight reads events in principles
and, arching gloriously over all the phenomena of a
widely complex subject of contemplation, views things,
not singly, but in their multitudinous relations ; yet
the very comprehension of his vision makes him
somewhat timid, and his moderation, accordingly, lacks
the crowning grace of moral audacity. Calhoun has
audacity, but lacks comprehensiveness.
As Webster's mind, from its enlargement of view,
bas an instinctive intellectual conscientiousness, the
J 56 THE AMERICAN MIND.
processes of his reasoning are principally indnctiv^
rising from facts to principles ; while Calhoun's are
principally deductive, descending from principles tc
facts. Now deduction is doubtless a sublime exercise
of logical genius, provided the principle be reached —
as it is reached by Webster, when he uses the pro-
cess — by induction; for it gives the mind power to
divine the future, and converts prophecy into a science.
Thus, from the deductive law of gravitation we can
predict the appearance of stellar phenomena thousands
of years hence. Edmund Burke is the greatest of
British statesmen, in virtue of his discovery and ap-
plication of deductive laws applicable to society and
government. But the mischief of Calhoun's deductive
method is, that, by nature or position, his understand-
ing is controlled by his will ; and, consequently, his
principles are often arbitrarily or capriciously chosen,
do not rise out of the nature of things, but out of
the nature of Mr. Calhoun ; and therefore it is fre-
quently true of him, what Macaulay untruly declares
of Burke, that "he chooses his position like a fanat-
ic, and defends it like a philosopher," — as it might
be said that Clay chooses his like a tactician, and de-
fends it like a fanatic.
If we carefully study the speeches of Web<ter and
Calhoun, in one of those great Congressional battle*
THE AMERICAN MIND 157
where they were fairly pitted against each other, we
ghall find that Webster's mind darts beneath the
smooth and rapid stream of his opponent's deductive
argument at a certain point, — fastens fatally on some
phrase, or fact, or admission, in which the fallacy
lurks, — and then devotes his reply to a searching
analysis and logical overthrow of that, without heed-
ing the rest. Calhoun, of course, has the ready
rejoinder that the thing demolished is twisted out of
its relations ; and then, with admirable control of hia
face, proceeds to dip into Webster's inductive argu-
ment, to extract some fact or principle which is in-
dissolubly related to what goes before and comes
after, and thus really misrepresents the reasoning he
seemingly answers. To overthrow Calhoun you have,
likt Napoleon at Wagram, only to direct a tremen-
dous blow at the centre ; to overthrow Webster,
like Napoleon at Borodino, you must rout the whole
line.
. In *he style of the two men we have, perhaps,
the best expression of their character; for style, it
has been well said, "is the measure of power, — as
the waves of the sea answer to the winds that caii
them up." Web.-ter's style varies with the moods
•f his mind, — short, crisp, biting, in sarcasm; lumi-
aous and even in statement; ligid, condensed, massive
158 THE AMERICAN MIND.
in argumentation; lofty and resounding in feeling
fierce, hot, direct, overwhelming, in passion. Cal-
houn's has the uniform vigor and clear precision of
a spoken essay.
Clay — the love of American economics, as Web-
ster was the pride — had all those captivating per
sonal qualities which attract men's admiration, at the
Bame time that they enforce their respect; and was
especially gifted with that flexibility, — that prompt,
intuitive, heart-winning grace, — which his great con-
temporaries lacked. The secret of his influence must
not be sought in his printed speeches. We never go
to them as we go to Webster's and Calhoun's for
political philosophy and vehement logic. But if
Webster as an orator was inductive, and convinced
the reason, and Calhoun deductive, and dazzled the
reason, Clay was most assuredly seductive, and car-
ried the votes. The nature of Clay, without being
deficient in force, was plastic and fluid, readily ac-
commodating itself to the moment's exigency, and
more solicitous to comprehend all the elements of
party power than all the elements of political thought.
His faculties and passions seem all to have united in
One power of personal impressiveness, and that per-
•onality once penetrated ;i whole party, hound togeth-
er discordant interests and antipathies, made itself
THE AMERICAN MIND. 159
felt as inspiration equally in Maine and Louisiana,
concentrated in itself the enthusiasm of sense for
principles, and of sensibility for men ; and these, the
qualities of a powerful political leader, who makes all
the demagogues work for him, without being himself
a demagogue, indicated his possession of something, at
least, of that
" Mystery of commanding ;
That birth-hour gift, that art-Napoleon,
Of winning, fettering, wielding, moulding, banding
The hearts of millions, till they move as one."
But the fact that Clay never reached the object
of his ambition proves that he was not a perfect
specimen of the kind of character to which he be-
longed ; and his personality, — swift, fusing, potent as
it was, — alert, compromising, supple as it was, —
still was not under thoroughly wise direction ; and a
sense of honor morbidly quick, and a resentment of
slight nervously egotistic, sometimes urged our most
accomplished politician into impolitic acts, which lev-
elled the labors of years.
Perhaps the best test even of a man's intellect is
the way he demeans himself when he is enraged;
and in this Webster was pre-eminent above all
American orators, while Calhoun was apt to lose his
balance, and become petty and passionate, and Claj
160 THE AMERICAN MIND
to exhibit a kind of glorious recklessness. Most of
the faults of Webster proceeded from his comprehen-
siveness of understanding being often unaccompanied
by a vigorous impetus from sentiment and feeling
and some of his orations are therefore unimpassioned
statements and arguments, which, however much they
may claim our assent as logicians, do not stir, and
thrill, and move us as men. Coming from but one
portion of his own nature, they touch only one portion
of the nature of others, and wield no dominion over
the will. Such was his celebrated speech on the Slav
ery question, which so many found difficult to answer
and impossible to accept. Not so was it when passion
and sentiment penetrated his understanding; for, in
Webster, passion was a fire which fused intellect and
character into one tremendous personal force, and
then burst out that resistless eloquence in which words
have the might and meaning of things, — that true
mental electricity, not seen in dazzling, zigzag flashes,
. — not heard in a grand, reverberating peal over the
head, — but in which, mingling the qualities of light
and sound, the blue bright flame startles and stings the
eye at the very moment the sharp crash pierces and
stuns the ear. No brow smitten by that holt, though the
brow of a Titan, could ever afterward lift itself above
the crowd without being marked by its enduring scar
THE AMEKICAN MIND. 161
»nd it was well that a great, and not easily moved,
nature, abundantly tried by all that frets and teases
the temper, should thus have borne within himself
Buch a terrible instrument of avenging justice, when
meanness presumed too far on the moderation of that
large intellect, when insolence goaded too sharply that
sullen fortitude !
The three great statesmen to whom we have re-
ferred, taken together, cover three all-important ele-
ments in every powerful national mind, — resistance,
persistence, and impressibility ; and each, by repre-
senting at the same time some engrossing industrial
interest, indicates that practical direction of the na
tional energies to which we have all along referred.
In this region of industry the nation has been grand-
ly creative ; and, by establishing the maxim that the
production of wealth is a matter secondary to ita
distribution, it promises to be as grandly beneficent.
But, perhaps, in the art and science of government it
has been more creative and more beneficent than in the
province of industry. The elements of order and radi-
calism it embosoms are in a healthy rather than de-
structive conflict, so that we may hope that even tha
problem of slavery will be settled without any wide-
ipread ruin and devastation. The mischief of radi«
sal ism in other countries is, that it commences ref
162 THE AMERICAN MIND.
Drmation by abjuring ]a\v; accordingly, it oppose*
political power on the principles of anarchy, and
wields it on the principles of despotism. Here the
toughest problem in the science of government has
been practically solved, by the expedient of legaliz-
ing resistance ; and thus, by providing legal inlets
and outlets for insurrection and revolution, we reap
the benefits of rebellion, and avoid its appalling evils.*
A nation which has done this can afford to bear
some taunts on its vices and defects, especially as
its sensitive vanity impels it to appropriate the truth
contained in every sarcasm under which it winces.
It now remains to ask how a national mind like
the American, with its powers generally directed by
its sentiments to commerce, industrial production, law,
and politics, — which are the most lucrative occupa-
tions, — and but relatively directed to reforms, —
which are the most unprofitable, — how it appears
when tested by those virtues which are the conditions
of a nation's durable strength? The question is not
one of particulars, because, in every social system, no
matter how far advanced in humane culture, there,
will always be individuals and small classes repre-
senting the vices of every grade of civilization which
• The crime of the Southern Rebellion specially consiited it
riolating this fundamental principle of American politics.
THE AMERICAN MIND. 163
history or tradition has recorded, from cannitals all
the way down to dandies. We have our share of
New Zealand and our share of Almacks ; but in
viewing a national mind we must fasten on the
strongest elements and the average humanity. Looked
at from this liberal point, American life would bear
comparatively well the tests of prudence, moderation,
and benevolence ; a little less confidently, those of
veracity, steadfastness, and justice ; and considerably
less those of beauty, heroism, and self-devotion.
But it is not so much in the present as in the fu-
ture that we have the grandest vision of the Amer-
ican mind. We have seen that its organic substance,
as distinguished from the unas>imilated elements in
contact or conflict with it, is solidly and productively
practical ; and as it is a sleepless energy, resisting,
persisting, and impressible, we may hope that it will
transmute into itself the best life of other national
minds, without having its individuality overwhelmed ;
that it will be strong and beautiful witli their virtues
and accomplishments, without being weak with their
vices and limitations ; and that, continually enriched
by new and various mental life, it will result in being
h. comprehensive national mind, harmoniously com-
bining characteristics caught from all nations, — so
that Greece might in it recognize beauty, and Koine
164 THE AMERICAN MIND.
will, and Germany earnestness, and Italy art, ano
France vivacity, and Ireland impulse, and England
tenacity. It is in this contemplation of America as
a conquering Mind that we should most delight, — a
mind worthy of the broad continent it is to overarch,
— a mind too sound at the core for ignorance to stu-
pefy, or avarice to harden, or lust of power to con-
sume, — a mind full in the line of the historical
progress of the race, holding wide relations with all
communities and all times, listening to every word
of cheer or warning muttered from dead or thundered
from living lips, and moving down the solemn path-
way of the ages, an image of just, intelligent, benefi-
cent Power I
tier
1
VI
THE ENGLISH MIND.
T IB hardly necessary for us to say that a nation
is not a mere aggregation of existing individu-
als, or collection of provinces and colonies, but an
organic living body of laws, institutions, manners, and
literature, whose present condition is the result of the
bIow growth of ages, and whose roots stretch far back
into the past life of the people. By a national mind
we mean the whole moral and mental life of a
nation, as embodied in its facts and latent in its
sentiments and ideas. This body of mind, the organ-
ization of centuries, exercises, in virtue of its mass,
a positive attractive force on all individual minds
within the sphere of its influence, compelling them
to be partakers of the thoughts and passions of t lie
national heart and brain, and receiving in return
their contributions of individual thoughts and passions.
Now a national mind is great according to the vitality
and vigor at the centre of its being, the fidelity with
which it re&ists whatever is foreign to its own n*»
166 THE ENGLISH MIND.
ture, and its consequent perseverance in its own
mherent laws of development. Tried by these tests,
that pyramidal organism, with John Bidl at the base
and Shakespeare at the apex, which we call the
English mind, is unexcelled, if not unequalled, in
modern times tor its sturdy force ot being, its mus-
cular strength of faculty, the variety of its directing
sentiments, and its tough hold upon existence. No
other national mind combines such vast and various
creativeness, and presents so living a synthesis of
seemingly elemental contradictions, which is at the
same time marked by such distinctness of individual
features. That imperial adjective, English, fits its
sedition as well as its servility, its radicalism as well
as its conservatism, its squalor as well as its splendor,
its vice as well "as its virtue, its morality and relig-
ion as well as its politics and government. The
unity of its nature is never lost in all the prodigious
variety of its manifestation. Prince, peasant, Cavalier,
Roundhead. Whig, Tory, poet, penny-a-liner, philan-
thropist, ruffian, — William Wilberforce in Parliament,
Richard Turpin on the York road. — all agree in
being English, all agree in a common contempt,
blatant or latent, for everything not English. Lib-
erty is English, wisdom is English, philosophy is
English, religion is English, eartli is English, air if
THE ENGLISH MIND. 167
Englisl y heaven is English, hell is English. And
this imperious dogmatism, too, has none of the uneasy
self-distrust which peeps through the vociferous brag
of corresponding American phenomena ; but, express-
ing its seated faith in egotism's most exquisite non
sequiturs, it says stoutly, with Parson Adams, " A
schoolmaster is the greatest of men, and I am the
greatest of schoolmasters " ; and, moreover, it believes
what it says. The quality is not in the tongue, but
in the character of the nation.
This solid self-confidence and pride of nationality,
this extraordinary content with the image reflected in
the mirror of self-esteem, indicates that the national
mind is not tormented by the subtle sting of abstract
opinions or the rebuking glance of unrealized ideals,
but that its reason and imagination work on the level
of its Will. The essential peculiarity, therefore, of
the English Mind is its basis in Character, and con-
sequent hold upon facts and disregard of abstractions.
Coarse, strong, massive, sturdy, practical, — organizing
its thoughts into faculties, and toughening its faccWes
into the consistency of muscle and bone, — its wh do
soul is so embodied and embrained, that it imprint*
on its most colossal mental .abors tie stern charac-
teristics of shier physical strength. It not only haa
fire, but fuel enough to feed its fire. Its thoughts
168 THE ENGLISH MIND.
are acts, its theories are institutions, its volitions are
events. It has no ideas not inherent in its own
organization, or which it has not assimilated and
absorbed into its own nature by collision or com-
munion with other national minds. It is enriched
but never overpowered by thoughts and impulses
from abroad, for whatever it receives it forces into
harmony with its own broadening processes of inte-
rior development. Thus the fiery, quick-witted, wilful
and unscrupulous Norman encamped in its domains,
and being unable to reject him, and its own stubborn
vitality refusing to succumb, it slowly and sullenly,
through long centuries, absorbed him into itself, and
blended fierce Norman pride and swift Norman intel-
ligence with its own solid substance of sense and
humor. By the same jealous and resisting, but assim-
ilative method, it gradually incorporated the principles
of Roman law into its jurisprudence, and the spirit of
Italian, Spanish, and German thought into its litera-
ture, receiving nothing, however, which it did not
modify with its own individuality, and scrawling
"England, her mark," equally on what it borrowed
and what it created.
A national mind thus rooted in character, with an
organizing genius directed by homely sentiments, and
with its sympathies fastened on palpable aims ano
THE ENGLISH MIND. 109
objects, has all the strength which comes* from ideas
invigorated but narrowed by facts. General maxims
disturb it not, for it never acts from reason alone,
or passion alone, or understanding alone ; but reason,
passion, understanding, conscience, religious sentiment,
are all welded together in its thoughts and actions,
and pure reason, or pure conscience, or pure passion,
it not only neglects, but stigmatizes. Its principles
are precedents buttressed by prejudices, and these are
obstinately asserted from force of character rather
than reasoned out by force of intellect. " Taffy,"
said swearing Lord Chancellor Thurlow to Lord
Kenyon, " you are obstinate, and give no reasons ;
now Scott is obstinate, too, but he gives reasons, —
and bad ones they are ! "
Indeed, the English mind believes what it practises,
and practises what it believes, and is rarely weakened
in its active power by perceiving a law of morality
or intelligence higher than its own practical morality
and intelligence. It meets all emergencies with expe-
dients, and gives to its reasons the emphasis of its
will. Bringing everything to the test of common
pense and fact, it is blind to the operation cf the
great laws of rectitude and retribution objective to
itself, but trusts that the same practical sagacity and
practical energy which have heretofore met real dan-
170 THE ENGLISH MIND.
gers, will meet impending dangers when they become
real. It has no forecasting science of right, but
when self-preservation depends on its doing right, the
most abstract requirements of justice will be " done
into English " in as coarse and as sensible a way as
its old hack-writers translated Juvenal and Plutarch.
In the mean time it prefers to trust
" In the good old plan,
That they should take who have the power,
That they should keep who can."
Indeed, such a complete localization of thought,
morality, and religion was never before witnessed
in a civilized nation. It is content with the rela-
tive and the realized in manners, laws, institutions,
literature, and religion ; and it disowns the jurisdic-
tion, and sulkily disregards the judgments, of absolute
truth and morality. If its imperious and all-grasping
tyranny provokes a province into just rebellion, na-
tional statesmen send national warriors to put it
down, and prayers are offered in national churches
for the victory. The history of its Indian empire —
an empire built up by the valor and crimes of Clive,
and preserved by the serene remorselessness of
Hastings's contriving intellect — is as interesting as
the " Pirate's Own Book," and exhibits the triumph
of similar principles ; but whatever is done for the
THE ENGLISH MIND. 171
national aggrandizement is not only vindicated but
baptized ; and when Edmund Burke made the most
desperate effort in the history of eloquence to induce
the highest court of the realm to apply the Higher
Law to the enormities of Hastings, he not only failed
of success, but the English mind condemns him now
for vituperating the character of " an eminent servant
of the public." There is no crime in such matters
but to fail in crime. We have heard, lately, many
edifying and sonorous sentences quoted from Engli«h
jurists about the law of God overriding the law of
man ; but it is not remembered that when an Eng-
lish jurist speaks of the law of God, he really means
that fraction of it which he thinks has become, or is
becoming, the law of England. To make a true
Englishman responsible for any maxim which is
essentially abstract, inorganic, «/iprecedented, and for-
eign to the interior working of the national mind, is
to misconceive both his meaning and his nature. No
great English humorist — that is, no man who sees
through phrases into characters — has ever blundered
Into such a mistake. The true localizing principle is
hinted by Goldsmith's braggart theologian: "When 1
Bay religion, I of course! mean the Christian religion
and when T say Christian religion, I would have you
know, «r, tnat I mean the Chjrch of England ! "
172 THE ENGLISH MIND.
Now iv 8 evident that a national mind thus proud
and practical, thus individual and insular, making, as
it does, the senses final, and almost deifying rank and
property, would naturally exhibit in its manners and
institutions a double aristocracy of blood and capital.
Hence results the most hateful of English character-
istics, — the disposition, we mean, of each order of
English society to play the sycophant to the class
above it, and the tyrant to the class below it ; though,
from the inherent vigor and independence of the
Englishman's nature, his servility is often but the
mask of his avarice or hatred. The best representa
tive of this unamiable combination of arrogance and
meanness is that full-blown Briton, or, as Parr would
have called him, that ' ; ruffian in ermine," Lord Chan-
cellor Thurlow, who could justly claim the rare dis-
tinction of being the greatest bully and the greatest
parasite of his time. But this peculiarity is com-
monly modified by nobler and sturdier qualities, and
the nation is especially felicitous in the coarse but
strong practical morality which is the life of its man-
ners. The fundamental principles of social order are
never brought into question by the average English
mind, and even its sensuality is honest and hearty,
unsophisticated by that subtile refinement of thinking
by which a Frenchman will blandly violate the tea
THE ENGLISH MIND. 11 3
commandments on philosophic principles, and with
hardly the disturbance of a single rule of etiquette.
In the domestic virtues likewise, — in those attach-
ments which cluster round a family and a home, —
the Englishman is pre-eminent. The Frenchman is
wider and more generous in his generalities, more of
a universal philanthropist ; but his joy is out of doors,
pnd he would hardly, if he could help it, dine at
home for the salvation of mankind. But political
liberty is only for those who have homes and love
them ; and though the Englishman's theories are nar-
row, they are facts, while the Frenchman's, if more
expansive, are unrealized.
The leading defect of English manners, however
\a consequent on their chief merit. Being the natural
expression of the national mind, all the harshness as
well as all the honesty of the people is sincerely ex-
pressed in them ; and they press especially hard on
the poor and the helpless. In the mode of conduct-
ing political disputes, in the ferocity and coarseness
of political and personal libels, and in the habit of
calling unpleasant objects by their most unpleasant
names, we perceive; the national contempt of all tin
decent draperies which mental refinement casts ovei
«ensual tastes and aggres.-ive passions. The literatun
of the nation strikingly exhibits this ingrained 'oarse
174 THE ENGLISH MIND.
ness at the foundation of its mind, and its greatest
poets and novelists are full of it in their delineations
of manners and character. Chaucer and Shakespeare
humorously represent it ; Ben Jonson and Fielding,
the two most exclusively English of all England's
imaginative writers, are at once its happy expounders
and bluff exponents ; and Swift, whose large Saxon
brain was rendered fouler by misanthropy, absolutely
riots in the gutter. This robust manhood, anchored
deep in strong sensations and rough passions, gives
also a peculiar pugnacity to English manners. No
man can rise there who cannot stand railing, stand
invective, stand ridicule, " stand fight." Force of
character bears remorselessly down on everything and
everybody that resists it, and no man is safe who
cannot emphasize the " me." This harshness is a sign
of lusty health and vigor, and doubtless educates men
by opposition into self-reliance ; but woe unto those
it crushes ! Thus a friend of ours once strayed, in
the early part of the present century, into the Court
of King's Bench, where Lord Ellenborough then sat
in all the insolence of office, and where Mr. Garrovv,
the great cross-examining advocate, then wantoned in
all the arrogance of witness-badgering. The first ob-
ject that arrested his attention was a middle-aged
woman, whose plump red face and full form displayed
THE ENGLISH MIND. 175
do natural pendency to disorders of the nerves, but
who was now very palpably in a violent fit of hys-
terics. Shocked at tin's exhibition, he asked a by-
stander the cause of her extraordinary emotion.
" O," was the indifferent reply, " she is a witness
whc has just been cross-examined by Mr. Garrow."
As English manners grew naturally out of English
character, so England's social and political institutions
have grown naturally out of English manners, and all
are hieroglyphics of national qualities. They express,
in somewhat grotesque forms and combinations, the
thoughts and sentiments of the ruling classes from age
to age. Springing originally out of the national heart
and brain, w r e may be sure that, however absurd and
even inhuman some of them may now appear, they
served a practical purpose, and met a national want,
at the period of their establishment ; and though the
forms in which the national life is embodied are clung
'o with a prejudice which sometimes boils into fanat-
ical fury, and though the dead body of an institution
is often fondly retained long after its spirit is de-
parted, this sullen conservative bigotry gives stability
and working power to the government amidst the
wildest storms of faction, and its evils are moderated
by a kind of reluctant reason and justice, which in
the long run gets the mastery. Thus the constitution
176 THE ENGLISH MIND.
Df the House of Commons, before the Eeform Bill of
1832, was not fitted to the altered circumstances of
the nation, and the reformers really adhered to the
principle of English popular representation in their
almost revolutionary changes in its forms ; but it
would be a great error to suppose that in the
unreformed House of Commons legislation did not
regard the interest of unrepresented constituencies, be-
cause it abstractly had the power to disregard them.
