tl 
 
 
 V 
 
 Yf 
 
 1 
 
 r 
 
 

 
 NAPOLEON AT JENA. 
 (From a painting by Horace Vernet in the Palace at Versailles.)
 
 REPRESENTATIVE MEN 
 
 SEVEN LECTURES 
 
 BY 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
 
 NEW YORK : 46 EAST i 4 TH STREET 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY 
 
 BOSTON: 100 PURCHASE STREET
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 TAOE 
 
 I. USES OF GREAT MEN .... 7 
 
 II. PLATO ; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER . . 35 
 
 PLATO : NEW READINGS .... 67 
 
 III. SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC . . 77 
 
 IV. MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC . . 121 
 V. SHAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET . . . 153 
 
 VI. NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE, WORLD, 181 
 
 VII. GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER . . .211 
 (3)
 
 USES OF GREAT MEN 
 
 (5)
 
 I. 
 
 USES OF GREAT MEN. 
 
 IT is natural to believe in great men. If the com 
 panions of our childhood should turn out to be 
 heroes, and their condition regal, it would not sur 
 prise us. All mythology opens with demigods, and 
 the circumstance is high and poetic ; that is, their 
 genius is paramount. In the legends of the Gautama, 
 the first men ate the earth, and found it deliciously 
 sweet. 
 
 Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The 
 world is upheld by the veracity of good men : they 
 make the earth wholesome. They who lived with 
 them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet 
 and tolerable only in our belief in such society ; and 
 actually or ideally we manage to live with superiors. 
 We call our children and our lands by their names. 
 Their names are wrought into the verbs of language, 
 their works and effigies are in our houses, and every 
 circumstance of the day recalls an anecdote of them. 
 
 The search after the great is the dream of youth 
 and the most serious occupation of manhood. We 
 travel into foreign parts to find his works if possi 
 ble, to get a glimpse of him. But we are put off 
 with fortune instead. You say the English are prac- 
 
 (7)
 
 8 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 tical ; the Germans are hospitable ; in Valencia the 
 climate is delicious ; and in the hills of the Sacra 
 mento there is gold for the gathering. Yes, but I 
 do not travel to find comfortable, rich, and hospitable 
 people, or clear sky, or ingots that cost too much. 
 But if there were any magnet that would point to the 
 countries and houses where are the persons who are 
 intrinsically rich and powerful, I would sell all, and 
 buy it, and put myself on the road to-day. 
 
 The race goes with us on their credit. The knowl 
 edge that in the city is a man who invented the 
 railroad raises the credit of all the citizens. But 
 enormous populations, if they be beggars, are dis 
 gusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or of 
 fleas the more, the worse. 
 
 Our religion is the love and cherishing of these 
 patrons. The gods of fable are the shining mo 
 ments of great men. We run all our vessels into one 
 mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism, Christ- 
 ism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the necessary and 
 structural action of the human mind. The student 
 of history is like a man going into a warehouse to 
 buy cloths or carpets. He fancies he has a new 
 article. If he go to the factory, he shall find that 
 his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and rosettes 
 which are found on the interior walls of the pyramids 
 of Thebes. Our theism is the purification of the 
 human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think 
 nothing but man. He believes that the great 
 material elements had their origin from his thought. 
 And our philosophy finds one essence collected or 
 distributed.
 
 USES OF GREAT MEN. 9 
 
 If now we proceed to inquire into the kinds of 
 service we derive from others, let us be warned of 
 the danger of modern studies, and begin low enough. 
 We must not contend against love, or deny the sub 
 stantial existence of other people. I know not what 
 would happen to us. We have social strengths. 
 Our affection towards others creates a sort of vantage 
 or purchase which nothing will supply. I can do 
 that by another which I cannot do alone. I can say 
 to you what I cannot first say to myself. Other men 
 are lenses through which we read our own minds. 
 Each man seeks those of different quality from his 
 own, and such as are good of their kind ; that is, he 
 seeks other men, and the otherest. The stronger 
 the nature, the more it is reactive. Let us have the 
 quality pure. A little genius let us leave alone. A 
 main difference betwixt men is, whether they attend 
 their own affair or not. Man is that noble endoge 
 nous plant which grows, like the palm, from within 
 outward. His own affair, though impossible to 
 others, he can open with celerity and in sport. It is 
 easy to sugar to be sweet, and to nitre to be salt. 
 We take a great deal of pains to waylay and entrap 
 that which of itself will fall into our hands. I count 
 him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of 
 thought, into which other men rise with labor and 
 difficulty ; he has but to open his eyes to see things 
 in a true light, and in large relations; whilst they 
 must make painful corrections, and keep a vigilant 
 eye on many sources of error. His service to us is 
 of like sort. It costs a beautiful person no exertion 
 to paint her image on our eyes ; yet how splendid is
 
 10 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 that benefit ! It costs no more for a wise soul to 
 convey his quality to other men. And every one 
 can do his best thing easiest. " Pen tie inoycns, 
 bcaiicoup tf effet ." He is great who is what he is 
 from nature, and who never reminds us of others. 
 
 But he must be related to us, and our life receive 
 from him some promise of explanation. I cannot 
 tell what I would know ; but I have observed there 
 are persons who, in their character and actions, 
 answer questions which I have not skill to put. 
 One man answers some questions which none of 
 his contemporaries put, and is isolated. The past 
 and passing religions and philosophies answer some 
 other question. Certain men affect us as rich possi 
 bilities, but helpless to themselves and to their 
 times, the sport, perhaps, of some instinct that 
 rules in the air, they do not speak to our want. 
 But the great are near; we know them at sight. 
 They satisfy expectation, and fall into place. What 
 is good is effective, generative ; makes for itself 
 room, food, and allies. A sound apple produces 
 seed a hybrid does not. Is a man in his place, 
 he is constructive, fertile, magnetic, inundating 
 armies with his purpose, which is thus executed. 
 The river makes its own shores, and each legiti 
 mate idea makes its own channels and welcome 
 harvests for food, institutions for expression, 
 weapons to fight with, and disciples to explain it. 
 The true artist has the planet for his pedestal ; the 
 adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader 
 than his own shoes. 
 
 Our common discourse respects two kinds of use
 
 USES OF GREA T MEN. 1 1 
 
 or service from superior men. Direct giving is 
 agreeable to the early belief of men ; direct giving 
 of material or metaphysical aid, as of health, eternal 
 youth, fine senses, arts of healing, magical power, 
 and prophecy. The boy believes there is a teacher 
 who can sell him wisdom. Churches believe in 
 imputed merit. But, in strictness, we are not much 
 cognizant of direct serving. Man is endogenous, 
 and education is his unfolding. The aid we have 
 from others is mechanical, compared with the dis 
 coveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is 
 delightful in the doing, and the effect remains. 
 Right ethics are central, and go from the soul 
 outward. Gift is contrary to the law of the uni 
 verse. Serving others is serving us. I must ab 
 solve me to myself. " Mind thy affair," says the 
 spirit; "coxcomb, would you meddle with the 
 skies, or with other people ? " Indirect service is 
 left. Men have a pictorial or representative quality, 
 and serve us in the intellect. Behmen and Sweden- 
 borg saw that things were representative. Men are 
 also representative ; first, of things, and secondly, 
 of ideas. 
 
 As plants convert the minerals into food for ani 
 mals, so each man converts some raw material in 
 nature to human use. The inventors of fire, elec 
 tricity, magnetism, iron, lead, glass, linen, silk, 
 cotton ; the makers of tools ; the inventor of deci 
 mal notation ; the geometer ; the engineer ; the 
 musician, severally make an easy way for all 
 through unknown and impossible confusions. Each 
 man is, by secret liking, connected with some dis-
 
 12 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 trict of nature, whose agent and interpreter he is, 
 as Linnaeus, of plants ; Muber, of bees ; Fries, of 
 lichens ; Van Mons, of pears ; Dalton, of atomic 
 forms ; Euclid, of lines ; Newton, of fluxions. 
 
 A man is a centre for nature, running out threads 
 of relation through everything, fluid and solid, ma 
 terial and elemental. The earth rolls; every clod 
 and stone comes to the meridian ; so every organ, 
 function, acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its relation 
 to the brain. It waits long, but its turn comes. 
 Each plant has its parasite, and each created thing 
 its lover and poet. Justice has already been done 
 to steam, to iron, to wood, to coal, to loadstone, 
 to iodine, to corn and cotton ; but how few materials 
 are yet used by our arts ! The mass of creatures 
 and of qualities are still hid and expectant. It 
 would seem as if each waited, like the enchanted 
 princess in fairy tales, for a destined human de 
 liverer. Each must be disenchanted, and walk 
 forth to the day in human shape. In the history 
 of discovery, the ripe and latent truth seems to have 
 fashioned a brain for itself. A magnet must be 
 made man, in some Gilbert, or Swedenborg, or 
 Oersted, before the general mind can come to en 
 tertain its powers. 
 
 If we limit ourselves to the first advantages : a 
 sober grace adheres to the mineral and botanic 
 kingdoms, which in the highest moments comes up 
 as the charm of nature, the glitter of the spar, tlie 
 sureness of affinity, the veracity of angles. Light 
 and darkness, heat and cold, hunger and food, 
 sweet and sour, solid, liquid, and gas, circle us
 
 USES OF GREAT MEN. 13 
 
 round in a wreath of pleasures, and, by their agree 
 able quarrel, beguile the day of life. The eye re 
 peats everyday the first eulogy on things "He 
 saw that they were good." We know where to 
 find them ; and these performers are relished all 
 the more after a little experience of the pretending 
 races. We are entitled, also, to higher advantages. 
 Something is wanting to science, until it has been 
 humanized. The table of logarithms is one thing, 
 and its vital play, in botany, music, optics, and 
 architecture, another. There are advancements to 
 numbers, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little 
 suspected at first, when, by union with intellect 
 and will, they ascend into the life, and reappear in 
 conversation, character, and politics. 
 
 But this comes later. We speak now only of our 
 acquaintance with them in their own sphere, and the 
 way in which they seem to fascinate and draw to 
 them some genius who occupies himself with one 
 thing all his life long. The possibility of interpre 
 tation lies in the identity of the observer with the 
 observed. Each material thing has its celestial side ; 
 has its translation, through humanity, into the spirit 
 ual and necessary sphere, where it plays a part as 
 indestructible as any other. And to these, their 
 ends, all things continually ascend. The gases 
 gather to the solid firmament ; the chemic lump 
 arrives at the plant, and grows ; arrives at the 
 quadruped, and walks ; arrives at the man, and 
 thinks. But also the constituency determines the 
 vote of the representative. He is not only repre 
 sentative, but participant. Like can only be known
 
 14 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 by like. The reason why he knows about them 
 is, that he is of them ; he has just come out of 
 nature, or from being a part of that thing. Ani 
 mated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate zinc, 
 of zinc. Their quality makes his career ; and he can 
 variously publish their virtues, because they com 
 pose him. Man, made of the dust of the world, 
 does not forget his origin ; and all that is yet inani 
 mate will one day speak and reason. Unpublished 
 nature will have its whole secret told. Shall we say 
 that quartz mountains will pulverize into innumera 
 ble Werners, Von Buchs, and Beaumonts ; and the 
 laboratory of the atmosphere holds in solution I 
 know not what Berzeliuses and Davys? 
 
 Thus we sit by the fire, and take hold on the 
 poles of the earth. This quasi omnipresence sup 
 plies the imbecility of our condition. In one of 
 those celestial days, when heaven and earth meet 
 and adorn each other, it seems a poverty that we can 
 only spend it once : we wish for a thousand heads, a 
 thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its im 
 mense beauty in many ways and places. Is this 
 fancy? Well, in good faith, we are multiplied by 
 our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors. 
 Every ship that comes to America got its chart from 
 Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Homer. 
 Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplanc borrows 
 the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all 
 round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of 
 men who have perished to add their point of light to 
 our sky. Engineer, broker, jurist, physician, moral 
 ist, theologian, and every man, inasmuch as he has
 
 USES OF GREAT MEN. 15 
 
 any science, is a definer and map-maker of the 
 latitudes and longitudes of our condition. These 
 road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must 
 extend the area of life, and multiply our relations. 
 We are as much gainers by finding a new property 
 in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet. 
 
 We are too passive in the reception of these ma 
 terial or semi-material aids. We must not be sacks 
 and stomachs. To ascend one step we are bet 
 ter served through our sympathy. Activity is conta 
 gious. Looking where others look, and conversing 
 with the same things, we catch the charm which 
 lured them. Napoleon said, " You must not fight 
 too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all 
 your art of war." Talk much with any man of vig 
 orous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit of 
 looking at things in the same light, and, on each oc 
 currence, we anticipate his thought. 
 
 Men are helpful through the intellect and the 
 affections. Other help, I find a false appearance. 
 If you affect to give me bread and fire, I perceive 
 that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves 
 me as it found me, neither better nor worse ; but all 
 mental and moral force is a positive good. It goes 
 out from you, whether you will or not, and profits 
 me whom you never thought of. I cannot even hear 
 of personal vigor of any kind, great power of perform 
 ance, without fresh resolution. We are emulous of 
 all that man can do. Cecil s saying of Sir Walter 
 Raleigh, " I know that he can toil terribly," is an 
 electric touch. So are Clarendon s portraits of 
 Hampden : " who was of an industry and vigilance
 
 1 6 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 not to be tired out or wearied by the most laborious, 
 and of parts not to be imposed on by the most subtle 
 and sharp, and of a personal courage equal to his 
 best parts ;" of Falkland : " who was so severe ar 
 adorer of truth that he could as easily have giver 
 himself leave to steal as to dissemble." We canno 
 read Plutarch without a tingling of the blood ; and I 
 accept the saying of the Chinese Mencius : " A sagt 
 is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the man 
 ners of Loo are heard of, the stupid become intelli 
 gent, and the wavering, determined." 
 
 This is the moral of biography ; yet it is hard fo 
 departed men to touch the quick like our own com 
 panions, whose names may not last as long. \Vh:i 
 is he whom I never think of ? whilst in every soliUul 
 are those who succor our genius, and stimulate us ii 
 wonderful manners. There is a power in love U 
 divine another s destiny better than that other can 
 and, by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task 
 What has friendship so signal as its sublime attrac 
 tion to whatever virtue is in us ? We will neve 
 more think cheaply of ourselves, or of life. We ar 
 piqued to some purpose, and the industry of th 
 diggers on the railroad will not again shame us. 
 
 Under this head, too, falls that homage, ver 
 pure, as I think, which all ranks pay to the hero c 
 the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus, down t 
 Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine 
 Hear the shouts in the street ! The people canno 
 see him enough. They delight in a man. Here is 
 head and a trunk ! What a front ! What eyes ! At 
 lantean shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic
 
 USES OF GREAT MEN. 1 7 
 
 with equal inward force to guide the great machine ! 
 This pleasure of full expression to that which, in 
 their private experience, is usually cramped and ob 
 structed, runs, also, much higher, and is the secret 
 of the reader s joy in literary genius. Nothing is 
 kept back. There is fire enough to fuse the moun 
 tain of ore. Shakspeare s principal merit may be 
 conveyed in saying that he, of all men, best under 
 stands the English language, and can say what he 
 will. Yet these unchoked channels and floodgates 
 of expression are only health or fortunate constitu 
 tion. Shakspeare s name suggests other and purely 
 intellectual benefits. 
 
 Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with 
 their medals, swords, and armorial coats, like the 
 addressing to a human being thoughts out of a cer 
 tain height, and presupposing his intelligence. This 
 honor, which is possible in personal intercourse 
 scarcely twice in a lifetime, genius perpetually pays ; 
 contented, if now and then, in a century, the proffer 
 is accepted. The indicators of the values of matter 
 are degraded to a sort of cooks and confectioners, on 
 the appearance of the indicators of ideas. Genius is 
 the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible re 
 gions, and draws their map ; and, by acquainting us 
 with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the 
 old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of 
 which the world we have conversed with is the 
 show. 
 
 We go to the gymnasium and the swimming- 
 school to see the power and beauty of the body ; 
 there is the like pleasure, and a higher benefit, from
 
 1 8 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds ; as feats of 
 memory, of mathematical combination, great power 
 of abstraction, the transmutings of the imagination, 
 even versatility and concentration, as these acts ex 
 pose the invisible organs and members of the mind, 
 which respond, member for member, to the parts of 
 the body. For we thus enter a new gymnasium, 
 and learn to choose men by their truest marks, 
 taught, with Plato, " to choose those who can, with 
 out aid from the eyes or any other sense, proceed to 
 truth and to being." Foremost among these activ 
 ities are the summersaults, spells, and resurrections 
 wrought by the imagination. When this wakes, a 
 man seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times 
 his force. It opens the delicious sense of indeter 
 minate size, and inspires an audacious mental habit. 
 We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a 
 sentence in a book or a word dropped in conversa 
 tion sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are 
 bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of 
 the pit. And this benefit is real, because we are en 
 titled to these enlargements, and, once having passed 
 the bounds, shall never again be quite the miserable 
 pedants we were. 
 
 The high functions of the intellect are so allied 
 that some imaginative power usually appears in all 
 eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of the first 
 class, but especially in meditative men of an intuitive 
 habit of thought. This class serve us, so that they 
 have the perception of identity and the perception of 
 reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakspeare, Swcden- 
 borg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws.
 
 USES OF GREAT MEW. K) 
 
 The perception of these laws is a kind of metre of 
 the mind. Little minds are little, through failure to 
 see them. 
 
 Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our delight 
 in reason degenerates into idolatry of the herald. 
 Especially when a mind of powerful method has 
 utructed men, we find the examples of oppression. 
 The dominion of Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, 
 the credit of Luther, of Bacon, of Locke, in re 
 ligion, the history of hierarchies, of saints, and the 
 sects which have taken the name of each founder, 
 are in point. Alas ! every man is such a victim. The 
 imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of 
 power. It is the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle 
 and to blind the beholder. But true genius seeks to 
 defend us from itself. True genius will not impov 
 erish, but will liberate, and add new senses. If a 
 wise man should appear in our village, he would 
 create, in those who conversed with him, a new con 
 sciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to un 
 observed advantages ; he would establish a sense of 
 immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we 
 could not be cheated ; as every one would discern the 
 checks and guaranties of condition. The rich would 
 s je their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes 
 and their resources. 
 
 But nature brings all this about in due time. Ro 
 tation is her remedy. The soul is impatient of 
 masters, and eager for change. Housekeepers say 
 of a domestic who has been valuable, " She had 
 lived with me long enough." We are tendencies, or 
 rather symptoms, and none of us complete. We
 
 20 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives. Ro 
 tation is the law of nature. When nature removes a 
 great man, people explore the horizon for a successor ; 
 but none comes, and none will. His class is extin 
 guished with him. In some other and quite different 
 field, the next man will appear; not Jefferson, not 
 Franklin, but now a great salesman ; then a road- 
 contractor; then a student of fishes ; then a buffalo- 
 hunting explorer, or a semi -savage Western general. 
 Thus we make a stand against our rougher masters ; 
 but against the best there is a finer remedy. The 
 power which they communicate is not theirs. When 
 we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to 
 Plato, but to the idea, to which, also, Plato was 
 debtor. 
 
 I must not forget that we have a special debt to a 
 single class. Life is a scale of degrees. Between 
 rank and rank of our great men are wide intervals. 
 Mankind have, in all ages, attached themselves to a 
 few persons, who, either by the quality of that idea 
 they embodied, or by the largeness of their recep 
 tion, were entitled to the position of leaders and law 
 givers. These teach us the qualities of primary 
 nature admit us to the constitution of things. Wj 
 swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are 
 effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, 
 of which the men about us are dupes. But life is a 
 sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, " Let there be 
 an entrance opened for me into realities ; 1 have 
 worn the fool s cap too long." We will know the 
 meaning of our economies and politics. Give us the 
 cipher, and, if persons and things are scores of a
 
 USES OF GREAT MEN. 21 
 
 celestial music, let us read off the strains. We have 
 been cheated of our reason ; yet there have been 
 sane men who enjoyed a rich and related existence. 
 What they know they know for us. With each new 
 mind, a new secret of nature transpires ; nor can the 
 Bible be closed until the last great man is born. 
 These men correct the delirium of the animal spirits, 
 make us considerate, and engage us to new aims and 
 powers. The veneration of mankind selects these 
 for the highest place. Witness the multitude of 
 statues, pictures, and memorials which recall their 
 genius in every city, village, house, and ship : 
 
 " Ever their phantoms arise before us, 
 
 Our loftier brothers, but one in blood; 
 At bed and table they lord it o er us, 
 
 With looks of beauty, and words of good." 
 