Such an impolitic exercise of political monopoly
would have reformed the representation a hundred
years ago. So was it, less than half a century ago,
with the horrible severity of the criminal law, which
made small thefts capital crimes, punishable with
death. Conservatives like Eldon and Ellenborough
opposed their repeal as vehemently as if the nationa."
safety depended on their remaining as scarecrows on
the statute books, though as judges they would no
more have executed them than they would have
committed murder. It is understood in England that
when the national mind outgrows a law, " its inactiv-
ity," in Plunket's phrase, "is its only excuse for ex-
istence," though to propose its repeal is to incur the
imputation of Jacobinism. " The wisdom of our an-
cestors," is the Englishman's reverent phrase as he
contemplates these gems from the antique ; but w«
THE ENGLISH MIND. 177
•hould do injustice both to his humanity and his
jhrewdness, did we reason deductively from them to
results, as though they were still living institutions
issuing now in ghastly facts. He keeps the withered
and ugly symbols of his old bigotries for ornament,
not for use!
Indeed, this unreasoning devotion to organic forms,
even after they have lost all organic life, is ever
accompanied by a sagacity which swiftly accommo-
dates itself to emergencies ; and the sense of the
people never shines so resplendently as in avoiding
the full logical consequences of its nonsense, — which
nonsense we shall find had commonly its origin in
sense. Thus the abject theory of the Divine Right
of Kings was a politic and convenient fiction, in the
early days of the English Reformation, to operate
against the Jesuit theory of the sovereignty of the
people, by which the Papists hoped to re-establish
Romanism ; but when Protestant kings carried the
theory out into practice, the genius of the people as
easily extemporized a divine right of regicide and
revolution. But while the original theory was politic,
either as a weapon against Romanism or faction, it
is curious to observe how eagerly it was inculcated
by the national Church as a part of religion. South,
•peaking of deadly sins, refers to ''blaspheming God,
a* i
178 THE ENGLISH MIND.
disobeying the King, and the like " ; and even th«
heavenly-minded Taylor asserts, in perhaps the great-
est of ] lis sermons, "that perfect submission to kings
is the glory of the Protestant cause " ; and this per*
feet submission, not to the constitution and the laws,
but to the king, he proceeds, with superb sophistries,
to invest with the dignity of one of those Christian
works which are the signs of Christian faith. But
the moment that James the Second laid a rough hand
on the established safeguards of the property, lives,
and religion of the nation, the whole people fell a*, ay
from him ; the Tory who preached submission as a
duty, and the Whig who claimed rebellion as a right,
were both instantly united in a defence of their com-
mon English heritage ; and a tempest of opposition
arose whose breath blew the monarch from his
throne.
And this brings us to the consideration of the con-
crete and national character of English freedom,
which, having its foundations deep in the manner*} of
the people, and having organized its ideas in pro-
tecting institutions, has withstood all assaults because
it has ever been intrenched in facts. The nhUDnal
genius embodies, incarnates, realizes all its sentimer.ts
nnd thoughts. Establishing rights by the hard pro-
cess of growth and development, it holds them witn
THE ENGLISH MIND. 179
pant's grasp. Seeing in them the grotesque reflec-
tion of its own anomalous nature, it loves them with
the rude tenderness of a lioness for her whelps. It
cares little for abstract liberty, but it will defend
its liberties to the death. It cares little for the
Rights of Man, but for the rights of English man it
will fight " till from its bones the flesh be hacked.'
It cares little for grand generabties about liberty
equality, and fraternity ; but, swearing lusty oaths, and
speaking from the level of character, it bluntly in-
forms rulers that, loving property, it will pay no
taxes which it does not itself impose, and that, being
proud, it will stand no invasion of its inherited prop-
erty of political privileges. It will allow the gov-
ernment to exercise almost tyrannical power provided
it violates no established forms of that Libert},
" whose limbs were made in England." Its attach-
ment to the externals of its darling rights has a
gruff pugnacity and mastiff-like grip, which some-
times exhibit the obstinate strength of stupidity itself,
— a quality which Sheridan happily hit off when he
obJ3cted in Parliament to a tax on mile-stones, be-
cause, he said, " they were a race who could not
meet to remonstrate." So strong is its realizing fac-
ulty, so intensely does it live in the concrete, that it
forces svery national thought Into an institution
180 THE ENGLISH MIND.
Thus it found rough rebellious qualities seated deep
in its arrogant nature, and demanding expression.
These first found vent in bloody collisions with its
rulers, but eventually battled themselves into laws by
which resistance was legalized ; and thus the homely
but vigorous imagination of the English Mind, or-
ganizing by instinct, at last succeeded in the stu-
pendous effort of consummating the wedlock of liberty
and order by organizing even insurrection, and forcing
anarchy itself to wear the fetters of form. This, we
need not say, is the greatest achievement in the art
of politics that the world has ever seen ; and Eng-
land and the United States are the only nations
which have yet been able to perform it. Any child
can prattle prettily about human rights and resistance
to tyrants ; but to tame the wild war-horses of radical
passions, and compel their hot energies to subserve
the purposes of reason, is the work of a full-grown
and experienced man.
We now come to a most delicate topic, which can
hardly be touched without offence, or avoided with-
out an oversight of the most grotesque expression of
the English Mind. The determining sentiments nf the
people are to war, industry, una general individual and
material aggrandizement, — to things human rather
than *o things divine ; but every trae Englishman,
THE ENGLiSH MIND. 181
oowever much of a practical Atheist he may be, feela
a genuine horror of infidelity, and always has a religion
to swear by, and, if need be, to fight for. He makea
it — we are speaking of the worldling — subordinate to
English laws and customs, Anglicizes it, and never
allows it to interfere with his selfish or patriotic set-
vice to his country, or with the gratification of hia
passions ; but he still believes it, and, what is more,
believes that he himself is one of its edifying expo-
nents. This gives a delicious unconscious hypocrisy
to the average national mind, which has long been
the delight and the butt of English humorists. Its
most startling representative was the old swearing,
drinking, licentious, church-and-king Cavalier, who was
little disposed, the historian tells us, to shape his life
according to the precepts of the Church, but who
was always "ready to fight knee-deep in blood for
her cathedrals and palaces, for every line of her ru-
bric, and every thread of her vestments." Two cen-
turies ;igo, Mrs. Aphra Behn described the English
squire as "going to church every Sunday morning,
to set a good example to the lower orders, and as
getting the parson drunk every Sunday night to show
lis respect for the Church." Goldsmith, in that ex
quisite sketch wherein ne records the comments made
\>y representative men uf various classes on tlw
182 THE ENGLISH MIND.
probable effects of a political measure, makes his
soldier rip out a tremendous oath as a pious prelim-
inary to the expression of his fear that the meas-
ure in question will ruin the Church. The cry
raised generally by cunning politicians, that " the
Church is in danger," is sure to stir all the ferocity,
Btupidity, and ruffianism of the nation in its support.
Religion in England is, in fact, a part of politics, and
therefore the most worldly wear its badges. Thus all
English warriors, statesmen, and judges are religious
men, but the religion is ever subordinate to the
profession or business in hand. " Mr. Whitefield,"
said Lord George Sackville, condescendingly, "you
may preach to my soldiers, provided you say nothing
against the articles of war." Mr. Prime Minister
Pitt spends six days of the week in conducting a
bloody war to defend the political, and especially the
religious institutions of England against the diabolical
designs of French Atheists and Jacobins, and on
Sunday morning fights a duel on Wimbledon Com
mon. Sometimes the forms of religion are conde-
scendingly patronized because they are accrediced
marks of respectability. Percival Stockdale tells us
that he was appointed chaplain to a man-of-war, sta-
tioned at Plymouth, but found it difficult to exercise
his functions. He at last directly requested the cap
THE ENGLISH MIND. 183
(Bin to allow him to read prayers. "Well," said
the officer, " you had better, Mr. Stockdale, begin
next Sunday, as I suppose this thing must be done
as long as Christianity is about." But perhaps the
quaintest example of this combination of business
and theology is found in that English judge, who
was condemning to death, under the old barbarous
law, a person who had forged a one-pound note.
Lord Campbell tells us that, after exhorting the
criminal to prepare for another world, he added :
"And I trust that, through the mediation and merits
of our blessed Redeemer, you may there experience
that mercy which a due regard to the credit of the
paper currency of the country forbids you to hope
for here." Indeed, nothing could more forcibly de-
monstrate how complete is the organization of the
English Mind than this interpenetration of the form
of the religious element with its most earthly aims ;
and therefore it is that the real piety of the nation,
whether ritual or evangelical, is so sturdy and active,
and passes so readily from Christian doctrines into
Christian virtues. In its best expressions it is some-
what local ; but what it loses in transcendent breadth
and elevation of sentiment it gains in practical fac-
ulty to perform every day duties.
We must have performed this anal f sis of the level
184 THE ENGLISH MIND.
English Mind with a shameful obtusenes;*, if we have
not all along indicated and implied its capacity to
produce and nurture great and strong men of action
and men of thought. It has, in truth, been singu
larly fertile in forcible individuals, whose character!
have the compound raciness of national and persona
peculiarity, and relish of the soil whence they sprung
Few of these, however cosmopolitan may have beeu
their manners, or comprehensive their reason, have
escaped the grasp of that gravitation by which the
great mother mind holds to her knee her most ca-
pricious and her most colossal children. Let us look
at this brood of giants in an ascending scale of in
tellectual precedence, fastening first on those who an
nearest the common heart and represent most exclu
sively the character of the nation's general mind
Foremost among these is Sir Edward Coke, thf
leviathan of the common law, and the sublime of
common sense, — a man who could have been pro
dnced only by the slow gestation of centuries, Eng
lish in bone and blood and brain. Stout as an oak
though capable of being yielding as a willow ; with
an intellect tough, fibrous, holding with a Titanic
clutch its enormity of acquisition ; with a disposition
hard arrogant, obstinate, just ; and with a heart ava-
ricious of wealth and power, scorning all weak an<i
THE ENGLISH MIND. 185
most amiable emotions, but clinging, in spite of its
selfish fits and starts of servility, to English laws,
customs, and liberties, with the tenacity of mingled
instinct and passion ; the man looms up before us,
rude, ungenerous, and revengeful, as when he insulted
Bacon in his abasement, and roared out " spider of
hell" to Raleigh in his unjust impeachment, yet
rarely losing that stiff, daring spirit which drafted the
immortal " Petition of Right," and that sour and sul-
len honesty which told the messenger of James I.,
who came to command him to prejudge a case in
which the king's prerogative was concerned, " when
the case happens, I shall do that which will be fit
for a judge to do." Less hard, equally brave, and
mere genial, Chief Justice Holt stands before us,
with his English force of understanding, sagacity of
insight, fidelity to facts, and fear of nothing but —
the tongue of Lady Holt ; wise, and with a slight
conceit of his wisdom ; a man who has no doubts
that laws should be executed and that rogues should
be hanged, and before the shrewd glance of whose
knowing eye sophism instantly dwindles, and all the
bubbles of fanaticism incontinently collapse. Thus he
once committed a blasphemous impostor by the name
of Atkins, who belonged to a sect, half cheats, half
Kulls, called " The Prophets " Ono of the hrother
186 THE ENGLISH MIND.
hood immediately waited on him and said authorita
lively, "I come to you, a prophet from the Lord
God, who has sent me to thee, and would have thee
grant a nolle prosequi to John Atkins, his servant,
whom thou hast sent to prison." Such a demand
might have puzzled some judges, but Holt's grim
humor and English sagacity darted at once to the
point which betrayed the falsity of the fanatic's claim.
'•Thou art a false prophet and lying knave," he
answered. "If the Lord God had sent thee, it would
have been to the Attorney-General, for He knows
that it belongeth not to the Chief Justice to grant a
nolle prosequi. But I, as Chief Justice, can grant
you a warrant to bear him company," — which, it is
unnecessary to add, he immediately did. The mas-
culine spirit of Coke and Holt is visible in all the
great English lawyers and magistrates, refined into a
graceful firmness in Hardwicke, caricatured in the
bluff, huffing, swearing imperiousness of Thurlow, and
finding in Eldon, who combined Thurlow's bigotry
with Hardwicke's courtesy, its latest representative.
In respect to the statesmen of England, we will
pass over many small, sharp, snapping minds, emi-
nent as red-tape officials and ministers of routine, f.nd
many commanding intellects and men versed in af
bi"-g, in order that we may the more emphasize the
THE ENGLISH MIND. 187
name of Chatham, who, though it was said of him
that he knew nothing perfectly but Barrow's Sermons
and Spenser's Faerie Queene, is pre-eminent among
English statesmen for the union of the intensest na-
tionality with the most thoroughgoing force of imagi-
nation «ind grandest elevation of sentiment. Feeling
the glory and the might of his country throbbing in
every pulsation of his heroic heart, he was himself
the nation individualized, could wield all its resources
cf spirit and power, and, while in office, penetrated,
animated, kindled, the whole people with his own fiery
and invincible soul. As a statesman, he neither had
comprehension of understanding nor the timidity in
action which often accompanies it ; but, a hero and
a man of genius, he was fertile in great conceptions,
destitute of all moral fear, on fire with patriotic en-
thusiasm. Possessing a clear and bright vision of
some distant and fascinating, but seemingly inaccessi-
ble object, and bearing down all opposition with a
will as full of the heat of his genius as his concep-
ton was with its light, he went crashing through all
intervening obstacles right to his mark, and then
proudly pointed to his success in justification of his
processes. In a lower sphere of action, and with a
patriotism less ideal, but still glorious with the beau-
tiful audacity and vivii' vision of genius, is that most
188 THE ENGLISH MIND.
heroic of English naval commanders, Nelson. Bear
ing in his brain an original plan of attack, and
flashing his own soul into the roughest sailor at the
guns, fleet after fleet sunk or dispersed as they came
into collision with that indomitable valor guided by
that swift, sure, far-darting mind. His heroism, how-
ever, was pervaded through and through with the
vulgarest prejudices of the common English seaman.
His three orders to his men when he took the com
mand on the opening of the French war sound like
the voice of England herself; first, "to obey orders
implicitly ; second, to consider every man their enemy
who spoke ill of the King ; and, third, to hate a
Frenchman as they did the Devil."
In ascending from men eminent in action to men
renowned in thought, we are almost overwhelmed by
the thick throng of names, illustrious in scientific
discovery and literary creation, which crowd upon
the attention. Leaving out of view the mass of
originating genius which has been drawn into the
service of the nation's applying talent, in the vast
field of its industrial labors, what a proof of the
richness, depth, strength, variety, and unity of the
English Mind is revealed in its literature alone
This bears the impress of the same nationality which
characterizes its manners and institutions, but a
THE ENGLISH MIND. 189
nationality more or less refined, ennobled, and ex-
ulted. If we observe the long line of its poets,
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Pope,
Byron, with hardly the exceptions of Spenser, Mil-
ton, and "Wordsworth, we shall find that, however
exalted, divinized, some of them may be in imagina-
tion and sentiment, and however palpable may be
the elements of thought they have assimilated directly
from visible nature or other literatures, they still all
rest on the solid base of English character, all par-
take of the tough English force,
" And of that fibre, quick and strong,
Whose throbs are love, whose thrills are song."
Though they shoot up from the level English mind
to almost starry heights, their feet are always firm
on English ground. Their ideal elevation is ever
significant of the tremendous breadth and vigor of
their actual characters. Mountain peaks that cleave
the air of another world, with heaven's most purple
glories playing on their summits, their broad founda-
tions are still immovably fixed on the earth. It is,
as the poet says of the Alps, • Earth climbing to
heaven." This reality of manhood gives body and
human interest to their loftiest ecstasies of creative
passion, for the superlative i* ever vitalized by the
positive force which urges it up, and never mimics
190 THE ENGLISH MIND.
the crazy fancy of Oriental exaggeration. When to
the impassioned imagination of Shakespeare's lover
the eyes of his mistress became "lights that do mis-
lead the Morn," we have a more than Oriental extrav-
agance ; but in the shock of sweet surprise it gives
our spirits there is no feeling of the unnatural or
the bizarre.
Observe, again, that portion of English literature
which relates to the truisms and the problems of
morality, philosophy, and religion. Now, no didactic
writing in the world is so parched and mechanical as
the English, as long as it deals dryly with gener-
alities ; but the moment a gush of thought comes
charged with the forces of character, truisms instantly
freshen into truths, and the page is all alive and
inundated with meaning. Dr. Johnson is sometimes,
with cruel irony, called '' the great English moralist,'
in which capacity he is often the most stupendously
tiresome of all moralizing word-pilers ; but Dr. John-
son, the high-churchman and Jacobite, pouring out his
mingled tide of reflection and prejudice, hating Whigs,
snarling at Milton, and saying " You lie, sir," to an
opponent, is as racy as Montaigne or Swift. Ascend-
ing higher intc the region of English philosophy, we
shall find that the peculiarity of the great English
thinker 78, that he grapples a subject, not with hit
THE ENGLISH MIND. 191
understanding alone, but with his whole nature, ex-
tends the empire of the concrete into the region of
pure speculation, and, uulike the German and French-
man, builds not on abstractions, but on conceptions
which are o'erinformed with his individual life and
experience. Hobbes and Locke, in their metaphysics,
draw their own portraits as unmistakably as Milton
and Wordsworth do theirs in their poetry. This pecu-
liarity tends to make all English thought relative, but
what it loses in universality it more than gains in
energy, in closeness to things, and in power to kin-
dle thought in all minds brought within its influence.
The exception to this statement, as far as regards
universality, is found in that puzzle of critical science,
"Nature's darling" and marvel, Shakespeare, who,
while he comprehends England, is not comprehended
by it, but stands, in some degree, not only for Eng-
lish but for modern thought ; and perhaps Bacon's ca-
pacious and beneficent intellect, whether we consider
the ethical richness of its tone or the beautiful com-
prehensiveness of its germinating maxims, can hardly
be deemed, to use his own insular image, "an island
cut off from other men's lands, but rather a conti-
nent that joins to them." Still, accepting generally
those limitations of English thought which result from
its intense vitality and nationality, we are not likelj
192 THE ENGLISH MIND.
to mourn much over its relative narrowness, if we
place it by the side of the barren amplitude, or
ample barrenness, of abstract thinking. Take, for ex-
ample, any great logician, with his mastery of logi-
cal processes, and compare him with a really great
reasoner of the wide, conceptive genius of Hooker, or
Chillingworth, or Barrow, or Burke, with his mastery
of logical premises, and, in respect to mental enlight-
enment alone, do you not suppose that the clean and
clear, but unproductive understanding of the passion-
less dialectician will quickly dwindle before the mas-
sive nature of the creative thinker ? The fabrics of
reason, indeed, require not only machinery but ma-
terials.
As a consequence of this ready interchange of re-
flective and creative reason in the instinctive opera-
tion of the English mind, its poets are philosophers,
and its philosophers are poets. The old English
drama, from its stout beginning in Marlowe's " con
fcistent mightiness " and " working words," until it
melted in the flushed, wild-eyed voluptuousness of
Fletcher's fancy, and again hardened in the sensual-
ized sense of Wycherley's satire and the diamond
glitter of Congreve's wit, is all aglow with the fire
»ml fierceness of impassioned reason. Dryden a-gue-f
(n annihilating sarcasms and radiant metaphors ; Pop*
THE ENGLISH MIND. 193
runs ethius into rhythm and epigrams. In the relig-
ious poets of the school of Herbert and Vaughan,
a curious eye is continually seen peering into the
dusky corners of insoluble problems, and metaphysic
niceties are vitally inwrought with the holy quaint-
ness of their meditations, and the wild-rose perfume
of their sentiments ; and, in the present century, the
knottiest problems of philosophy have come to us
touched and irradiated with the ethereal imaginations
of "Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge, or shot pas-
sionately out from the hot heart of Byron.
But, reluctantly leaving themes which might tempt
to wearying digressions, we wish to add a word or
two respecting the mental characteristics of four men
who are pre-eminently the glory of the English intel-
lect, — Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Newton;
and if the human mind contains more wondrous fac-
ulties than these exhibit, we know them not. The
essential quality of Chaucer is the deep, penetrating,
Dantean intensity of his single conceptions, which go
right to the heart of the objects conceived, so that
there is an absolute contact of thought and thing
vithout any interval. These conceptions, however,
he gives in succession, not in combination ; and the
supreme greatness of Shakespeare's almost celestial
strength is seen in this, that while he conceives as
9 M
194 THE ENGLISH MIND.
intensely as Chaucer, he has the further power of
combining diverse conceptions into a complex whole,
•* vital in every part," and of flashing the marvellous
combination at once upon the mind in words that
are things. Milton does not possess this poetic com
prehensiveness of conception and combination ; but
he stands before us as perhaps the grandest and
mightiest individual man in literature, — a man who
transmuted all thoughts, passions, acquisitions, and
aspirations into the indestructible substance of personal
character. Assimilating and absorbing into his own
nature the spirit of English Puritanism, he starts from
a firm and strong, though somewhat narrow base ; but,
like an inverted pyramid, he broadens as he ascends,
and soars at last into regions so exalted and so holy
that his song becomes, in his own divine words, " the
majestic image of a high and stately drama, shutting
up and intermingling her solemn scenes and acts
with a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping
symphonies ! " It would not become us here to
speak of Newton, — although, in the exhaustless cre-
ativeness of his imagination, few poets have equalled
him, — except to note the union in his colossal char-
acter of boundless inventiveness with an austere Eng-
lish constancy to the object in view. His mind, when
an the trail of discovery, was infinitely fertile in the
THE ENGLISH MIND. 195
most original and ingenious guesses, conjectures, and
hypotheses, and his life might have been barren of
scientific results had he yielded himself to their soft
fascination; but in that great, calm mind they were
tested and discarded with the same rapid ease that
marked their conception ; and the persistent Genius
pitched far beyond the outmost walls of positive
knowledge,
"Went sounding on its dim and perilous way!"
In these remarks on the English Mind, with their
insufficient analysis of incomplete examples, and the
result, it may be, of a most " scattering and unsure
observance," we have at least endeavored to follow it
as it creeps, and catch a vanishing view of it as it
Boars, without subjecting the facts of its organic life to
any misleading rhetorical exaggeration or embellish-
ment. We have attempted the description of this
transcendent star in the constellation of nationalities.
as we would describe any of those great products of
nature whose justification is found in their existence.
Yet we are painfully aware how futile is the effort
to sketch in a short essay characteristics which have
taken ten centuries of the energies of a nation to
evolve; but, speaking to those who know something
by descent and experience of the virtues and the
rices of the English blood, we may have hinted what
[96 THE ENGLISH MIND.
we could not represent. For this proud antl praeti
cal, this arrogant and insular England,
" Whose shores beat back the ocean's foamy feet,"
Is the august mother of nations destined to survive
her ; has sown, by her bigotry and rapacity, no less
than her enterprise, the seeds of empires all over
the earth ; and from the English Mind as its germ
has sprung our own somewhat heterogeneous but
rapidly organizing American Mind, worthy, as we
think, of its parentage, and intended, as we trust,
for a loftier and more comprehensive dominion; dis-
tinguished, unlike the English, by a mental hospital-
ity which eagerly receives, and a mental energy
which quickly assimilates, the blended life-sty earns of
various nationalities ; with a genius less persistent,
but more sensitive and flexible ; with a freedom less
local ; with ideas larger and more generous ; with a
past, it may be, less rich in memories, but with a
hiture more glorious in hopes.
vn.