 How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, 
 the service rendered by those who introduce moral 
 truths into the general mind? I am plagued, in all 
 my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. If I 
 work in my garden and prune an apple-tree, I am 
 well enough entertained, and could continue indefi 
 nitely in the like occupation. But it comes to mind 
 that a day is gone, and I have got this precious noth 
 ing done. I go to Boston or New York, and run up 
 and down on my affairs : they are sped, but so is the 
 day. I am vexed by the recollection of this price I 
 have paid for a trifling advantage. I remember the 
 pcau a dne, on which whoso sat should have his de 
 sire, but a piece of the skin was gone for every wish. 
 I go to a convention of philanthropists. Do what I
 
 22 REPRESENTATIVE AfEJV. 
 
 can, I cannot keep my eyes off the clock. But if 
 there should appear in the company some gentle soul 
 who knows little of persons or parties, of Carolina or 
 Cuba, but who announces a law that disposes these 
 particulars, and so certifies me of the equity which 
 checkmates every false player, bankrupts every self- 
 seeker, and apprises me of my independence on any 
 conditions of country, or time, or human body, that 
 man liberates me ; I forget the clock. I pass out of 
 the sore relation to persons. I am healed of my 
 hurts. I am made immortal by apprehending my 
 possession of incorruptible goods. Here is great 
 competition of rich and poor. We live in a market, 
 where is only so much wheat, or wool, or land ; and 
 if I have so much more, every other must have so 
 much less. I seem to have no good, without breach 
 of good manners. Nobody is glad in the gladness 
 of another, and our system is one of war, of an in 
 jurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon race 
 is educated to wish to be first. It is our system ; 
 and a man comes to measure his greatness by the 
 regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors. But 
 in these new fields there is room : here are no self- 
 esteems, no exclusions. 
 
 I admire great men of all classes, those who stand 
 for facts and for thoughts ; I like rough and smooth, 
 "scourges of God 11 and "darlings of the human 
 race." I like the first Caesar; and Charles V.. of 
 Spain; and Charles XII., of Sweden ; Richard Plan- 
 tagenet ; and Bonaparte, in France. I applaud a 
 sufficient man, an officer equal to his office ; cap 
 tains, ministers, senators. I like a master standing
 
 USES OF GREAT MEN. 23 
 
 firm on legs of iron, well-born, rich, handsome, elo 
 quent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by 
 fascination into tributaries and supporters of his 
 power. Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or 
 staff-like, carry on the work of the world. But I 
 find him greater when he can abolish himself, and 
 all heroes, by letting in this element of reason, ir 
 respective of persons ; this subtilizer, and irresistible 
 upward force, into our thought, destroying indi 
 vidualism ; the power so great that the potentate is 
 nothing. Then he is a monarch who gives a con 
 stitution to his people ; a pontiff who preaches the 
 equality of souls, and releases his servants from their 
 barbarous homages ; an emperor who can spare his 
 empire. 
 
 But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, 
 two or three points of service. Nature never spares 
 the opium or nepenthe ; but, wherever she mars her 
 creature with some deformity or defect, lays her 
 poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer 
 goes joyfully through life, ignorant of the ruin, and 
 incapable of seeing it, though all the world point 
 their finger at it every day. The worthless and 
 offensive members of society, whose existence is a 
 social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill- 
 used people alive, and never get over their aston 
 ishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their 
 contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden 
 virtues, not only in heroes and archangels, but in 
 gossips and nurses. Is it not a rare contrivance that 
 lodged the due inertia in every creature, the conserv 
 ing, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or
 
 24 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 changed? Altogether independent of the intellectual 
 force in each is the pride of opinion, the security 
 that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame, not a 
 mowing idiot, but uses what spark of perception and 
 facility is left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her 
 opinion over the absurdities of all the rest. Differ 
 ence from me is the measure of absurdity. Not one 
 has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a 
 bright thought that made things cohere with this 
 bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the midst of 
 this chuckle of self-gratulation, some figure goes by 
 which Thersites too can love and admire. This is 
 he that should marshal us the way we were going. 
 There is no end to his aid. Without Plato, we 
 should almost lose our faith in the possibility of a 
 reasonable book. We seem to want but one, but 
 we want one. We love to associate with heroic per 
 sons, since our receptivity is unlimited; and, with 
 the great, our thoughts and manners easily become 
 great. We are all wise in capacity, though so few 
 in energy. There needs but one wise man in a com 
 pany, and all are wise, so rapid is the contagion. 
 
 Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes 
 from egotism, and enable us to see other people and 
 their works. But there are vices and follies incident 
 to whole populations and ages. Men resemble their 
 contemporaries, even more than their progenitors. It 
 is observed in old couples, or in persons who have 
 been housemates for a course of years, that they grow 
 like ; and if they should live long enough, we 
 should not be able to know them apart. Nature 
 abhors these complaisances, which threaten to melt
 
 USES OF GREAT MEN. 25 
 
 the world into a lump, and hastens to break up such 
 maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes 
 on between men of one town, of one sect, of one 
 political party ; and the ideas of the time are in the 
 air, and infect all who breathe it. Viewed from any 
 high point, this city of New York, yonder city of 
 London, the western civilization, would seem a bun 
 dle of insanities. We keep each other in countenance, 
 and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of the time. 
 The shield against the stingings of conscience is the 
 universal practice, or our contemporaries. Again : it is 
 very easy to be as wise and good as your companions. 
 We learn of our contemporaries what they know, 
 without effort, and almost through the pores of the 
 skin. We catch it by sympathy, or as a wife arrives 
 at the intellectual and moral elevations of her hus 
 band. But we stop where they stop. Very hardly 
 can we take another step. The great, or such as hold 
 of nature, and transcend fashions, by their fidelity to 
 universal ideas, are saviors from these federal errors, 
 and defend us from our contemporaries. They are 
 the exceptions which we want, where all grows alike. 
 A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism. 
 
 Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves 
 from too much conversation with our mates, and 
 exult in the depth of nature in that direction in which 
 he leads us. What indemnification is one great man 
 for populations of pigmies ! Every mother wishes one 
 son a genius, though all the rest should be mediocre. 
 But a new danger appears in the excess of influence 
 of the great man. His attractions warp us from our 
 place. We have become underlings and intellectual
 
 26 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 suicides. Ah ! yonder in the horizon is our help : 
 other great men, new qualities, counterweights and 
 checks on each other. We cloy of the honey of each 
 peculiar greatness. Every hero becomes a bore at last. 
 Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted, yet he said of 
 the good Jesus, even, " I pray you, let me never hear 
 tljat man s name again." They cry up the virtues of 
 George Washington "Damn George Washing 
 ton ! " is the poor Jacobin s whole speech and confu 
 tation. But it is human nature s indispensable 
 defence. The centripetence augments the centrifu 
 ge nee. We balance one man with his opposite, and 
 the health of the State depends on the see-saw. 
 
 There is, however, a speedy limit to the use of he 
 roes. Every genius is defended from approach by 
 quantities of unavailableness. They are very attrac 
 tive, and seem at a distance our own ; but we are 
 hindered on all sides from approach. The more we 
 are drawn, the more we are repelled. There is 
 something not solid in the good that is done for us. 
 The best discovery the discoverer makes for himself. 
 It has something unreal for his companion, until he 
 too has substantiated it. It seems as if the Deity 
 dressed each soul which he sends into nature in cer 
 tain virtues and powers not communicable to other 
 men, and, sending it to perform one more turn 
 through the circle of beings, wrote, " Not transfera 
 ble," and " Good for this trip only " 1 on these gar 
 ments of the soul. There is somewhat deceptive 
 about the intercourse of minds. The boundaries are 
 invisible, but they are never crossed. There is such 
 good will to impart, and such good will to receive,
 
 USES OF GREAT MEN. 2j 
 
 that each threatens to become the other ; but the 
 law of individuality collects its secret strength : you 
 are you, and I am I, and so we remain. 
 
 For nature wishes everything to remain itself; 
 and whilst every individual strives to grow and ex 
 clude, and to exclude and grow, to the extremities 
 of the universe, and to impose the law of its being 
 on every other creature, Nature steadily aims to 
 protect each against every other. Each is self- 
 defended. Nothing is more marked than the power 
 by which individuals are guarded from individuals, in 
 a world where every benefactor becomes so easily a 
 malefactor, only by continuation of his activity into 
 places where it is not due ; where children seem so 
 much at the mercy of their foolish parents, and where 
 almost all men are too social and interfering. We 
 rightly speak of the guardian angels of children. 
 How superior in their security from infusions of evil 
 persons, from vulgarity and second thought ! They 
 shed their own abundant beauty on the objects they 
 behold. Therefore, they are not at the mercy of such 
 poor educators as we adults. If we huff and chide 
 them, they soon come not to mind it, and get a self- 
 reliance ; and if we indulge them to folly, they learn 
 the limitation elsewhere. 
 
 We need not fear excessive influence. A more gen 
 erous trust is permitted. Serve the great. Stick at 
 no humiliation. Grudge no office thou canst render. 
 Be the limb of their body, the breath of their mouth. 
 Compromise thy egotism. Who cares for that, so 
 thou gain aught wider and nobler? Never mind the 
 taunt of Boswellism : the devotion may easily be
 
 28 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 greater than the wretched pride which is guarding its 
 own skirts. Be another not thyself, but a Platonist ; 
 not a soul, but a Christian ; not a naturalist, but a 
 Cartesian ; not a poet, but a Shaksperian. In vain ; 
 the wheels of tendency will not stop, nor will all the 
 forces of inertia, fear, or of love itself, hold thee 
 there. On, and forever onward ! The microscope 
 observes a monad or wheel-insect among the in- 
 fusories circulating in water. Presently a dot ap 
 pears on the animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it 
 becomes two perfect animals. The ever-proceeding 
 detachment appears not less in all thought, and in 
 society. Children think they cannot live without 
 their parents. But long before they are aware of 
 it, the black dot has appeared, and the detachment 
 taken place. Any accident will now reveal to them 
 their independence. 
 
 But great men the word is injurious. Is there 
 caste? Is there fate? What becomes of the promise 
 to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments the supcr- 
 foetation of nature. " Generous and handsome," 
 he says, "is your hero; but look at yonder poor 
 Paddy, whose country is his wheelbarrow ; look at 
 his whole nation of Paddies." Why are the masses, 
 from the dawn of history down, food for knives and 
 powder? The idea dignifies a few leaders, who have 
 sentiment, opinion, love, self-devotion ; and they 
 make war and death sacred ; but what for the 
 wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness 
 of man is every day s tragedy. It is as real a loss 
 that others should be low as that we should be low ; 
 for we must have society.
 
 USES OF GREAT MEM. 29 
 
 Is it a reply to these suggestions, to say society is a 
 Pestalozzian school ; all are teachers and pupils in 
 turn. We are equally served by receiving and by 
 imparting. Men who know the same things are not 
 long the best company for each other. But bring to 
 each an intelligent person of another experience, and 
 it is as if you let off water from a lake, by cutting a 
 lower basin. It seems a mechanical advantage, and 
 great benefit it is to each speaker, as he can now 
 paint out his thought to himself. We pass very fast, 
 in our personal moods, from dignity to dependence. 
 And if any appear never to assume the chair, but 
 always to stand and serve, it is because we do not 
 see the company in a sufficiently long period for the 
 whole rotation of parts to come about. As to what 
 we call the masses and common men there are 
 no common men. All men are at last of a size ; and 
 true art is only possible on the conviction that every 
 talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair play, and 
 an open field, and freshest laurels to all who have 
 won them ! But heaven reserves an equal scope for 
 every creature. Each is uneasy until he has pro 
 duced his private ray unto the concave sphere, and 
 beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exal 
 tation. 
 
 The heroes of the hour are relatively great of a 
 faster growth ; or they are such, in whom, at the 
 moment of success, a quality is ripe which is then in 
 request. Other" days will demand other qualities. 
 Some rays escape the common observer, and want a 
 finely adapted eye. Ask the great man if there be 
 none greater. His companions are ; and not the
 
 30 REPRESENTATIVE ME.V. 
 
 less great, but the more, that society cannot see 
 them. Nature never sends a great man into the 
 planet without confiding the secret to another soul. 
 
 One gracious fact emerges from these studies 
 that there is true ascension in our love. The repu 
 tations of the nineteenth century will one day be 
 quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of hu 
 manity is the real subject whose biography is written 
 in our annals. We must infer much, and supply 
 many chasms in the record. The history of the 
 universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. 
 No man, in all the procession of famous men, is 
 reason or illumination, or that essence we were look 
 ing for, but is an exhibition, in some quarter, of 
 new possibilities. Could we one day complete the 
 immense figure which these flagrant points compose ! 
 The study of many individuals leads us to an ele 
 mental region wherein the individual is lost, or 
 wherein all touch by their summits. Thought anil 
 feeling, that break out there, cannot be impounded 
 by any fence of personality. This is the key to th_ 
 power of the greatest men their spirit diffuses it 
 self. A new quality of mind travels by night and by 
 day, in concentric circles from its origin, and pub 
 lishes itself by unknown methods; the union of all 
 minds appears intimate; what gets admission to 
 one cannot be kept out of any other ; the smallest 
 acquisition of truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so 
 much good to the commonwealth of souls. If tlu 
 disparities of talent and position vanish when the 
 individuals are seen in the duration which is neces 
 sary to complete the career of each, even more
 
 USES OF GREAT MEN. 31 
 
 swiftly the seeming injustice disappears when we 
 ascend to the central identity of all the individuals, 
 and know that they are made of the substance which 
 ordaineth and doeth. 
 
 The genius of humanity is the right point of view 
 of history. The qualities abide ; the men who ex 
 hibit them have now more, now less, and pass away; 
 the qualities remain on another brow. No experi 
 ence is more familiar. Once you saw phoenixes : they 
 are gone ; the world is not therefore disenchanted. 
 The vessels on which you read sacred emblems turn 
 out to be common pottery ; but the sense of the pict 
 ures is sacred, and you may still read them trans 
 ferred to the walls of the world. For a time our 
 teachers serve us personally, as metres or milestones 
 of progress. Once they were angels of knowledge, 
 and their figures touched the sky. Then we drew 
 near, saw their means, culture, and limits ; and they 
 yielded their place to other geniuses. Happy, if a 
 few names remain so high that we have not been 
 able to read them nearer, and age and comparison 
 have not robbed them of a ray. But, at last, we 
 shall cease to look in men for completeness, and 
 shall content ourselves with their social and dele 
 gated quality. All that respects the individual is 
 temporary and prospective, like the individual him 
 self, who is ascending out of his limits into a catho 
 lic existence. We have never come at the true and 
 best benefit of any genius, so long as we believe him 
 an original force. In the moment when he ceases to 
 help us as a cause, he begins to help us more as an 
 effect. Then he appears as an exponent of a vaster
 
 32 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 mind and will. The opaque self becomes transpar 
 ent with the light of the First Cause. 
 
 Yet, within the limits of human education and 
 agency, we may say great men exist that there may 
 be greater men. The destiny of organized nature is 
 amelioration, and who can tell its limits? It is for 
 man to tame the chaos ; on every side, whilst he lives, 
 to scatter the seeds of science and of song, that 
 climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder, and the 
 germs of love and benefit may be multiplied.
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER 
 
 (33)
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 35 
 
 II. 
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 AMONG books, Plato only is entitled to Omar s 
 fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he said, 
 " Burn the libraries ; for their value is in this book." 
 These sentences contain the culture of nations ; these 
 are the corner-stone of schools ; these are the foun 
 tain-head of literatures. A discipline it is in logic, 
 arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry, language, rhet 
 oric, ontology, morals, or practical wisdom. There 
 was never such range of speculation. Out of Plato 
 come all things that are still written and debated 
 among men of thought. Great havoc makes he 
 among our originalities. We have reached the 
 mountain from which all these drift boulders were 
 detached. The Bible of the learned for twenty-two 
 hundred years, every brisk young man who says in 
 succession fine things to each reluctant generation 
 Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rous 
 seau, Alfieri, Coleridge is some reader of Plato, 
 translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good 
 things. Even the men of grander proportion suffer 
 some deduction from the misfortune (shall I say?) of 
 coming after this exhausting generalizer. St. Augus 
 tine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg,
 
 36 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 Goethe, are likewise his debtors, and must say after 
 him. For it is fair to credit the broadest generalizer 
 with all the particulars deducible from his thesis. 
 
 Plato is philosophy, and philosophy Plato at 
 once the glory and the shame of mankind, since 
 neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add anv 
 idea to his categories. No wife, no children, had lu, 
 and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his pos 
 terity, and are tinged with his mind. How many 
 great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of 
 night, to be his men Platonists ! The Alexan 
 drians, a constellation of genius ; the Elizabethans, 
 not less ; Sir Thomas More, Henry .More, John 
 Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, 
 Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Mar- 
 cilius Ficinus and Picus Mirandola. Calvinism is 
 in his Phnedo ; Christianity is in it. Mahometanism 
 draws all its philosophy, in its handbook of morals, 
 the Akhlak-y-Jalaly, from him. Mysticism finds in 
 Plato all its texts. This citizen of a town in Greece 
 is no villager nor patriot. An Englishman reads 
 and says, "How English!" A German, "How 
 Teutonic!" An Italian, "How Roman and how 
 Greek ! " As they say that Helen of Argos had that 
 universal beauty that everybody felt related to her, 
 so Plato seems, to a reader in New England, an 
 American genius. His broad humanity transcends 
 all sectional lines. 
 
 This range of Plato instructs us what to think of 
 the vexed question concerning his reputed works 
 what are genuine, what spurious. It is singular that 
 wherever we find a man higher, by a whole head,
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 37 
 
 than any of his contemporaries, it is sure to come 
 into doubt what are his real works. Thus Homer, 
 Plato, RafFaelle, Shakspeare. For these men mag 
 netize their contemporaries, so that their companions 
 can do for them what they can never do for them 
 selves ; and the great man does thus live in several 
 bodies, and write, or paint, or act by many hands ; 
 and, after some time, it is not easy to say what is the 
 authentic work of the master, and what is only of his 
 school. 
 
 Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his 
 own times. What is a great man but one of great 
 affinities, who takes up into himself all arts, sciences, 
 all knowables, as his food? He can spare nothing; 
 he can dispose of everything. What is not good for 
 virtue is good for knowledge. Hence his contem 
 poraries tax him with plagiarism. But the inventor 
 only knows how to borrow ; and society is glad to 
 forget the innumerable laborers who ministered to 
 this architect, and reserves all its gratitude for him. 
 When we are praising Plato, it seems we are praising 
 quotations from Solon, and Sophron, and Philolaus. 
 Be it so. Every book is a quotation ; and every 
 house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, 
 and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation 
 from all his ancestors. And this grasping inventor 
 puts all nations under contribution. 
 
 Plato absorbed the learning of his times Phi 
 lolaus, Timaeus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what 
 else ; then his master, Socrates ; and, finding him 
 self still capable of a larger synthesis, beyond all 
 example then or since, he travelled into Italy, to
 
 3^ REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 gain what Pythagoras had for him ; then into Egypt, 
 and perhaps still farther east, to import the other 
 element, which Europe wanted, into the European 
 mind. This breadth entitles him to stand as Un 
 representative of philosophy. He says, in the Re 
 public, " Such a genius as philosophers must of 
 necessity have is wont but seldom, in all its parts, 
 to meet in one man ; but its different parts generally 
 spring up in different persons/ Every man who 
 would do anything well must come to it from a 
 higher ground. A philosopher must be more than 
 a philosopher. Plato is clothed with the powers of a 
 poet, stands upon the highest place of the poet, and 
 (though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric 
 expression) mainly is not a poet because he chose 
 to use the poetic gift to an ulterior purpose. 
 
 Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. 
 Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. 
 They lived in their writings, and so their house and 
 street life was trivial and commonplace. If you 
 would know their tastes and complexions, the most 
 admiring of their readers most resembles them. 
 Plato, especially, has no external biography. If he 
 had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of 
 them. He ground them all into paint. As a good 
 chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher converts 
 the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual per 
 formances. 
 
 He was born 430 A.C., about the time of the 
 death of Pericles; was of patrician connection in his 
 times and city; and is said to have had an early in 
 clination for war ; but, in his twentieth year, meeting
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 39 
 
 with Socrates, was easily dissuaded from this pursuit, 
 and remained for ten years his scholar, until the 
 death of Socrates. He then went to Megara ; ac 
 cepted the invitations of Dion and of Dionysius, to 
 the court of Sicily ; and went thither three times, 
 though very capriciously treated. He travelled into 
 Italy ; then into Egypt, where he stayed a long time : 
 some say three, some say thirteen, years. It is 
 said he went farther, into Babylonia : this is uncer 
 tain. Returning to Athens, he gave lessons, in the 
 Academy, to those whom his fame drew thither ; and 
 died, as we have received it, in the act of writing, at 
 eighty-one years. 
 