TH A CKERAY.
rililjK death of Thackeray has elicited from the
J- prt-ss hoth of England and the United States a
Beries of warm testimonials to the genius of the
writer and the character of the man. The majority
of them bear the marks of proceeding from personal
friends or acquaintances, and the majority of them
resent with special heat the imputation that the ob-
ject of their eulogy was, in any respect, a cynic. A
shrewd suspicion arises that such agreement in select-
ing the topic of defence indicates an uneasy conscious-
ness of a similar agreement, in the reading public,
as to the justice of the charge. If this were so, we
6liould think the question was settled against the
eulogists. As the inmost individuality of a man of
genius inevitably escapes in his writings, and as the
multitude of readers judge of him by the general
impression his works have left on their minds, their
intelligent verdict in regard to his real disposition
and nature carries with it more authority than the
198 THACKERAY.
testimony of his chance companions. Acres of evi*
dence concerning the correct life and benevolent
feelings of Smollett and Wieland can blind no dis-
cerning eye to the palpate fact that sensuality and
misanthropy entered largely into the composition of
the author of "Roderick Random," and that a profound
disbelief in what commonly goes under the name of
virtue, and a delight in toying with voluptuous images,
characterized the historian of " Agathon." The world
has little to do with the outward life a man of gen-
ius privately leads, in comparison with the inward
life he universally diffuses ; and an author who con
trives to impress fair-minded readers that his mind
is tainted with cynical views of man and society, can
hardly pass as a genial lover of his race on the
Btrength of certificates that he has performed indi-
vidual acts of kindness and good-will. The question
relates to the kind of influence he exercises on those
he has never seen or known. What this influence
is, in the case of Thackeray, we by no means think
is expressed in so blunt and rough a term as "cyn-
ical," and those who use it must be aware that it
but coarsely conveys the notion they have of the
individuality of the writer they seek to characterize.
But clear perceptions often exist in persons who
lack the power, or shirk the labor, of giving exacl
THACKERAY. 199
definitions ; and among the readers of Thackeray who
quietly take in the subtile essence of his personality,
there is less disagreement in their impressions than
in their statements. To give what seems to us a fair
transcript of the general feeling respecting the writer
and the man will be the object of the present
paper.
And, first, to exclude him at once from the class
and company of the great masters of characterization,
we must speak of his obvious limitations. He is
reported to have said of himself, that he " had no
head above his eyes " ; and a man who has no head
above his eyes is not an observer after the fashion
of Shakespeare, or Cervantes, or Goethe, or Scott, or
even of Fielding. The eye observes only what the
mind, the heart, and the imagination are gifted to
see ; and sight must be reinforced by insight before
eouls can be discerned as well as manners, ideas as
well as objects, realities and relations as well as ap-
pearances and accidental connections.
But, without taking an epigram of humorous self-
depreciation as the statement of a fact, it is still
plain that Thackeray was not a philosopher or a
poet, in the sense in which a great novelist or dram-
atist possesses the qualities of either. He had no
tonception of causes and principles, no grasp of hu«
200 THACKERAY.
man nature, as distinguished from the peculiarities of
individuals, no perception of the invisible foundations
of visible things, no strictly creative power. The
world drifted before his eyes as his stories drift to
their conclusion ; and as to the meaning or purpose
or law of the phenomenon, he neither knew nor
Bought to know. This peculiar scepticism, the result
not of the exercise, but the absence, of philosophical
thought, is characteristic of the " Bohemian " view of
life ; and, among a certain class, whose ideal of wis-
dom is not so much to know as to be " knowing,"
this ignorant indifference to principles is one of
Thackeray's chief claims to distinction. His philoso-
phy is the vanity of all things, and the enjoyment
of as many as you can. His superficiality in this
respect is evident the moment we pass to some
dramatist or novelist who seizes the substance of
human nature and human life, and represents things
in their vital relations, instead of in the mechanical
juxtaposition in which they " happen " to be observed
Shakespeare's plot, for example, is a combination of
events ; Thackeray's story, a mere procession of inci-
dents. Shakespeare knew woman as well as women,
and created Cleopatra and Cordelia ; Thackeray
sharply scrutinized a certain number of women, and
fashioned Becky Sharp and Amelia. The gulf be>
THACKERAY. 201
iween tne two writers, in respect to naturalness, tc
a knowledge of human nature, and to individual
characterizations, is as wide as that which yawned
between Lazarus and Dives. They never can he
brought into the same class, without a flippant and
heedless oversight of the distinction between kind9
of genius, and of their different positions in the slid-
ing-scale of minds.
Connected with this lack of high thought and im-
agination, is a lack of great passions, and an absence
of sympathy with them in life. They are outside ot
Thackeray's world. When he touches on them, it is
with a fleer of incredulity: he has a suspicion ot
private theatricals ; he is curious to see the dressing
for the part ; he keeps a bright lookout to detect the
stage-strut in the hero's stride, and ironically encores
the impassioned declamation. In nothing does he
better succeed in taking the romance from life, than
in this oversight of the reality of great passions in
his quick penetration through all the masks of their
imitators. He is so bent on stripping the king's
robes from the limbs of the thief, that he has lost
the sense of kingly natures. His world is, to a
great extent, a world in which the grand and the
ooble are "left out in the cold," and the prominence
given to the mean md the common. He takes the
»*
202 THACKERAY.
real heart and vitality out of mankind, calls what
remains by the name of human nature, and adopts
a theory of life which makes all history impossible,
• — except the " History of Pendennis." An amusing
illustration of this defect is observable in one of his
" Roundabout Papers," written during the Confederate
Rebellion. He had travelled all over the United
States with the sharpest eye that any tourist ever
brought with him across the Atlantic ; but he saw
nothing of the essential character of the people, and
he could not for the life of him imagine, after his
return, why we went to war. While North and
South were engaged in their fierce death-grapple, he
had no perception of the ideas at stake, or the pas-
sions in operation. He took a kindly view of both
parties in the contest. " How hospitable they were,
those Southern men!" They gave him excellent
claret in New Orleans. " Find me," he says, " speak-
ing ill of such a country ! " A Southern acquaint-
ance sent him a case of Medoc, just as he was
starting for a voyage up the Mississippi. " Where
are you," he exclaims, " honest friends, who gave me
of your kindness and your cheer? May I l>e con-
siderably boiled, blown up, and snagged, if I speak
bard words of you. May claret turn sour ere I do!
This may be geniality, but it is the geniality of in
THACKEEAY. 203
3iffereni>e to great things. A uation in its death-
throes,-— one side passionately battling for the most
gigantic of shams as well as iniquities, — the land
flooded with blood, — and still the good-natured " de-
lineator of human nature" utterly unable to account
for the strange phenomena, is only sure that the
Southerners cannot be so bad and wrong as they
are represented, for did they not give him "that
excellent light claret"?
Another defect of Thackeray, and the consequence
of those we have mentioned, is the limitation of the
range of his observation and the comparative poverty
of his materials. Because he confines himself to the
delineation of actual life, he is sometimes absurdly
considered to include it, when, in fact, he only in-
cludes a portion, and that a relatively small portion.
A man may have a wide experience of the world
without knowing experimentally much of Thackeray's
world ; and those whose knowledge of the world is
chiefly confined to what they obtain from the novel-
ists of manners and society, soon learn that Thack-
eray's predecessors and Thackeray's contemporaries
contain much which Thackeray overlooks. He is
>nly one of a large number of observers, each with
a special aptitude for some particular province of
»<jtual life, each repairing certain deficiencies of the
204 THACKERAY.
others, and all combined falling short of the immense
variety of the facts. In his own domain he is a
master, but his mastery comes from his keen and
original perception of what has been frequently ob-
served before, rather than from his discovery of a
new field of observation. After generalizing the
knowledge of life and the types of character we have
obtained through his writings, we find they are not
bo much additions to our knowledge as verifications
and revivals of it. The form rather than the sub-
stance is what is new, and the superficiality of
thought underlying the whole representation is often
painfully evident. The maxims which may be de-
duced from the incidents and characters would make
but an imperfect manual of practical wisdom.
We now come, by the method of exclusion, to the
positive qualities of Thackeray, and to the direction
and scope of his powers. Gifted originally with a
joyous temperament, a vigorous understanding, a
keen sensibility, and a decided, though somewhat in-
dolent self-reliance, he appears, before he came before
the world as a writer, to have seen through most of
the ordinary forms of human pretension, and to have
bad a considerable experience of human rascality
He lost a fortune in the process of learning the
rarious vanities, follies, and artifices he afterwards
THACKERAT. 205
exposed, and thus may be considered to have fairly
earned the right to be their satirist. A man who
has been deceived by a hypocrite or cheated by a
rogue describes hypocrites and rogues from a sharper
insight, and with a keener scorn, than a man who
knows them only from the observation of their vic-
tims. Truisms brighten into truths, and hearsays into
certainties, under the touch of such an artist. As a
man's powers are determined in their direction by his
materials, — as what he has seen, known, and assim-
ilated becomes a part of his intellect and individual-
ity, — Thackeray obeyed the mere instinct of his
genius in becoming the delineator of manners and
the satirist of shams. The artificial — sometimes as
complicated with the natural, sometimes as entirely
overlaying it, sometimes as almost extinguishing it —
was the field where his powers could obtain their
appropriate exercise. They had indeed grown into
powers by the nutriment derived from it, and took
to their game as the duck takes to the water. From
the worst consequences of this perilous mental direc-
tion he was saved by his tenderness of heart, and
his love and appreciation of simple, unpretending
moral excellence, lie never hardened into misan-
thropy or soured into cynicism. Much of his repre-
tentntion of life is necessarily ungenial, for it is the
206 THACKERAY.
representation of the selfish, the dissolute, the hard
hearted, and the worthless. Those who accuse him
of cynicism for the manner in which he depicted
these must expect a toleration after the fashion of
the Regent Duke of Orleans, " who thought," says
Macaulay, " that he and his fellow-creatures were
Yahoos," but then he thought " the Yahoo was a
very agreeable sort of animal." Thackeray's stand-
ard of human nature was not high, and his peculiar
talent lay in delineating specimens of it lower than
his own standard, but the wholesome impulses of hia
heart taught him when to use the lash and the
scourge. The general impression his individuality
leaves on the mind is not that of a cynic, but of a
Bceptic. He takes the world as he finds it; usually
treats of it in a tone of good-natured banter ; is
pleased when he can praise, and often grieved when
he is compelled to censure ; touches lightly, but sure-
ly, on follies, and only kindles into wrath at obdu-
rate selfishness or malignity ; hardly thinks the world
ran be bettered ; and dismisses it as something whose
ultimate purpose it is impossible to explain. He re-
cords that portion which passes under his own mi-
croscopic vision, and leaves to others the task of
reconciling the facts with accredited theories.
In hvs earliest works the satirist is predominant
THACKERAY. 207
»ver the humorist He adopted the almost universal
policy of Englishmen who wish to attract public at-
tention, — the policy of assault. Mr. Bull can only
be roised into the admission of a writer's ability by
feeling the smart of his whip on his hide. Sydney
Smith, Macaulay, Carlyle, Kingsley, Ruskin, Thack
eray, having something to say to him, began with
Bhrieking out that he was a fool and a rogue ; and,
thus gaining his ear, proceeded to state their rea-
sons for so injurious an opinion, with a plentiful
mixture all the time of opprobrious epithets to pre-
vent a relapse into insensibility. This system natu
rally tends to make authors exaggerate things out
of their relations in order to give immediate effect
to their special view, and the habit of indiscriminate
issault frequently survives the necessity for its exer-
cise. Thackeray appears at first to have considered
that his business was to find fault ; to carry into lit-
erature the functions of the detective police ; to pry
into the haunts, and arrest the persons, of scoundrels
who evaded the ordinary operations of the law. The
most fashionable clubs and drawing-rooms were in-
raded, to catch scamps whom a common policeman
would have sought in low alleys and hells. The
successful exposer found a saturnine enjoyment in the
tor. fusion ana scandal which his ingeruity and per-
208 THACKERAY.
tinacity wrought among " respectable " people, and his
taste for the sport was naturally increased by its
indulgence, and his success in its prosecution. He
contracted a morbid liking for tainted character, and
his sharp glance and fine scent were exercised to
discover the taint in characters generally sound and
healthy. The latent weaknesses, foibles, follies, vices,
of the intelligent and good became the objects of his
search, somewhat to the exclusion of their nobler
and predominant qualities, and the result was, in
many instances, wofully partial estimates and exhibi-
tions of men and women. The truth was truth only
from the satirist's point of view.
But all these earlier works — " The Yellowplush
Correspondence," " The Confessions of Fitz -Boodle."
" The Luck of Barry Lyndon," " Men's Wives,"
"The Book of Snobs," not to mention others — have
the one merit of being readable, — a. merit which
Thackeray never lost. The fascination they exert
is in spite of the commonness of their materials. The
charm comes from the writer, and his mode of treat-
ment. The wit and the humor, so "bitter-sweet";
the fine fancy and delicate observation ; the eye for
ludicrous situations ; the richness, raciness, and occa
•ional wildness of the comic vein ; the subtilty of
the unexpected strokes of pathos ; the perfect obedr
THACKERAY. 209
ence of the style to the mind it expresses ; and the
continual presence of the writer himself, making him-
self the companion of the reader, — gossiping, hinting,
sneering, laughing, crying, as the narrative proceeds,
— combine to produce an effect which nobody, to say
the least, ever found dull. The grace, flexibility, and
easy elegance of the style are especially notable. It
is utterly without pretension, and partakes of the
absolute sincerity of the writer ; it is talk in print,
seemingly as simple as the most familiar private chat,
yet as delicate in its felicities as the most elaborate
composition.
In " Vanity Fair," the first novel which gave the
author wide celebrity, we have all the qualities we
have noticed cast into the frame of a story, — a story
which has a more connected interest and a more
elastic movement than its successors, though we can-
not think that it equals some of them in general
power of thought, observation, and characterization.
The moral, if moral it have, is that the Amelias of
the world, with all their simplicity and ignorance,
will, in the long run, succeed better than the Becky
Sharps, with all their evil knowledge and selfish
acuteness. Amelia is evidently as nnrdi the favorite
of the author's heart as liecky is of his brain, and
Vo has expended nearly as much skill in the delinea
210 THACKERAY.
tion of the one as of the other. The public, how
ever, was prepared for the first, but the second took
it by surprise. It was the most original female char-
acter of its kind that had appeared in contemporary
fiction, and the raciness and never-faltering courage
with which the character was developed, through all
the phases of her career, seemed an insult to the
sex. " Cynic ! " cried the ladies. The truth, in this
case, was the cause of offence. The Sharps wisely
held their tongues, and left the denial of the possi-
bility of such a woman to those who had happily
never made her acquaintance. Thackeray had evi-
dently seen her, and seen also the Marquis of Steyne.
The latter represents a class of titled reprobates in
England and on the Continent, whom other novelists
have repeatedly attempted to domesticate in the do-
main of romance, but have failed from ignorance or
exaggeration. The peculiarity of the Marquis is that
a long life of habitual and various vice has spread a
thick scurf over his soul, so that he has lost by de-
grees all consciousness of the existence of such an
organ. Few felons have gone to the gallows or the
gibbet with such an oblivion of the immortal part of
than as this noble Marquis exhibits in going to his
daily dissoluteness and depravity. The character is
in some respects a horrible one, but it is probabl*
THACKERAY. 211
true. Shakespeare makes Emilia wish that the " per-
nicious soul " of Iago " may rot half a grain a day " ;
and it would certainly seem that the soul may, by
a coufse of systematic and cynical depravity, be com-
pletely covered up, if it may not be gradually con-
sumed.
" The History of Pendennis ". has more variety
of character, and more minute analysis of feeling,
than "Vanity Fair," but the story drifts and drags.
Though Mrs. Pendennis and Laura rank high among
Thackeray's good women, his genius is specially seen
in Blanche Amory, a most perfect and masterly ex-
hibition of the union of selfishness and malice with
Hentimentality, resulting, as it seems to us, in a char-
acter more wicked and heartless than that of Becky
Sharp. Major Pendennis and she carry off the
honors of the book, — a book which, with all its
wealth of wit, humor, and worldly knowledge, still
leaves the saddest impression on the mind of all of
Thackeray's works. It is enjoyed while we are en-
gaged in reading its many-peopled pages ; the sepa-
rate scenes and incidents are full of matter ; but it
wants unity and purpose, and the wide information
of the superficies of life it conveys is of the kind
tvhich depresses rather than exhilu-ates. The gloss is
altogether taken both from literature and society, and
212 THACKERAY.
the subtile scepticism of the author's view of life is
destructive of those illusions which are beneficent, as
well as of those delusions which are mischievous.
There are certain habits, prejudices, opinions, and pre-
conceptions, which, though they cannot stand the test
of relentless criticism, are still bound up with virtues,
and are at some periods of life the conditions both
of action and good action. They should be unlearned
by experience, if unlearned at all. To begin life
with a theoretical disbelief in them, is to anticipate
experience at the cost often of destroying ambition
and weakening will. Thackeray in this novel gives
a great deal of that sort of information which is not
practically so good as the ignorance of enthusiasm and
the error of faith. TTe assent as we read, and con-
giatulate ourselves on being so much more knowing
than our neighbors ; but at the end we find that,
while our eyes have been opened, the very sources
of volition have been touched with paralysis.
"The History of Henry Esmond" is an attempt
to look at the age of Queen Anne through the eyes
of a contemporary, and to record the result of the
inspection in the style of the period. It is, on the
whole, successful. The diction of the book is exqui-
site ; pleasant glimpses are given of the memorable
Qien of the era, — literary, political, and military
THACKERAY. 213
»nd the languid pace with which the story rambles
to its conclusion provokes just that tranquil interest
with which Esmond himself recalls in memory the
incidents of his career. Both persons and scenes
have the visionary grace and remoteness which oV
jects take when seen through the thin and shining
mist of imaginative recollection. Beatrix Esmond,
the heroine, is another of Thackeray's studies in
perverted feminine character, and is worthy of the
delineator of Becky and Blanche. The picture of
the old age of this pernicious beauty, given in "The
Virginians/' is equally skilful and true. The defect
in the plot of " Henry Esmond " is obvious to every
reader. Lady Castlewood, whom the author intends to
represent as the ideal of a noble woman, loves the
lover of her daughter and is swayed by passions
and placed in situations degrading to womanhood ;
while Esmond himself, put forward as a high-toned
gentleman and chivalrous man of honor, is so demor-
alized by his passion for a jilt, that he enters into a
conspiracy to overturn the government, and involve
England in civil war, simply to pleas*; her, and with
a profound disbelief in the. cause for which he is to
draw his sword. The atrocious villany of such con-
duct, from which a Marqms o*" Steyne would have
recoiled, appears to Thackeray simply the weaknesi
►f a noble nature.
214 THACKERAY.
u The Newcoraes " is perhaps the most genial of
the author's works, aud the one which best exhibits
the maturity and the range of his powers. It seems
written with a pen diamond-pointed, so glittering and
incisive is its slightest touch. The leading idea is
the necessary unhappiness of marriage without mu-
tual love, no matter what other motive, selfish cr
generous, may prompt it ; and the worldly view of
the matter, as contrasted with the romantic, has
never been combated with more unanswerable force
than by this realist and man of the world. The
practical argument loses none of its power by be-
ing given in instances, instead of declamations or
syllogisms. The sincerity and conscientiousness of
Thackeray's mind, and the absence in him of any
pretension to emotions he does not feel and ideas he
does not believe, are very marked in this book. He
has the honesty of a clear-sighted and clear-headed
witness on the stand, stating facts as they appear to
him, and on the watch to escape being perjured by
yielding to the impulses either of amiability or mal-
ice. In the versatile characterization of the work,
two inimitable personages stand out as the best ex-
pression of Thackeray's heart, — Colonel Newcome
Biid Madame de Florae. Ethel Newcome seems to
as, on the whole, an ambitious failure, lacking the
THACKERAY. 215
(isual vitality of the author's feminine characters, and
wrought out with set purpose against his grain to
show that he could conceive and delineate " a young
lady." It is hard for the reader to share Clive's
passion for her, for she never arrives in the book to
substantial personality. She brings to mind Adam,
in the German play, who is represented as passing
across the stage, " going to be created." Rosey Mac-
kenzie has infinitely more life. Lady Kew is a good
female counterpart of the Marquis of Steyne ; Ma-
dame d'lvry is Blanche Amory grown up ; Mrs. Mac-
kenzie is petty malice and selfishness personified ;
and all three are masterpieces in their sev,r?.l kinds.
Indeed, the ingenious contrivances of hui>\an beings
to torment each other were never better aex forth
than in these " Memoirs of a Respectable Fanr.ly."
We have no space to do even partial justice to
"The Virginians," " Lovel the Widower,'' and "The
Adventures of Philip." Attractive as tlwse are, they
furnish no specially novel illustrations of Thackeray's
powers, and exhibit no change in the point of ikv
from which he surveyed life Perhaps as he gr^w
older there was a more obvious desire on his pert tc
appear amiable. He celebrates the I indly virtues.
He protests aga'.ist being called a cyni» ; condescends
to interrupt the course of his story t/ answer petu
<J16 THACKERAI.
lant criticisms petulantly ; and relaxes somewhat from
his manly and resolute tone. The struggle between
his feelings and his obstinate intellectual habit of
minutely inspecting defects is obvious on his page.
He likes good people, yet cannot help indulging in
a sly, mischievous cut at their faults, and then seems
vexed that he yields to the temptation. His humility
is often that of a person who tells his neighbor that
he is a fool and then adds. " but so are we all, more
or less " ; the particular fool pointed out having a dim
intuition that the rapid generalization at the end is
intended rather to indicate the wisdom of the gener-
alizer than his participation in the universal folly.
A covert insult thus lurks under his ostentatious
display of charity. And then in his jets of geniality
there is something suspicious. He condescends; he
slaps wn the back ; he patronizes in praising ; he is
benevolent from pity ; and, with a light fleer or van-
ishing touch of sp./^sr", he hints that it is a superior
intelligence thai ' 'hus disporting in the levities of
good-fellowship.
One thing remains to be said regarding the collec-
tive impression left on the mind by Thackeray's works.