 But the biography of Plato is interior. We are 
 to account for the supreme elevation of this man in 
 the intellectual history of our race how it happens 
 that, in proportion to the culture of men, they be 
 come his scholars ; that as our Jewish Bible has im 
 planted itself in the table-talk and household life of 
 every man and woman in the European and American 
 nations, so the writings of Plato have preoccupied 
 every school of learning, every lover of thought, 
 every church, every poet, making it impossible to 
 think, on certain levels, except through him. He 
 stands between the truth and every man s mind, and 
 has almost impressed language, and the primary 
 forms of thought, with his name and seal. I am 
 struck, in reading him, with the extreme modernness 
 of his style and spirit. Here is the germ of that 
 Europe we know so well, in its long history of arts 
 and arms ; here are all its traits, already discernible 
 in the mind of Plato and in none before him.
 
 40 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 It has spread itself since into a hundred histories, 
 but has added no new element. This perpetual 
 modernness is the measure of merit in every work 
 of art ; since the author of it was not misled by any 
 thing short-lived or local, but abode by real and 
 abiding traits. How Plato came thus to be Europe, 
 and philosophy, and almost literature, is the problem 
 for us to solve. 
 
 This could not have happened without a sound, 
 sincere, and catholic man, able to honor, at the 
 same time, the ideal, or laws of the mind, and fate, 
 or the order of nature. The first period of a nation, 
 as of an individual, is the period of unconscious 
 strength. Children cry, scream, and stamp with 
 fury, unable to express their desires. As soon as 
 they can speak and tell their want, and the reason of 
 it, they become gentle. In adult life, whilst the per 
 ceptions are obtuse, men and women talk vehemently 
 and superlatively, blunder and quarrel ; their man 
 ners are full of desperation; their speech is full of 
 oaths. As soon as, with culture, things have cleared 
 up a little, and they see them no longer in lumps 
 and masses, but accurately distributed, they desist 
 from that weak vehemence, and explain their mean 
 ing in detail. If the tongue had not been framed for 
 articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest. 
 The same weakness and want, on a higher plane, oc 
 cur daily in the education of ardent young men and 
 women. "Ah! you don t understand me; I have 
 never met with any one who comprehends me ; " and 
 they sigh and weep, write verses, and walk alone 
 fault of power to express their precise meaning. In
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 41 
 
 a month or two, through the favor of their good 
 genius, they meet some one so related as to assist 
 their volcanic estate ; and, good communication be 
 ing once established, they are thenceforward good 
 citizens. It is ever thus. The progress is to accu 
 racy, to skill, to truth, from blind force. 
 
 There is a moment, in the history of every na 
 tion, when, proceeding out of this brute youth, the 
 perceptive powers reach their ripeness, and have not 
 yet become microscopic; so that man, at that in 
 stant, extends across the entire scale, and, with his 
 feet still planted on the immense forces of night, 
 converses, by his eyes and brain, with solar and stel 
 lar creation. That is the moment of adult health, 
 the culmination of power. 
 
 Such is the history of Europe, in all points ; and 
 such in philosophy. Its early records, almost per 
 ished, are of the immigrations from Asia, bringing 
 with them the dreams of barbarians ; a confusion 
 of crude notions of morals, and of natural philoso 
 phy, gradually subsiding, through the partial insight 
 of single teachers. 
 
 Before Pericles, came the Seven Wise Masters ; and 
 we have the beginnings of geometry, metaphysics, and 
 ethics ; then the partialists deducing the origin 
 of tilings from flux or water,, or from air, or from 
 fire, or from mind. All mix with these causes 
 mythologic pictures. At last, comes Plato, the dis 
 tributor, who needs no barbaric paint, or tattoo, or 
 whooping; for he can define. He leaves with Asia 
 the vast and superlative ; he is the arrival of accuracy
 
 42 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 and intelligence. " He shall be as a god to me, 
 who can rightly divide and define." 
 
 This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the 
 account which the human mind gives to itself of the 
 constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie 
 forever at the base the one, and the two : 
 I, Unity, or Identity; and, 2, Variety. We unite 
 all things by perceiving the law which pervades 
 them ; by perceiving the superficial differences and 
 the profound resemblances. But every mental 
 act this very perception of identity or oneness 
 recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and 
 otherness. It is impossible to speak, or to think, 
 without embracing both. 
 
 The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many 
 effects; then for the cause of that; and again the 
 cause, diving still into the profound ; self-assured 
 that it shall arrive at an absolute and sufficient 
 one a one that shall be all. "In the midst of 
 the sun is the light, in the midst of the light is truth, 
 and in the midst of truth is the imperishable being," 
 say the Vedas. All philosophy, of East and West, 
 has the same centripetence. Urged by an opposite 
 necessity, the mind returns from the one to that which 
 is not one, but other or many; from cause to effect ; 
 and affirms the necessary existence of variety, the 
 self-existence of both, as each is involved in the 
 other. These strictly blended elements it is the prob 
 lem of thought to separate, and to reconcile. Their 
 existence is mutually contradictory and exclusive ; 
 and each so fast slides into the other that we can 
 r\ever sa.y what is one, and what it is not. The Pro-
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 43 
 
 teus is as nimble in the highest as in the lowest 
 grounds, when we contemplate the one, the true, the 
 good, as in the surfaces and extremities of matter. 
 
 In all nations there are minds which incline to 
 dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity. 
 The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose 
 all being in one Being. This tendency finds its 
 highest expression in the religious writings of the 
 East, and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the 
 Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu Purana. 
 Those writings contain little else than this idea, and 
 they rise to pure and sublime strains in celebrating it. 
 
 The Same, the Same : friend and foe are of one 
 stuff; the ploughman, the plough, and the furrow 
 are of one stuff; and the stuff is such, and so much, 
 that the variations of form are unimportant. "You 
 are fit " (says the supreme Krishna to a sage) " to 
 appre .iend that you are not distinct from me. That 
 which I am, thou art, and that also is this world, 
 with its gods, and heroes, and mankind. Men con 
 template distinctions because they are stupefied with 
 ignorance." "The words /and mine constitute 
 ignorance. What is the great end of all, you shall 
 now learn from me. It is soul one in all bodies, 
 pervading, uniform, perfect, preeminent over nature, 
 exempt from birth, growth, and decay, omnipresent, 
 made up of true knowledge, independent, uncon 
 nected with unrealities, with name, species, and the 
 rest, in time past, present, and to come. The 
 knowledge that this spirit, which is essentially one, 
 is in one s own and in all other bodies is the wis 
 dom of one who knows the unity of things. As one
 
 44 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 diffusive air, passing through the perforations of a 
 flute, is distinguished as the notes of a scale, so the 
 nature of the Great Spirit is single, though its forms 
 be manifold, arising from the consequences of acts. 
 When the difference of the investing form, as that of 
 God, or the rest, is destroyed, there is no distinction. 1 
 " The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu, 
 who is identical with all things, and is to be regarded 
 by the wise as not differing from, but as the same 
 as, themselves. I neither am going nor coming; nor 
 is my dwelling in any one place ; nor art thou, thou ; 
 nor are others, others; nor am I, I." As if he had 
 said, "All is for the soul, and the soul is Vishnu; 
 and animals and stars are transient paintings ; and 
 light is whitewash ; and durations are deceptive ; and 
 form is imprisonment ; and heaven itself a decoy." 
 That which the soul seeks is resolution into being, 
 above form, out of Tartarus, and out of heaven 
 liberation from nature. 
 
 If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in 
 which all things are absorbed, action tends directly 
 backwards to diversity. The first is the course or 
 gravitation of mind ; the second is the power of 
 nature. Nature is the manifold. The unity ab 
 sorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and 
 creates. These two principles reappear and inter 
 penetrate all things, all thought ; the one, the many. 
 One is being ; the other, intellect : one is necessity ; 
 the other, freedom : one, rest ; the other, motion : one, 
 power ; the other, distribution : one, strength ; the 
 other, pleasure : one, consciousness ; the other, defi 
 nition : one, genius ; the other, talent : one, earnest-
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 45 
 
 ness ; the other, knowledge : one, possession ; the 
 other, trade : one, caste ; the other, culture : one, 
 king ; the other, democracy : and, if we dare carry 
 these generalizations a step higher, and name the 
 last tendency of both, we might say that the end of 
 the one is escape from organization pure science ; 
 and the end of the other is the highest instrumental 
 ity, or use of means, or executive deity. 
 
 Each student adheres, by temperament and by 
 habit, to the first or to the second of these gods of 
 the mind. By religion, he tends to unity ; by intel 
 lect, or by the senses, to the many. A too rapid 
 unification, and an excessive appliance to parts and 
 particulars, are the twin dangers of speculation. 
 
 To this partiality the history of nations corre 
 sponded. The country of unity, of immovable insti 
 tutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in 
 abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in 
 practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense 
 fate, is Asia ; and it realizes this faith in the social in 
 stitution of caste. On the other side, the genius of 
 Europe is active and creative : it resists caste by 
 culture ; its philosophy was a discipline ; it is a land 
 of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the East 
 loved infinity, the West delighted in boundaries. 
 
 European civility is the triumph of talent, the ex 
 tension of system, the sharpened understanding, 
 adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight in manifes 
 tation, in comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens, 
 Greece, had been working in this element with the 
 joy of genius not yet chilled by any foresight of the 
 djtriment of an excess. They saw before them no
 
 46 REPRESENTATIVE MEN, 
 
 sinister political economy; no ominous Malthus; no 
 Paris or London ; no pitiless subdivision of classes 
 the doom of the pin-makers, the doom of the 
 weavers, of dressers, of stockingers, of carders, of 
 spinners, of colliers; no Ireland; no Indian caste, 
 superinduced by the efforts of Europe to throw it otf. 
 The understanding was in its health and prime. 
 Art was in its splendid novelty. They cut the 
 Pentelican marble as if it were snow, and their 
 perfect works in architecture and sculpture seemed 
 things of course, not more difficult than the comple 
 tion of a new ship at the Medford yards, or new mills 
 at Lowell. These things are in course, and may be 
 taken for granted. The Roman legion, Byzantine 
 legislation, English trade, the saloons of Versailles, 
 the cafes of Paris, the steam-mill, steam-boat, steam- 
 coach, may all be seen in perspective ; the town- 
 meeting, the ballot-box, the newspaper and cheap 
 press. 
 
 Meantime Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern pilgrim 
 ages, imbibed the idea of one Deity in which all 
 things are absorbed. The unity of Asia, and the 
 detail of Europe ; the infinitude of the Asiatic soul, 
 and the defining, result-loving, machine-making, sur 
 face-seeking, opera-going Europe Plato came to 
 join, and by contact to enhance, the energy of each. 
 The excellence of Europe and Asia are in his brain. 
 Metaphysics and natural philosophy expressed the 
 genius of Europe ; he substructs the religion of Asia 
 as the base. 
 
 In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of 
 the two elements. It is as easy to be great as to be
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 47 
 
 small. The reason why we do not at once believe 
 in admirable souls is because they are not in our 
 experience. In actual life, they are so rare as to be 
 incredible ; but, primarily, there is not only no pre 
 sumption against them, but the strongest presump 
 tion in favor of their appearance. But whether voices 
 were heard in the sky, or not ; whether his mother 
 or his father dreamed that the infant man-child was 
 the son of Apollo ; whether a swarm of bees settled 
 on his lips, or not a man who could see two sides 
 of a thing was born. The wonderful synthesis so 
 familiar in nature ; the upper and the under side of 
 the m^dal of Jove ; the union of impossibilities, 
 which reappears in every object ; its real and its 
 ideal power was now, also, transferred entire to 
 the consciousness of a man. 
 
 The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract 
 truth, he saved himself by propounding the most 
 popular of all principles, the absolute good, which 
 rules rulers, and judges the judge. If he made tran 
 scendental distinctions, he fortified himself by drawing 
 all his illustrations from sources disdained by orators 
 and polite conversers ; from mares and puppies ; from 
 pitchers and soup-ladles ; from cooks and criers ; the 
 shops of potters, horse-doctors, butchers, and fish 
 mongers. He cannot forgive in himself a partiality, 
 but is resolved that the two poles of thought shall 
 appear in his statement. His argument and his sen 
 tence are self-poised and spherical. The two poles 
 appear ; yes, and become two hands, to grasp and 
 appropriate their own. 
 
 Every great artist has been such by synthesis.
 
 4$ REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 Our strength is transitional, alternating; or, shall I 
 say, a thread of two strands. The seashore, sea 
 seen from shore, shore seen from sea ; the taste of 
 two metals in contact ; and our enlarged powers at 
 the approach and at the departure of a friend ; the 
 experience of poetic creative ness, which is not found 
 in staying at home, nor yet in travelling, but in tran 
 sitions from one to the other, which must therefore 
 be adroitly managed to present as much transitional 
 surface as possible ; this command of two elements 
 must explain the power and the charm of Plato. 
 Art expresses the one, or the same by the different. 
 Thought seeks to know unity in unity ; poetry to 
 show it by variety ; that is, always by an object or 
 symbol. Plato keeps the two vases, one of aether 
 and one of pigment, at his side, and invariably uses 
 both. Things added to things, as statistics, civil 
 history, are inventories. Things used as language 
 are inexhaustibly attractive. Plato turns incessantly 
 the obverse and the reverse of the medal of Jove. 
 
 To take an example : The physical philosophers 
 had sketched each his theory of the world ; the 
 theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit ; theories 
 mechanical and chemical in their genius. Plato, a 
 master of mathematics, studious of all natural laws 
 and causes, feels these, as second causes, to be no 
 theories of the world, but bare inventories and lists. 
 To the study of nature he therefore prefixes the 
 dogma, " Let us declare the cause which led the 
 Supreme Ordainer to produce and compose the uni 
 verse. He was good ; and he who is good has no 
 kind of envy. Exempt from envy, he wislud that
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 49 
 
 all things should be as much as possible like himself. 
 Whosoever, taught by wise men, shall admit this as 
 the prime cause of the origin and foundation of the 
 world will be in the truth." "All things are for 
 the sake of the good, and it is the cause of every 
 thing beautiful." This dogma animates and imper 
 sonates his philosophy. 
 
 The synthesis which makes the character of his 
 mind appears in all his talents. Where there is 
 great compass of wit, we usually find excellencies 
 that combine easily in the living man, but in descrip 
 tion appear incompatible. The mind of Plato is not 
 to be exhibited by a Chinese catalogue, but is to be 
 apprehended by an original mind in the exercise of 
 its original power. In him the freest abandonment 
 is united with the precision of a geometer. His 
 daring imagination gives him the more solid grasp of 
 facts ; as the birds of highest flight have the strongest 
 alar bones. His patrician polish, his intrinsic ele 
 gance, edged by an irony so subtle that it stings and 
 paralyzes, adorn the soundest health and strength of 
 frame. According to the old sentence, " If Jove 
 should descend to the earth, he would speak in the 
 style of Plato." 
 
 With this palatial air, there is, for the direct aim of 
 several of his works, and running through the tenor 
 of them all, a certain earnestness, which mounts, 
 in the Republic and in the Phaedo, to piety. He 
 has been charged with feigning sickness at the time 
 of the death of Socrates. But the anecdotes that 
 have come down from the times attest his manly 
 interference before the people in his master s behalf,
 
 52 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 these accounts, and consider how I may exhibit my 
 soul before the judge in a healthy condition. Where 
 fore, disregarding the honors that most men value, 
 and looking to the truth, I shall endeavor in reality 
 to live as virtuously as I can; and when I die, to die 
 so. And I invite all other men, to the utmost of my 
 power; and you, too. I in turn invite to this contest, 
 which, I affirm, surpasses all contests here." 1 
 
 He is a great average man ; one who, to the best 
 thinking, adds a proportion and equality in his fac 
 ulties, so that men see in him their own dreams and 
 glimpses made available, and made to pass for what 
 they are. A great common-sense is his warrant and 
 qualification to be the world s interpreter. He has 
 reason, as all the philosophic and poetic class have ; 
 but he has, also, what they have not this strong 
 solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the appear 
 ances of the world, and build a bridge from the streets 
 of cities to the Altantis. He omits never this 
 graduation, but slopes his thought, however pictur 
 esque the precipice on one side, to an access from the 
 plain. He never writes in ecstasy, or catches us up 
 into poetic raptures. 
 
 Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could 
 prostrate himself on the earth, and cover his eyes, 
 whilst he adored that which cannot be numbered, or 
 gauged, or known, or named; that of which every 
 thing can be affirmed and denied: that "which is 
 entity and nonentity. He called it super-essential. 
 He even stood ready, as in the Parmenides, to 
 demonstrate that it was so that this Being ex-
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 53 
 
 cccded the limits of intellect. No man ever more 
 fully acknowledged the Ineffable. Having paid his 
 homage, as for the human race, to the Illimitable, he 
 then stood erect, and for the human race affirmed, 
 " And yet things are knowable ! " that is, the Asia 
 in his mind was first heartily honored the ocean 
 of love and power, before form, before will, before 
 knowledge, the Same, the Good, the One; and now, 
 refreshed and empowered by this worship, the instinct 
 of Europe, namely, culture, returns ; and he cries, 
 Yet things are knowable ! They are knowable, 
 because, being from one, things correspond. There 
 is a scale ; and the correspondence of heaven to earth, 
 of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our 
 guide. As there is a science of stars, called astron 
 omy ; a science of quantities, called mathematics ; a 
 science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a 
 science of sciences, I call it Dialectic, which is 
 the Intellect discriminating the false and the true. It 
 rests on the observation of identity and diversity ; 
 for to judge is to unite to an object the notion 
 which belongs to it. The sciences, even the best, 
 mathematics and astronomy, are like sportsmen, 
 who seize whatever prey offers, even without being 
 able to make any use of it. Dialectic must teach the 
 usj of them. "This is of that rank that no intel 
 lectual man will enter on any study for its own sake, 
 but only with a view to advance himself in that one 
 sole science which embraces all." 
 
 " The essence or peculiarity of man is to compre 
 hend a whole; or that which, in the diversity of 
 sensations, can be comprised under a rational unity."
 
 54 REPRESE1VTATIVE MEN. 
 
 "The soul which has never perceived the truth 
 cannot pass into the human form." I announce to 
 men the Intellect. I announce the good of being 
 interpenetrated by the mind that made nature ; this 
 benefit, namely, that it can understand nature, which 
 it made and maketh. Nature is good, but intellect 
 is better; as the law-giver is before the law-receiver. 
 I give you joy, O sons of men ! that truth is alto 
 gether wholesome ; that we have hope to search out 
 what might be the very self of everything. The 
 misery of man is to be balked of the sight of es 
 sence, and to be stuffed with conjectures ; but the 
 supreme good is reality ; the supreme beauty is 
 reality ; and all virtue and all felicity depend on this 
 science of the real: for courage is nothing else than 
 knowledge ; the fairest fortune that can befall man 
 is to be guided by his daemon to that which is truly 
 his own. This also is the essence of justice to 
 attend every one his own ; nay, the notion of virtue 
 is not to be arrived at, except through direct con 
 templation of the divine essence. Courage, then ! 
 for " the persuasion that we must search that which 
 we do not know will render us, beyond comparison, 
 better, braver, and more industrious than if we 
 thought it impossible to discover what we do not 
 know, and useless to search for it." He secures a 
 position not to be commanded, by his passion for 
 reality ; valuing philosophy only as it is the pleasure 
 of conversing with real being. 
 
 Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said. Cult- 
 tire. He saw the institutions of Sparta, and recog 
 nized more genially, one would say, than any since,
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 55 
 
 the hope of education. He delighted in every 
 accomplishment, in every graceful and useful and 
 truthful performance ; above all, in the splendors of 
 genius and intellectual achievement. "The whole 
 of life, O Socrates, said Glauco, is with the wise, 
 the measure of hearing such discourses as these. 1 
 What a price he sets on the feats of talent, on the 
 powers of Pericles, of Isocrates, of Parmenides ! 
 What price, above price, on the talents themselves ! 
 He called the several faculties gods, in his beautiful 
 personation. What value he gives to the art of 
 gymnastic in education ; what to geometry ; what to 
 music ; what to astronomy, whose appeasing and 
 medicinal power he celebrates ! In the Timaeus he 
 indicates the highest employment of the eyes. " By 
 us it is asserted that God invented and bestowed 
 sight on us for this purpose that, on surveying 
 the circles of intelligence in the heavens, we might 
 properly employ those of our own minds, which, 
 though disturbed when compared with the others 
 that are uniform, are still allied to their circulations; 
 and that, having thus learned, and being naturally 
 possessed of a correct reasoning faculty, we might, 
 by imitating the uniform revolutions of divinity, set 
 right our own wanderings and blunders. 1 And in 
 the Republic "By each of these disciplines a 
 certain organ of the soul is both purified and reani 
 mated, which is blinded and buried by studies of 
 another kind ; an organ better worth saving than ten 
 thousand eyes, since truth is perceived by this 
 alone." 
 
 He said, Culture ; but he first admitted its basis,
 
 56 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 and gave immeasurably the first place to advantages 
 of nature. His patrician tastes laid stress on the 
 distinctions of birth. In the doctrine of the organic 
 character and disposition is the origin of caste. 
 " Such as were fit to govern, into their composition 
 the informing Deity mingled gold ; into the military, 
 silver; iron and brass for husbandmen and artificers." 
 The East confirms itself, in all ages, in this faith. 
 The Koran is explicit on this point of caste. " Men 
 have their metal, as of gold and silver. Those of 
 you who were the worthy ones in the state of igno 
 rance will be the worthy ones in the state of faith, as 
 soon as you embrace it." Plato was not less firm : 
 "Of the five orders of things, only four can be 
 taught to the generality of men." In the Republic, 
 he insists on the temperaments of the youth, as first 
 of the first. 
 
 A happier example of the stress laid on nature is 
 in the dialogue with the young Theages, who wishes 
 to receive lessons from Socrates. Socrates declares 
 that, if some have grown wise by associating with 
 him, no thanks are due to him; but, simply, whilst 
 they were with him they grew wise, not because 
 of him ; he pretends not to know the way of it. " It 
 is adverse to many, nor can those be benefited by 
 associating with me, whom the Daemon opposes ; so 
 that it is not possible for me to live with these. 
 With many, however, he does not prevent me from 
 conversing, who yet are not at all benefited by as 
 sociating with me. Such, O Theages, is the asso 
 ciation with me ; for if it pleases the God, you will 
 make great and rapid proficiency : you will not, if
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 57 
 
 he does not please. Judge whether it is not safer to 
 be instructed by some one of those who have power 
 over the benefit which they impart to men than by 
 me, who benefit or not, just as it may happen." As 
 if he had said, " I have no system. I cannot be 
 answerable for you. You will be what you must. If 
 there is love between us, inconceivably delicious and 
 profitable will our intercourse be ; if not, your time 
 is lost, and you will only annoy me. I shall seem to 
 you stupid, and the reputation I have, false. Quite 
 above us, beyond the will of you or me, is this secret 
 affinity or repulsion laid. All my good is magnetic, 
 and I educate, not by lessons, but by going about 
 my business." 
 
 He said, Culture ; he said, Nature ; and he failed 
 not to add, "There is also the divine." There is 
 no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to 
 convert itself into a power, and organizes a huge in 
 strumentality of means. Plato, lover of limits, loved 
 the illimitable, saw the enlargement and nobility 
 which come from truth itself and good itself, and 
 attempted, as if on the part of the human intel 
 lect, once for all, to do it adequate homage 
 homage fit for the immense soul to receive, and 
 yet homage becoming the intellect to render. He 
 said, then, " Our faculties run out into infinity, and 
 return to us thence. We can define but a little 
 way ; but here is a fact which will not be skipped, 
 and which to shut our eyes upon is suicide. All 
 things are in a scale ; and, begin where we will, as 
 cend and ascend. All things are symbolical ; and 
 what we call results are beginnings."
 
 58 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 A key to the method and completeness of Plato is his 
 twice-bisected line. After he has illustrated the rela 
 tion between the absolute good and true and the forms 
 of the intelligible world, he says: " Let there be a 
 line cut in two unequal parts. Cut again each of 
 these two parts, one representing the visible, the 
 other the intelligible, world, and these two new 
 sections, representing the bright part and the dark 
 part of these worlds, you will have, for one of the 
 sections of the visible world, images, that is, 
 both shadows and reflections ; for the other section 
 the objects of these images that is, plants, ani 
 mals, and the works of art and nature. Then divide 
 the intelligible world in like manner; the one sec 
 tion will be of opinions and hypotheses, and the 
 other section, o. f truths." To these four sections 
 the four operations of the soul correspond conject 
 ure, faith, understanding, reason. As every pool 
 reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and 
 thing restores us an image and creature of the su 
 preme Good. The universe is perforated by a mill 
 ion channels for his activity. All things mount and 
 mount. 
 
 All his thought has this ascension ; in Phaedrus, 
 teaching that beauty is the most lovely of all things, 
 exciting hilarity, and shedding desire and confidence 
 through the universe, wherever it enters ; and it 
 enters, in some degree, into all things ; but that there 
 is another, which is as much more beautiful than 
 beauty, as beauty is than chaos ; namely, wisdom, 
 which our wonderful organ of sight cannot reach 
 unto, but which, could it be seen, would ravish us
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 59 
 
 with its perfect reality. He has the same regard 
 to it as the source of excellence in works of art. 
 When an artificer, in the fabrication of any work, 
 looks to that which always subsists according to the 
 same ; and, employing a model of this kind, ex 
 presses its idea and power in his work ; it must 
 follow that his production should be beautiful. But 
 when he beholds that which is born and dies, it will 
 be far from beautiful." 
 
 Thus ever : the Banquet is a teaching in the same 
 spirit, familiar now to all the poetry, and to all the 
 sermons, of the world, that the love of the sexes is 
 initial ; and symbolizes, at a distance, the passion 
 of the soul for that immense lake of beauty it exists 
 to seek. This faith in the Divinity is never out of 
 mind, and constitutes the limitation of all his dog 
 mas. Body cannot teach wisdom: God only. In 
 the same mind, he constantly affirms that virtue 
 cannot be taught ; that it is not a science, but an 
 inspiration ; that the greatest goods are produced 
 to us through mania, and are assigned to us by a 
 divine gift. 
 
 This leads me to that central figure which he has 
 established in his Academy, as the organ through 
 which every considered opinion shall be announced, 
 and whose biography he has likewise so labored 
 that the historic facts are lost in the light of 
 Plato s mind. Socrates and Plato are the double 
 star, which the most powerful instruments will not 
 entirely separate. Socrates, again, in his traits and 
 genius, is the best example of that synthesis which 
 constitutes Plato s extraordinary power. Socrates,
 
 60 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 a man of humble stem, but honest enough ; of the 
 commonest history ; of a personal homeliness so re 
 markable as to be a cause of wit in others the 
 rather that his broad good-nature and exquisite taste 
 for a joke invited the sally, which was sure to be 
 paid. The players personated him on the stage ; 
 the plotters copied his ugly face on their stone jugs. 
 He was a cool fellow, adding to his humor a perfect 
 temper, and a knowledge of his man, be he who he 
 might whom he talked with, which laid the com 
 panion open to certain defeat in any debate and in 
 debate he immoderately delighted. The young men 
 are prodigiously fond of him, and invite him to their 
 feasts, whither he goes for conversation. He can 
 drink, too; has the strongest head in Athens; and 
 after leaving the whole party under the table goes 
 away, as if nothing had happened, to begin new 
 dialogues with somebody that is sober. In short, 
 he was what our country-people call an old one. 
 
 He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, was 
 monstrously fond of Athens, hated trees, never will 
 ingly went beyond the walls, knew the old characters, 
 valued the bores and philistines, thought every 
 thing in Athens a little better than anything in any 
 other place. He was plain as a Quaker in habit and 
 speech, affected low phrases, and illustrations from 
 cocks and quails, soup-pans and sycamore-spoons, 
 grooms and farriers, and unnamable offices es 
 pecially if he talked with any superfine person. He 
 had a Franklin-like wisdom. Thus he showed one 
 who was afraid to go on foot to Olympia that it was
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 6 1 
 
 no more than his daily walk within doors, if contin 
 uously extended, would easily reach. 
 
 Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears, 
 an immense talker, the rumor ran that, on one 
 or two occasions, in the war with Boeotia, he had 
 shown a determination which had covered the re 
 treat of a troop ; and there was some story that, 
 under cover of folly, he had, in the city government, 
 when one day he chanced to hold a seat there, 
 evinced a courage in opposing singly the popular 
 voice, which had well-nigh ruined him. He is very 
 poor ; but then he is hardy as a soldier, and can 
 live on a few olives ; usually, in the strictest sense, 
 on bread and water, except when entertained by his 
 friends. His necessary expenses were exceedingly 
 small, and no one could live as he did. He wore no 
 under garment ; his upper garment was the same for 
 summer and winter; and he went barefooted; and 
 it is said that, to procure the pleasure, which he 
 loves, of talking at his ease all day with the most 
 elegant and cultivated young men, he will now and 
 then return to his shop, and carve statues, good or 
 bad, for sale. However that be, it is certain that he 
 had grown to delight in nothing else than this con 
 versation ; and that, under his hypocritical pretence 
 of knowing nothing, he attacks and brings down all 
 the fine speakers, all the fine philosophers, of Athens, 
 whether natives, or strangers from Asia Minor and the 
 islands. Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is 
 so honest, and really curious to know; a man who 
 was willingly confuted if he did not speak the truth, 
 and who willingly confuted others asserting what.
 
 62 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 was false ; and not less pleased when confuted than 
 when confuting ; for he thought not any evil hap 
 pened to men of such a magnitude as false opinion 
 respecting the just and unjust. A pitiless disputant, 
 who knows nothing, but the bounds of whose con 
 quering intelligence no man had ever reached ; whose 
 temper was imperturbable ; whose dreadful logic was 
 always leisurely and sportive ; so careless and igno 
 rant as to disarm the wariest, and draw them, in the 
 pleasantest manner, into horrible doubts and confu 
 sion. But he always knew the way out; knew it, 
 yet would not tell it. No escape ; he drives them to 
 terrible choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the 
 Hippiases and Gorgiases, with their grand reputa 
 tions, as a boy tosses his balls. The tyrannous real 
 ist ! Meno has discoursed a thousand times, at 
 length, on virtue, before many companies, and very 
 well, as it appeared to him ; but, at this moment, he 
 cannot even tell what it is this cramp-fish of a 
 Socrates has so bewitched him. 
 
 This hard-headed humorist, whose strange con 
 ceits, drollery, and bonhommie diverted the young 
 patricians, whilst the rumor of his sayings and quib 
 bles gets abroad every day, turns out, in the sequel, 
 to have a probity as invincible as his logic, and to 
 be either insane, or, at least, under cover of this 
 play, enthusiastic in his religion. When accused 
 before the judges of subverting the popular creed, he 
 affirms the immortality of the soul, the future reward 
 and punishment; and, refusing to recant, in a ca 
 price of the popular government, was condemned to 
 die, and sent to the prison. Socrates entered the
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER, 63 
 
 prison, and took away all ignominy from the place, 
 which could not be a prison whilst he was there. 
 Crito bribed the jailer ; but Socrates would not go 
 out by treachery. " Whatever inconvenience ensue, 
 nothing is to be preferred before justice. These 
 tilings I hear like pipes and drums, whose sound 
 makes me deaf to everything you say." The fame 
 of this prison, the fame of the discourses there, and 
 the drinking of the hemlock, are one of the most 
 precious passages in the history of the world. 
 
 The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the 
 droll and the martyr, the keen street and market 
 debater with the sweetest saint known to any history 
 at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of Plato, 
 so capacious of these contrasts ; and the figure of 
 Socrates, by a necessity, placed itself in the fore 
 ground of the scene, as the fittest dispenser of the 
 intellectual treasures he had to communicate. It 
 was a rare fortune that this ^sop of the mob and 
 this robed scholar should meet, to make each other 
 immortal in their mutual faculty. The strange syn 
 thesis in the character of Socrates capped the syn 
 thesis in the mind of Plato-. Moreover, by this 
 means, he was able, in the direct way, and without 
 envy, to avail himself of the wit and weight of 
 Socrates, to which unquestionably his own debt was 
 great ; and these derived again their principal advan 
 tage from the perfect art of Plato. 
 
 It remains to say that the defect of Plato in power 
 is only that which results inevitably from his quality. 
 He is intellectual in his aim ; and therefore, in ex 
 pression, literary. Mounting into heaven, diving
 
 64 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 into the pit, expounding the laws of the State, the 
 passion of love, the remorse of crime, the hope of 
 the parting soul, he is literary, and never other 
 wise. It is almost the sole deduction from the merit 
 of Plato that his writings have not what is, no 
 doubt, incident to this regnancy of intellect in his 
 work the vital authority which the screams of 
 prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and 
 Jews possess. There is an interval ; and to cohe 
 sion, contact is necessary. 
 
 I know not what can be said in reply to this criti 
 cism, but that we have come to a fact in the nature 
 of things : an oak is not an orange. The qualities 
 of sugar remain with sugar, and those of salt with 
 salt. 
 
 In the second place, he has not a system. The 
 dearest defenders and disciples are at fault. He at 
 tempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is 
 not complete or self-evident. One man thinks he 
 means this, and another that ; he has said one 
 thing in one place, and the reverse of it in another 
 place. He is charged with having failed to make 
 the transition from ideas to matter. Here is the 
 world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece 
 of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark 
 of haste, or botching, or second thought ; but the 
 theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches. 
 
 The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. 
 Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a known 
 and accurate expression for the world, and it should 
 be accurate. It shall be the world passed through 
 the mind of Plato nothing less. Every atom shall
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 65 
 
 have the Platonic tinge ; every atom, every relation 
 or quality you knew before, you shall know again, 
 and find here, but now ordered ; not nature, but art. 
 And you shall feel that Alexander indeed overran, 
 with men and horses, some countries of the planet ; 
 but countries, and things of which countries are 
 made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of 
 men, have passed through this man as bread into his 
 body, and become no longer bread, but body ; so all 
 this mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has 
 clapped copyright on the world. This is the ambi 
 tion of individualism. But the mouthful proves too 
 large. Boa constrictor has good will to eat it, but 
 he is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt, and, 
 biting, gets strangled ; the bitten world holds the 
 biter fast by his own teeth. There he perishes ; un- 
 conquered nature lives on, and forgets him. So it 
 fares with all: so must it fare with Plato. In view 
 of eternal nature, Plato turns out to be philosophical 
 exercitations. He argues on this side, and on that. 
 The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could 
 never tell what Platonism was ; indeed, admirable 
 texts can be quoted on both sides of every great 
 question from him. 
 
 These things we are forced to say, if we must con 
 sider the effort of Plato, or of any philosopher, to 
 dispose of Nature which will not be disposed of. 
 No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest 
 success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma 
 remains. But there is an injustice in assuming this 
 ambition for Plato. Let us not seem to treat with 
 flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion
 
 64 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 into the pit, expounding the laws of the State, the 
 passion of love, the remorse of crime, the hope of 
 the parting soul, he is literary, and never other 
 wise. It is almost the sole deduction from the merit 
 of Plato that his writings have not what is, no 
 doubt, incident to this regnancy of intellect in his 
 work the vital authority which the screams of 
 prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and 
 Jews possess. There is an interval ; and to cohe 
 sion, contact is necessary. 
 
 I know not what can be said in reply to this criti 
 cism, but that we have come to a fact in the nature 
 of things : an oak is not an orange. The qualities 
 of sugar remain with sugar, and those of salt with 
 salt. 
 
 In the second place, he has not a system. The 
 dearest defenders and disciples are at fault. He at 
 tempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is 
 not complete or self-evident. One man thinks he 
 means this, and another that ; he has said one 
 thing in one place, and the reverse of it in another 
 place. He is charged with having failed to make 
 the transition from ideas to matter. Here is the 
 world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece 
 of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark 
 of haste, or botching, or second thought ; but the 
 theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches. 
 
 The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. 
 Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a known 
 and accurate expression for the world, and it should 
 be accurate. It shall be the world passed through 
 the mind of Plato nothing less. Every atom shall
 
 PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 65 
 
 have the Platonic tinge ; every atom, every relation 
 or quality you knew before, you shall know again, 
 and find here, but now ordered ; not nature, but art. 
 And you shall feel that Alexander indeed overran, 
 with men and horses, some countries of the planet ; 
 but countries, and things of which countries are 
 made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of 
 men, have passed through this man as bread into his 
 body, and become no longer bread, but body ; so all 
 this mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has 
 clapped copyright on the world. This is the ambi 
 tion of individualism. But the mouthful proves too 
 large. Boa constrictor has good will to eat it, but 
 he is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt, and, 
 biting, gets strangled ; the bitten world holds the 
 biter fast by his own teeth. There he perishes ; un- 
 conquered nature lives on, and forgets him. So it 
 fares with all: so must it fare with Plato. In view 
 of eternal nature, Plato turns out to be philosophical 
 exercitations. He argues on this side, and on that. 
 The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could 
 never tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable 
 texts can be quoted on both sides of every great 
 question from him. 
 
 These things we are forced to say, if we must con 
 sider the effort of Plato, or of any philosopher, to 
 dispose of Nature which will not be disposed of. 
 No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest 
 success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma 
 remains. But there is an injustice in assuming this 
 ambition for Plato. Let us not seem to treat with 
 flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion
 
 66 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 to their intellect, have admitted his transcendent 
 claims. The way to know him is to compare him, 
 not with nature, but with other men. How many 
 ages have gone by, and he remains unapproached ! 
 A chief structure of human wit, like Karnac, or the 
 mediaeval cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains, it re 
 quires all the breadth of human faculty to know it. I 
 think it is trueliest seen when seen with the most 
 respect. His sense deepens, his merits multiply, 
 with study. When we say, Here is a fine collection 
 of fables ; or when we praise the style ; or the com 
 mon sense ; or arithmetic ; we speak as boys, and 
 much of our impatient criticism of the dialectic, I 
 suspect, is no better. The criticism is like our im 
 patience of miles when we are in a hurry ; but it is 
 still best that a mile should have seventeen hundred 
 and sixty yards. The great-eyed Plato proportioned 
 the lights and shades after the genius of our life.
 
 PLATO: NEW READINGS. 67 
 
 PLATO: NEW READINGS. 
 
 THE publication, in Mr. Bonn s " Serial Library," 
 of the excellent translations of Plato, which we es 
 teem one of the chief benefits the cheap press has 
 yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a few 
 more notes of the elevation and bearings of this 
 fixed star; or to add a bulletin, like the journals, of 
 Plato at the latest dates. 
 
 Modern science, by the extent of its generalization, 
 has learned to indemnify the student of man for the 
 defects of individuals by tracing growth and ascent in 
 races, and, by the simple expedient of lighting up the 
 vast background, generates a feeling of complacency 
 and hope. The human being has the saurian and 
 the plant in his rear. His arts and sciences, the 
 easy issue of his brain, look glorious when prospec- 
 tively beheld from the distant brain of ox, crocodile, 
 and fish. It seems as if nature, in regarding the 
 geologic night behind her, when, in five or six 
 millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as 
 Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise 
 discontented with the result. These samples attested 
 the virtue of the tree. These were a clear ameliora 
 tion of trilobite and saurus, and a good basis for 
 further proceeding. With this artist time and space 
 are cheap, and she is insensible to what you say of 
 tedious preparation. She waited tranquilly the How-
 
 68 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 ing periods of paleontology, for the hour to be struck 
 when man should arrive. Then periods must pass 
 before the motion of the eartli can be suspected ; 
 then before the map of the instincts and the cultivable 
 powers can be drawn. But as of races, so the suc 
 cession of individual men is fatal and beautiful, an 1 
 Plato has the fortune, in the history of mankind, tu 
 mark an epoch. 
 
 Plato s fame does not stand on a syllogism, or on 
 any masterpieces of the Socratic reasoning, or on any 
 thesis ; as, for example, the immortality of the soul. 
 He is more than an expert, or a schoolman, or a 
 geometer, or the prophet of a peculiar message. lie 
 represents the privilege of the intellect, the power, 
 namely, of carrying up every fact to successive plat 
 forms, and so disclosing in every fact a germ of ex 
 pansion. These expansions are in the essence of 
 thought. The naturalist would never help us to them 
 by any discoveries of the extent of the universe, but 
 is as poor when cataloguing the resolved nebula of 
 Orion as when measuring the angles of an acre. I5ut 
 the Republic of Plato, by these expansions, may be 
 said to require, and so to anticipate, the astronomy 
 of Laplace. The expansions are organic. The mind 
 does not create what it perceives, any more than the 
 eye creates the rose. In ascribing to Plato the merit 
 of announcing them, we only say, Here was a more 
 complete man, who could apply to nature the whole 
 scale of the senses, the understanding, and the reason. 
 These expansions or extensions consist in continuing 
 the spiritual sight where the horizon falls on our 
 natural vision, and by this second sight discovering
 
 PLATO: NEW READINGS. 69 
 
 the long lines of law which shoot in every direction. 
 Everywhere he stands on a path which has no end, 
 but runs continuously round the universe. There 
 fore, every word becomes an exponent of nature. 
 Whatever he looks upon discloses a second sense and 
 ulterior senses. His perception of the generation of 
 contraries, of death out of life and life out of death, 
 that law by which, in nature, decomposition is 
 recomposition, and putrefaction and cholera are only 
 signals of a new creation ; his discernment of the 
 little in the large and the large in the small ; study 
 ing the State in the citizen and the citizen in the 
 State ; and leaving it doubtful whether he exhibited 
 the Republic as an allegory on the education of the 
 private soul ; his beautiful definitions of ideas, of 
 time, of form, of figure, of the line, sometimes hypo- 
 thetically given, as his defining of virtue, courage, 
 justice, temperance ; his love of the apologue, and 
 his apologues themselves ; the cave of Trophonius ; 
 the ring of Gyges ; the charioteer and two horses ; 
 the golden, silver, brass, and iron temperaments ; 
 Theuth and Thamus ; and the visions of Hades and 
 the Fates fables which have imprinted themselves 
 in the human memory like the signs of the zodiac ; 
 his soliform eye and his boniform soul ; his doctrine 
 of assimilation ; his doctrine of reminiscence ; his 
 clear vision of the laws of return, or reaction, which 
 secure instant justice throughout the universe, in 
 stanced everywhere, but specially in the doctrine, 
 1 What comes from God to us returns from us to 
 God," and in Socrates belief that the laws below are 
 sisters of the laws above.
 