That impression, sharply scroti. lize.l, we Jvill venture
to say is this, that life as ho rep'<??<;r.is it is life not
*orih the living. It is doub'.'.r^s rj-y / tertaining ti
THACKERAY. 217
read about, and it is not without instruction ; but
who would wish to go through the labor and vexa-
tion of leading it? Who would desire to be any one
of the characters, good or bad, depicted in it? Who
would consider it: pleasures and rewards as any com-
pensation for its struggles, disappointments, and dis-
illusions ? Who, if called upon to accept existence
under its conditions, would not, on the whole, con-
sider existence a bore or a buiden, rather than a
blessing? This can, we think, be said of no other
delineator of human life and human character of equal
eminence ; and it points to that pervading scepticism,
in Thackeray's mind, which is felt to be infused into
the inmost substance of his works. Deficient in those
qualities and beliefs which convey inspiration as well
as information, which impart heat to the will as well
as light to the intellect, — lacking the insight of
principles and the experience ot great passions and
uplifting sentiments, — his representation even of the
actual world excludes the grand forces which really
animate and move it, a.id thus ignores those deeper
elements which give to life earnestness, purpose, and
glow.
vm.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.*
rpHE romance of "The Marble Faun" will be
-*- widely welcomed, not only for its intrinsic mer-
its, but because it is a sign that its writer, after a
silence of seven or eight years, has determined to
resume his place in the ranks of authorship. In his
Preface he tells us, that in each of his previous publi-
cations he had unconsciously one person in his eye,
whom he styles his " gentle reader." He meant it
"for that one congenial friend, more comprehensive
of his purposes, more appreciative of his success,
more indulgent of his shortcomings, and, in all re-
Bpects, closer and kinder than a brother, — that all-
sympathizing critic, in short, whom an author never
actually meets, but to whom he implicitly makes his
appeal, whenever he is conscious of having done his
best." He believes that this reader did once exist
for him, and duly received the scrolls he flung " upon
• The Marble Faun ; or the Romance of Monte Beni. By Na-
thaniel Hawthorne. BoHton, 1860.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 219
whatever wind was blowing, in the faith that they
would find him out" " But," he questions, " is he
extant now? In these many years since he last
heard from me, may he not have deemed his earthly
task accomplished, and have withdrawn to the para-
dise of gentle readers, wherever it may be, to the
enjoyments of which his kindly charity on my behalf
must surely have entitled him ? " As, however, Haw-
thorne's reputation has been steadily growing with
the lapse of time, he has no cause to fear that the
longevity of his gentle reader will not equal his
own.
The publication of this new romance seems to offer
us a fitting occasion to attempt some description of
ihe peculiarities of the genius of which it is the lat-
est offspring, and to hazard some judgments on its
predecessors. It is more than twenty-five years since
Hawthorne began that remarkable series of stories
and essays which are now collected in the volumes
of "Twice -Told Tales," " The Snow Image and other
Tales," and " Mosses from an Old Manse." From the
first he was recognized, by such readers as he chanced
to find, as a man of genius; yet for a long time he
enjoyed, in his own words, the distinction of being
"the obscurest man of letters in America." I lis
readers were " gentle " rather than enthusiastic ; their
220 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
fina delight in his creations was an individual per-
ception of subtile excellences of thought and style,
too refined and self-satisfying to be contagious ; and
the public was untouched, whilst the " gentle " reader
was full of placid enjoyment. Indeed, we fear that
this kind of reader is something of an Epicurean,
welcoming a new genius as a private blessing, sent
by a benign Providence to quicken a new life in his
somewhat jaded sense of intellectual pleasure ; and
that, after having received a fresh sensation, he is
apt to be serenely indifferent whether the creator of
it starve bodily or pine mentally from the lack of a
cordial human shout of recognition.
There would appear, on a slight view of the matter,
Co be no reason for the little notice which Hawthorne's
early productions received. The subjects were mostly
drawn from the traditions and written records of
New England, and gave the '• beautiful strangeness "
of imagination to objects, incidents, and characters
which were familiar facts in the popular mind. The
style, while it had a purity, sweetness, and grace
which satisfied the most fastidious and exacting
taste, Had, at the same time, more than the simpli-
city and clearness of an ordinary school-book. Hut,
though the subjects and the style were thus popular
there was something in the shaping and informing
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 221
ipirit which failed to awaken interest, or awak-
ened interest without exciting delight. Misanthro-
py, when it has its source in passion, — when it is
fierce, bitter, fiery, and scornful, — when it vigorous-
ly echoes the aggressive discontent of the world, and
furiously tramples on the institutions and the men,
luckily rather than rightfully, in the ascendant, — this
is always popular ; but a misanthropy which springs
from insight, — a misanthropy which is lounging,
languid, sad, and depressing, — a misanthropy which
remorselessly looks through cursing misanthropes and
chirping men of the world with the same sure, de-
tecting glance of reason, — a misanthropy which has
no fanaticism, and which casts the same ominous doubt
on subjectively morbid as on subjectively moral action,
— a misanthropy which has no respect for impulses,
but has a terrible perception of spiritual laws, — this
is a misanthropy which can expect no wide recog-
nition ; and it would be vain to deny that traces ot
this kind of misanthropy are to be found in Haw-
thorne's earlier, and are not altogether absent from
his later works. He had spiritual insight, but it did
not penetrate to the sources of spiritual joy ; and his
deepest glimpses of truth were calculated rather to
sadden than to inspire. A blandly sceptical distrust
of human nature was the result 01 his most piercing
222 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
glances into the human soul. He had humor, and
sometimes humor of a delicious kind ; but this sun-
shine of the soul was but sunshine breaking through,
or lighting up, a sombre and ominous cloud. There
was also observable in his earlier stories a lack of
vigor, as if the power of his will had been impaired
by the very process which gave depth and excursive-
ness to his mental vision. Throughout, the impres-
Bion is conveyed of a shy recluse, alternately bashful
in disposition and bold in thought, gifted with origi-
nal and various capacities, but capacities which seemed
to have been developed in the shade. Shakespeare
sails moonlight the sunlight sick; and it is in some
Buch moonlight of the mind that the genius of Haw-
thorne found its first expression. A mild melan-
choly, sometimes deepening into gloom, sometimes
brightening into a " humorous sadness," characterized
his early creations. Like his own Hepzibah Pyn-
cheon, he appeared "to be walking in a dream"; or
rather, the life and reality assumed by his emotions
" made all outward occurrences unsubstantial, like
the teasing phantasms of an unconscious slumber."
Though dealing largely in description, and with the
most accurate perceptions of outward objects, he still,
to use again his own words, gives the impression
of a man " chiefly accustomed to look inward, and
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 223
to whom external matters are of little value 01 im-
port, unless they bear relation to something within
his own mind." But that " something within his own
mind" was often an unpleasant something, — perhaps
a ghastly occult perception of deformity and sin in
what appeared outwardly fair and good ; so that the
reader felt a secret dissatisfaction with the disposition
which directed the genius, even in the homage he
awarded to the genius itself. As psychological por-
traits of morbid natures, his delineations of character
might have given a purely intellectual satisfaction ;
but there was audible, to the delicate ear, a faint and
muffled growl of personal discontent, which showed
they were not mere exercises of penetrating imagi-
native analysis, but had in them the morbid vitality
of a despondent mood.
Yet, after admitting these peculiarities, nobody who
ia now drawn to the "Twice -Told Tales," from his
interest in the later romances of Hawthorne, can fail
to wonder a little at the limited number of readers
they attracted on their original publication ; for many
of these stories are at once a representation of early
New England life and a criticism of it. They have
much in them of the deepest truth of history. ''The
Legends of the Province House," ' The Gray Cham-
Dion," "The Gentle Boy," "The Minister's Black
224 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
Veil," " Endicott and the Red Cross," not to men-
tion others, contain important matter which cannot
be found in Bancroft or even Winthrop. They ex-
hibit the inward struggles of New England men and
women with some of the darkest problems of exist-
ence, and have more vital import to thoughtful
minds than the records of Indian or Revolutionary
warfare. In the " Prophetic Pictui-es," " Fancy's
Show-Box," "The Great Carbuncle," "The Haunted
Mind," and " Edward Fane's Rose-Bud," there are
flashes of moral insight, which light up, for the mo-
ment, the darkest recesses of the individual mind ;
and few sermons reach to the depth of thought and
sentiment from which these seemingly airy sketches
draw their sombre life. It is common, for instance,
for religious moralists to insist on the great spiritual
truth, that wicked thoughts and impulses, which cir-
cumstances prevent from passing into wicked acts,
are still deeds in the sight of God ; but the living
truth subsides into a dead truism, as enforced by
commonplace preachers. In " Fancy's Show-Box,"
Hawthorne seizes the prolific idea ; and the respecta-
ble merchant and respected church-member, in the
B.ill hour of his owl meditations, convicts himself of
being a liar, cheat, thief, seducer, and murderer, a?
Ue casts his glance over the mental events which form
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 225
{us spiritual biography. Interspersed with serious
histories and moralities like these are others which
embody the sweet and playful, though still thought-
ful and slightly saturnine action of Hawthorne's mind,
— like " The Seven Vagabonds," " Snow-Flakes,"
" The Lily's Quest," " Mr. Higgenbotham's Catastro-
phe," " Little Annie's Ramble," " Sights from a
Steeple," " Sunday at Home," and " A Rill from the
Town-Pump."
The " Mosses from an Old Manse " are intellectu-
ally and artistically much superior to the " Twice-
Told Tales." The twenty-three stories and essays
which make up the volumes are almost perfect of
their kind. Each is complete in itself, and many
might be expanded into long romances by the simple
method of developing the possibilities of their shad-
owy types of character into appropriate incidents.
In description, narration, allegory, humor, reason
fancy, subtilty, inventiveness, they exceed the best
productions of Addison ; but they want Addison's
sensuous contentment, and sweet and kindly spirit.
Thougli the author denies that he has exhibited his
own individual attributes in these " Mosses," though
he professes not to he "one of those supremely hos-
pitable people who serve up their own hearts deli
rately fried, with brain-sauce, as a titbit for theii
10* o
226 NATHANIEL HA.WTHORNE.
beloved public," — yet it is none the less apparent
that he has diffused through each tale and sketch
the life of the mental mood to which it owed ita
existence, and that one individuality pervades and
colors the whole collection. The defect of the seri-
ous stories is, that character is introduced, not as
thinking, but as the illustration of thought. The
persons are ghostly, with a sad lack of flesh and
blood. They are phantasmal symbols of a medita-
tive and imaginative analysis of human passions and
aspirations. The dialogue, especially, is bookish,
as though the personages knew their speech was to
be printed, and were careful of the collocation and
cadence of their words. The author throughout is
evidently more interested in his large, wide, deep,
indolently serene, and lazily sure and critical view
of the conflict of ideas and passions, than he is with
the individuals who embody them. lie shows moral
insight without moral earnestness. lie cannot con-
tract his mind to the patient delineation of a moral
individual, but attempts to use individuals in order
to express the last results of patient moral pcrcep
tion. Young Goodman Brown and Roger Malvin
are not persons ; they are the mere loose, persona/
expression of subtile thinking. " The Celestial Rail
road," " The Procession of Life." " Earth's Holocaust,
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 227
"The Bosom Serpent," indicate thought of a charac-
ter equally deep, delicate, and comprehensive ; but
the characters are ghosts of men rather than sub-
stantial individualities. In the " Mosses from an Old
Manse," we are really studying the phenomena of
human nature, while, for the time, we beguile our-
selves into the belief that we are following the for
tunes of individual natures.
Up to this time, the writings of Hawthorne con-
veyed the impression of a genius in which insight
bo dominated over impulse that it was rather men-
tally and morally curious than mentally and morally
impassioned. The quality evidently wanting to its
full expression was intensity. In the romance of
" The Scarlet Letter " he first made his genius effi-
cient by penetrating it with passion. This book
forced itself into attention by its inherent power ;
and the author's name, previously known only to a
limited circle of readers, suddenly became a familiar
word in the mouths of the great reading public of
America and England. It may be said that it " cap-
tivated " nobody, but took everybody captive. Its
power could neither be denied nor resisted. There
were growls of disapprobation from novel-reader- that
Hester Prynne and the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale were
wbjected to cruel punishments unknown to the juris-
228 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
prudence of fiction, — that the author was an inquis
itor who put his victims on the rack, — and that
neither amusement nor delight resulted from seeing
the contortions and hearing the groans of these mar-
tyrs of sin ; but the fact was no less plain that Haw-
thorne had for once compelled the most superficial
lovers of romance to submit themselves to the magic
of his genius. The readers of Dickens voted him,
with three times three, to the presidency of their
republic of letters ; the readers of Hawthorne were
caught by a coup d'etat, and fretfully submitted to a
despot whom they could not depose.
The success of " The Scarlet Letter " is an exam-
ple of the advantage which an author gains by the
simple concentration of his powers on one absorbing
Bubject. In the " Twice -Told Tales" and the " Moss-
es from an Old Manse " Hawthorne had exhibited a
wider range of sight and insight than in " The Scar-
let Letter." Indeed, in the little sketch of " Endi
cott and the Red Cross," written twenty years before,
he had included in a few sentences the whole matter
which lie afterwards treated in his famous story. In
describing the various inhabitants of an early New
England town, as far as they were representative,
he touched incidentally on a " young woman, with
no mean share of beauty, who^e doom it was to
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 229
wear the letter A on the breast of her gown, in the
eyes of all the world and her own children. And
even her own children knew what that initial signi-
fied. Sporting with her infamy, the lost and desper-
ate creature had embroidered the fatal token in scarlet
cloth, with golden thread and the nicest art of needle-
work ; so that the capital A might have been thought
to mean Admirable, or anything, rather than Adul-
teress." Here is the germ of the whole pathos and
terror of " The Scarlet Letter " ; but it is hardly
noted in the throng of symbols, equally pertinent, in
the few pages of the little sketch from which we
have quoted.
Two characteristics of Hawthorne's genius stand
plainly out in the conduct and characterization of the
romance of " The Scarlet Letter," which were less
obviously prominent in his previous works. The
first relates to his subordination of external incidents
to inward events. Mr. James's " solitary horseman "
does more in one chapter than Hawthorne's hero in
twenty chapters ; but then James deals with the
tirrns of men, while Hawthorne deals with their souls.
Hawthorne relies almost entirely for the interest of
his story on what is fe\t and done within the minds
of his characters. Even his most picturesque descrip-
Kons and narratives are only one tenth matter to
230 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
nine tenth3 spirit. The results that follow from one
external act of folly or crime are to him enough for
an Iliad of woes. It might be supposed that his
whole theory of Romantic Art was based on these
tremendous lines of Wordsworth : —
"Action is momentary, —
The motion of a muscle, this way or that :
Suffering is long, obscure, and infinite."
The second characteristic of his genius is con-
nected with the first. With his insight of individual
60uls he combines a far deeper insight of the spirit-
ual laws which govern the strangest aberrations of
individual souls. But it seems to us that his mental
eye, keen-sighted and far-sighted as it is, overlooks
the merciful modifications of the austere code whose
pitiless action it so clearly discerns. In his long and
patient brooding over the spiritual phenomena of
Puritan life, it is apparent, to the least critical ob-
server, that he has imbibed a deep personal antip-
athy to the Puritanic ideal of character ; but it is no
less apparent that his intellect and imagination have
been strangely fascinated by the Puritanic idea of jus-
tice. His brain has been subtly infected by the Puri-
tanic perception of Law, without being warmed by
the Puritanic faith in Grace. Individually, he would
arvueh prefer to have been one of his own " Seven
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 231
Vagabonds" rather than one of the austerest preach-
ers of the primitive church of New England ; but the
austerest preacher of the primitive church of New Eng-
land would have been more tender and considerate
to a real Mr. Dimmesdale and a real Hester Prynne
than this modern romancer has been to their typical
representatives in the world of imagination. Through-
out " The Scarlet Letter " we seem to be following
the guidance of an author who is personally good-
natured, hut intellectually and morally relentless.
" The House of the Seven Gables," Hawthorne's
next work, while it has less concentration of passion
and tension of mind than " The Scarlet Letter," in-
cludes a wider range of observation, reflection, and
character ; and the morality, dreadful as fate, which
hung like a black cloud over the personages of the
previous story, is exhibited in more relief. Although
the book has no imaginative creation equal to little
Pearl, it still contains numerous examples of char-
acterization at once delicate and deep. Clifford, es-
pecially, is a study in psychology, as well as a
marvellously subtile delineation of enfeebled man-
hood. The general idea of the story is this, —
"that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into
the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every
temporary advantage, becomes a pure aud uncontrcl-
232 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
Iable mischief" ; and the mode in which this idea is
carried out shows great force, fertility, and refine-
ment of mind. A weird fancy, sporting with the
facts detected by a keen observation, gives to every
gable of the Seven Gables, every room in the House,
every burdock growing rankly before the door, a sym-
bolic significance. The queer mansion is haunted, —
haunted with thoughts which every moment are lia-
ble to take ghostly shape. All the Pyncheons whc
have resided in it appear to have infected the very
timbers and walls with the spiritual essence of their
lives, and each seems ready to pass from a memory
into a presence. The stern theory of the author
regarding the hereditary transmission of family qual-
ities, and the visiting of the sins of the fathers on
the heads of their children, almost wins our reluc-
tant assent through the pertinacity w T ith which the
generations of the Pyncheon race are made not
merely to live in the blood and brain of their de-
scendants, but to cling to their old abiding-place on
earth, so that to inhabit the house is to breathe
the Pyncheon soul and assimilate the Pyncheon in-
dividuality. The whole representation, masterly aa
it is, considered as an effort of intellectral and im
aginative power, would still be morally bleak, were it
not for the sunshine and warmth radiated from the
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 283
character of Phoebe. In this delightful creation,
Hawthorne for once gives himself up to homely
human nature, and has succeeded in delineating a
New England girl, cheerful, blooming, practical, affec-
tionate, efficient, full of innocence and happiness,
with all the " handiness " and native sagacity of her
class, and so true and close to nature that the
process by which she is slightly idealized is com-
pletely hidden.
In this romance there is also more humor than in
any of his other works. It peeps out, even in the
most serious passages, in a kind of demure rebellion
against the fanaticism of his remorseless intelligence.
In the description of the Pyncheon poultry, which
we think unexcelled by anything in Dickens for
quaintly fanciful humor, the author seems to indulge
in a sort of parody of his own doctrine of the he-
reditary transmission of family qualities. At any
rate, that strutting chanticleer, with his two meagre
wives and one wizened chicken, is a sly side fleer
at the tragic aspect of the law of descent. Miss
Hepzibah Pyncheon, her shop, and her customers,
are so delightful, that the reader would willingly
spare a good deal of Clifford and Judge Pyncheon
and Holgrave, for more details of them and Phoebe.
Uncle Venner, also, the old wood-sawyer, who boasti
234 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
"that he has seen a good deal of the world, not only
in people's kitchens and back-yards, but at the street-
corners, and on the wharves, and in other places
where his business " called him, and who, on the
strength of this comprehensive experience, feels qual-
ified to give the final decision in every case which
tasks the resources of human wisdom, is a very
much more humane and interesting gentleman than
the Judge. Indeed, one cannot but regret that Haw-
thorne should be so economical of his undoubted
stores of humor, and that, in the two romances he
has since written, humor, in the form of character,
does not appear at all.
Before proceeding to the consideration of " The
Blithedale Romance," it is necessary to say a few
words on the seeming separation of Hawthorne's ge-
nius from his will. He has none of that ability
which enabled Scott and enables Dickens to force
their powers into action, and to make what was
legun in drudgery soon assume the character of
inspiration. Hawthorne cannot thus use his genius ;
his genius always uses him. This is so true, that
he often succeeds better in what calls forth his per
Bonal antipathies than in what calls forth his pen
konal sympathies. His Life of General Pierce, foi
instance, is altogether destitute of life ; yet in writ
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 235
Big it he must have exerted himself to the utmost!
ta his object was to urge the claims of an old and
dear friend to the Presidency of the Republic The
ityle, of course, is excellent, as it is impossible for
Hawthorne to write bad English ; but the genius of
the man has deserted him. General Pierce, whom
he loves, he draws so feebly, that one doubts, while
reading the biography, if such a man exists; Hol-
lingsworth, whom he hates, is so vividly character-
ized, that the doubt is, while we read the romance,
vhether such a man can possibly be fictitious.
Midway between such a work as the " Life of
General Pierce " and " The Scarlet Letter " may be
placed "The "Wonder-Book" and "Tangle wood Tales."
In these Hawthorne's genius distinctly appears, and
appears in its most lovable, though not in its deepest
form. These delicious stories, founded on the my-
thology of Greece, were written for children, but
they delight men and women as well. Hawthorne
never pleases grown people so much as when he
writes with an eye to the enjoyment of little people.
Now " The Blithedale Romance " is far from be-
ing so pleasing a performance as " Tanglewood Tales,"
yet it very much better illustrates the operation, in-
dicates the quality, and expresses the power, of the
tuthor's genius. His great books appear not so
£36 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
much created by him as through him. They have
the character of revelations, — he, the instrument, be-
ing often troubled with the burden they impose on
his mind. His profoundest glances into individual
bouIs are like the marvels of clairvoyance. It would
Beem, that, in the production of such a work as
" The Blithedale Romance," his mind had hit acci-
dentally, as it were, on an idea or fact mysteriously
related to some morbid sentiment in the inmost core
of his nature, and to numerous scattered observations
of human life, lying unrelated in his imagination.
In a sort of meditative dream, his intellect drifts iu
the direction to which the subject points, broods pa-
tiently over it, looks at it, looks into it, and at last
looks through it to the law by which it is governed.
Gradually, individual beings, definite in spiritual qual-
ity, but shadowy in substantial form, group them-
Belves around this central conception, and by degrees
assume an outward body and expression correspond-
ing to their internal nature. On the depth and in-
tensity of the mental mood, the force of the fascina-
tion it exerts over him, and the length of time it
holds him captive, depend the solidity and substance
of the individual characterizations. In this way Miles
Coverdale, Ilollingsworth, Westervelt, Zenobia, and
Priscilla become real persons to the mind which ha»
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 237
railed them into being. He knows every secret and
watches every motion of their souls, yet is, in a
measure, independent of them, and pretends to no
authority by which he can alter the destiny which
consigns them to misery or happiness. They drift
to their doom by the same law by which they drifted
across the path of his vision. Individually, he abhors
Hollingsworth, and would like to annihilate Wester-
velt, yet he allows the superb Zenobia to be their
victim ; and if his readers object that the effect of
the whole representation is painful, he will doubtless
agree with them, but sorrowfully confess his incapaci-
ty honestly to alter a sentence. He professes to
tell the story as it was revealed to him ; and the
license in which a romancer might indulge is denied
to a biographer of spirits. Show him a fallacy in
his logic of passion and character, point out a false
or defective step in his analysis, and he will gladly
alter the whole to your satisfaction ; but four humap
souls, such as he has described, being given, their
mutual attractions and repulsions will end, he feels
assured, in just such a catastrophe as he has stated.
Eight years have passed since "The Blithedale
Romance " was written, and during nearly the whole
of this period Hawthorne has resided abroad. " The
Marble Faun," which must, on the whole, be coo-
238 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
Bidered the greatest of his works, proves that his
genius has widened and deepened in this interval
without any alteration or modification of its charac
teristic merits and characteristic defects. The mosi
obvious excellence of the work is the vivid truthful
ness of its descriptions of Italian life, manners, and
scenery ; and, considered merely as a record of a
tour in Italy, it is of great interest and attractive-
ness. The opinions on Art, and the special criti-
cisms on the masterpieces of architecture, sculpture,
and painting, also possess a value of their own. The
story might have been told, and the characters fully
represented, in one third of the space devoted to
them, yet description and narration are so artfully
combined that each assists to give interest to the
other. Hawthorne is one of those true observers
who concentrate in observation every power of their
minds. He has accurate sight and piercing insight.