 70 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 More striking examples are his moral conclusions. 
 Plato affirms the coincidence of science and virtue ; 
 for vice can never know itself and virtue ; but virtue 
 knows both itself and vice. The eye attested that 
 justice was best as long as it was profitable ; Plato 
 affirms that it is profitable throughout ; that the profit 
 is intrinsic, though the just conceal his justice from 
 gods and men ; that it is better to suffer injustice 
 than to do it ; that the sinner ought to covet punish 
 ment ; that the lie was more hurtful than homicide ; 
 and that ignorance, or the involuntary lie, was more 
 calamitous than involuntary homicide ; that the soul 
 is unwillingly deprived of true opinions, and that no 
 man sins willingly ; that the order or proceeding of 
 nature was from the mind to the body ; and, though 
 a sound body cannot restore an unsound mind, yet 
 a good soul can, by its virtue, render the body the 
 best possible. The intelligent have a right over the 
 ignorant, namely, the right of instructing them. 
 The right punishment of one out of tune is to make 
 him play in tune ; the fine which the good, refusing 
 to govern, ought to pay, is, to be governed by a 
 worse man ; that his guards shall not handle gold 
 and silver, but shall be instructed that there is gold 
 and silver in their souls, which will make men will 
 ing to give them everything which they need. 
 
 This second sight explains the stress laid on geom 
 etry. He saw that the globe of earth was not more 
 lawful and precise than was the supersensible ; that 
 a celestial geometry was in place there, as a logic of 
 lines and angles here below ; that the world was 
 throughout mathematical ; the proportions are con-
 
 PLATO: NEW READINGS. 7 1 
 
 stant of oxygen, azote, and lime ; there is just so 
 much water, and slate, and magnesia ; not less are 
 the proportions constant of the moral elements. 
 
 This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and falsehood, 
 delighted in revealing the real at the base of the acci 
 dental ; in discovering connection, continuity, and 
 representation everywhere ; hating insulation ; and 
 appears like the god of wealth among the cabins of 
 vagabonds, opening power and capability in every 
 thing he touches. Ethical science was new and va 
 cant when Plato could write thus: "Of all whose 
 arguments are left to the men of the present time, no 
 one has ever yet condemned injustice or praised 
 justice, otherwise than as respects the repute, honors, 
 and emoluments arising therefrom ; while, as respects 
 either of them in itself, and subsisting by its own 
 power in the soul of the possessor, and concealed 
 both from gods and men, no one has yet sufficiently 
 investigated, either in poetry or prose writings, 
 how, namely, that the one is the greatest of all the 
 evils that the soul has within it, and justice the 
 greatest good." 
 
 His definition of ideas, as what is simple, per- 
 Tianent, uniform, and self-existent, forever discrimi 
 nating them from the notions of the understanding, 
 marks an era in the world. He was born to behold 
 the self-evolving power of spirit, endless generator of 
 new ends ; a power which is the key at once to the 
 centrality and the evanescence of things. Plato is so 
 centred that he can well spare all his dogmas. Thus 
 the fact of knowledge and ideas reveals to him the 
 fact of eternity ; and the doctrine of reminiscence he
 
 72 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 offers as the most probable particular explication. 
 Call that fanciful it matters not : the connection 
 between our knowledge and the abyss of being is 
 still real, and the explication must be not less 
 magnificent. 
 
 He has indicated every eminent point in specula 
 tion. He wrote on the scale of the mind itself, so 
 that all things have symmetry in his tablet. He put 
 in all the past without weariness, and descended 
 into detail with a courage like that he witnessed in 
 nature. One would say that his forerunners had 
 mapped out each a farm, or a district, or an island, 
 in intellectual geography, but that Plato first drew 
 the sphere. He domesticates the soul in nature : 
 man is the microcosm. All the circles of the visible 
 heaven represent as many circles in the rational soul. 
 There is no lawless particle, and there is nothing 
 casual in the action of the human mind. The names 
 of things, too, are fatal, following the nature of 
 things. All the gods of the Pantheon are, by their 
 names, significant of a profound sense. The gods 
 are the ideas. Pan is speech, or manifestation ; 
 Saturn, the contemplative ; Jove, the regal soul ; and 
 Mars, passion. Venus is proportion ; Calliope, the 
 soul of the world ; Aglaia, intellectual illustration. 
 
 These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had appeared 
 often to pious and to poetic souls ; but this well-bred, 
 all-knowing Greek geometer comes with command, 
 gathers them all up into rank and gradation, the 
 Euclid of holiness, and marries the two parts of 
 nature. Before all men, he saw the intellectual
 
 PLA TO : NE W READINGS. 73 
 
 values of the moral sentiment. He describes his own 
 ideal when he paints in Timasus a god leading things 
 from disorder into order. He kindled a fire so truly 
 in the centre that we see the sphere illuminated, 
 and can distinguish poles, equator, and lines of lati 
 tude, every arc and node ; a theory so averaged, so 
 modulated, that you would say the winds of ages 
 had swept through this rhythmic structure, and not 
 that it was the brief extempore blotting of one short 
 lived scribe. Hence it has happened that a very 
 well-marked class of souls, namely, those who de 
 light in giving a spiritual, that is, an ethico-intel- 
 lectual expression to every truth, by exhibiting an 
 ulterior end which is yet legitimate to it, are said to 
 Platonize. Thus, Michel Angelo is a Platonist in 
 his sonnets. Shakspeare is a Platonist when he 
 writes, "Nature is made. better by no mean, but 
 nature makes that mean, 1 or, 
 
 " He that can endure 
 To follow with allegiance a fallen lord 
 Docs conquer him that did his master conquer, 
 And earns a place in the story." 
 
 Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and tis the magnitude 
 only of Shakspeare s proper genius that hinders him 
 from being classed as the most eminent of this 
 school. Swedenborg, throughout his prose poem of 
 " Conjugal Love," is a Platonist. 
 
 His subtlety commended him to men of thought. 
 The secret of his popular success is the moral aim 
 which endeared him to mankind. "Intellect," he 
 said, "is king of heaven and of earth;" but in
 
 74 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 Plato, intellect is always moral. His writings have 
 also the sempiternal youth of poetry. For their 
 arguments, most of them, might have been couched 
 in sonnets ; and poetry has never soared higher than 
 in the Timasus and the Phzedrus. As the poet, too, 
 he is only contemplative. He did not, like Pythag 
 oras, break himself with an institution. All his 
 painting in the Republic must be esteemed mythical, 
 with intent to bring out, sometimes in violent colors, 
 his thought. You cannot institute, without peril of 
 charlatanism. 
 
 It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege for 
 the best (which, to make emphatic, he expressed by 
 community of women), as the premium which he 
 would set on grandeur. There shall be exempts of 
 two kinds : first, those who by demerit have put 
 themselves below protection outlaws ; and, sec 
 ondly, those who by eminence of nature and desert 
 are out of the reach of your rewards : let such be free 
 of the city, and above the law. We confide them to 
 themselves : let them do with us as they will. Let 
 none presume to measure the irregularities of Michel 
 Angelo and Socrates by village scales. 
 
 In his eighth book of the Republic he throws a 
 little mathematical dust in our eyes. I am sorry to 
 see him, after such noble superiorities, permitting 
 the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence a little 
 with the baser sort, as people allow themselves with 
 their dogs and cats.
 
 SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC 
 
 (75)
 
 SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 77 
 
 III. 
 
 SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 
 
 AMONG eminent persons, those who are most dear 
 to men are not of the class which the economist 
 calls producers : they have nothing in their hands ; 
 they have not cultivated corn nor made bread ; they 
 have not led out a colony nor invented a loom. A 
 higher class, in the estimation and love of this city- 
 building, market-going race of mankind, are the 
 poets, who, from the intellectual kingdom, feed the 
 thought and imagination with ideas and pictures 
 which raise men out of the world of corn and money, 
 and console them for the short-comings of the day 
 and the meannesses of labor and traffic. Then, also, 
 the philosopher has his value, who flatters the intel 
 lect of this laborer, by engaging him with subtleties 
 which instruct him in new faculties. Others may 
 build cities ; he is to understand them, and keep 
 them in awe. But there is a class who lead us into 
 another region the world of morals, or of will. 
 What is singular about this region of thought is its 
 claim. Wherever the sentiment of right comes in, 
 it takes precedence of everything else. For other 
 things, I make poetry of them ; but the moral senti 
 ment makes poetry of me.
 
 78 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 I have sometimes thought that he would render 
 the greatest service to modern criticism who shall 
 draw the line of relation that subsists between Sh.ik- 
 speare and Swedenborg. The human mind stands 
 ever in perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding 
 sanctity, impatient equally of each without the other. 
 The reconciler has not yet appeared. If we tire of 
 the saints, Shakspeare is our city of refuge. Yet the 
 instincts presently teach that the problem of essence 
 must take precedence of all others the questions 
 of Whence? What? and Whither? and the solution 
 of these must be in a life, and not in a book. A 
 drama or poem is a proximate or oblique reply ; but 
 Moses, Menu, Jesus, work directly on this problem. 
 The atmosphere of moral sentiment is a region of 
 grandeur which reduces all material magnificence to 
 toys, yet opens to every wretch that has reason the 
 doors of the universe. Almost with a fierce haste it 
 lays its empire on the man. In the language of the 
 Koran, "God said, The heaven and the earth, and 
 all that is between them, think ye that we created 
 them in jest, and that ye shall not return to us? 
 It is the kingdom of the will, and by inspiring the 
 will, which is the seat of personality, seems to con 
 vert the universe into a person : 
 
 "The realms of being to no other bow. 
 Not only all are thine, but all are Thou." 
 
 All men are commanded by the saint. The Koran 
 makes a distinct class of those who are by nature 
 good, and whose goodness has an influence on others, 
 and pronounces this class to be the aim of creation ;
 
 SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 79 
 
 the other classes are admitted to the feast of being, 
 only as following in the train of this. And the 
 Persian poet exclaims to a soul of this kind : 
 
 "Go boldly forth, and feast on being s banquet; 
 Thou art the called the rest admitted with thee." 
 
 The privilege of this caste is an access to the 
 secrets and structure of nature, by some higher 
 method than by experience. In common parlance, 
 what one man is said to learn by experience, a man 
 of extraordinary sagacity is said, without experience, 
 to divine. The Arabians say that Abul Khain, the 
 mystic, and Abu Ali Seena, the philosopher, con 
 ferred together ; and on parting the philosopher 
 said, "All that he sees, I know; " and the mystic 
 said, " All that he knows, I see." If one should ask 
 the reason of this intuition, the solution would lead 
 us into that property which Plato denoted as Remi 
 niscence, and which is implied by the Bramins in the 
 tenet of Transmigration. The soul having baen often 
 born, or, as the Hindoos say, "travelling the path 
 of existence through thousands of births," having 
 beheld the things which are here, those which are in 
 heaven, and those which are beneath, there is nothing 
 of which she has not gained the knowledge ; no 
 wonder that she is able to recollect, in regard to any 
 one thing, what formerly she knew. "For all 
 things in nature being linked and related, and the 
 soul having heretofore known all, nothing hinders 
 but that any man who has recalled to mind, or, 
 according to the common phrase, has learned, one 
 thing only should of himself recover all his ancient
 
 So REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he have 
 but courage, and faint not in the midst of his re 
 searches. For inquiry and learning is reminiscence 
 all." How much more, if lie that inquires be a holy 
 and godlike soul ! For, by being assimilated to the 
 original soul, by whom, and after whom, all things 
 subsist, the soul of man does then easily flow into all 
 things, and all tilings flow into it ; they mix ; and he is 
 present and sympathetic with their structure and law. 
 This path is difficult, secret, and beset with terror. 
 The ancients call it ecstasy or absence a getting 
 out of their bodies to think. All religious history 
 contains traces of the trance of saints a beatitude, 
 but without any sign of joy, earnest, solitary, even 
 sad; "the flight," Plotinus called it, " of the alone 
 to the alone;" Mt^ff/c, the closing of the eyes, 
 whence our word, Mystic. The trances of Socrates, 
 Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox. Pascal, 
 Guion, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But 
 what as readily comes to mind is the accompani 
 ment of disease. This beatitude comes in terror, 
 and with shocks to the mind of the receiver. " It 
 o erinforms the tenement of clay," and drives the 
 man mad ; or gives a certain violent bias, which 
 taints his judgment. In the chief examples of re 
 ligious illumination, somewhat morbid has mingled, 
 in spite of the unquestionable increase of mental 
 power. Must the highest good drag after it a quality 
 which neutralizes and discredits it? 
 
 " Indeed, it takes 
 
 From our achievements, when performed at height, 
 The pith and marrow of our attribute."
 
 SWEDEXBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. Si 
 
 Shall we say that the economical mother disburses 
 so much earth and so much fire, by weight and metre, 
 to make a man, and will not add a pennyweight, 
 though a nation is perishing for a leader? There 
 fore, the men of God purchased their science by folly 
 or pain. If you will have pure carbon, carbuncle, or 
 diamond to make the brain transparent, the trunk 
 and organs shall be so much the grosser: instead of 
 porcelain, they are potter s earth, clay, or mud. 
 
 In modern times, no such remarkable example of 
 this introverted mind has occurred as in Emanuel 
 Swedenborg, born in Stockholm in 1688. This 
 man, who appeared to his contemporaries a visionary 
 and elixir of moonbeams, no doubt led the most real 
 life of any man then in the world ; and now, when 
 the royal and ducal Frederics, Christians, and Bruns- 
 wicks of that day have slid into oblivion, he begins 
 to spread himself into the minds of thousands. As 
 happens in great men, he seemed, by the variety and 
 amount of his powers, to be a composition of several 
 persons like the giant fruits which are matured in 
 gardens by the union of four or five single blossoms. 
 His frame is on a larger scale, and possesses the ad 
 vantages of size. As it is easier to see the reflection 
 of the great sphere in large globes, though defaced 
 by some crack or blemish, than in drops of water, so 
 men of large calibre, though with some eccentricity 
 or madness, like Pascal or Newton, help us more 
 than balanced mediocre minds. 
 
 His youth and training could not fail to be extraor 
 dinary. Such a boy could not whistle or dance, but 
 goes grubbing into mines and mountains, prying
 
 S3 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 into chemistry and optics, physiology, mathematics, 
 and astronomy, to find images fit for the measure of 
 his versatile and capacious brain. He was a scholar 
 from a child, and was educated at Upsala. At the 
 age of twenty-eight he was made Assessor of the 
 Hoard of Mines, by Charles XII. In 1716 he k-ft 
 home for four years, and visited the universities of 
 England, Holland, France, and (iermany. He per 
 formed a notable feat of engineering in 1718, at the 
 siege of Frederikshald, by hauling two galleys, five 
 boats, and a sloop some fourteen English miles 
 overland, for the royal service. In 1721 he journeyed 
 over Europe, to examine mines and smelting-works. 
 He published in 1716 his " Doxlalus Hyperboreus," 
 and from this time, for the next thirty years, was 
 employed in the composition and publication of his 
 scientific works. With the like force, he threw him 
 self into theology. In 1743, when he was fifty-four 
 years old, what is called his illumination began. All 
 his metallurgy and transportation of ships overland 
 was absorbed into this ecstasy. He ceased to pub 
 lish any more scientific books, withdrew from his 
 practical labors, and devoted himself to the \\riting 
 and publication of his voluminous theological works, 
 which were printed at his own expense, or at that of 
 the Duke of Brunswick, or other prince, at Dresden, 
 Leipsic, London, or Amsterdam. Later, he resigned 
 his office of Assessor; the salary attached to this 
 office continued to be paid to him during his life. 
 His duties had brought him into intimate acquaintance 
 with King Charles XII., by whom he was much con 
 sulted and honored. The like favor was continued
 
 SWEDENBORG ; OK, THE MYSTIC. 83 
 
 to him by his successor. At the Diet of 1751, 
 Count Hopken says the most solid memorials on 
 finance were from his pen. In Sweden, he appears to 
 have attracted a marked regard. His rare science 
 and practical skill, and the added fame of second 
 sight and extraordinary religious knowledge and gifts, 
 drew to him queens, nobles, clergy, ship-masters, and 
 people about the ports through which he was wont to 
 pass in his many voyages. The clergy interfered a 
 little with the importation and publication of his re 
 ligious works ; but he seems to have kept the 
 friendship of men in power. He was never married. 
 He had great modesty and gentleness of bearing. 
 His habits were simple ; he lived on bread, milk, and 
 vegetables ; he lived in a house situated in a large 
 garden ; he went several times to England, where 
 he does not seem to have attracted any attention 
 whatever from the learned or the eminent ; and died 
 at London, March 29, 1772, of apoplexy, in his 
 eighty-fifth year. He is described, when in London, 
 as a man of a quiet, clerical habit, not averse to tea 
 and coffee, and kind to children. He wore a sword 
 when in full velvet dress, and whenever he walked 
 out carried a gold-headed cane. There is a common 
 portrait of him in antique coat and wig, but the face 
 has a wandering or vacant air. 
 
 The genius which was to penetrate the science of 
 the age with a far more subtle science, to pass the 
 bounds of space and time, venture into the dim 
 spirit-realm and attempt to establish a new religion 
 in the world, began its lessons in quarries and 
 forges, in the smelting-pot and crucible, in ship-
 
 S.}. REPRESENTATIVE ME.V. 
 
 yards and dissecting-rooms. No one man is perhaps 
 able to judge of the merits of his works on so many 
 subjects. One is glad to learn that his books on 
 mines and metals are held in the highest esteem by 
 those who understand these matters. It seems that 
 he anticipated much science in the nineteenth cen 
 tury ; anticipated, in astronomy, the discovery of the 
 seventh planet but, unhappily, not also of the 
 eighth ; anticipated the views of modern astronomy 
 in regard to the generation of earths by the sun ; in 
 magnetism, some important experiments and conclu 
 sions of later students; in chemistry, the atomic 
 theory ; in anatomy, the discoveries of Schlichting, 
 Monro, and Wilson ; and first demonstrated the 
 office of the lungs. His excellent English editor 
 magnanimously lays no stress on his discoveries, 
 since he was too great to care to be original ; and 
 we are to judge by what he can spare of what 
 remains. 
 
 A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times, 
 uncomprehended by them, and requires a long focal 
 distance to be seen ; suggests, as Aristotle, Bacon, 
 Selden, Humboldt, that a certain vastness of learn 
 ing, or quasi omnipresence of the human soul in 
 nature, is possible. His superb speculation, as from 
 a tower, over nature and arts, without ever losing 
 sight of the texture and sequence of things, almost 
 realizes his own picture, in the " Principia," of the 
 original integrity of man. Over and above the 
 merit of his particular discoveries is the capital merit 
 of his self-equality. A drop of water has the proper 
 ties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a storm. There is
 
 SIVEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 85 
 
 beauty of a concert, as well as of a flute ; strength of a 
 host, as well as of a hero ; and in Swedenborg those 
 who are best acquainted with modern books will most 
 admire the merit of mass. One of the missouriums 
 and mastodons of literature, he is not to be meas 
 ured by whole colleges of ordinary scholars. His 
 stalwart presence would flutter the gowns of a uni 
 versity. Our books are false by being fragmentary ; 
 their sentences are bon-mots, and not parts of natural 
 discourse ; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure 
 in nature ; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their 
 petulance or aversion from the order of nature 
 being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in har 
 mony with nature, and purposely framed to excite sur 
 prise, as jugglers do by concealing their means. But 
 Swedenborg is systematic, and respective of the world 
 in every sentence ; all the means are orderly given ; his 
 faculties work with astronomic punctuality, and this 
 admirable writing is pure from all pertness or egotism. 
 Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of 
 great ideas. Tis hard to say what was his own ; 
 yet his life was digrfified by noblest pictures of the 
 universe. The robust Aristotelian method, with its 
 breadth and adecjuateness, shaming our sterile and 
 linear logic by its genial radiation, conversant with 
 series and degree, with effects and ends, skilful to 
 discriminate power from form, essence from accident, 
 and opening by its terminology and definition high 
 roads into nature, had trained a race of athletic 
 philosophers. Harvey had shown the circulation of 
 the blood ; Gilbert had shown that the earth was a 
 magnet ; Descartes, taught by Gilbert s magnet,
 
 86 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 with its vortex, spiral, and polarity, had filled Europe 
 with the leading thought of vortical motion, as the 
 secret of nature. Newton, in the year in which 
 Sweclenborg was born, published the " Principia,* 
 and established the universal gravity. Malpighi, fol 
 lowing the high doctrines of Hippocrates, Leucippus, 
 and Lucretius, had given emphasis to the dogma that 
 nature works in leasts tola in minimis exist it 
 natural Unrivalled dissectors, Swammerdam, 
 Leuwenhoek, Winslow, Eusta chius, Heister, Vesalius, 
 Bocrhaave, had left nothing for scalpel or microscope 
 to reveal in human or comparative anatomy; Lin 
 naeus, his contemporary, was affirming, in his beauti 
 ful science, " Nature is always like herself; " and, 
 lastly, the nobility of method, the largest application 
 of principles, had been exhibited by Leibnitz and 
 Christian Wolff, in cosmology ; whilst Locke and 
 Grotius had drawn the moral argument. What was 
 left for a genius of the largest calibre, but to go over 
 their ground, and verify and unite? It is easy to 
 see, in these minds, the origin of Swedenborg s stud 
 ies, and the suggestion of his problems. He had a 
 capacity to entertain and vivify these volumes of 
 thought. Yet the proximity of these geniuses, one 
 or other of whom had introduced all his leading 
 ideas, makes Swedenborg another example of the 
 difficulty, even in a highly fertile genius, of proving 
 originality, the first birth and annunciation of one of 
 the laws of nature. 
 
 He named his favorite views, the doctrine of Forms, 
 the doctrine of Series and Degrees, the doctrines of 
 Influx, the doctrine of Correspondence. His state-
 
 SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 87 
 
 inent of these doctrines deserves to be studied in his 
 books. Not every man can read them, but they will 
 reward him who can. His theologic works are valu 
 able to illustrate these. His writings would be a 
 sufficient library to a lonely and athletic student ; 
 and the " Economy of the Animal Kingdom" is one 
 of those books which, by the sustained dignity of 
 thinking, is an honor to the human race. He had 
 studied spars and metals to some purpose. His va 
 ried and solid knowledge makes his style lustrous 
 with points and shooting spicula of thought, and re 
 sembling one of those winter mornings when the air 
 sparkles with crystals. The grandeur of the topics 
 makes the grandeur of the style. He was apt for 
 cosmology, because of that native perception of iden 
 tity which made mere size of no account to him. 
 In the atom of magnetic iron he saw the quality 
 which would generate the spiral motion of sun and 
 planet. 
 
 The thoughts in which he lived were the univer 
 sality of each law in nature ; the Platonic doctrine of 
 the scale or degrees ; the version or conversion of 
 each into other, and so the correspondence of all the 
 parts ; the fine secret that little explains large, and 
 large, little ; the centrality of man in nature, and the 
 connection that subsists throughout all things : he 
 saw that the human body was strictly universal, or 
 an instrument through which the soul feeds and is 
 fed by the whole of matter ; so that he held, in exact 
 antagonism to the skeptics, that " The wiser a man 
 is, the more will he be a worshipper of the Deity." 
 In short, he was a believer in the Identity-philoso-
 
 88 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 phy, which he held not idly, as the dreamers of Ber 
 lin or Boston, but which he experimented with and 
 established through years of labor, with the heart 
 and strength of the rudest Viking that his rough 
 Sweden ever sent to battle. 
 
 This theory dates from the oldest philosophers, and 
 derives perhaps its best illustration from the newest. 1 1 
 is this : that nature iterates her means perpetually on 
 successive planes. In the old aphorism, nature is 
 always self -similar. In the plant, the eye or germi- 
 native point opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, with 
 a power of transforming the leaf into radicle, stamen, 
 pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed. The whole art 
 of the plant is still to repeat leaf on leaf without end, 
 the more or less of heat, light, moisture, and food 
 determining the form it shall assume. In the ani 
 mal, nature makes a vertebra, or a spine of verte 
 brae, and helps herself still by a new spine, with 
 a limited power of modifying its form, spine 
 on spine, to the end of the world. A poetic anato 
 mist, in our own day, teaches that a snake, being 
 a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line, 
 constitute a right angle; and between the lines 
 of this mystical quadrant all animated beings 
 find their place; and he assumes the hair-worm, 
 the span-worm, or the snake as the type or predic 
 tion of the spine. Manifestly, at the end of the 
 spine nature puts out smaller spines, as arms ; 
 at the end of the arms, new spines, as hands ; 
 at the other end she repeats the process, as 
 legs and feet. At the top of the column she puts 
 out another spine, which doubles or loops itself
 
 SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 89 
 
 over, as a span-worm, into a ball, and forms the 
 skull, with extremities again ; the hands being now 
 the upper jaw, the feet the lower jaw, the fingers and 
 toes being represented this time by upper and lower 
 teeth. This new spine is destined to high uses. It 
 is a new man on the shoulders of the last. It can 
 almost shed its trunk, and manage to live alone ac 
 cording to the Platonic idea in the Timaeus. Within 
 it, on a higher plane, all that was done in the 
 trunk repeats itself. Nature recites her lesson once 
 more in a higher mood. The mind is a finer body, 
 and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, 
 absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and 
 ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process 
 of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, compar 
 ing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here 
 again is the mystery of generation repeated. In the 
 brain are male and female faculties ; here is marriage, 
 here is fruit. And there is no limit to this ascending 
 scale, but series on series. Everything at the end 
 of one use is taken up into the next, each series punc 
 tually repeating every organ and process of the 
 last. We are adapted to infinity. We are hard 
 to please, and love nothing which ends ; and in 
 nature is no end ; but everything, at the end of 
 one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of 
 these things climbs into daemonic and celestial na 
 tures. Creative force, like a musical composer, goes 
 on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, 
 now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand 
 times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with 
 the chant.
 
 90 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is good, 
 but grander when we find chemistry only an ex 
 tension of the law of masses into particles, and that 
 the atomic theory shows the action of chemistry to 
 be mechanical also. Metaphysics shows us a sort ol 
 gravitation, operative also in the mental phenomena : 
 and the terrible tabulation of the French statists brings 
 every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also 
 to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twenty thou 
 sand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes or marries 
 his grandmother, then in every twenty thousand, or 
 thirty thousand, is found one man who eats slices 
 or marries his grandmother. What we call gravita 
 tion, and fancy ultimate, is one fork of a mightier 
 stream, for which we have yet no name. Astronomy 
 is excellent; but it must come up into life to have its 
 full value, and not remain there in globes and spaces. 
 The globule of blood gyrates around its own axis in 
 the human veins, as the planet in the sky; and the 
 circles of intellect relate to those of the heavens. 
 Each law of nature has the like universality; eating, 
 sleep or hybernation, rotation, generation, metamor 
 phosis, vortical motion, which is seen in eggs as in 
 planets. These grand rhymes or returns in nature 
 the dear, best-known face startling us at every turn, 
 under a mask so unexpected that we think it the face 
 of a stranger, and carrying up the semblance into 
 divine forms delighted the prophetic eye of Swe- 
 denborg ; and he must be reckoned a leader in that 
 revolution which, by giving to science an idea, has 
 given to an aimless accumulation of experiments, 
 guidance and form and a boating luart.
 
 SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 91 
 
 I own, with some regret, that his printed works 
 amount to about fifty stout octavos, his scientific 
 works being about half of the whole number; and 
 it appears that a mass of manuscript still unedited re 
 mains in the royal library at Stockholm. The scien 
 tific works have just now been translated into English, 
 in an excellent edition. 
 
 Ssvedenborg printed these scientific books in the 
 ten years from 1734 to 1744, and they remained 
 from that time neglected ; and now, after their cen 
 tury is complete, he has at last found a pupil in Mr. 
 Wilkinson, in London, a philosophic critic, with a 
 coequal vigor of understanding and imagination com 
 parable only to Lord Bacon s, who has produced his 
 master s buried books to the day, and transferred 
 them, with every advantage, from their forgotten 
 Latin into English, to go round the world in our 
 commercial and conquering tongue. This startling 
 reappearance of Swedenborg, after a hundred years, 
 in his pupil, is not the least remarkable fact in his 
 history. Aided, it is said, by the munificence of Mr. 
 Clissold, and also by his literary skill, this piece of 
 poetic justice is done. The admirable preliminary 
 discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched 
 these volumes throw all the contemporary philoso 
 phy of England into shade, and leave me nothing to 
 say on their proper grounds. 
 
 The "Animal Kingdom" is a book of wonderful 
 merits. It was written with the highest end to 
 put science and the soul, long estranged from each 
 other, at one again. It was an anatomist s account 
 of the human body, in the highest style of poetry.
 
 92 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 Nothing can exceed the bold and brilliant treatment 
 of a subject usually so dry and repulsive. He saw 
 nature " wreathing through an everlasting spiral, with 
 wheels that never dry, on axes that never creak," 
 and sometimes sought "to uncover those secret re 
 cesses where nature is sitting at the fires in the depths 
 of her laboratory ; " whilst the picture comes recom 
 mended by the hard fidelity with which it is based 
 on practical anatomy. It is remarkable that this 
 sublime genius decides peremptorily for the analytic, 
 against the synthetic method ; and, in a book whose 
 genius is a daring poetic synthesis, claims to confine 
 himself to a rigid experience. 
 
 He knows, if he only, the flowing of nature, and 
 how wise was that old answer of Amasis to him who 
 bade him drink up the sea "Yes, willingly, if you 
 will stop the rivers that flow in." Few knew as much 
 about nature and her subtle manners, or expressed 
 more subtly her goings. He thought as large a 
 demand is made on our faith by nature as by mira 
 cles. " He noted that in her proceeding from first 
 principles through her several subordinations, there 
 was no state through which she did not pass, as if 
 her path lay through all things." " For as often as 
 she betakes herself upward from visible phenomena, 
 or, in other words, withdraws herself inward, she in 
 stantly, as it were, disappears, while no one knows 
 what has become of her, or whither she is gone ; so 
 that it is necessary to take science as a guide in pur 
 suing her steps." 
 
 The pursuing the inquiry under the light of an end 
 or final cause gives wonderful animation, a sort of
 
 SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 93 
 
 personality to the whole writing. This book an 
 nounces his favorite dogmas. The ancient doctrine 
 of Hippocrates, that the brain is a gland; and of 
 Leucippus, that the atom may be known by the 
 mass ; or in Plato, the macrocosm by the micro 
 cosm ; and in the verses of Lucretius, 
 
 " Ossa videlicet e pauxillis atque minutis 
 Ossibus sic et de pauxillis atque minutis 
 Visceribus viscus gigni, sanguenque creari 
 Sanguinis inter se multis coeuntibus guttis; 
 Ex aurique putat micis consistere posse 
 Aurum, et de terris terrain concrescere parvis ; 
 Ignibus ex igneis, humorem humoribus esse." 
 
 LIB. I. 835. 
 
 " The principle of all things, entrails made 
 Of smallest entrails ; bone, of smallest bone ; 
 Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one ; 
 Gold, of small grains ; earth, of small sands compacted ; 
 Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted ;" 
 
 and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim, that 
 "nature exists entire in leasts," is a favorite 
 thought of Swedenborg. "It is a constant law of 
 the organic body that large, compound, or visible 
 forms exist and subsist from smaller, simpler, and 
 ultimately from invisible forms, which act similarly to 
 the larger ones, but more perfectly and more univer 
 sally ; and the least forms so perfectly and universally 
 as to involve an idea representative of their entire 
 universe." The unities of each organ are so many 
 little organs, homogeneous with their compound ; the 
 unities of the tongue are little tongues ; those of the 
 stomach, little stomachs; those of the heart are little
 
 94 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 hearts. This fruitful idea furnishes a key to every 
 secret. What was too small for the eye to detect 
 was read by the aggregates ; what was too large, by 
 the units. There is no end to his application of the 
 thought. " Hunger is an aggregate of very many 
 little hungers, or losses of blood by the little veins 
 all over the body." It is a key to his theology, 
 also. " Man is a kind of very minute heaven, cor 
 responding to the world of spirits and to heaven. 
 Every particular idea of man, and every affection, 
 yea, every smallest part of his affection, is an image 
 and effigy of him. A spirit may be known from only 
 a single thought. God is the grand man/ 
 
 The hardihood and thoroughness of his study of 
 nature required a theory of forms, also. " Forms 
 ascend in order from the lowest to the highest. The 
 lowest form is angular, or the terrestrial and cor 
 poreal. The second and next higher form is the 
 circular, which is also called the perpetual-angular, 
 because the circumference of a circle is a perpetual 
 angle. The form above this is the spiral, parent and 
 measure of circular forms ; its diameters are not rec 
 tilinear, but variously circular, and have a spherical 
 surface for centre ; therefore it is called the perpetual- 
 circular. The form above this is the vortical, or 
 perpetual-spiral ; next, the perpetual-vortical, or celes 
 tial ; last, the perpetual-celestial, or spiritual."" 
 
 Was it strange that a genius so bold should take 
 the last step, also, conceive that he might attain the 
 science of all sciences, to unlock the meaning of the 
 world? In the first volume of the "Animal King 
 dom," he broaches the subject in a remarkable note:
 
 SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 95 
 
 "In our doctrine of Representations and Corre 
 spondences, we shall treat of both these symbolical 
 and typical resemblances, and of the astonishing 
 things which occur, I will not say in the living body 
 only, but throughout nature, and which correspond 
 so entirely to supreme and spiritual things that one 
 would swear that the physical world was purely sym 
 bolical of the spiritual world ; insomuch that if we 
 choose to express any natural truth in physical and 
 definite vocal terms, and to convert these terms 
 only into the corresponding and spiritual terms, we 
 shall by this means elicit a spiritual truth, or theo 
 logical dogma, in place of the physical truth or pre 
 cept ; although no mortal would have predicted that 
 anything of the kind could possibly arise by bare 
 literal transposition ; inasmuch as the one precept, 
 considered separately from the other, appears to have 
 absolutely no relation to it. I intend, hereafter, to 
 communicate a number of examples of such corre 
 spondences, together with a vocabulary containing the 
 terms of spiritual things, as well as of the physical 
 things for which they are to be substituted. This 
 symbolism pervades the living body." 
 
 The fact, thus explicitly stated, is implied in all 
 poetry, in allegory, in fable, in the use of emblems, 
 and in the structure of language. Plato knew of it, 
 as is evident from his twice-bisected line, in the 
 sixth book of the Republic. Lord Bacon had found 
 that truth and nature differed only as seal and print ; 
 and he instanced some physical propositions, with 
 their translation into a moral or political sense. 
 Belunen, and all mystics, imply this law in their
 
 g6 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 dirk riddle-writing. The poets, in as far as they 
 are poets, use it ; but it is known to them only as 
 the magnet was known for ages as a toy. Swcden- 
 borg first put the fact into a detached and scientific 
 statement, because it was habitually present to him, 
 and never not seen. It was involved, as we ex 
 plained already, in the doctrine of identity an:l 
 iteration, because the mental series exactly tallies 
 with the material series. It required an insight that 
 could rank things in order and series ; or, rather, it 
 required such Tightness of position that the poles of 
 the eye should coincide with the axis of the world. 
 The earth had fed its mankind through five or si:c 
 millenniums, and they had sciences, religions, philos 
 ophies ; and yet had failed to see the correspondence 
 of meaning between every part and every other part. 
 And, down to this hour, literature has no book in 
 which the symbolism of things is scientifically 
 opened. One would say that as soon as men had 
 the first hint that every sensible object animal, 
 rock, river, air, nay, space and time subsists not 
 for itself, nor finally to a material end, but as a 
 picture-language to tell another story of beings and 
 duties, other science would be put by, and a science 
 of such grand presage would absorb all faculties ; 
 that each man would ask of all objects what they 
 mean : Why does the horizon hold me fast, with my 
 joy and grief, in this centre? Why hear I the same 
 sense from countless differing voices, and read one 
 never quite expressed fact in endless picture-language? 
 Yet, whether it be that these things will not be in 
 tellectually learned, or that many centuries must
 
 SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 97 
 
 elaborate and compose so rare and opulent a soul, 
 there is no comet, rock stratum, fossil, fish, quad 
 ruped, spider, or fungus that, for itself, does not 
 interest more scholars and classifiers than the mean 
 ing and upshot of the frame of things. 
 
 But Swedenborg was not content with the culinary 
 use of the world. In his fifty-fourth year these 
 thoughts held him fast, and his profound mind 
 admitted the perilous opinion, too frequent in relig 
 ious history, that he was an abnormal person, to 
 whom was granted the privilege of conversing with 
 angels and spirits ; and this ecstasy connected itself 
 with just this office of explaining the moral import of 
 the sensible world. To a right perception, at once 
 broad and minute, of the order of nature, he added 
 the comprehension of the moral laws in their widest 
 social aspects ; but whatever he saw, through some 
 excessive determination to form in his constitution 
 he saw not abstractly, but in pictures, heard it in 
 dialogues, constructed it in events. When he at 
 tempted to announce the law most sanely, he was 
 forced to couch it in parable. 
 
 Modern psychology offers no similar example of a 
 deranged balance. The principal powers continued 
 to maintain a healthy action ; and to a reader who 
 can make due allowance in the report for the 
 reporter s peculiarities, the results are still instruc 
 tive, and a more striking testimony to the sublime 
 laws he announced than any that balanced dulness 
 could afford. He attempts to give some account of 
 the modus of the new state, affirming that " his 
 presence in the spiritual world is attended with a
 
 98 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 certain separation, but only as to the intellectual part 
 of his mind, not as to the will part ; " and he affirms 
 that "he sets, with the internal sight, the tilings 
 that are in another life more clearly than he sees 
 the things which are here in the world/ 1 
 
 Having adopted the belief that certain books of 
 the Old and New Testaments were exact allegories, 
 or written in the angelic and ecstatic mode, he em 
 ployed his remaining years in extricating from the 
 literal the universal sense. He had borrowed from 
 Plato the fine fable of " a most ancient people, men 
 better than we, and dwelling nigher to the gods ; 
 and Swedenborg added that they used the earth 
 symbolically; that these, when they saw terrestrial 
 objects, did not think at all about them, but only 
 about those which they signified. The correspond 
 ence between thoughts and things henceforward 
 occupied him. "The very organic form resembles 
 the end inscribed on it." A man is in general, and 
 in particular, an organized justice or injustice, sel 
 fishness or gratitude. And the cause of this har 
 mony he assigned in the Arcana : " The reason 
 why all and single things, in the heavens and on 
 earth, are representative is because they exist from 
 an influx of the Lord, through heaven." This 
 design of exhibiting such correspondences, which, 
 if adequately executed, would be the poem of the 
 world, in which all history and science would play 
 an essential part, was narrowed and defeated by the 
 exclusively theologic direction which his inquiries 
 took. His perception of nature is not human and 
 universal, but is mystical and Hebraic. He fastens
 
 SWEDEXBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 99 
 
 each natural object to a theologic notion : a horse 
 signifies carnal understanding; a tree, perception; 
 the moon, faith ; a cat means this ; an ostrich, that ; 
 an artichoke, this other ; and poorly tethers every 
 symbol to a several ecclesiastical sense. The slip 
 pery Proteus is not so easily caught. In nature, 
 each individual symbol plays innumerable parts, as 
 each particle of matter circulates in turn through 
 every system. The central identity enables any one 
 symbol to express successively all the qualities and 
 shades of real being. In the transmission of the 
 heavenly waters, every hose fits every hydrant. Na 
 ture avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry 
 that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. 
 Everything must be taken genially, and we must be 
 at the top of our condition to understand anything 
 rightly. 
 
 His theological bias thus fatally narrowed his 
 interpretation of nature, and the dictionary of sym 
 bols is yet to be written. But the interpreter whom 
 mankind must still expect will find no predecessor 
 who has approached so near to the true problem. 
 