When he modifies either the form or the spirit of
tne objects he describes, he does it either by viewing
them through the medium of an imagined mind or
by obeying associations which they themselves sug-
gest. We might quote from the descriptive portions
of the work a hundred pages, at least, which would
demonstrate how closely accurate observation is con-
nected with the highest powers of the intellect and
imagination.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 239
The style of the book is perfect of its kir.d, and, if
H&wthorne had written nothing else, would entitle him
to rank among the great masters of English composi-
tion. Walter Savage Landor is reported to have said
of an author whom he knew in his youth, * My friend
wrote excellent English, a language now obsolete."
Had " The Marble Faun " appeared before he uttered
this sarcasm, the wit of the remark would have been
pointless. Hawthorne not only writes English, but the
Bweetest, simplest, and clearest English that ever has
been made the vehicle of equal depth, variety, and
subtilty of thought and emotion. His mind is re-
flected in his style, as a face is reflected in a mir-
ror ; and the latter does not give back its image
with less appearance of effort than the former. His
excellence consists not so much in using common
words as in making common words express uncom
mon things. Swift, Addison, Goldsmith, not to men
tion others, wrote with as much simplicity ; but the
style of neither embodies an individuality so com
plex, passions so strange and intense, sentiments so
fantastic and preternatural, thoughts so profound and
delicate, and imaginations so remote from the recog-
nized limits of the ideal, as find an orderly outlet in
the pure English of Hawthorne. He has hardly a
Word to which Mrs. Trimmer would primly object,
HO NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
\ardly a sentence which would call forth the frosty
nathema of Blair, Hurd, Karnes, or Whately, and
yet he contrives to embody in his simple style qual-
ities which would almost excuse the verbal extrava-
gances of Carlyle.
In regard to the characterization and plot of " The
Marble Faun," there is room for widely varying
opinions. Hilda, Miriam, and Donatello will be
generally received as superior in power and depth
to any of Hawthorne's previous creations of charac-
ter; Donatello, especially, must be considered one of
the most original and exquisite conceptions in the
wbole range of romance ; but the story in which
they appear will seem to many an unsolved puzzle,
and even the tolerant and interpretative "gentle
reader" will be troubled with the unsatisfactory con-
clusion. It is justifiable for a romancer to sting the
curiosity of his readers with a mystery, Only on the
implied obligation to explain it at last ; but this story
begins in mystery only to end in mist. The sugges-
tive faculty is tormented rather than genially excited,
and in the end is left a prey to doubts. The cen-
tral idea of the story, the necessity of sin to convert
such a creature as Donatello into a moral being, is
not happily illustrated in the leading event. When
Donatello kills the wretch who malignantly dogs tha
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 241
Iteps of Miriam, all readers think that Donatello
committed no sin at all ; and the reason is, that
Hawthorne has deprived the persecutor of Miriam
of all human attributes, made him an allegorical rep-
resentation of one of the most fiendish forms of un-
mixed evil, so that we welcome his destruction with
something of the same feeling with which, in follow*
ing the allegory of Spenser or Bunyan, we rejoice
in the hero's victory over the Blatant Beast or Gi-
ant Despair. Conceding, however, that Donatello's
act was murder, and not "justifiable homicide," we
are still not sure that the author's conception of his
nature and of the change caused in his nature by
that act, are carried out with a felicity correspond-
ing to the original conception.
In the first volume, and in the early part of the
second, the author's hold on his design is compara-
tively firm, but it somewhat relaxes as he proceeds,
and in the end it seems almost to escape from his
grasp. Few can be satisfied with the concluding
chapters, for the reason that nothing is really con-
cluded. We are willing to follow the ingenious pro-
cesses of Calhoun's deductive logic, because we are
•ure, that, however severely they task the faculty
of attention, they will lead to some positive result ;
but Hawthorne's logic of events leaves us in the end
11 r
242 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
bewildered in a labyrinth of guesses. The book is,
on the whole, such a great book, that its defects
felt with all the more force.
In this rapid glance at some of the peculiarities
of Hawthorne's genius, we have not, of course, been
able to do full justice to the special merits of tho
works passed in review ; but we trust that we have
Baid nothing which would convey the impression that
we do not place them among the most remarkable
romances produced in an age in which romance-writ-
ing has called forth some of the highest powers of
the human mind. In intellect and imagination, in
the faculty of discerning spirits and detecting laws,
we doubt if any living novelist is his equal ; but his
genius, in its creative action, has been heretofore
attracted to the dark rather than the bright side of
the interior life of humanity, and the geniality which
evidently is in him has rarely found adequate ex-
pression. In the many works which he may still be
expected to write, it is to be hoped that his mind
will lose some of its sadness of tone without losing
any of its subtilty and depth ; but, in any event, it
would be unjust to deny that he has already don«
enough to insure him a commanding position in
American literature as long as American literature
kas an existence.
IX.
EDWARD EVERETT. •
IT is certainly fit, gentlemen, that the pensfr of
bereavement which this city and the whole na-
tion have felt in the death of Mr. Everett should
find emphatic expression in the Club of which hr
was the honored President. Known to every mem-
ber as the most exquisitely affable of presiding offi-
cers ; a chairman with the gracious and graceful
manners of a host ; ever ready to listen as to speak ;
and masking the eminence, which all were glad to
acknowledge, in that bland and benignant courtesy,
of which all were made to feel the charm, — hif
presence gave a peculiar dignity to our meetings,
which it will be impossible to replace and impressed
on all of us the conviction, that to his other gifts
and accomplishments must be added the distinction
of having been the most accomplished gentleman of
his time. Indeed, it is probable, that, in this quality
• Read before the Thursday Evenirg Club, at its meeting on
bonnry 26, 1866.
244: EDWARD EVERETT.
of high-bred and inbred courtesy, which we iM have
luch good cauoe to admire and to remember, may be
found the explanation and justification of some things
in his character and cur^r whicli have been sub
jected to adverse and acrimonious criticism ; and, in
the few remarks I propose to rnake, allow me to
throw into relations to this felicity of his nature,
the powers and achievements which have made him
so widely famous, and, what is better, so widely
mourned.
Mr. Everett was born with that fineness of men
tal and of bodily organization, the sensitiveness of
which is hardly yet thoroughly tolerated by the
world which still profits by its superiorities. There
was refinement in the very substance of his being
by a necessity of his constitution he disposed every-
thing he perceived into some orderly relations to
ideas of dignity and grace; he instinctively shunned
what was coarse, discordant, uncomely, unbecoming ;
and that internal world of thoughts, sentiments, and
dispositions, which each man forms or re-forms for
himself, and in which he really lives, in his case
obeyed the law of comeliness, and came out as
uaturally in his manners as in his writings, in the
beautiful urbanity of his behavior, as iu the cadencei
periods of his eloquence. The fascination of thin
EDWARD EVERETT. 245
must have been felt even in his childhood, for he
was an orator whose infant prattle attracted an au-
dience ; and he may be said to have passed from the
cradle into public life. To a swiftness and accuracy
of apprehension which made study the most delight-
ful and self-rewarding of tasks, he added a general
brightness, vigor and poise of faculties, which gave
premature promise of the reflection and judgment
which were to come. By some sure instinct, the
friends who seemed combined in a kindly conspiracy
to assist and to spoil him, must have felt that they
had to do with a nature whose innate modesty was
its protection from conceit, and whose ambition to
excel was but one form of its ambition for excel-
lence. The fact to be considered is, that, in child-
hood and in youth as in manhood and age, there was
something in him which irresistibly attracted admi-
ration and esteem, and made men desirous of help-
ing him on in the path his genius chose, and to the
goal from which his destiny beckoned.
It will be impossible here to do more than indi-
cate the steps of that comprehensive career, so full
of distinction for himself, so full of benefit for the
nation, which has been for the past ten days the
theme of so many eulogies: — the college student,
bearing away the highest honors of his class ; the
246 EDWARD EVERETT.
boy-preacher, whose pulpit eloquence alternately ki*
died and melted men of maturest years ; the Greek
Professor, whose knowledge of the finest and most
flexible instrument of human thought extorted the
admiration of the most accomplished of all the trans-
lators of Plato ; the fertile Writer and wide-ranging
Critic, whose familiarity with many languages only
added to the energy and elegance with which he
wielded the resources of his own ; the Representative
of Middlesex, whose mastery of the minutest details
of political business was not more evident than his
ready grasp of the broader principles of political
science ; the Governor of Massachusetts, whose wise
and able administration gave a new impulse to the
cause of education and to some of the most impor-
tant of the arts of peace ; the Ambassador, who co-
operated with his friend, the great Secretary, in
converting the provocations to what would have
been one of the most calamitous of all wars into the
occasion for negotiating one of the most beneficent
<»f all treaties ; the President of Harvard, bringing
back to his Alma Mater the culture he had received
from her increased an hundred-fold, and presenting
to the students the noble example of a scholarship
which was always teaching, and therefore always
Earning ; the Secretary of State, whose brief posses
EDWARD EVERETT. 247
Hon of office was yet sufficient to show with what
firmness of purpose he could uphold American honor
and with what prodigality of information he could
expound American rights ; the Orator of all " occa-
sions," scattering through many years, and from a
hundred platforms, the rich stores of his varied
knowledge, the ripe results of his large experience,
and the animating inspirations of his fervid soul ;
the Patriot, who ever made his scholarship, states-
manship, and eloquence serviceable and subsidiary to
the interest and glory of his country, and who, when
would-be parricides lifted their daggers to stab the
august mother who had borne them, flung himself,
with a grand superiority to party prejudices, and a
brave disdain of consequences to himself, into the
great current of impassioned purpose which surged
up from the nation's heroic heart ; the Christian phi-
lanthropist, who, through a long life, had been the
object of no insult or wrong which could rouse in
him the fierce desire for vengeance, and whose last
public effort was a magnanimous plea for that " re-
taliation " which Christianity both allows and enjoins :
— all these claims to honor, all this multiform and
multiplied activity, have been the subjects of eagei
Bnd emulous panegyric ; and little has been ever
tacked \n the loving and grateful survey.
248 EDWARD EVERETT.
Such a career implies the most assiduous self-cul
ture ; but it was a culture free from the fault ot
intellectual selfishness, for it was not centred in
itself, but pursued with a view to the public service
and the thirst for acquisition was not stronger than
the ardor for communication. Such a career also
implies a constant state of preparation for public
duties ; but only by those whose ambition is to get
office, rather than to get qualified for office, will this
peculiarity be sneeringly imputed to a love of dis-
play. Still, the vast publicity which such a career
rendered inevitable would have developed in him
some of the malignant, or some of the frivolous, vices
of public life, had it not been that a fine modesty
tempered his constant sense of personal efficiency, —
had it not been that a certain shyness at the core
of his being made it impossible that his self-reliance
should rush rudely out in any of the brazen forms
of self-assertion. And this brings me back to that
essential gentlemanliness of nature, which penetrated
every faculty, and lent its tone to every expression,
of our departed President. This gave him a most
lensitive regard for the rights and feelings of others,
and this made him instinctively expect the same
regard for his own. He guarded with an almosf
jealous vigilance the reserves of his individuality
EDWARD EVERETT. 249
ftnd resented all uncouth or unwarranted intrusion
into these sanctuaries which his dignity shielded,
with a feeling of grieved surprise. In his wide con-
verse with men, even in the contentions of party,
bis mind ever moved in a certain ideal region of
mutual courtesy and respect. It was to be antici
patedj that, in the rough game of politics, where
blows are commonly given and received with equal
carelessness, and where mutual charges of dishonesty
are both expected and unheeded, such a nature as
Mr. Everett's should sometimes suffer exquisite pain ;
that his nerves should quiver in impatient disgust of
such odious publicity ; that he should be tempted al
times to feel that the inconsiderate assailers of hia
character —
" Made it seem more sweet to be
The little life of bank and brier.
The bird that pipes his lone desire,
And dies unheard within his tree,
" Than he who warbles long find loud,
And drops at Glory's temple-gates ;
For whom the carrion-vulture wait9
To tear his heart before the crowd ! "
In this sensitiveness, refinement, and courtesy of
nature, in this chivalrous respect for other minds
»nd tenderness for other hearts, 's to be found thf
250 EDWARD EVERETT.
peculiarity of his oratory. He was the last great
master of persuasive eloquence. The circumstances
of the time have given to our public speaking an
aggressive and denouncing character, and invective
has contemptuously cast persuasion aside, and almost
reduced it to the condition of one of the lost arts.
This is undoubtedly a great evil, for invective com-
monly dispenses with insight, is impotent to interpret
what it assails, and fits the tongue of mediocrity as
readily as that of genius. It is true that the might-
iest exemplars of eloquence have been those who
have wielded this most terrific weapon in the armory
of the orator with the most overwhelming effect.
Demosthenes, Chatham, Burke, Mirabeau, men of
vivid minds, hot hearts, and audacious wills, have
made themselves the terror of the assemblies they
ruled, by their power of uttering those brief and
Ireadful invectives, which " appall the guilty and
make bold the free," — which come like the light-
ning, irradiating for an instant what in an instant
they blast. Perhaps the noblest spectacle in the
unnals of eloquence is that in which the mute rage
and despair of a hundred millions of Asiatics found,
in the assembly responsible for their oppression, fiery
utterance from the intrepid lips of Burke. But such
men are rightly examples only to their peers ; a
EDWARD EVERETT. 251
certain autocracy of nature is the animating prin-
ciple of their genius ; and, when they are copied sim-
ply by the tongue, they are likely to produce shrews
rather than sages. Mr. Everett followed the bent
of his character and the law of ha mind when he
aimed to enter into genial relations with hia auditors,
and to associate the reception of his views with a
quickening of their better feelings, and an addition to
their self-respect Mount Vernon, the poor of East
Tennessee, the poor of Savannah, attest that his
greatest triumphs were those of persuasion. And in
recalling the tones of that melodious voice, whose
words were thus works, one is tempted to think
that Force, in eloquence, is the mailed giant of the
leudal age, who, assailing under a storm of missiles
the fortress of his adversary, makes the tough gates
Bhiver under the furiously rapid strokes of his battle-
axe, and enters as a victor ; while Persuasion, " with
his garland and singing robes about him," speaks
the magical word which makes the gates fly open of
their own accord, and enters as a guest.
It is but just, gentlemen, that our lamented Presi-
tent, the. source of. so many eurogies, should now be
their theme ; that his joy in recognizing eminency
ui others should be met by a glad and universal
252 EDWARD EVERETT.
recognition of 't in himself. And, certainty, that
spotless private and distinguished public life could
have closed at no period when the heart of the
whole loyal nation was more eager to admire the
genius of the orator, and sound the praises of the pa-
triot, and laud the virtues of the man, than on the
day when his mortal frame, beautiful in life, and
beautiful in death, was followed by that long pro-
cession of bereaved citizens, through those mourning
streets, to that consecrated grave !
X.
THOMAS STARR KING.*
I CANNOT doubt that all of you, friends and
parishioners of Thomas Starr King, have felt
how difficult it is to speak in detail of the qualities
of him, the mere mention of whose name so quickly
brings up his presence in all its gracious and genial
power, and his nature in all its exquisite harmony.
He comes to us always as a person, and not as an
assemblage of qualities ; and however precious may
be the memory of particular traits of mind or disposi-
tion, they refuse to be described in general terms,
but are all felt to be excellent and lovable, because
expressive of him. Others may attract us through
.be splendor of some special faculty, or the eminency
of some special virtue, but in his case it is the whole
individual we admire and love, and the faculty takes
•ts peculiar character, the virtue acquires its subtile
tharra, because considered as an outgrowth of the
• Address at the Msmorial Service at Hollis Street Church, Bo*
too, on Sunday evening, April 3, 1864.
254 THOMAS STARR KING.
beautiful, beneficent, and bounteous nature in which
it had its root.
And here, I think, we touch the source of his in-
fluence and the secret of » ts power, as friend, pastor,
preacher, writer, patriot, and — let me add — states
man. He had the rare felicity, in everything he said
and did, of communicating himself, — the most pre-
cious thing he could bestow ; and he so bound others
to him by this occupation of their hearts, that to love
him was to love a second self. This communication
was as unmistakable in his lightest talk with a
chance companion, as in that strong hold on masses
of men, and power of lifting them up to the height
of his own thought and purpose, which, in the case
of California, will give his name a position among
the moral founders of states. Everybody he met he
unconsciously enriched ; everywhere he went he in-
stinctively organized. Meanness, envy, malice, big-
otry, avarice, hatred, low views of public and private
duty, all bad passions and paltry expediencies, slunk
away abashed from every mind which felt the light
and heat of that sun-like nature, stealing or stream-
ing into it. Such evil spirits could not live in such
ft rebuking presence, whether it came in the form
of wit, or tenderness, or argument, or admonition, of
exhilarating appeal, or soul-animating eloquence. Ev
THOMAS STARR KINO. 255
«rybody was more generous from contact with that
radiating beneficence ; everybody caught the contagion
of that cheerful spirit of humanity ; everybody felt
grateful to that genial exorcist, who drove the devils
of selfishness and pride from the heart, and softly
ensconced himself in their vacated seats. The won-
der is, not that he raised so much for benevolent
purposes, but that he did not make a complete sweep
of all the pockets which opened so obediently to his
winning appeal. Rights of property, however jeal-
ously guarded against others, were felt to be imper-
tinent towards him ; his presence outvalued everything
in the room he gladdened with his beaming face ,
people were pleasingly tormented with a desire to
give him something ; for giving was so emphatically
the law of his own being, he was so joyously disin-
terested himself, that, in his company, avarice itself
Baw the ridiculous incongruity of its greed, and, with
a grim smile, suffered its clutch on its cherished
hoards to relax.
And this thorough good nature had nothing of the
weakness, nothing of the cant, nothing or the fear of
giving offence, nothing of the self-^onnciousness, noth
ing of the bending and begging air of professional
benevolence, but was as erect and resolute as it was
wholesome and sweet. It seemed the effect of the
256 THOMAS STARR KINO.
native vigor as well as the native kindliness of jit
cordial and opulent soul. It never cloyed with its
amiability. It did not insult the poor with conde-
scension, or court the rich with servility, but took its
place on an easy equality and fraternity with all,
without the pretence of being the inferior of any.
While he was too manly to ape humility, the mere
idea of setting himself up as " a superior being "
would have drawn from him one of those bursts of
uncontrollable merriment, happy as childhood's and
as innocent, which will linger in the ears of friends
who often heard that glad music, until the grave
closes over them as it has over him.
The expression of this nature through the intellect
was as free from obstruction as through morals and
manners. His mind, like his heart, was open on all
sides. Clear, bright, eager, rapid, and joyous ; with
observation, memory, reason, imagination, in full play ;
with a glance quick to detect the ludicrous as well
as tne beautiful ; and with an analogical power, both
in the region of fancy and understanding, of remark-
able vivacity and brilliancy ; his intellect early fast-
ened on facts and on principles with the delight of
impulse rather than the effort of attention and will.
In swiftness and. exactness of perception, both o»
ideas and of theii relations, he was a marvel fron
THOMAS STARR KING. 257
his boyhood. Grasping with such ease, and assimi-
lating with such readiness, the nutriment of thought,
he made mind faster than others receive impressions.
His faculties palpably grew day by day, increasing
their force and enlarging their scope with every fresh
and new perception of nature and books and men.
He tasted continually the deep joy of constant men-
tal activity. Who shall measure the happiness of
that exhilarating sense of daily increase of knowl-
edge and development of power ? — the sweet sur-
prise of swift-springing thoughts from never-failing
fountains, ■— the glow and elation of soul as objects
poured in from without, and ideas streamed out from
within ! His mind, as independent as it was recep-
tive, and as free from self-distrust as from presump-
tion, never lost its balance as it sensitively quivered
nnder the various knowledge that went thronging
into it; for there was the judgment to dispose as
wed as the passion to know, and the sacred hunger
for new truth and beauty never degenerated into
that ignoble gluttony which paralyzes the action of
the mind it overfeeds.
There is something glorious in the contemplation
of a youth passed in such constant, such happy, such
»elf-rewarding toil. He nad a natural aptitude for
large ideas and deep sentiments. His mind caught
258 THOMAS STARE KING.
at laws immersed in bewildering details, — darted to
the salient points and delved to the central princi-
ples of controverted questions, — and absorbed systems
of philosophy as hilariously as others devour story-
books. The dauntless boy grappled with such
themes as Plato and Goethe, and wrote about them
with a prematureness of scholarship, a delicacy of
discernment, a sweet, innocent combination of confi-
dence and diffidence, which were inexpressibly charm-
ing. Throughout his career, in sermon and in
lecture, this strong tendency to view everything
in its principles was always prominent ; and as a
popularizer of ideas removed from ordinary appre-
hension, — secreted, indeed, from general view in
the jargon of metaphysics, — he was, perhaps, with-
out an equal in the country.
It is hardly possible to say what this mind might
not have grown to be, had not the drain on its en-
ergies begun almost as early as the unfolding of its
faculties, — had not the dissipation of power nearly
kept pace with its accumulation. His time, talent,
and sympathies were the property of all they de-
lighted and benefited. The public seized on him at
an early age, and did not loosen its grasp until
within a few days of his death. His parish was nol
» ofined to this society, but overed the ever-enlarg
THOMAS STARR KING. 259
ing circle of his acquaintances and audiences. The
demands, accordingly, on that fertile brain and boun-
teous heart were constant and endless. We were
always after him to write, to preach, to lecture, to
converse ; we plotted lovingly against his leisure ;
and as long as there was a bit of life in him, we
claimed it with all the indiscriminate eagerness of
exacting affection. As soon as a thought sprouted
in his head, we insisted on having it ; and we were
all in a friendly conspiracy to prevent his exercise
of that patient, concentrated, uninterrupted thinking,
which conducts to the heights of intellectual power.
Perhaps his elastic mind might have stood this
drain ; but the mind is braced by the emotional forces
which underlie it ; and it was on these that his
friends delighted to feed. His sympathetic nature
attracted towards him the craving for sympathy in
others ; and nothing draws more on the very sources
of vitality, mental and moral, than this assumption
of the sorrows, disappointments, heart-breaks, and mis-
eries of others, this incessant giving out of the very
capital and reserve fund of existence, to meet the
demands for sympathy. I have sometimes seen him
physically an^ morally fatigued and exhausted from
this over-exertion of brain and heart, and have won-
iered why, if each found it so hard to bear his oun
260 THOMAS STARR KING.
burdens in silence, we did not consider the cruelty
of casting the burdens of all, in one mountainous
load, upon him.
When we remember this immense readiness to give,
this admission of the claims of misfortune and trou-
ble to take out patent rights on his time and sym-
pathy, it is astonishing how much, intellectually, he
achieved. This was owing not more to the fine qual-
ity of his intellect than to its mode of action, for
deep down in the very centre of his being was the
element of beauty, and this unceasingly strove to
mould all he thought and did into its own likeness.