 Swedenborg styles himself, in the title-page of his 
 books, " Sen-ant of the Lord Jesus Christ ; " and by 
 force of intellect, and in effect, he is the last Father 
 in the Church, and is not likely to have a successor. 
 No wonder that his depth of ethical wisdom should 
 give him influence as a teacher. To the withered 
 traditional Church yielding dry catechisms, he let in 
 nature again, and the worshipper, escaping from the 
 vestry of verbs and texts, is surprised to find himself 
 a party to the whole of his religion. Ilis religion
 
 100 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 thinks for him, and is of universal application. He 
 turns it on every side ; it fits every part of life, 
 interprets and dignifies every circumstance. Instead 
 of a religion which visited him diplomatically three 
 or four times, when he was born, when he mar 
 ried, when he fell sick, and when lie died, and for 
 the rest never interfered with him, here was a 
 teaching which accompanied him all day, accompa 
 nied him even into sleep and dreams ; into his think 
 ing, and showed him through what a long ancestry 
 his thoughts descend ; into society, and showed by 
 what affinities he was girt to his equals and his 
 counterparts ; into natural objects, and showed their 
 origin and meaning, what are friendly and what are 
 hurtful ; and opened the future world, by indicating 
 the continuity of the same laws. His disciples 
 allege that their intellect is invigorated by the study 
 of his books. 
 
 There is no such problem for criticism as his the 
 ological writings, their merits are so commanding ; 
 yet such grave deductions must be made. Their 
 immense and sandy diffuseness is like the prairie or 
 the desert, and their incongruities are like the last 
 deliration. He is superfluously explanatory, and his 
 feeling of the ignorance of men strangely cxa;^ 
 gerated. Men take truths of this nature very f.i^t. 
 Yet he abounds in assertions ; he is a rich discoverer, 
 and of things which most import us to know. His 
 thought dwells in essential resemblances, like the re 
 semblance of a house to the man who built it. lie 
 saw things in their law, in likeness of function, not of 
 structure. There is an invariable method and order
 
 SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. IOI 
 
 in his delivery of his truth, the habitual proceeding of 
 the mind from inmost to outmost. What earnest 
 ness and weightiness his eye never roving, with 
 out one swell of vanity, or one look to self, in any 
 common form of literary pride ! A theoretic or specu 
 lative man, but whom no practical man in the universe 
 could affect to scorn. Plato is a gownsman ; his gar 
 ment, though of purple and almost sky-woven, is an 
 academic robe, and hinders action with its volumi 
 nous folds. But this mystic is awful to Caesar. Ly- 
 curgus himself would bow. 
 
 The moral insight of Swedenborg, the correction 
 of popular errors, the announcement of ethical laws, 
 take him out of comparison with any other modern 
 writer, and entitle him to a place, vacant for some 
 ages, among the law-givers of mankind. That slow 
 but commanding influence which he has acquired, 
 like that of other religious geniuses, must be exces 
 sive also, and have its tides, before it subsides into 
 a permanent amount. Of course, what is real and 
 universal cannot be confined to the circle of those 
 who sympathize strictly with his genius, but will pass 
 forth into the common stock of wise and just think 
 ing. The world has a sure chemistry, by which it 
 extracts what is excellent in its children, and lets fall 
 the infirmities and limitations of the grandest mind. 
 
 That metempsychosis which is familiar in the old 
 mythology of the Greeks, collected in Ovid and in 
 the Indian Transmigration, and is there objective, or 
 really takes place in bodies by alien will, in Swe- 
 denborg s mind has a more philosophic character. 
 It is subjective, or depends entirely upon the thought
 
 102 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 of the person. All things in the universe arrange 
 themselves to each person anew, according to his 
 ruling love. Man is such as his affection and 
 thought are. Man is man by virtue of willing, not 
 by virtue of knowing and understanding. As he is, 
 so he sees. The marriages of the world are broken 
 up. Interiors associate all in the spiritual world. 
 Whatever the angels looked upon was to them celes 
 tial. Each Satan appears to himself a man : to those 
 as bad as he, a comely man ; to the purified, a heap 
 of carrion. Nothing can resist states; everything 
 gravitates ; like will to like ; what we call poetic 
 justice takes effect on the spot. We have come into 
 a world which is a living poem. Every thing is as 
 I am. Bird and beast is not bird and beast, but 
 emanation and effluvia of the minds and wills of men 
 there present. Every one makes his own house and 
 state. The ghosts are tormented with the fear of 
 death, and cannot remember that they have died. 
 They who are in evil and falsehood are afraid of all 
 others. Such as have deprived themselves of charity 
 wander and flee ; the societies which they approach 
 discover their quality, and drive them away. The 
 covetous seem to themselves to be abiding in cells 
 where their money is deposited, and these to be in 
 fested with mice. They who place merit in good 
 works seem to themselves to cut wood. " I asked 
 such if they were not wearied. They replied that 
 they have not yet done work enough to merit 
 heaven. " 
 
 He delivers golden sayings, which express with 
 singular beauty the ethical laws; as when he uttered
 
 SWEDENBORG ; OK, THE MYSTIC. 103 
 
 that famed sentence, that " In heaven the angels 
 are advancing continually to the springtime of their 
 youth, so that the oldest angel appears the young 
 est;" "The more angels, the more room;" "The 
 perfection of man is the love of use ;" " Man, in his 
 perfect form, is heaven;" "What is from Him is 
 Him;" "Ends always ascend as nature descends ;" 
 and the truly poetic account of the writing in the 
 inmost heaven, which, as it consists of inflexions ac 
 cording to the form of heaven, can be read without 
 instruction. He almost justifies his claim to preter 
 natural vision, by strange insights of the structure of 
 the human body and mind. "It is never permitted 
 to any one in heaven to stand behind another and 
 look at the back of his head ; for then the influx 
 which is from the Lord is disturbed." The angels, 
 from the sound of the voice, know a man s love ; from 
 the articulation of the sound, his wisdom ; and from 
 the sense of the words, his science. 
 
 In the " Conjugal Love," he has unfolded the 
 science of marriage. Of this book one would say 
 that, with the highest elements, it has failed of 
 success. It came near to be the Hymn of Love 
 which Plato attempted in the " Banquet ; " the love 
 which, Dante says, Casella sang among the angels 
 in Paradise ; and which, as rightly celebrated, in its 
 genesis, fruition, and effect, might well entrance the 
 soul, as it would lay open the genesis of all institu 
 tions, customs, and manners. The book had been 
 grand if the Hebraism had been omitted, and the 
 law stated without Gothicism, as ethics, and with 
 that scope for ascension of state which the nature of
 
 104 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 things requires. It is a fine Platonic development 
 of the science of marriage ; teaching that sex is uni 
 versal, and not local ; virility in the male qualifying 
 every organ, act, and thought ; and the feminine in 
 woman. Therefore, in the real or spiritual world 
 the nuptial union is not momentary, but incessant 
 and total; and chastity not a local, hut a universal 
 virtue; unchastity being discovered as much in the 
 trading, or planting, or speaking, or philosophizing, 
 as in generation ; and that, though the virgins he 
 saw in heaven were beautiful, the wives were incom 
 parably more beautiful, and went on increasing in 
 beauty evermore. 
 
 Yet Swedenborg, after his mode, pinned his theory 
 to a temporary form. He exaggerates the circum 
 stance of marriage ; and, though he finds false mar 
 riages on earth, fancies a wiser choice in heaven. 
 But of progressive souls, all loves and friendships are 
 momentary. Do you love me? means, Do you see 
 the same truth? If you do, we are happy with the 
 same happiness ; but presently one of us passes into 
 the perception of new truth we are divorced, and 
 no tension in nature can hold us to each other. I 
 know how delicious is this cup of love I existing 
 for you, you existing for me ; but it is a child s 
 clinging to his toy; an attempt to eternize the fire 
 side and nuptial chamber; to keep the picture-al 
 phabet through which our first lessons are prettily 
 conveyed. The Eden of God is bare and grand ; 
 like the outdoor landscape remembered from the 
 evening fireside, it seems cold and desolate whilst 
 you cower over the coals ; but once abroad again, we
 
 SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. IO. 
 
 pity those who can forego the magnificence of nature 
 for candle-light and cards. Perhaps the true subject 
 of the " Conjugal Love " is Conversation, whose laws 
 are profoundly eliminated. It is false, if literally 
 applied to marriage. For God is the bride or bride 
 groom of the soul. Heaven is not the pairing of 
 two, but the communion of all souls. We meet, and 
 dwell an instant under the temple of one thought, 
 and part as though we parted not, to join another 
 thought in other fellowships of joy. So far from 
 there being anything divine in the low and proprie 
 tary sense of Do you love me ? it is only when you 
 leave and lose me, by casting yourself on a sentiment 
 which is higher than both of us, that I draw near, 
 and find myself at your side ; and I am repelled, 
 if you fix your eye on me and demand love. In 
 fact, in the spiritual world we change sexes every 
 moment. You love the worth in me ; then I am 
 your husband ; but it is not me, but the worth, that 
 fixes the love ; and that worth is a drop of the ocean 
 of worth that is beyond me. Meanti.me, I adore the 
 greater worth in another, and so become his wife. 
 He aspires to a higher worth in another spirit, and 
 is wife or receiver of that influence. 
 
 Whether from a self-inquisitorial habit that he grew 
 into from jealousy of the sins to which men of 
 thought are liable, he has acquired, in disentangling 
 and demonstrating that particular form of moral dis 
 ease, an acumen which no conscience can resist. I 
 refer to his feeling of the profanation of thinking to 
 what is good " from scientilics. 11 " To reason about
 
 106 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 faith is to doubt and deny." He was painfully alive 
 to the difference between knowing and doing, and 
 this sensibility is incessantly expressed. Philoso 
 phers are, therefore, vipers, cockatrices, asps, hemor 
 rhoids, presters, and flying serpents ; literary men are 
 conjurors and charlatans. 
 
 But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that 
 here we find the seat of his own pain. Possibly 
 Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted faculties. 
 Success, or a fortunate genius, seems to depend on a 
 happy adjustment of heart and brain ; on a due pro 
 portion, hard to hit, of moral and mental power, 
 which, perhaps, obeys the law of those chemical ratios 
 which make a proportion in volumes necessary to 
 combination, as when gases will combine in certain 
 fixed rates, but not at any rate. It is hard to carry 
 a full cup ; and this man, profusely endowed in heart 
 and mind, early fell into dangerous discord with him 
 self. In his " Animal Kingdom " he surprised us by 
 declaring that he loved analysis and not synthesis ; 
 and now, after his fiftieth year, he falls into jealousy 
 of his intellect; and, though aware that truth is not 
 solitary, nor is goodness solitary, but both must ever 
 mix and marry, he makes war on his mind, takes tlu 
 part of the conscience against it, and on all occa- 
 sions traduces and blasphemes it. The violence is 
 instantly avenged. Beauty is disgraced, love is un 
 lovely, when truth, the half part of heaven, is denied, 
 as much as when a bitterness in men of talent leads 
 to satire and destroys the judgment. He is wise, but 
 wise in his own despite. There is an air of infinite 
 grief, and the sound of wailing, all over and through
 
 SWEDENBORG; OR, 7 HE MYSTIC. 107 
 
 this lurid universe. A vampire sits in the seat of the 
 prophet, and turns with gloomy appetite to the images 
 of pain. Indeed, a bird does not more readily weave 
 its nest, or a mole bore into the ground, than this 
 seer of the souls substructs a new hell and pit, each 
 more abominable than the last, round every new crew 
 of offenders. He was let down through a column 
 that seemed of brass, but it was formed of angelic 
 spirits, that he might descend safely amongst the un 
 happy, and witness the vastation of souls ; and heard 
 there, for a long continuance, their lamentations ; he 
 saw their tormentors, who increase and strain pangs 
 to infinity ; he saw the hell of the jugglers, the hell of 
 the assassins, the hell of the lascivious ; the hell of rob 
 bers, who kill and boil men ; the infernal tun of the 
 deceitful ; the excrementitious hells ; the hell of the 
 revengeful, whose faces resembled a round, broad 
 cake, and their arms rotate like a wheel. Except 
 Rabelais and Dean Swift, nobody ever had such 
 science of filth and corruption. 
 
 These books should be used with caution. It is 
 dangerous to sculpture these evanescing images of 
 thought. True in transition, they become false if 
 fixed. It requires, for his just apprehension, almost 
 a genius equal to his own. But when his visions be 
 come the stereotyped language of multitudes of per 
 sons, of all degrees of age and capacity, they are 
 perverted. The wise people of the Greek race were 
 accustomed to lead the most intelligent and virtuous 
 young men, as part of their education, through the 
 Eleusinian mysteries, wherein, with much pomp and 
 graduation, the highest truths known to ancient wis-
 
 IDS REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 dom were taught. An ardent and contemplative 
 young man, at eighteen or twenty years, might read 
 once these books of Swedenborg, these mysteries of 
 love and conscience, and then throw them aside for 
 ever. Genius is ever haunted by similar dreams, 
 when the hells and the heavens are opened to it. I kit 
 these pictures are to be held as mystical ; that is, as a 
 quite arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth, 
 not as the truth. Any other symbol would be as 
 good : then this is safely seen. 
 
 Swedenborg s system of the world wants central 
 spontaneity; it is dynamic, not vital, and lacks power 
 to generate life. There is ho individual in it. The 
 universe is a gigantic crystal, all whose atoms and 
 laminae lie in uninterrupted order, and with unbroken 
 unity, but cold and still. What seems an individual 
 and a will, is none. There is an immense chain of 
 intermediation, extending from centre to extremes, 
 which bereaves every agency of all freedom and 
 character. The universe, in his poem, suffers under 
 a magnetic sleep, and only reflects the mind of the 
 magnetizer. Every thought comes into each mind 
 by influence from a society of spirits that surround it, 
 and into these from a higher society, and so on. All 
 his types mean the same few things. All his figures 
 speak one speech. All his interlocutors Sweden- 
 borgise. Be they who they may, to this complexion 
 must they come at last. This Charon ferries them 
 all over in his boat : kings, counsellors, cavaliers, 
 doctors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane, King 
 George II., Mahomet, or whosoever, and all gather 
 one grimness of hue and style. Only when Cicjro
 
 SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 109 
 
 comes by, our gentle seer sticks a little at saying he 
 talked with Cicero, and, with a touch of human re 
 lenting, remarks, "one whom it was given me to 
 believe was Cicero ; " and when the soi disant Roman 
 opens his mouth, Rome and eloquence have ebbed 
 awav, it is plain theologic Swedenborg, like the 
 rest. His heavens and hells are dull : fault of want 
 of individualism. The thousand-fold relation of men 
 is not there. The interest that attaches in nature to 
 each man, because he is right by his wrong, and 
 wrong by his right, because he defies all dogmatiz 
 ing and classification, so many allowances, and con- 
 tingences, and futurities are to be taken into account, 
 strong by his vices, often paralyzed by his virtues, 
 sinks into entire sympathy with his society. This 
 wa nt reacts to the centre of the system. Though 
 the agency of " the Lord " is in every line referred to 
 by name, it never becomes alive. There is no lustre 
 in that eye which gazes from the centre, and which 
 should vivify the immense dependency of beings. 
 
 The vice of Swedenborg s mind is its theologic de 
 termination. Nothing with him has the liberality of 
 universal wisdom, but we are always in a church. 
 That Hebrew muse, which taught the lore of right 
 and wrong to men, had the same excess of influence 
 for him it has had for the nations. The mode, as 
 well as the essence, was sacred. Palestine is ever the 
 more valuable as a chapter in universal history, and 
 ever the less an available element in education. The 
 genius of Swedenborg, largest of all modern souls in 
 this department of thought, wasted itself in the en 
 deavor to reanimate and conserve what had already
 
 HO REPRESENTATIVE MEJV. 
 
 arrived at its natural term, and, in the great secular 
 Providence, was retiring from its prominence, before 
 western modes of thought and expression. Sweden- 
 borgand Behmen both failed by attaching themselves 
 to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral 
 sentiment, which carries innumerable Christianities, 
 humanities, divinities, in its bosom. 
 
 The excess of influence shows itself in the incon 
 gruous importation of a foreign rhetoric. " What 
 have I to do/ asks the impatient reader, " with jas 
 per and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony ; what with 
 arks and passovers, ephahs and ephods ; what with 
 lepers and emerods ; what with heave-offerings and 
 unleavened bread ; chariots of fire, dragons crowned 
 and horned, behemoth and unicorn ? Good for 
 Orientals, these are nothing to me. The more learn 
 ing you bring to explain them, the more glaring the 
 impertinence. The more coherent and elaborate the 
 system, the less I like it. I say, with the Spartan, 
 Why do you speak so much to the purpose, of that 
 which is nothing to the purpose? My learning is 
 such as God gave me in my birth and habit, in the 
 delight and study of my eyes, and not of another 
 man s. Of all absurdities; this of some foreigner, 
 proposing to take away my rhetoric, and substitute 
 his own, and amuse me with pelican and stork, in 
 stead of thrush and robin ; palm-trees and shittim- 
 wood, instead of sassafras and hickory, seems the 
 most needless." 
 
 Locke said, "God, when he makes the prophet, 
 does not unmake the man." Swedenborg s history 
 points the remark. The parish disputes, in the
 
 SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. HI 
 
 Swedish church, between the friends and foes of 
 Luther and Melancthon, concerning " faith alone " 
 and " works alone," intrude themselves into his 
 speculations upon the economy of the universe and 
 of the celestial societies. The Lutheran bishop s son, 
 "or whom the heavens are opened, so that he sees 
 vith eyes, and in the richest symbolic forms, the 
 awful truth of things, and utters again, in his books, 
 as under a heavenly mandate, the indisputable secrets 
 of moral nature, with all these grandeurs resting 
 upon him, remains the Lutheran bishop s son ; his 
 judgments are those of a Swedish polemic, and his 
 vast enlargements purchased by adamantine limita 
 tions. He carries his controversial memory with 
 him in his visits to the souls. He is like Michael 
 Angelo, who, in his frescoes, put the cardinal who 
 had offended him to roast under a mountain of devils ; 
 or, like Dante, who avenged, in vindictive melodies, 
 all his private wrongs ; or, perhaps still more like 
 Montaigne s parish priest, who, if a hail-storm passes 
 over the village, thinks the day of doom is come, and 
 the cannibals already have got the pip. Swedenborg 
 confounds us not less with the pains of Melancthon, 
 mcl Luther, and Wolfius, and his own books, which 
 he advertises among the angels. 
 
 Under the same theologic cramp, many of his 
 dogmas are bound. His cardinal position in morals 
 is, that evils should be shunned as sins. But he 
 does not know what evil is, or what good is, who 
 thinks any ground remains to be occupied, after say 
 ing that evil is to be shunned as evil. I doubt not 
 he was led by the desire to insert the element of per-
 
 112 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 sonality of Deity. But nothing is added. One man, 
 you say, dreads erysipelas, show him that this 
 dread is evil; or, one dreads hell, show him that 
 dread is evil. He who loves goodness, harbors 
 angels, reveres reverence, and lives with God. The 
 less we have to do with our sins, the better. No 
 man can afford to waste his moments in compunc 
 tions. "That is active duty," say the Hindoos, 
 "which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge, 
 which is for our liberation : all other duty is good 
 only unto weariness." 
 
 Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious 
 theologic limitation, is this Inferno. Swedenborg 
 has devils. Evil, according to old philosophers, is 
 good in the making. That pure malignity can exist, 
 is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to 
 be entertained by a rational agent ; it is atheism ; it 
 is the last profanation. Euripides rightly said, 
 
 " Goodness and being in the gods are one ; 
 He who imputes ill to them makes them none." 
 
 To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology 
 arrived, that Swedenborg admitted no conversion for 
 evil spirits ! But the divine effort is never relaxed ; 
 the carrion in the sun will convert itself to grass and 
 flowers ; and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on 
 gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true. 
 Burns, with the wild humor of his apostrophe to 
 "poor old Nickie Ben," 
 
 " O wad ye tak a thought, and mend ! 
 has the advantage of the vindictive theologian.
 
 SWEDENBORGi OR, THE MYSTIC. 113 
 
 Everything is superficial and perishes, but love and 
 truth only. The largest is always the truest senti 
 ment, and we feel the more generous spirit of the 
 Indian Vishnu, "I am the same to all mankind. 
 There is not one who is worthy of my love or 
 hatred. They who serve me with adoration, I 
 am in them, and they in me. If one whose ways 
 are altogether evil serve me alone, he is as respectable 
 as the just man ; he is altogether well employed ; he 
 soon becometh of a virtuous spirit and obtaineth 
 eternal happiness." 
 