It was not only expressed in fancy and imagination,
in the richness of his imagery and the cadence of his
periods, and in that peculiar combination of softness
and fire which lent to his eloquence its persuasive
power, but it gave luminousness to his arrangement,
method to his scholarship, consecutiveness to his ar-
gumentation, symmetry to his moral life. It abridged
as well as decorated his work. Things that went into
his mind huddled and confused, hastened to fall into
their right relations, and harmoniously adjust them-
selves to some definite plan and purpose, as soon as
Lhey felt the disposing touch of that artistic intelli-
gence, to which all disorder was unbecoming as wel.
as unsystematic. This quality of beauty, an elemeiM
THOMAS STARR KING. 261
of his character as well as a shaping faculty of hia
mind, demanded symmetry in all things, — symmetry
of form in things imaginative, symmetry of law in
things intellectual, symmetry of life in things moral
The besetting sins of the head and the heart ap-
peared to him uncomely as well as wrong, and he
avoided them through an instinctive love of the good
and the fair. As much of our intellectual and moral
effort is spent in removing obstacles and overcoming
temptations, and as from this weary work he was in
a great measure spared, the time saved was so many
year3 added to his life.
But it must be added, that this pervading senti-
ment of the beautiful did not make him one of those
bigots of the ideal, whom the deformities of practical
life keep in a morbid state of constant moral or men
tal irritation. From the fret of this fine fanaticism,
which always weakens the character it seemingly
adorns, he was preserved by his exquisite, his deli
cious sense of the ludicrous. The deformed, when
his eye sparkled upon it, hastened to change into the
grotesque ; it acquired, indeed, a quaint beauty of its
own ; it irritated, not his nerves, but his risibilities ;
it slid into his loving neart, — always open to things
human, — and was there nursed and cherished on the
lunnieat mirth and laughter that humorous object
262 THOMAS STARR KING.
ever fed upon. For the morally deformed his whole
being had an instinctive repugnance ; but when him-
self the mark at which meanness or malice aimed, he
always seemed to me rather amused than exasper-
ated. The oddity of the meanness, the strange futility
of the malice, affected him like a practical joke ;
quick as lightning to detect the base thing, he still
dismissed it laughingly from his mind, with hardly
the appearance of having suffered wrong, and certain-
ly without any desire or intention to retaliate. No
wound could fester in that humane and healthy soul.
The love of the beautiful, to which I have referred
as so strong an element in his nature, was, as it re-
gards natural scenery, most completely embodied in
his eloquent book on the White Hills, — which will
look the sadder to us now that the loving chronicler
of their varying aspects- of grandeur and grace, who
has associated his own name with every valley and
peak, will visit them no more ; but when his ser-
mons and lectures are published, it will be seen how
closely the beautiful in nature was linked in his
mind with the beautiful in thought, in character, and
in action. He loved his theological calling, and it
was his ambition to pay the debt which every able
man is said to owe his profession, namely, to contrib-
ute some worn of permanent value to its literature.
THOMAS STARR KINO. 263
J lad he lived, he would, I think, have written the
most original, the most interpretative, and the most
attractive of all books on the life, character, and
apistles of the Apostle Paul. But it was ordered
that his life should be chiefly spent in direct actior
on men through speech and personal influence ; and
theology may well wait for the book, when human-
ity had such pressing need for the man.
I hardly know how to speak of his moral and
spiritual qualities ; for, noble as they were, they were
not detached from his mind, but pervaded it. Both
as a thinker and as a reformer he was brave almost
to audacity; but his courage was tempered by an ad-
mirable discretion and sense of the becoming, and
his quick self-recovery from a mistake or error was
•iot one of the least of his gift<. He seemed to have
do fear, not even the subtlest form which fear as-
sumes in our day, — the fear of being thought afraid.
No supercilious taunt, or imputation of timidity, could
sting him into going further in liberal theology and
reforming politics than his own intelligence and con-
science carried hiin. Malignity was a spiritual vice
>f which I have sometimes doubted if he had even
the mental perception. His charity and toleration
vere as wide as his knowledge of men. Controversy
ras a gymnastic in wnich he delighted to f"Hce hii
264 THOMAS STARR KINO.
faculties, but he could look at disputed questions
from the point of view of his opponents, discrimi-
nate between dogmas and the holders of them, ana
assail opinions without unwittingly defaming charac-
ter. "Speaking the truth in love," was a text which
he seemed born to illustrate ; and if, as a theologian,
he did not perceive the moral evil of the world in
all its ghastliness, it was because its most hateful
forms stole away when he appeared, and, addressing
what was good in men, the good went gladly out
to him in return. His piety, pure, deep, tender, se-
rene, and warm, took hold of the positive principles
of light and beneficence, not of the negative ones of
darkness and depravity, and — himself a child of tho
light — he preached the religion of spiritual joy.
The rarity of such a character, and the wide in-
fluence it was calculated to exert in virtue of ita
native qualities, were only seen in all their beauty
and might when he went from us to California, and
we looked at him from afar. In four years he con-
densed the work of forty. The very genius of or-
ganization seemed to wait upon his steps. Men
Hocked to him as to a natural benefactor. As a
clergyman, he built up the strongest church in the
State, with an income the largest of any in the land.
&s a philanthropist, he raised for the most beneficent
TH0MA3 STARR KING. 265
at all charities the most munificent of all subscrip-
tions. As a patriotic Christian statesman, he includ-
ed the real elements of power in the community,
took the people out of tub hands of disloyal politi-
cians, lifted them up to the level of his own ardent
soul, and not only saved the State to the Union, but
imprinted his own generous and magnanimous spirit
on its forming life. In the full speed of this victo-
rious career, with the blessings of a nation raining
upon him, he was arrested by death, — the rich and
abounding life suddenly summoned to the Source of
Life, and " happy to go." Human willingness could
hardly answer the Divine Will with more perfect
submission ; and it is not for us, who remember with
what a shock of inexpressible grief and pain that un
expected departure smote the hearts of kindred and
friends, but who also remember how often from this
pulpit, and from his lips, we have been taught that
the purpose of Providence in sending death is always
beneficent, to doubt that the stroke, so heavy to us,
so " happy " to him, was prompted by wisdom and
love. Bowing before that transcendent mystery, and
not seeking to penetrate it, let us (hid consolation in
the faith that this child of the light has been caught
up into the Light Ineftable, — that this preacher of the
"eligion of joy has entered into the joy of his Lord.
19
XL
AGASSIZ.*
NO thoughtful person can have watched the ten-
dencies of scientific thinking, for the last twenty
or thirty years, without being impressed with its bear-
ings on Natural Theology and the Philosophy of the
Mind. A large class of scientific men, eminent for
their powers of observation and understanding, but
deficient in the more subtile and profound elements
of mind which mark the philosophic thinker, have
undoubtedly evinced in their speculations a strong
leaning to Materialism, in what may be considered
its worst form, namely, the doctrine that organized
beings owe their origin to merely physical agents.
The intellectual defect of these savans is a seeming
incapacity to comprehend, appreciate, and feel the
necessity of the fertile idea of Cause. For this they
substitute the abstraction of Law, without a distinct
impression of the meaning of the term, for law im
plies a power that legislates. It is no cause, buJ
• E»say on Classification, 1867.
agassiz. 267
only the mode in which a cause operates ; " not action,
but a rule of action." The distinguishing character-
istic of a mind of the second class is its content
with that explanation of a problem which is one or
two removes from its centre and heart. It has no
fine, detecting sense of the real thing to be investi-
gated, explained, or affirmed. Too sceptical to admit
the validity of that mental instinct, that gravitation to
tfie truth, which conducts to solid and intelligent be-
lief, they are credulous enough in giving omnipotence
to the lifeless notion of law, if by so doing they can
escape from the living conception of cause. The in-
troduction of the idea of God is to them not only a
fallacy but an affront, and throws them into a state
of intellectual irritation which is not favorable to the
fair consideration of the facts and arguments which
make such an introduction necessary.
But the defect is not merely intellectual. It is
also personal, and has one of its roots in the most
refined form of vanity and pride. Everybody is
familiar with the subjectivity and self-assertion of
poets. We are not surprised when Do.nte makes
himself the lord of the next world, and plunges his
enemies into hell, with the full faith that there cud
be no disagreement between the Deity and himself
is to their guilt or mode of punishment We are
268 AGASSIZ.
not surprised when Byron colors all nature with the
hues of his own spirit, forces natural objects into
Bymbols of his own caprices of disgust or desperation,
and views mankind as limited to Byron -kind. But
we are hardly prepared to suspect that men engaged
in a scientific scrutiny of material existences evei
project their own nature on what th«y observe, or
are tempted to make their own mindu the measure
of things. Yet this is, in many cases, the truth. A
clear objective perception of facts, and the laws and
principles which inhere in facts, is a moral, no less
than a mental quality. It implies a purification of
the character from egotism and prida of opinion, a
rare union of humility of feeling with a dacity of
thought, and, above all, the triumph o»* a f- acere love
of objective truth over the desire to er dt a subjec-
tive self. The moment a scientific m*tfi begins to
bluster about his discoveries, and c**.l them ' my
truth," it is all over with him. Me has given
pledges to the strongest of all selfisk principles that
he will see Nature hereafter only a» Nature squares
with his theory, and feeds his self^ .nportance. Es-
pecially, if he calls his notion Law , and makes law
an ultimate, beyond which the bun an reason cannot
go, he feels as if he were the crec ar of that which
he has, perhaps, only imperfectly observed. In hi*
AGASSIZ. 260
^age opinion it is the folly of superstition to admit
'.he necessity of God, but he sees no impropriety
in the apotheosis of his darling notion ; and, accord-
ingly, he quietly expels God from the universe, ano
puts himself in His place. He does it as unmistak
ably, though not as coarsely and obviously, as the
religious fanatic, who projects a deity from his malig-
nant passions, and then insists on his being worshipped
by all mankind. The temptation to substitute self
— either in its emotional, or imaginative, or reason-
ing expression — for objective truth is a temptation
which is not confined to any one class of powerful
natures, but operates on all ; and men of science
have their full share of the infirmity.
We have been led into these remarks by reading
the long introductory Essay on Classification, in the
first volume of Mr. Agassiz's " Contributions to the
Natural History of North America," — a work of
the first importance, if we merely consider its posi-
tive additions to our knowledge of Natural History ;
but especially interesting to us for the felicity and
jower with which it deals with the higher philoso-
phy of the science, and the superiority of the author
to the besetting mental sins W3 have indicated. In
Uie " Essay on Classification," the first of living nat
Uralists oroves himself also to be among the first of
270 AGASSIZ.
living thinkers in the department of natural theology
Its publication we cannot but think to be no mere
incident in the progress of science, but an event
It would seem to impose on every naturalist the
duty of agreeing with Mr. Agassiz or of refuting
him. No man of any scientific reputation can here-
after bring forward the development theory, or the
theory that animal life can be produced by the nat-
ural operation of physical agents, or the theory that
God is an obsolete idea in science, or the theory
that things were not created but occurred, without
harmonizing his theory with Mr. Agassiz's facts, and
grappling with Mr. Agassiz's ideas. The essay will
also do much to correct the anarchy of thought
which prevails among many naturalists, who, being
observers rather than thinkers, have confused notions
of the real problems to be decided, are sometimes
on one side of an important question, sometimes on
another, with an imperfect comprehension of the vital
points at issue ; and who need nothing 60 much as
the assistance of a master-mind, to draw a definite
line between the two opposing systems, and to indi-
cate the consequences of each.
There can be no doubt of the right of Mr. Agas«
b.z to speak with authority on the philosophy of his
icienoe ; for he has fairly earned the right to speak
AGASSIZ. 271
ty labor, by study, by the most extensive investiga-
tions, by patient and continuous thought. The whole
immense subject of natural history, in itself and in
its literature, is reflected in the clear and compre-
hensive mirror of his mind. He knows facts, and
the relations of facts, so thoroughly, that he can
wield them with ease as elements of the profoundest
philosophical reasoning. The breadth of his view
preserves him from the vice of detaching classes of
facts from their relations, emphasizing them into
undue importance, and severing the fine cord of
connection which gives them their real significance.
By the instinct of his intelligence he looks at every-
thing, not as isolated, but as related, and consequent-
ly he is not content with facts, but searches for the
principles which give coherence to facts. As an ob-
server, he is both rapid and accurate. He possesses
not merely the talent of observation, but its genius ;
tnd hence his ability to perform the enormous tasks
which he imposes on his industry. His mind is
eminently large, sound, fertile, conscientious, and sa-
gacious, quick and deep in its insight, wide in the
range of its argumentation, capable equally of the
trinutest microscopic, scrutiny and the broadest gen-
eralizations, independent of schools and systems, and
inspired by that grand and ennobling love of truth
272 AGASSIZ.
which is serenely superior to fear, interest, vanity
ambition, or the desire of display. In the operation
of his mind there is no predominance of any single
power, but the intellectual action of what we feel to
be a powerful nature. When he observes, his whole
mind enters into the act of observation, just as when
he reasons, his whole mind enters into the act of
reasoning. This unity of the man in each intellect-
ual operation gives to his statements and arguments
the character of depositions under oath. His personal
honor is pledged for his accuracy, and his works are
therefore free from those lies of the brain whic^i
spring from narrow thought, confused perceptions
and hasty generalizations. Though in decided oppo-
sition to many eminent naturalists, he, in common
with all lovers of truth, has none of the fretful dis-
putativeness of polemics ; and while he calmly and
clearly controverts antagonistic theories, he exhibits
nothing of the disputatious spirit.
The " Essay on Classification," the reading of which
has occasioned these general observations on the char-
acteristics of Mr. Agassiz as a scientific thinker, is
addressed to all minds that reflect, and not merely
to the professed naturalist. In the general reader, its
perusal will be likely to produce something of that
wonder and awe which his first introduction to th*
AGASSIZ. 273
marvels of astronomy infused into his mind. And
first, Mr. Agassiz takes the ground, that the divisions
of the animal kingdom according to type, class, or-
der, family, genus, and species are not convenient
devices of the human understanding to classify its
knowledge, but were instituted by God as the cate-
gories of His thinking. There is a systematic ar-
rangement in nature which science did not invent,
but gradually discovered. The terms in which this
arrangement is expressed are the translation into
human language of the thoughts of the Creator.
The plan of creation, so far from growing out of
the necessary action of natural laws, betrays in ev
ery part, to the profound student, the signs of hav-
ing been the free conception of the Divine Intellect,
matured in His mind before it was manifested in
external forms. The existence of a plan involves
premeditation prior to the act which carried the plan
into execution ; and if, through all the various stages
of the physical history of the globe, this plan of an-
imal creation has never been departed from, we are
tompelled to see in it the marks of thought and fore-
thought, of intelligent purpose and unity of design.
Now the researches of Cuvier, who classified animals
according to their structure, and of Von Baer, who
classified them according to their development, have
12* B
274 AGASSIZ.
sbown that the animal kingdom exhibits four pri
mary divisions, the representatives of which are or-
ganized upon four different plans of structure, and
grow up according to four different modes of devel-
opment. As regards living animals, at no period do
the types pass into each other. The type of each
animal is defined from the beginning, and controls
the whole development. The embryo of the verte-
brate is a vertebrate from the beginning, and does
not exhibit at any time a correspondence with the
invertebrates. In regard to extinct species the same
principle holds good. Within thirty years it was cus-
tomary for geologists and palaeontologists to assert
that the lowest animals first made their appearance
on the earth, and that these were followed by higher
and higher types, until the series was closed by man.
Now it is well known that representatives of the
four types of animals existed simultaneously in the
earliest geological periods. All naturalists now agree
that there was no priority in time of the appearance
of radiata, mollusks, and articulata ; and if some still
ntend that vertebrata originated later than the oth-
eis, it is still conceded that they appeared before the
tnd of the first great epoch in the history of the
globe. It is curious how this great principle of type
tonfrols the animal kingdom. Many facts, at first
AGASSIZ. 275
considered favorable to the notion that animal life
was originated by the physical conditions and sur-
roundings of its existence, have been turned against
the theory by bringing in this fertile idea. Thus the
blind fish in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky has
been cited as indicating that physical conditions de-
termine the absence or presence of organs. But the
discovery of a rudimentary eye in this fish proves
that, in its creation, the plan of structure of the type
to which it belongs was followed, though the organ
was of no use. Indeed, the connection between or-
gans and functions, which in most works on natural
theology is emphasized as the great proof of causal
and intelligent force, is not universally true. Organs
without functions are among the ascertained facts of
zoology. The whale has teeth which never cut
through the gum. The males of mammalia have
breasts which are never used. Pinnated animals
have fingers which are never moved. Why is this?
The reason is, that these organs, though not neces-
sary to the mode of existence of the animals, are
retained because they relate to the fundamental char-
acteristics of their class. " The organ remains, not
for the performance of a function, but with reference
to a plan " ; as in architecture the same external
combinations which mark the style to which a build-
276 AGASSIZ.
ing belongs are often retained for the sake of sym-
raetry and harmony of proportion, when they serve
no practical object.
Now here is a great fact, true not only as regards
living animals, but in respect to fossil species of for
mer geological epochs, which carry the mind back
into an incalculable remoteness of time, — the fact,
namely, that all organized beings were made on four
different plans of structure. These are types, ideas.
The question is, Can we discriminate between these
types and the classes in which the four plans of
structure are carried out in actual organizations ?
If we can thus discriminate, we of course lift the
question out of matter into mind. We pass from
organization to the Thought and Will that organ-
ized. In all matters under human control we are
accustomed to take this step. At whatever point we
view a fact or event, we trace it back through all
the stages of its progress to the invisible thought
which contrived it, and the invisible will that bade
it be. We never hesitate, when we discern a plan
carried practically out in human affairs, to give the
plan a previous ideal existence in the mind of its
human originator. If we should reason in piactical
affairs, as some naturalists reason in regard to tho
origin of organized beings, we should insist that no
AGASSIZ. 277
oae had the logical right to pass, beyond the steam-
engine, which is a plan carried out, to the mind of
James "Watt, where it previously existed in idea.
Now Mr. Agassiz has demonstrated that all ani«
mals, both of living and extinct species, which have
come under the notice of naturalists, exhibit the
marks of these four plans of structure, and of no
more, however infinitely diversified they may be in
their details of structure. The number of existing
Bpecies is at least two hundred and fifty thousand,
with innumerable living representatives ; and there is
every reason to suppose that the number of extinct
species is at least as great. Thus, from the begin-
ning, through geological epochs which rival in time*
the marvels of astronomy in space, and under all the
physical conditions and changes of the planet, we
»erceive four ideas controlling the structure of r\]
:rganized beings. Leaving out of view the difficulty
of supposing that physical elements should possess
creative intelligence to originate animal life, we may
still ask, without profanity, Where, in Heaven's name,
did they get the memory ? lt\ each epoch they
would have been compelled to create anew, for the
previous animals had left no living representative to
hint the secret of their structure to the wild ele-
mental philosophers who were called upon to extern
278 AGASSIZ.
porize animal life after the old plans. They would
have been compelled to recollect the mode in which
they did it in the elder time. What is this but a
misuse of terms, — a wilful naming of one thing by
thb appellation of another, — a projection of qualities
characteristic of intelligent forces, upon forces which
Rre unintelligent and necessitated?
Mr. Agassiz therefore insists that these four plana
of structure correspond to four ideas in the Creator's
mind, which are independent of the animal forms in
which they are carried out. It is impossible for us
to condense the facts and arguments by which, in
thirty-one weighty chapters, he proceeds to show that,
from whatever point we survey animal life, we are
inevitably led to a Supreme Personal Intelligence
as its cause and support, — to an intelligence whose
working in the animal creation exhibits " thought,
considerate thought, combining power, premeditation,
prescience, omniscience." Throughout this portion of
his essay we continually feel the power and compre-
hensiveness of his mind, both in the graceful ease
with which an immense weight and affluence ol
knowledge is borne, and the vigorous felicity with
which it is wielded in the service of ideas. There is
no branch of his subject in which he does not show
Himself the master of his materials. The moat con
AGASSIZ. 279
fused facts fall into order and relation, and readily
support principles they were at first supposed to
deny, when subjected to the scrutiny of his penetrat-
ing intelligence. His chapters on the simultaneous
existence of the most diversified types under identi-
cal circumstances ; on the repetition of identical types
under the most diversified circumstances; on the uni-
ty of plan in otherwise highly diversified types ; on
the correspondence in the details of structure in ani-
mals otherwi.se entirely disconnected ; on the various
degrees and different kinds of relationship among ani-
mals ; on their gradation of structure ; their range of
geographical distribution ; on the serial connection in
structure of those widely scattered on the globe's sur-
face ; on the relation between their size and struct-
ure, and between their size and the mediums in
which they live ; on the permanency of specific pe-
culiarities in all organized beings ; and on their hab-
its, metamorphoses, duration of life, succession, stand-
ing, rank, and development: — these are all fertile in
original thought and exact observation, and all swell
the grand cumulative argument with which he rigor-
ously connects organized beings with their Divine
Source. It seems to us that he does not leave a
loose or broken link in the whole chain of his rear
toning.
280 AGASSIZ.
The second portion of his essay is devoted to s
systematic description of the leading groups of ex-
isting animals, as a foundation for a natural system
of classification, and the third portion to an elaborate
exposition and examination of the principal systems
of zoology from Aristotle to Von Baer. His defini-
tions of the divisions of what he calls the natural
system of classification are clear and exact Branches
or types are characterized by the plan of their struct-
ure ; classes, by the manner in which that plan is
executed, as far as ways and means are concerned ;
orders, by the degrees of complication of that struct-
ure ; families, by their form, as far as determined by
structure ; genera, by the details of the execution in
special parts ; and species, by the relations of indi-
viduals to one another, and to the world in which
they live, as well as by the proportion of their parts,
their ornamentation, etc. All other divisions are but
limitations of these. The representatives of these
divisions are perishable individuals. If we select a
living animal, we find that it has in its structure all
the marks by which we assign it, not only to a cer-
tain species and genus, but to an order, family, class
and type ; and this classification is not arbitrary, a
human device for simplifying our knowledge, but the
detection in the object itself of peculiarities divinelj
AOASSIZ. 281
impressed on its structure. Thus in the animal king-
dom, God himself has combined unity and simplicity
with the vastest diversity ; and the study of Natural
History is not merely the contemplation of His works,
but of His ideas and method, — a study, therefore, in
which the spirit of meekness and awe can be united
with a depth, force, daring, and amplitude of thought,
compared with which the speculations of the selfish
and sceptical school of natural philosophers appear
feeble, and petty, and pert. The greatness of a
philosopher is to be measured by what he suggests
and aims after, as well as by what he discovers,
and he never seems so great as when he uses his
powers in attempting to follow the indications in na
ture of a Creative Intelligence infinitely greater than
himself.
In conclusion, we may say that Mr. Agassiz's
processes and results are curiously contradictory of
the dictum of that self-chosen legislator of science,
Auguste Comte. We have been assured, over and
over again, by the champions of the Philosophic Posi-
tive, that Comte's law of the evolution of scientific
thought is incontrovertible. Every branch of knowl-
edge, according to this law, passes through three
itages ; first, the theological or supernatural, in which
phenomena are referred to supernatural agents m
282 AGASSIZ.
their causes, the principle being the same whether
the divine source of things is sought in fetichism
or theism ; second, the metaphysical, or transitional
stage, in which a passage is made from divine per-
sons to personified abstractions, which are supposed
to underlie, animate, and produce phenomena; and aa
the highest conception of the supernatural stage is
God considered as cause, so the highest conception
of the metaphysical stage is Nature, considered as
force ; third, the positive stage, in which all inquiry
after causes and essences is discarded, God and Na-
ture are expelled from phenomena, and things are
classified according to their invariable relations of
succession and similitude. The hope of the positivist
U. that the various laws with which he now contents
his understanding will, in the progress and perfection
of science, be found to be the expression of one
general and all-inclusive Law. There are, therefore,
three modes of viewing facts and relations : the first,
which represents the infancy of a science, regards
God as the Creator, the second regards Nature as
the soul, and the third regards Law as the regulator,
of phenomena. The highest conception of the posi-
tivist, if individualized, would represent the universe
onder the care of a colossal, yet impersonal police-
man, whose business was to preserve order. A
AGASSIZ. 283
present, the positivist admits that he has only seen
tome of the inferior police, but he think9 the glori-
ous hope may be not unreasonably indulged that,
ages after he is rotten, humanity will catch a glimpse
of the master constable himself. By the limitation
of the human faculties it is impossible for him to
pass to any other orders of government. If he keep9
within the circle of the knowable, he stops at the
constable ; to superstition and metaphysics belong the
absurdity of asserting that the constable is not ulti-
mate, but implies a governor and a sovereign !
Now, in the " Essay on Classification," Mr. Agassiz
has certainly indicated his right to be ranked with
positive philosophers as far as the observation, dis-
covery, and verification of laws is concerned. He is
true throughout to facts and the relations of facts, V>
those " invariable relations of succession and simih
tude " which the objects of his science bear to each
other. He reaches positive conclusions, which there
is every probability that future additions to natural
history will confirm. He knows everything which
the positivists of zoology — positivists after the idea
of Comte — have observed and demonstrated. He La*
taken the science a3 left by them, and carried it for-
ward ; and both as an anatomist and embryologist, as
»n observer of the structure of animals and as an
284 AGASSIZ.
observer of their development, he has put on immov
able foundations the great law that all animals ar«
organized upon four different plans of structure, and
grow up according to four different modes of devel-
opment. He has corrected the errors, in matters of
fact, of many naturalists of Comte's method of think-
ing, who, while they are never weary of stigmatizing
the influence of theological and metaphysical theories
in corrupting science, have themselves unconsciously
misread facts by viewing them in the light of mislead-
ing theories. And after showing, as Mr. Agassiz has
done, that the various divisions of the system of classi-
fication he espouses exist in nature, are independent ol
the human mind, and are confirmed by observation
and experiment, it will not do to say that the science
of zoology itself is not yet in the positive stage.
How, then, are we to account for the fact that Mr.
Agassiz reverses the " inevitable " evolution of scien-
tific thought ? How shall we explain the problen
that he passes from the positive stage to the super-
natural, instead of to the positive from the supernat-
ural? It may be hinted — and tolerance and charity
are not always accompaniments of scientific infidelity
— that he does it in deference to popular prejudice.
and not in obedience to the evidence of objective
truth. This insinuation deserves to he considered
•omewhat at length.
AGASSIZ. 285
And first, we admit the paramount importance, in
he investigation of the facts of creation, of that In-
dependence of thought which is based on courageous
character. Cowardice paralyzes the noblest powers ;
and we own to an instinctive sympathy with every
man who, in stating the conscientious results of
thought and research, is honored with a howl of
execration from that large body of persons who sup-
pose that religion is only safe when it is under the
guardianship of ignorance and unreason. But we do
not think that the fear of rousing theological preju-
dice is the kind of fear that a man of science is
now in most danger of regarding. He is more
tempted to yield to that refined form of cowardice
which makes him apprehensive of offending the prej-
udices of his order. A theological leaning in his
scientific speculations is likely to expose him to the
suspicious of his peers in science, and withdraw from
him the signs of that subtle freemasonry by which
eading minds recognize each other. In France,
where eminence in the physical and mathematical
sciences is the measure of intellectual ability, there is
a strong scientific prejudice against associating nat-
ural science with natural theology ; and France ha;i
done much to give the tone to the scientific world
It would be horrible, if it were not comical, to no«
286 AGASSIZ.
tice the gravity with which the savans of the great
nation have withdrawn their patronage from the
Deity. Even Cousin, in his metaphysical opposition
to the materialistic tendencies of French thought,
excogitates a Deity who is rather a fine effect of
philosophic rhetoric than an object of worship ; and
he treats Christianity as a man of charming manners
would treat a pretty child, making philosophy most
condescendingly hold out its hand to her ! In the
middle of the last century the very valets of the
French men of science considered belief in God the
mark of a vulgar mind. Infidelity was prattled by
fops just as superstition was prattled by devotees.
Free and liberal minds, so called, became members
of an intellectual aristocracy, of which atheism, bla-
tant or latent, was the condition of admittance. At
present God is not so much denied as ignored.
French science professes to get along very well
without him. Religion, as far as it pretends to
intellectual supports, is regarded as a sign of weak-
ness, hypocrisy, or fear ; and the fear of being
thought a coward operates to scare many natural
philosophers into something very like cowardice. To
avoid the imputation of superstition, they often hesi-
tate to follow the natural action of their understand
jigs. We therefore consider that Mr. Agassiz, ai
AGASSIZ. 287
far as respects the public opinion of the scientific
world, — which is the public opinion to which he
naturally pays most heed, — will rather lose caste
than gain fame among scientific naturalists by insist-
ing so strenuously as he does on the theological as-
pects of his science. Especially will he be made the
object of ridicule for his belief in the interference of
God, as Creator, in each geological epoch, — a doc-
trine which will be considered by many as equiva.
lent to introducing miracles into science, and as
carrying it back to the most besotted supernatural
stage of knowledge.
We think, therefore, that Mr. Agassiz overcame a
temptation, rather than yielded to one, when he
broke through the technical limitations of his science,
and passed from laws to ideas, and from ideas to
God. But we have stronger proof that no desire
to propitiate popular prejudices induced him to run
the risk of offending scientific prejudices, in the
qualities of character impressed on his work itself.
The task of criticism is not merely to apply laws,
but discern natures ; and certainly Mr. Agassiz, in
the " E<say on Classification," has exhibited himself
as clearly as he has exhibited his subject. An hon-
est, sturdy, generous, self-renouncing love of tru h,
»nd willingness to follow whithersoever it loads, — to
288 AGASSIZ.
atheism, if the facts force him that way, to theism,
if the facts conduct him to God, — this is the char-
acteristic which his broad and open nature haa
stamped unmistakably on his page. Every sentence
speaks scorn of intellectual reserves, and innocence
of intellectual guile. And it is this truthful spirit
animating his labors which gives to his results no
small portion of their value and significance ; for
falseness in the character is likely in the end to
become falseness in the intellect ; and a thinker on
the great themes which interest all mankind is
shorn of his influence if his qualities of disposition
are such as to cast doubts on his mental honesty,
and to put his readers continually on their guard
against observations he is supposed capable of mak-
ing wilfully inaccurate, and reasonings he is sup-
posed capable of making wilfully fallacious.
In his "Essay on Classification," Mr. Agassiz states
his scientific convictions. But he is not merely a
scientific thinker : he is a scientific force ; and no
small portion of the immense influence he exerts is
iue to the energy, intensity, and geniality which
distinguish the nature of the man. In personal in-
tercourse he inspires as well as informs, communi-
cates not only knowledge, but the love of knowl-
edge, and makes for the time everything appear o'
AGASSIZ. 289
small account in comparison with the subject which
has possession of his soul. To hear him speak on
his favorite themes is to become inflamed with his
enthusiasm. He is at once one of the most domi-
nating and one of the most sympathetic of men,
having the qualities of leader and companion com-
bined in singular harmony. People follow him, work
for him, contribute money for his objects, not only
from the love inspired by his good fellowship, but
from the compulsion exercised by his force. Di-
vorced from his geniality, his energy would make
him disliked as a dictator ; divorced from his energy
his geniality would be barren of practical effects.
The good-will he inspires in others quickens their
active faculties as well as their benevolent feelings.
They feel that, magnetized by the man, they must
do something for the science impersonated in the
man, — that there is no way of enjoying his compan-
ionship without catching the contagion of his spirit.
lie consequently wields, through his social qualities,
a wider personal influence over a wider variety of
persons than any other scientific man of his time.
At his genial instigation, laborers delve and dive,
students toil for specimens, merchants open their
purses, legislatures pass appropriation bills. To do
something for Agassiz is a pleasing addition to the
IS 8
290 agassiz.
Whole Duty of Man in the region whert he lives.
Everybody feels that the indefatigable observer anu
thinker, who declined a lucrative lecture invitatiou
because, he said, he could not waste his time its
making money, has no other than public ends in
his eager demands for public co-operation in his
scientific schemes. A perfect democrat in his man-
ners, meeting every man on the level of his posi-
tion and character, he is the equal and companion
of all, and inundates all with his abounding personal
vitality and cheer. At times the intensity of his
temperament may rise to something like irascibility
in the championship of his settled convictions; but
this is felt to be a necessary consequence of that
identification of the man with his pursuit which is
the spring of his tireless energy and of his all-sacri-
ficing devotion to the advancement of his science.
Even his vehemence partakes of the largeness, gen-
erosity, and geniality of his nature, — is the "noble
rage" of a capacious yet ardent intelligence, momen-
tarily carried away by that hatred of error which is
the negative form of the love of truth.
This wide geniality is not, in Agassiz, confined to
his own race, but extends to the objects of his sci-
ence. He considers all organized beings as endowed
with minds ; and as a dramatic poet passes, by imagi-
AGASSIZ. 291
nation and sympathy, into individaal natures differ-
ing from his own, thinking from the point of view
of Bottom as easily as from the point of view of
Hamlet, so Agassiz, passing tt o bounds even of his
own kind, has a sort of interpretative glance into
the mental and moral constitution of animals, as well
as a scientific perception of their structure. He
seems at times to have established spiritual commu-
nication with them, so deeply and sympathetically he
comprehends their natures and needs ; and it might
be said that they appear to have a dim perception
of his good intentions towards their order, even when
he is compelled to sacrifice individuals among them
for the good of the science by which they are enno-
bled. We never hear of his being injured by any
of the creatures he captures and dissects. By a fan-
ciful exaggeration, we might even suppose that the
martyrs of his zoological researches, the patriots of
the Animal Kingdom, the Leonidases and Ilofers
of natural history, had a consciousness that they
were immolated for the benefit of their species ; that
their death was the price hy which the welfare of
their race was to be assured; that Agassiz, their in-
terpreter, who introduced them to the higher human
order of beings, had the dignity and permanent inter-
est* of their k>nd at heart even when he killed; ana
292 AGASSIZ.
that in his hands they became illustrations and proofs
of a vast scheme of creation, visible links in a chain
of reasoning which, beginning with the structure of
the lowest form of animal life, has no other intelli-
gent end than in the ideas of God.
XII.
WASlliauTON AND THE PRINCIPLES OP
THE REVOLUTION.*
THE day, gentlemen, we have here met to com-
memorate, in the spirit of a somewhat soberei
joy than rings in the noisy jubilee of the streets, is
not so much a day dedicated to liberty in the ab-
stract, as a day especially consecrated to American
liberty and American independence. The true char-
acter of that liberty is to be sought in the events of
our Colonial history, in the manners and laws of our
Colonial forefathers, and, above all, in the stern, brief
epitome of our whole Colonial life contained in that
memorable Declaration, the maxims of whose sturdy
wisdom still sound in our ears and linger in our
hearts, as we have heard them read in this hall to-
day ; a Declaration peculiar among all others of its
kind, not merely for the fearless free spirit which
beats and burns beneath every decisive sentence, but
or its combination of clearness in the statement of
• An Oration delivered before tie municipal authorities of Bo*
too, July 4, 1850.
294 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
particular grievances with audacity in the announce*
tfient of general principles ; a Declaration, indeed,
abounding in sentiments of liberty so sinewy and
bold, and ideas of liberty uo exact and practical, that
it bears on every immortal feature the signs of rep-
resenting a people, to whom liberty had been long
familiar as a living law, as an organized institution,
as a homely, household fact. The peculiarities which
distinguish the whole substance and tone of this sol-
emn instrument are peculiarities of the American
Revolution itself, giving dignity to its events and
import to its principles, as they gave success to its
arms.
Liberty, considered as an element of human na-
ture, would naturally, if unchecked, follow an ideal
law of development, appearing first as a dim but
potent sentiment; then as an intelligent sentiment, or
idea ; then as an organized idea, or body of institu-
tions, recognizing mutual rights and enforcing mutual
duties. But, in its historical development, we find
that the unselfish nature of liberty is strangely inter-
mixed with its selfish perversion ; that, in struggling
tvith outward oppression, it develops inward hatreds;
that the sentiment is apt tc fester into a malignant
passion, the idea to dwindle into a barren opinion,
%nd this passionate opinion to issue in anarchy, which
OP THE REVOLUTION. 295
ie despotism disorganized, but as tyrannical under its
thousand wills as under its one. These hostile ele-
ments, which make up the complex historical fact of
liberty, — one positive, the other negative, — one or-
ganizing, the other destructive, — are always at work
in human affairs with beneficent or baleful energy ;
but, as society advances, the baser elements give
way by degrees to the nobler, and liberty ever tenda
to realize itself in law. The most genial operation
of its creative spirit is when it appears as a still,
mysterious, plastic influence, silently and surely mod-
ifying the whole constitution of a despotic society,
Btealing noiselessly into manners, insinuating itself
: nto the administration of laws, grafting new shoots
upon the decaying trunks of old institutions, and in-
sensibly building up in a people's mind a character
strong enough to maintain rights which are also cus-
toms. If its most beneficent influence be seen in its
gradual organization of liberties, of sentiments rooted
in facts, its most barren effect for good is when it
scatters abstract opinions of freedom, true to nothing
existing in a people's practical life, and scorning all
illiance with manners or compromise with fact. This
is a fertile source of disorder, of revolts which end
in massacres, of Ages of Reason which end in
Reigns of Terro" ; and perhaps the failure of mosl
296 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
of the European movements comes from their being
either mad uprisings against the pressure of intolera«
ble miseries, or fruitless strivings to establish abstract
principles. Such principles, however excellent as
propositions, can influence only a small minority of
a nation, for a nation rises only in defence of rights
which have been violated, not for rights which it
has never exercised ; and abstract " liberty, equality,
and fraternity," pushed by amiable sentimentalists
like Lamartine, and Satanic sentimentalists like Le-
dru Rollin, have found their fit result in the armed
bureaucracy, now encamped in Paris, under the
ironical nickname of " French Republic."
Now, it was the peculiar felicity of our position,
that free institutions were planted here at the origi-
nal settlement of the country, — institutions which
De Tocqueville considers founded on principles far
in advance of the wisest political science of Europe
at that day; and accordingly our Revolution began in
the defence of rights which were customs, of ideas
which were facts, of liberties which were laws ; and
these rights, ideas, and liberties, embodying as they
llid the common life and experience of the people,
were truly considered a palpable property, an inal«
tenable inheritance of freedom, which the Stamp Act^
•nd the other measures of Colonial taxation, tlneai
OP THE REVOLUTION. 297
ened with confiscation. Parliament, therefore, ap-
peared in America as a spoiler, making war upon
the people it assumed to govern, and it thus stimu-
lated and combined the opposition of all classes ; for
a wrong cannot but be universally perceived when it
is universally felt. By thus starting up in defence
of the freedom they really possessed, the Colonies
vastly increased it. In struggling against innovation,
they " innovated " themselves into independence ; in
battling against novelties, they wrought out into act-
ual form the startling novelty of constitutional Amer-
ican liberty. It was because they had exercised
rights that they were such proficients in principles ;
it was because they had known liberty as an institu-
tion that they understood it as a science.
Thus it was not so much the perception of ab-
stract opinions, as the inspiration of positive institu-
tions, which gave our forefathers the heart to brave,
and the ability successfully to defy, the colossal
power of England ; but it must be admitted that in
its obnoxious colonial policy England had parted
with her wisdom, and ; n parting with her wisdom
had weakened her power ; falling, as Burke says,
under the opera/ion of that immutable law " which
decrees vexation *.o violence, and poverty to rapine.'
The England arrayed again** us was not the Eng
13»
298 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
land w'iich, a few years before, its energies wielded
by tbe lofty and impassioned genius of the elder
Pitt, had smitten the power and humbled the pride
of two great European monarchies, and spread its
fleets and armies, animated by one vehement soul,
over three quarters of the globe. The administra-
tions of the English government, from 1760 to the
close of our Revolutionary war, were more or less
directed by the intriguing incapacity of the king.
George the Third is said to have possessed many
private virtues, — and very private for a long time
he kept them from his subjects, — but, as a monarch,
he was without magnanimity in his sentiments or
enlargement in his ideas ; prejudiced, uncultivated,
bigoted, and perverse ; and his boasted morality and
piety, when exercised in the sphere of government,
partook of the narrowness of his mind and the ob-
stinacy of his will ; his conscience being used to
transmute his hatreds into duties, and his religious
sentiment to sanctify his vindictive passions ; and as
it was his ambition to rule an empire by the potty
politics of a court, he preferred rather to have his
folly flattered by parasites than his ignorance en-
lightened by statesmen. Such a disposition in the
king of a free country was incompatible with eflfi
riency in the conduct of affairs, as it split partiei
OF THE REVOLUTION. 299
into factions, and made established principles yield to
personal expedients. Bute, the king's first minister,
after a short administration unexampled for corrup-
tion and feebleness, gave way before a storm of pop-
ular contempt and hatred. To him succeeded George
Grenville, the originator of the Stamp Act, and the
blundering promoter of American Independence. Gren-
ville was a hard, sullen, dogmatic, penurious man of
affairs, with a complete mastery of the details of
parl : amen'^ary business, and threading with ease all
the labyrinths of English law, but limited in his con-
ceptions, fixed in his opinions, without any of that
sagacity which reads results in their principles, and
chiefly distinguished for a kind of sour honesty, not
infrequently found in men of harsh tempers and
technical intellects. It was soon discovered, that,
though imperious enough to be a tyrant, he was not
servile enough to be a tool ; that the same domineer-
ing temper which enabled him to push arbitrary
measures in Parliament, made him put insolent ques-
tions in the closet; and the king, in despair of a
servant who could not tax America and* persecute
Wilkes, without at the same time insulting his inna-
te. ~, dismissed him for the Marquis of Rockingham,
the 'eader of the great "Whig connection, and a sturdy
Wend of the Colonists both before the Revolution and
SCO WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
during its progress. Under him the Stamp Act waa
repealed ; but his administration soon proved too lib-
eral to satisfy the politicians who governed the un-
derstanding of the king ; and the experiment was
tried of a composite ministry, put together by Chat-
ham, consisting of members selected from different
factions, but without any principle of cohesion to
unite them ; and the anarchy inherent in the arrange-
ment became portentously apparent, when Chatham,
driven by the gout into a state of nervous imbecility,
left it to work out its mission of misrule, and its
eccentric control was seized by the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, the gay, false, dissipated, veering, presump-
tuous, and unscrupulous Charles Townshend. This man
was so brilliant and fascinating as an orator, that Wal-
pole said of one of his speeches, that it was like hear-
ing Garrick act extempore scenes from Congreve ;
but he was without any guiding moral or political
principles; and, boundlessly admired by the House
of Commons and boundlessly craving its admiration,
he seemed to act ever from the impulses of vanity,
and speak* ever from the inspiration of champagne.
Grenville, smarting under his recent defeat, but still
doggedly bent on having a revenue raised in Amer
ica, missed no opportunity of goading this versatile
political roue with his exasperating sarcasms. ^Yow
OP THE REVOLUTION. 301
»re cowards," said he on one occasion, turning to the
Treasury bench; "you are afraid of the Americans;
you dare not tax America." Townshend, stung by
this taunt, started passionately up from his seat, ex-
claiming, " Fear ! cowards ! dare not tax America ! T
do dare tax America!" and this boyish bravado ush-
ered in the celebrated bill, which was to cost Eng-
land thirteen colonies, add a hundred millions of
pounds to her debt, and affix a stain on her public
character. Townshend, by the grace of a putrid fever,
was saved from witnessing the consequences of his
vainglorious presumption ; and the direction of his
policy eventually fell into the hands of Lord North,
a good-natured, second-rate, jobbing statesman, equally
destitute of lofty virtues and splendid vices, under
whose administration the American war was com-
menced and prosecuted. Of all the ministers of
George the Third, North was the most esteemed by
his sovereign ; for he had the tact to follow plans
which originated in the king's unreasoning brain and
wilful disposition, and yet to veil their weak injus-
tice in a drapery of arguments furnished from his
own more enlarged mind and easier temper. Chat-
ham and Camden thundered against him in the
Lords ; Burke and Fox raved and shouted states
oianship to him in the Commons, and screamed out
802 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
the maxims of wisdom in ecstasies of invective ; but
he, good-naturedly tolerant to political adversaries,
blandly indhTerent to popular execration, and sleeping
quietly through whole hours of philippics hot with
threats of impeachment, pursued his course of court-
ordained folly with the serene composure of a Ulys-
Bes or a Somers. The war, as conducted by his
ministry, was badly managed ; but he had one wise
thought which happily failed to become a fact. The
command in America, on the breaking out of serious
disturbances, was offered to Lord Clive ; but, fortu-
nately for us, Clive, at about that time, concluded to
commit suicide, and our rustic soldiery were thus
saved from meeting in the field a general, who, in
vigor of will and fertility of resource, was unequalled
by any European commander who had appeared since
the death of Marlborough. It may here be added,
that Lord North's plans of conciliation were the
amiabilities of tyranny and benignities of extortion.
They bring to mind the little French fable, wherein
a farmer convokes the tenants of his barn-yard, and
with sweet solemnity says, " Dear animals, I have
assembled you here to advise me what sauce I shall
rook you with." " But," exclaims au insurrectionary
chicken, "we don't want to be eaten at all!" — 1«
which the urbane chairman replies, " My child, yoo
wander from the point ! "
OP THE REVOLUTION. 303
Such was the government whose policy and whose
»rms were directed against our rights and liberties
during the Revolutionary war. As soon as the
struggle began, it was obvious t lat England could
hold dominion over no portion of the country, except
what her armies occupied or wasted for the time ;
and that the issue of the contest turned on the ques-
tion as to which would first yield, — the obstinacy of
the king or the fortitude of the Americans. It was
plain that George the Third would never yield
except under compulsion from the other forces of
the English constitution ; that, as long as a corrupt
House of Commons would vote supplies, he would
prosecute the war, no matter what might be the ex-
pense of blood and treasure to England, no matter
what might be the infliction of misery upon America.
Conquest was hopeless ; and Lord North, before the
war was half concluded, was in favor of abandoning
it; but all considerations of policy and humanity
were lost upon the small mind and conscientiously
malignant temper of the king. Indeed, the peculiar-
ity of our struggle consisted in its being with an
unwise ruler, who could not understand that war,
waged after the objects for which it was declared
have utterly failed becomes mere rapine and mur-
der ; and our energy and endurance were put to tin
304 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
terrible test, of bearing up against the king's armies,
until the English nation, humbling its irritated pride,
should be roused in our behalf, and break down the
king's stubborn purpose. We all know, and may we
never forget, that this resistance to tyrannical inno-
vation was no fiery outbreak of popular passion,
spending itself in two or three battles, and then sub-
siding into gloomy apathy ; but a fixed and reason-
able resolve, proof against corrupt and sophistical
plans of conciliation, against defeats and massacres,
against universal bankruptcy and commercial ruin, —
a resolve, which the sight of burning villages, and
cities turned into British camps, only maddened intc
fiercer persistence, and which the slow consuming
fever of an eight years' war, with its soul-sickening
calamities and vicissitudes, could not weaken into
submission. The history, so sad and so glorious,
which chronicles the stern struggle in which our
rights and liberties passed through the awful baptism
of fire and blood, is eloquent with the deeds of many
patriots, warriors, and statesmen ; but these all fa
into relations t\ one prominent and commanding fig-
ure, towering up above the whole group in unap
proachable majesty, whose exalted character, warm
and bright with every public and private virtue, and
rital with the essential spirit of wisdom, has bursl
OP THE REVOLUTION. 305
ill sectional and national bounds, and made the
Dame of Washington the property of all mankind.
This illustrious man, at once the world's admira-
tion and enigma, we are taught by a fine instinct to
venerate, and by a wrong opinion to misjudge. The
might of his character has taken strong hold upon
the feelings of great masses of men ; but, in trans
la ting this universal sentiment into an intelligent
form, the intellectual element of his wonderful nature
is as much depressed as the moral element is ex-
alted, and consequently we are apt to misundor&tand
both. Mediocrity has a bad trick of idealizing itself
in eulogizing him, and drags him down to its own
level while assuming to lift him to the skks. How
many times have we been told that he was not a
man of genius, but a person of " excellent common
Bense," of "admirable judgment," of "rare virtues"!
and, by a constant repetition of this odious cant, we
have nearly succeeded in divorcing comprehension
from his sense, insight from his judgment, force from
his virtues, and life from the man. Accordingly, in
the panegyric of cold spirits, Washington disappears
in a cloud of commonplaces ; in the rodomontade of
boiling patriots, he expires in the agonies of rant.
Now, the sooner this bundle of mediocre talents and
moral qualities, which its contrivers have the an
30G WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
dacity to call George "Washington, is hissed out of
existence, the better it will be for the cause of talent
and the cause of morals : contempt of that is the con-
dition of insight. He had no genius, it seems.
no ! genius, we must suppose, is the peculiar and
Bhining attribute of some orator, whose tongue can
Bpout patriotic speeches, or some versifier, whose muse
can " Hail Columbia," but not of the man who sup-
ported states on his arm, and carried America in his
brain. The madcap Charles Townshend, the motion
of whose pyrotechnic mind was like the whiz of a
hundred rockets, is a man of genius ; but George
Washington, raised up above the level of even emi-
nent statesmen, and with a nature moving with the
still and orderly celerity of a planet round the sun,
— he dwindles, in comparison, into a kind of angelic
dunce! What is genius? Is it worth anything? Is
splendid folly the measure of its inspiration ? Is wis-
dom that which it recedes from, or tends towards?
And by what definition do you award the name to
the creator of an epic, and deny it to the creator of
a country? On what principle is it to be lavished
on him who sculptures in perishing marble the im-
age of possible excellence, and withheld from liiir
who built up in himself a transcendent character
indestructible as the obligations of Duty, and beauti
ful as ber rewards?
OP THE REVOLUTION. 307
Indeed, if by the genius of action you mean will
fcnlightened by intelligence, and intelligence energized
by will, — if force and insight be its characteristics,
and influence its test, — and, especially, if great ef-
fects suppose a cause proportionably great, that is, a
vital causative mind, — then is Washington most as-
suredly a man of genius, and one whom no other
American has equalled in the power of working
morally and mentally on other minds. His genius,
It is true, was of a peculiar kind, the genius of char-
acter, of thought and the objects of thought solidified
and concentrated into active faculty. He belongs
to that rare class of men, — rare as Homers and
Miltons, rare as Platos and Newtons, — who have
impressed their characters upon nations without pam-
pering national vices. Such men have natures broad
enough to include all the facts of a people's practical
life, and deep enough to discern the spiritual laws
which underlie, animate, and govern those facts.
Washington, in short, had that greatness of charac-
ter which is the highest expression and last result
of greatness of mind ; for there is no method of
building up character except through mind. Indeed,
character ike his is not built up, stone upon stone,
precept upon precept, but grows up, through an act-
ual contact of thought witn things, — the assimilative
308 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
mind transmuting the impalpable but potent spirit of
public sentiment, and the life of visible facts, and the
power of spiritual laws, into individual life and pow
er, so that their mighty energies put on personality,
as it were, and act through one centralizing human
will. This process may not, if you please, make the
great philosopher or the great poet; but it does make
the great man, — the man in whom thought and judg-
ment seem identical with volition, — the man whose
vital expression is not in words, but deeds, — the
man whose sublime ideas issue necessarily in sublime
acts, not in sublime art. It was because Washing-
ton's character was thus composed of the inmost sub-
stance and power of facts and principles, that men
instinctively felt the perfect reality of his comprehen-
sive manhood. This reality enforced universal re-
spect, married strength to repose, and threw into his
face that commanding majesty, which made men ot
the speculative audacity of Jefferson, and the lucid
genius of Hamilton, recognize, with unwonted meek-
ness, his awful superiority.
But, you may say, how does this account for Wash-
.ngton's v'rtues ? Was his disinterestedness will ? Was
his patriotism intelligence? Was his morality genius ?
These questions I should answer with an emphatic
res ; foi there are few falser fallacies than that which
OP THE REVOLUTION. 309
"^presents moral conduct as flowing from moral opin-
ions detached from moral character. Why, there is
hardly a tyrant, sycophant, demagogue, or liberticide
mentioned in history, who had not enough moral
opinions to suffice for a new Eden ; and Shakespeare,
the sure-seeing poet of human nature, delights to put
the most edifying maxims of ethics into the mouths
ot his greatest villains, of Angelo, of Richard the
Third, of the uncle-father of Hamlet. Without doubt
Ca?sar and Napoleon could have discoursed more flu-
ently than Washington on patriotism, as there are a
thousand French republicans, of the last hour's coin-
age, who could prattle more eloquently than he on
freedom. "But Washington's morality was built up in
warring with outward temptations and inward pas-
Bions, and every grace of his conscience was a trophy
of toil and struggle. He had no moral opinions
which hard experience and sturdy discipline had not
vitalized into moral sentiments, and organized into
moral powers ; and these powers, fixed and seated in
the inmost heart of his character, were mighty and
far-sighted forces, which made his intelligence moral
and his morality intelligent, and which no sorcery of
the selfish passions ;ould overcome or deceive. In
the sublime metaphysics of the New Testament, his
eye was single, and this made his whole body full o/
310 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
light. It is just here that so many other eminent
men of action, who have heen tried by strong temp
tations, have miserably failed. Blinded by pride, or
whirled on by wrath, they have ceased to discern
and regard the inexorable moral laws, obedience to
which is the condition of all permanent success ; and,
in the labyrinths of fraud and unrealities in which
crime entangles ambition, the thousand-eyed genius
of wilful error is smitten with folly and madness.
No human intellect, however vast its compass and
delicate its tact, can safely thread those terrible
mazes. "Every heaven-stormer," says a quaint Ger-
man, "finds his hell, as sure as every mountain its
valley." Let us not doubt the genius of Washington
because it was identical with wisdom, and because
its energies worked with, and not against, the spirit-
ual order its " single eye " was gifted to divine. We
commonly say that he acted in accordance with moral
laws ; but we must recollect that moral laws are in-
tellectual facts, and are known through intellectual
processes. We commonly say that he was so consci-
entious as ever to follow the path of right, and obey
the voice of duty. But what is right but an abstract
term for rights ? What is duty but an abstract term
*br duties ? Rights and duties move not in parallel
but converging lines; and how, in the terror, discord,
OP THE REVOLUTION. 311
and madness of a civil war, with rights and duties
in confused conflict, can a man seize on the exact
point where clashing rights harmonize, and where
opposing duties are reconciled, and act vigorously on
the conception, without having a conscience so in-
formed with intelligence that his nature gravitates to
the truth as by the very instinct and essence of
reason?
The virtues of Washington, therefore, appear moral
or mental according as we view them with the eye
of conscience or reason. In him, loftiness did not
exclude breadth, but resulted from it ; justice did not
exclude wisdom, but grew out of it ; and, as the wis-
est as well as justest man in America, he was pre-
eminently distinguished among his contemporaries for
moderation, — a word under which weak politicians
conceal their want of courage, and knavish politicians
their want of principle, but which in him was vital
and comprehensive energy, tempering audacity with
prudence, self-reliance with modesty, austere princi-
ples with merciful charities, inflexible purpose with
6erene courtesy, and issuing in that persistent and
unconquerable fortitude, in which lie excelled all
mankind. In scrutinizing the events of his life to
discover the processes by which his character grew
giadually up to its amazing height, we are arrested
812 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
at the beginning by tbe character of his mother, a
woman temperate like him in the use of words, from
her clear perception and vigorous grasp of things.
There is a familiar anecdote recorded of her, which
enables us to understand the simple sincerity and
genuine heroism she early instilled into his strong
and aspiring mind. At a time when his glory rang
through Europe ; when excitable enthusiasts were
crossing the Atlantic for the single purpose of seeing
him ; when bad poets all over the world were sack-
ing the dictionaries for hyperboles of panegyric ;
when the pedants of republicanism were calling him
the American Cincinnatus and the American Fabius
— as if our Washington were honored in playing the
adjective to any Roman, however illustrious ! — she,
in her quiet dignity, simply said to the voluble
friends who were striving to flatter her mother's
pride into an expression of exulting praise, " that he
had been a good son, and she believed he had done
his duty as a man." Under the care of a mother,
who flooded common words with such a wealth of
meaning, the boy was not likely to mistake medioc-
rity for excellence, but would naturally domesticate
in his heart lofty principles of conduct, and act from
them as a matter of course, without expecting or ob-
taining praise. The consequence was, that in earlv
OF THE REVOLUTION. 313
ife, and in his first occupation as surveyor, and
trough the stirring events of the French war, he
built up character day by day in a systematic en
durance of hardship; in a constant sacrifice of incli-
nations to duty ; in taming hot passions into the
service of reason ; in assiduously learning from other
minds ; in wringing knowledge, which could not be
taught him, from the reluctant grasp of a flinty ex-
perience ; in completely mastering every subject on
which he fastened his intellect, so that whatever he
knew he knew perfectly and forever, transmuting it
into mind, and sending it forth in acts. Intellectual
and moral principles, which other men lazily contem-
plate and talk about, he had learned through a pro-
cess which gave them the toughness of muscle and
V)ne. A man thus sound at the core and on the
surface of his nature ; so full at once of integrity and
Bagacity ; speaking ever from the level of his charac-
ter, and always ready to substantiate opinions with
deeds; — a man without any morbid egotism, or pre-
tension, or extravagance ; simple, modest, dignified,
incorruptible ; never giving advice wluV>h events did
not indorse as wise, never lacking fortitude to bear
calamities which resulted from his Mr>ce being over-
ruled ; — such a man could not but exact that re ig-
nition of commanding genius which inspires 'in'^eraal
14
314 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
confidence. Accordingly, when the contest between
the colonies and the mother country was assuming
its inevitable form of civil war, he was found to be
our natural leader in virtue of being the ablest man
among a crowd of able men. When he appeared
among the eloquent orators, the ingenious thinkers,
the vehement patriots, of the Revolution, his modesty
and temperate professions could not conceal his su-
periority : he at once, by the very nature of great
character, was felt to be their leader ; towered up,
indeed, over all their heads as naturally as the foun-
tain, sparkling yonder in this July sun, which, in its
long, dark, downward journey, forgets not the altitude
of its parent lake, and no sooner finds an outlet in
our lower lands than it mounts, by an impatient in-
stinct, surely up to the level of its far-off inland
source.
After the first flush and fevei of the Revolution-
ary excitement were over, and the haggard fact of
civil war was visible in all its horrors, it soon ap-
peared how vitally important was such a character
to the success of such a cause. We have already
seen that the issue of the contest depended, not on
the decision of this or that battle, not on the occu-
pation of this or that city, but on the power of the
colonists to wear ot\ the patience exhaust the re»
OP THE REVOLUTION. 315
sources, and tame the pride of Great Britain The
king, when Lord North threatened, in 1778, to resign
unless the war were discontinued, expressed his de-
termination to lose his crown rather than acknowl-
edge the independence of the rebels ; he was as much
f pposed to that acknowledgment in 1783 as 1778;
.md it was only by a pressure from without, and
when the expenditures for the war had reached more
^han a. hundred millions of pounds, that a reluctant
consent wab forced from that small, spiteful mind.
Now, undoubttdly a vast majority of the American
people were unalterably resolved on independence ;
but they were spread through thirteen colonies, were
not without mutual jfcakuaies, and were represented
in a Congress whose delegated powers were insuf-
ficient to prosecute war with vigor. The problem
was, how to combine the strength, allay the suspi-
cions, and sustain the patriotism of the people, dur-
ing a contest peculiarly calculated to distract and
weaken their energies. Washington "olved this prob
lem by the true geometry of indomitable personal
character. He was the soul of the RevoL>tion, felt
at its centre, and felt through all its parts, as a
uniting, organizing, animating power. Comprehensive
as America itself, through him, and through hi.*
%lone, could the strength of America aft. Hj wu
316 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
Becurity in defeat, cheer in despondency, light in
darkness, hope in despair, — the one man in whom
all could have confidence, — the one man whose sun-
like integrity and capacity shot rays of light and
heat through everything they shone upon. He would
not stoop to thwart the machinations of envy ; he
would not stoop to contradict the fictions and for-
geries of calumny ; and he did not need to do it.
Before the effortless might of his character, they
stole away, and withered, and died ; and through no
instrumentality of his did their abject authors become
immorta as the mali<*ners of Washington.
To do justice to Washington's military career, we
must consider that he had to fuse the hardest indi-
vidual materials into a mass of national force, which
was to do battle, not only with disciplined armies,
but with frost, famine, and disease. Missing the
rapid succession of brilliant engagements between
forces almost equal, and the dramatic storm and
gwift consummation of events, which European cam-
paigns have made familiar, there are those who see
l 1 him only a slow, sure, and patient commander,
without readiness of combination or energy of move-
ment. But the truth is, the quick eye of his pru
ilent audacity seized occasions to deliver blows with
the prompt felicity of Marlborough or Wellington
OP THE REVOLUTION. &1 S
He evinced no lack of the highest energy a.id sk/U
when he turned back the tide of defeat at Monmouth,
3r in the combinations which preceded the siege of
Yorktown, or in the rapid and masterly movements
by which, at a period when he was considered ut-
terly ruined, he stooped suddenly down upon Tren-
ton, broke up all the enemy's posts on the Delaware,
and snatched Philadelphia from a superior and victo-
rious foe. Again, some eulogists have caricatured
him as a passionless, imperturbable, " proper " man ;
but, at the battle of Monmouth, General Lee was
privileged to discover, that from those firm, calm
lips could leap words hotter and more smiting than
the hot June sun that smote down upon their heads.
Indeed, "Washington's incessant and various activity
answered to the strange complexity of his position,
as the heart and brain of a Revolution, which
demanded not merely generalship, but the highest
qualities of the statesman, the diplomatist, and the
patriot. As we view him in his long seven years'
struggle with the perilous difficulties r i his situation,
his activity constantly entangled in a mesh of con-
6icting considerations, — with his eye fixed on Con-
gress, on the States, and on the people, as will
as on the enemy, — compelled to compose sectional
quarrels, to inspire faltering patriotism, and to tri-
,418 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
amph over all the forces of stupidity and selfishness,
— compelled to watch, and wait, and warn, and for-
bear, and endure, as well as to act, — compelled,
amid vexations and calamities which might have
stung the dullest sensibilities into madness, to trans-
mute the fire of the fiercest passion into an element
of fortitude ; — and, especially, as we view him com-
ing out of that terrible and obscure scene of trial
and temptation, without any bitterness in his virtue,
or hatred in his patriotism, but full of the loftiest
wisdom and serenest power; — as we view all this in
the order of its history, that placid face grows grad-
ually sublime, and in its immortal repose looks rebuke
to our presumptuous eulogium of the genius whicl
breathes through it!
We all know that towards the end of the weary-
ing struggle, and when his matchless moderation and
invincible fortitude were about to be crowned witb
the hallowing glory which Liberty piously reserver
for her triumphant saints and martyrs, a committee
of his officers proposed to make him king ; and we
sometimes do him the cruel injustice to say that his
virtue overcame the temptation. lie was not knave
enough, or fool enough, to be tempted by such crim-
inal baubles. What was his view of the proposal ?
He, who had never sought popularity, but whoa
OP THE REVOLUTION. 319
popularity had sought, — he, who had entered public
life, not for the pleasure of exercising power, but for
the satisfaction of performing duty, — he, to be in-
sulted and outraged by such an estimate of his ser-
vices, and such a conception of his character! — why,
it could provoke in him nothing but an instantaneous
burst of indignation and abhorrence ! — and, in hia
reply, you will find that these emotions strain the
language of reproof beyond the stern courtesy of
military decorum.
The war ended, and our independence acknowl-
edged, the time came when American liberty, threat-
ened by anarchy, was to be reorganized in the
Constitution of the United States. As President of
the Convention which framed the Constitution, Wash-
ington powerfully contributed to its acceptance by the
States. The people were uncertain as to the equity
of its compromise of opposing interests, and adjust-
ment of clashing claims. By this eloquent and
learned man they were advised to adopt it ; by that
eloquent and learned ma', they were advised to re-
ject it; but there, at the end of the instrument itself,
and first among many eminent and honored names,
was the bold and honest signature of George Wash-
ington, a signature which always carried with it the
ntegrity and the influence of his character; and that
t$20 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
was an argument stronger even than any furnished
by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. The Constitution
was accepted ; and Washington, whose fame, to use
Allston's familiar metaphor, was ever the shadow
cast by his excellence, was of course unanimously
elected President. This is no place to set forth the
glories of his civil career. It is sufficient to say,
that, placed amid circumstances where ignorance, van-
ity, or rashness would have worked ruinous mischief
and disunion, he consolidated the government. One
little record in his diary, just before he entered upon
his office, is a key to the spirit of his administration.
His journey from Mount Vernon to the seat of gov-
ernment was a triumphal procession. At New York
the air was alive with that tumult of popular ap-
plause, which has poisoned the integrity by intox-
icating the pride of so many eminent generals and
statesmen. "What was the feeling of "Washington ?
Did he have a misanthrope's cynical contempt for
the people's honest tribute of gratitude ? Did he
have a demagogue's fierce elation in being the object
of the people's boundless admiration ? No. His sen-
sations, he tells us, were as painful as they were
pleasing. His lofty and tranquil mind thought of t lie
possible reverse of the scene after all his exertions
to do good. The streaming flags, the loud acclam*
OF THE REVOLUTION. 321
tions, the thunder of the cannon, and the shrill music
piercing through all other sounds, — these sent his
mind sadly forward to the solitude of his closet,
where, with the tender and beautiful austerity of his
character, he was perhaps to sacrifice the people's
favor for the people's safety, and to employ every
granted power of a Constitution he so perfectly un
derstood, in preserving peace, in restraining faction,
and in giving energy to all those constitutional re-
straints on popular passions, by which the wisdom of
to-morrow rules the recklessness of to-day.
In reviewing a life thus passed in enduring hard-
ship and confronting peril, fretted by constant cares
and worn by incessant drudgery, we are at first sad-
dened by the thought that such heroic virtue should
have been purchased by the sacrifice of happiness.
But we wrong Washington in bringing his enjoy-
ments to the test of our low standards. He has
everything for us to venerate, — nothing for our com-
miseration. He tasted of that joy which springs from
a sense of great responsibilities willingly incurred,
and great duties magnanimously performed. To him
was given the deep bliss of seeing the austere coun-
tenance of inexorable Duty melt into approving
smiles, and to him was realized the poet's rarturom
vision of her celestial compensations : —
U* o
822 WASHINGTON AND THE PRINCIPLES
" Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace,
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face."
It has been truly said that "men of intemperate
minds cannot be free ; their passions forge their fet-
ters " ; but no clank of any chain, whether of avarice
or ambition, gave the least harshness to the move-
ment of Washington's ample mind. In him America
has produced at least one man, whose free soul was
fit to be Liberty's chosen home. As was his indi-
vidual freedom, so should be our national freedom.
We have seen all along, that American liberty, in
its sentiment and idea, is no opinionated, will-strong,
untamable passion, bursting all bounds of moral re-
straint, and hungering after anarchy and license, but
a creative and beneficent energy, organizing itself in
laws, professions, trades, arts, institutions. From its
extreme practical character, however, it is liable to
contract a taint which has long vitiated English free-
dom. To the Anglo-Saxon mind, Liberty is not apt
to be the enthusiast's mountain nymph, with cheeks
wet with morning dew and clear eyes that mirror
the heavens, but rather is she an old dowager lady.
fatly invested in commerce and manufactures, and
oeevishly fearful that enthusiasm will reduce her es-
OP THE REVOLUTION. 323
thblishraent, and panics cut off her dividends. No*
the moment property becomes timid, agrarianism be-
comes bold ; and the industry which liberty has cre-
ated, liberty must animate, or it will be plundered
by the impudent and rapacious idleness its slavish
fears incite. Our political institutions, again, are but
the body of which liberty is the soul ; their preser-
vation depends on their being continually inspired by
the light and heat of the sentiment and idea whence
they sprung ; and when we timorously suspend, ac-
cording to the latest political fashion, the truest and
dearest maxims of our freedom at the call of expe-
diency or the threat of passion, — when we convert
politics into a mere game of interests, unhallowed by
a single great and unselfish principle, — we may be
Bure that our worst passions are busy " forging our
fetters"; that we are proposing all those intricate
problems which red republicanism so swiftly solves,
and giving Manifest Destiny pertinent hints to shout
new anthems of atheism over victorious rapine. The
liberty which our fathers planted, and for which they
sturdily contended, and under which they grandly
conquered, is a rational and temperate, but brave
and unyielding freedom, the august mother of insti-
tutions, the hardy nurse of enterprise, the sworn ally
of justice and order ; a Liberty that lifts her awful
324 WASHINGTON AND THE REVOLUTION.
md rebuking face equally upon the cowards who
would sell, and the braggarts who would pervert, her
precious gifts of rights and obligations; and this lib-
erty we are solemnly bound at all hazards to pro-
tect, at any sacrifice to preserve, and by all just
means to extend, against the unbridled excesses of
that ugly and brazen hag, originally scorned and de-
tested by those who unwisely gave her infancy a
home, but who now, in her enormous growth and
favored deformity, reels with bloodshot eyes, and di-
shevelled tresses, and words of unshamed slavishness,
into halls where Liberty should sit throned!
i
THE LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Santa Barbara
STACK COLLECTION
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
STAMPED BELOW.
30m-8,'65(F6447s4)9482
THIS BOOK MAY BE KEPT
UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY
FACILITY
AA 000 087 849