 For the anomalous pretension of Revelations of 
 the other world, only his probity and genius can 
 entitle it to any serious regard. His revelations de 
 stroy their credit by running into detail. If a man 
 say that the Holy Ghost has informed him that the 
 Last Judgment (or the last of the judgments) took 
 place in 1757; or, that the Dutch, in the other 
 world, live in a heaven by themselves, and the 
 English, in a heaven by themselves ; I reply, that the 
 Spirit, which is holy, is reserved, taciturn, and deals 
 in laws. The rumors of ghosts and hobgoblins 
 gossip and tell fortunes. The teachings of the high 
 Spirit are abstemious, and, in regard to particulars, 
 negative. Socrates Genius did not advise him to 
 act or to find, but if he purposed to do somewhat 
 not advantageous, it dissuaded him. "What God 
 is/ he said, " I know not; what he is not, I know." 
 The Hindoos have denominated the Supreme Being, 
 the " Internal Check." The illuminated Quakers 
 explained their Light, not as somewhat which leads 
 to any action, but it appears as an obstruction to any-
 
 114 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 thing unfit. But the right examples are private ex 
 periences, which are absolutely at one on this point. 
 Strictly speaking, Swedenborg s revelation is a con 
 founding of planes, a capital offence in so learned 
 a categorist. This is to carry the law of surface into 
 the plane of substance, to carry individualism and its 
 fopperies into the realm of essences and generals, 
 which is dislocation and chaos. 
 
 The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. Xo 
 imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropped an early 
 syllable to answer the longings of saints, the fears of 
 mortals. We should have listened on our knees to 
 any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought 
 his thoughts into parallelism with the celestial cur 
 rents, and could hint to human ears the scenery and 
 circumstance of the newly parted soul. But it is 
 certain that it must tally with what is best in nature. 
 It must not be inferior in tone to the already known 
 works of the artist who sculptures the globes of the 
 firmament, and writes the moral law. It must be 
 fresher than rainbows, stabler than mountains, agree 
 ing with flowers, with tides, and the rising and setting 
 of autumnal stars. Melodious poets shall be hoarse 
 as street ballads, when once the penetrating key-note 
 of nature and spirit is sounded, the earth-beat, 
 sea-beat, heart-beat, which makes the tune to which 
 the sun rolls, and the globule of blood, and the sap 
 of trees. 
 
 In this mood we hear the rumor that the seer has 
 arrived, and his tale is told. But there is no beauty, 
 no heaven : for angels, goblins. The sad muse loves 
 night and death, and the pit. His Inferno is mes-
 
 SWEDEXBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 115 
 
 mjric. His spiritual world bears the same relation 
 to the generosities and joys of truth, of which human 
 souls have already made us cognizant, as a man s 
 bad dreams bear to his ideal life. It is indeed very 
 like, in its endless power of lurid pictures, to the 
 phenomena of dreaming, which nightly turns many 
 an honest gentleman, benevolent, but dyspeptic, into 
 a wretch, skulking like a dog about the outer yards 
 and kennels of creation. When he mounts into the 
 heaven, I do not hear its language. A man should 
 not tell me that he has walked among the angels : his 
 proof is that his eloquence makes me one. Shall 
 the archangels be less majestic and sweet than the 
 figures that have actually walked the earth? These 
 angels that Swedenborg paints give us no very high 
 idea of their discipline and culture : they are all 
 country parsons : their heaven is 2*. fete champctre, an 
 evangelical picnic, or French distribution of prizes 
 to virtuous peasants. Strange, scholastic, didactic, 
 passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes of 
 souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and visits 
 doleful hells as a stratum of chalk or hornblende ! 
 He has no sympathy. He goes up and down the 
 world of men, a modern Rhadamanthus in gold- 
 h jaded cane and peruke, and with nonchalance and 
 the air of a referee distributes souls. The warm, 
 many-weathered, passionate-peopled world is to him 
 a grammar of hieroglyphs, or an emblematic free 
 mason s procession. How different is Jacob Behmen ! 
 he is tremulous with emotion, and listens awe-struck, 
 with the gentlest humanity, to the Teacher whose 
 lessons he conveys; and when he asserts that, "in
 
 Ii6 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 some sort, love is greater than God," 1 Ivis heart beats 
 so high that the thumping against his leathern coat is 
 audible across the centuries. Tis a great difference. 
 liehmen is healthily and beautifully wise, notwith 
 standing the mystical narrowness and incommuni- 
 cableness. Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, and, 
 with all his accumulated gifts, paralyzes and repels. 
 
 It is the best sign of a great nature, that it opens 
 a foreground, and, like the breath of morning land 
 scapes, invites us onward. Swedenborg is retrospec 
 tive, nor can we divest him of his mattock and shroud. 
 Some minds are forever restrained from descending 
 into nature ; others are forever prevented from 
 ascending out of it. With a force of many men, he 
 could never break the umbilical cord which held him 
 to nature, and he did not rise to the platform of pure 
 genius. 
 
 It is remarkable that this man, who, by his per 
 ception of symbols, saw the poetic construction of 
 things, and the primary relation of mind to matter, 
 remained entirely devoid of the whole apparatus of 
 poetic expression, which that perception creates. 
 He knew the grammar and rudiments of the mother- 
 tongue, how could he not read off one strain into 
 music? Was he like Saadi, who, in his vision, 
 designed to fill his lap with celestial flowers, as pres 
 ents for his friends ; but the fragrance of those roses 
 so intoxicated him, that the skirt dropped from his 
 hands? or, is reporting a breach of the manners of 
 that heavenly society? or, was it that he saw the 
 vision intellectually, and hence that chiding of the 
 intellectual that prevades his books? Be it as it
 
 SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC, n/ 
 
 may, his books have no melody, no emotion, no 
 humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level. In his 
 profuse and accurate imagery is no pleasure, for there 
 is no beauty. We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre 
 landscape. No bird ever sang in all these gardens 
 of the d >ad. The entire want of poetry in so trans 
 cendent a mind betokens the disease, and, like a 
 hoarse voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of warn 
 ing. I think, sometimes, he will not be read longer. 
 His great name will turn a sentence. His books 
 have become a monument. His laurel so largely 
 mixed with cypress, a charnel-breath so mingles with 
 the temple incense, that boys and maids will shun 
 the spot. 
 
 Yet, in this immolation of genius and fame at the 
 shrine of conscience, is a merit sublime beyond 
 praise. He lived to purpose : he gave a verdict. 
 He elected goodness as the clue to which the soul 
 must cling in all this labyrinth of nature. Many 
 opinions conflict as to the true centre. In the ship 
 wreck, some cling to running rigging, some to cask 
 and barrel, some to spars, some to mast ; the pilot 
 chooses with science, I plant myself here ; all will 
 sink before this ; "he comes to land who sails with 
 me." Do not rely on heavenly favor, or on compas 
 sion to folly, or on prudence, on common-sense, 
 the old usage and main chance of men : nothing 
 can keep you, not fate, nor health, nor admira 
 ble intellect ; none can keep you, but rectitude only, 
 rectitude for ever and ever ! and, with a tenacity 
 that never swerved in all his studies, inventions, 
 dreams, he adheres to this brave choice. I think
 
 IlS REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 of him as of some transmigrating votary of Indian 
 legend, who says, "though I be dog, or jackal, or 
 pismire, in the last rudiments of nature, under what 
 integument or ferocity, I cleave to right, as the sure 
 ladder that leads up to man and to God." 
 
 Swedenborg has rendered a double service to man 
 kind, which is now only beginning to be known. 
 By the science of experiment and use, he made his 
 first steps : he observed and published the laws of 
 nature ; and, ascending by just degrees, from events 
 to their summits and causes, he was fired with piety 
 at the harmonies he felt, and abandoned himself to 
 his joy and worship. This was his first service. If 
 the glory was- too bright for his eyes to bear, if lie 
 staggered under the trance of delight, the more ex 
 cellent is the spectacle he saw, the realities of being 
 which beam and blaze through him, and which no 
 infirmities of the prophet are suffered to obscure ; 
 and he renders a second passive service to men, not 
 less than the first perhaps, in the great circle of 
 being, and in the retributions of spiritual nature, not 
 less glorious or less beautiful to himself.
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 121 
 
 IV. 
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 
 
 EVERY fact is related on one side to sensation, 
 and on the other to morals. The game of thought 
 is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find 
 the other : given the upper to find the under side. 
 Nothing so thin but has these two faces ; and, when 
 the observer has seen the obverse he turns it over to 
 see the reverse. Life is a pitching of this penny, 
 heads or tails. We never tire of this game because 
 there is still a slight shudder of astonishment at the 
 exhibition of the other face at the contrast of the two 
 faces. A man is flushed with success, and bethinks 
 himself what this good luck signifies. He drives his 
 bargain in the street ; but it occurs that he also is 
 bought and sold. He sees the beauty of a human 
 face and searches the cause of that beauty which 
 must be more beautiful. He builds his fortunes, 
 maintains the laws, cherishes his children ; but he 
 asks himself, why? and whereto? This head and 
 this tail are called, in the language of philosophy, 
 Infinite and Finite; Relative and Absolute; Apparent 
 and Real ; and many fine names beside. 
 
 Each man is born with a predisposition to one or 
 the other of these sides of nature ; and it will easily
 
 122 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 happen that men will be found devoted to one of the 
 other. One class has the perception of difference 
 and is conversant with facts and surfaces ; cities and 
 persons; and the bringing certain things to pass; 
 the men of talent and action. Another class have 
 the perception of identity, and are men of faith and 
 philosophy, men of genius. 
 
 Each of these riders drives too fast. Plotinus be 
 lieves only in philosophers ; Fenelon, in saints ; 
 Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read the haughty 
 language in which Plato and the Platonists speak of 
 all men who are not devoted to their own shining 
 abstractions : other men are rats and mice. The 
 literary class is usually proud and exclusive. The 
 correspondence of Pope and Swift describes mankind 
 around them as monsters ; and that of Goethe and 
 Schiller, in our own time, is scarcely more kind. 
 
 It is easy to see how this arrogance comes. The 
 genius is a genius by the first look he casts on any 
 object. Is his eye creative? Does he not rest in 
 angles and colors, but beholds the design, he will 
 presently undervalue the actual object. In powerful 
 moments his thought has dissolved the works of art 
 and nature into their causes, so that the works 
 appear heavy and faulty. He has a conception of 
 beauty which the sculptor cannot embody. Picture, 
 statue, temple, railroad, steam-engine existed first in 
 an artist s mind, without flaw, mistake, or friction, 
 which impair the executed models. So did the 
 church, the state, college, court, social circle, and all 
 the institutions. It is not strange that these men, 
 remembering what they have seen and hoped of
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 123 
 
 ideas, should affirm disdainfully the superiority of 
 ideas. Having at some time seen that the happy 
 soul will carry all the arts in power, they say, Why 
 cumber ourselves with superfluous realizations? and, 
 like dreaming beggars, they assume to speak and act 
 as if these values were already substantiated. 
 
 On the other part, the men of toil and trade and 
 luxury, the animal world, including the animal in 
 the philosopher and poet also, and the practical 
 world, including the painful drudgeries which are 
 never excused to philosopher or poet any more than 
 to the rest, weigh heavily on the other side. The 
 trade in our streets believes in no metaphysical 
 causes, thinks nothing of the force which necessitated 
 traders and a trading planet to exist : no, but sticks 
 to cotton, sugar, wool, and salt. The ward meet 
 ings, on election days, are not softened by any mis 
 giving of the value of these ballotings. Hot life is 
 streaming in a single direction. To the men of this 
 world, to the animal strength and spirits, to the men 
 of practical power, whilst immersed in it, the man of 
 ideas appears out of his reason. They alone have 
 reason. 
 
 Tilings always bring their own philosophy with 
 them ; that is, prudence. No man acquires property 
 without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also. In 
 England, the richest country that ever existed, prop 
 erty stands for more, compared with personal ability, 
 than in any other. After dinner, a man believes 
 less, denies more: verities have lost some charm. 
 After dinner, arithmetic is the only science : ideas 
 are disturbing, incendiary, follies of young men,
 
 124 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 repudiated by the solid portion of society ; and a 
 man comes to be valued by his athletic and animal 
 qualities. Spence relates, that Mr. Pope was with 
 Sir Godfrey Kneller one day, when his nephew, a 
 Guinea trader, came in. " Nephew," said Sir 
 Godfrey, " you have the honor of seeing the two 
 greatest men in the world." " I don t know how 
 great men you may be," said the Guinea man, " but 
 I don t like your looks. I have often bought a man 
 much better than both of you, all muscles and bones, 
 for ten guineas." Thus, the men of the senses 
 revenge themselves on the professors, and repay 
 scorn for scorn. The first had leaped to conclusions 
 not yet ripe, and say more than is true ; the others 
 make themselves merry with the philosopher, and 
 weigh man by the pound. They believe that mus 
 tard bites the tongue, that pepper is hot, friction- 
 matches are incendiary, revolvers to be avoided, and 
 suspenders hold up pantaloons ; that there is much 
 sentiment in a chest of tea; and a man will be elo 
 quent, if you give him good wine. Are you tender 
 and scrupulous, you must eat more mince-pie. 
 They hold that Luther had milk in him when he 
 said, 
 
 " Wer nicht liebt Wein, Wcih, und Gesang, 
 Der bleibt ein Narr scin Lebcn lang ; " 
 
 and when he advised a young scholar, per 
 plexed with fore-ordination and free-will, to get well 
 drunk. " The nerves," says Cabanis, " they are the 
 man." My neighbor, a jolly farmer, in the tavern 
 bar-room, thinks that the use of money is sure and
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 125 
 
 speedy spending. "For his part," he says, "he 
 puts his down his neck, and gets the good of it." 
 
 The inconvenience of this way of thinking is, that 
 it runs into indifferentism, and then into disgust. 
 Life is eating us up. We shall be fables presently. 
 Keep cool : it will be all one a hundred years hence. 
 Life s well enough ; but we shall be glad to get out 
 of it, and they will all be glad to have us. Why 
 should we fret and drudge? Our meat will taste to 
 morrow as it did yesterday, and we may at last have 
 had enough of it. "Ah, 11 said my languid gentle 
 man at Oxford, " there s nothing new or true, and 
 no matter." 
 
 With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans : 
 our life is like an ass led to market by a bundle of 
 hay being carried before him : he sees nothing but 
 the bundle of hay. "There is so much trouble in 
 coming into the world," said Lord Bolingbroke, " and 
 so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of 
 it, that tis hardly worth while to be here at all." I 
 knew a philosopher of this kidney, who was accus 
 tomed briefly to sum up his experience of human 
 nature in saying, "Mankind is a damned rascal;" 
 and the natural corollary is pretty sure to follow, 
 " The world lives by humbug, and so will I." 
 
 The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutu 
 ally exasperating each other, and the scoffer express 
 ing the worst of materialism, there arises a third 
 party to occupy the middle ground between these 
 two ; the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by 
 being in extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to 
 be the beam of the balance. He will not go beyond
 
 126 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 his card. He sees the one-sidedness of these men 
 of the street; he will not be a Gibeonite; he stands 
 for the intellectual faculties, a cool head, and what 
 ever serves to keep it cool : no unadvised industry, 
 no unrewarded self-devotion, no loss of the brains in 
 toil. Am I an ox, or a dray? You arc both in 
 extremes, he says. You that will have all solid, and 
 a world of pig-lead, deceive yourselves grossly. You 
 believe yourselves rooted and grounded on adamant ; 
 and yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowledge, 
 you are spinning like bubbles in a river, you know 
 not whither or whence, and you are bottomed and 
 capped and wrapped in delusions. 
 
 Neither will he be betrayed to a book, and wrapped 
 in a gown. The studious class are their own victims : 
 they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads 
 are hot, the night is without sleep, the clay a fear of 
 interruption, pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. 
 If you come near them, and see what conceits they 
 entertain, they are abstractionists, and spend 
 their days and nights in dreaming some dream ; in 
 expecting the homage of society to some precious 
 scheme built on a truth, but destitute of proportion 
 in its presentment, of justness in its application, and 
 of all energy of will in the schemer to embody and 
 vitalize it. 
 
 But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot sec. I 
 know that human strength is not in extremes, but 
 in avoiding extremes. I, at least, will slum the 
 weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth. What 
 is the use of pretending to powers we have not ? 
 What is the use of pretending to assurances we have
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 127 
 
 not respecting the other life? Why exaggerate the 
 power of virtue ? Why be an angel before your time ? 
 These strings, wound up too high, will snap. If there 
 is a wish for immortality, and no evidence, why not 
 say just that? If there are conflicting evidences, why 
 not state them? If there is not ground for a candid 
 thinker to make up his mind, yea or nay, why not 
 suspend the judgment? I weary of these dogma- 
 tizcrs. I tire of these hacks of routine, who deny the 
 dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand here to 
 try the case. I am here to consider, GK.OTTEIV, to con 
 sider how it is. I will try to keep the balance true. 
 Of what use to take the chair, and glibly rattle off 
 theories of society, religion, and nature, when I know 
 that practical objections lie in the way, insurmount 
 able by me and by my mates? Why so talkative in 
 public, when each of my neighbors can pin me to my 
 seat by arguments I cannot refute? Why pretend 
 that life is so simple a game, when we know how 
 subtle and elusive the Proteus is? Why think to 
 shut up all things in your narrow coop, when we know 
 there are not one or two only, but ten, twenty, a 
 thousand things, and unlike ? Why fancy that you 
 have all the truth in your keeping? There is much 
 to say on all sides. 
 
 Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that 
 there is no practical question on which anything 
 more than an approximate solution can be had? Is 
 not marriage an open question, when it is alleged 
 from the beginning of the world that such as are in 
 the institution wish to get out, and such as are out 
 wish to get in ? And the reply of Socrates to him
 
 128 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 who asked whether he should choose a wife, still 
 remains reasonable, " that whether he should choose 
 one or not, he would repent it." 1 Is not the state a 
 question? All society is divided in opinion on the 
 subject of the state. Nobody loves it ; great numbers 
 dislike it and suffer conscientious scruples to alle 
 giance ; and the only defence set up is the fear of do 
 ing worse in disorganizing. Is it otherwise with the 
 church ? Or, to put any of the questions which 
 touch mankind nearest shall the young man aim 
 at a leading part in law, in politics, in trade ? It 
 will not be pretended that a success in either of these 
 kinds is quite coincident with what is best and in 
 most in his mind. Shall he then, cutting the stays 
 that hold him fast to the social state, put out to sea 
 with no guidance but his genius? There is much to 
 say on both sides. Remember the open question 
 between the present order of " competition," and the 
 friends of "attractive and associated labor." The 
 generous minds embrace the proposition of labor 
 shared by all ; it is the only honesty ; nothing else is 
 safe. It is from the poor man s hut alone that 
 strength and virtue come ; and yet, on the other side, 
 it is alleged that labor impairs the form and breaks 
 the spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, 
 " We have no thoughts." Culture, how indispen 
 sable ! I cannot forgive you the want of accomplish 
 ments ; and yet culture will instantly destroy that 
 chiefest beauty of spontaneousness. Excellent is 
 culture for a savage ; but once let him read in the 
 book and he is no longer able not to think of Plu- 
 \arch s heroes. In short, since true fortitude of
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 12$ 
 
 understanding consists " in not letting what we know 
 be embarrassed by what we do not know," we ought 
 to secure those advantages which we can command, 
 and not risk them by clutching after the airy and un 
 attainable. Come, no chimeras ! Let us go abroad ; 
 let us mix in affairs ; let us learn, and get, and have, 
 and climb. " Men are a sort of moving plants, and, 
 like trees, receive a great part of their nourishment 
 from the air. If they keep too much at home they 
 pine." Let us have a robust, manly life ; let us know 
 what we know for certain ; what we have let it be 
 solid and seasonable and our own. A world in the 
 hand is worth two in the bush. Let us have to do 
 with real men and women, and not with skipping 
 ghosts. 
 
 This, then, is the right ground of the skeptic 
 this of consideration, of self-containing; not at all of 
 unbelief; not at all of universal denying, nor of uni 
 versal doubting doubting even that he doubts ; 
 least of all of scoffing and profligate jeering at all 
 that is stable and good. These are no more his 
 moods than are those of religion and philosophy. 
 He is the considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, 
 counting stock, husbanding his means, believing that 
 a man has too many enemies than that he can afford 
 to be his own ; that we can not give ourselves too 
 many advantages in this unequal conflict with powers 
 so vast and unweariable ranged on one side, and this 
 little, conceited, vulnerable popinjay that a man is, 
 bobbing up and down into every danger, on the 
 other. It is a position taken up for better defence, as 
 of more safety and one that can be maintained ; and
 
 130 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 it is one of more opportunity and range ; as, when 
 we build a house the rule is to set it not too high 
 nor too low under the wind, but out of the dirt. 
 
 The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mo 
 bility. The Spartan and Stoic schemes are too stark 
 and stiff for our occasion. A theory of Saint John 
 and of non-resistance seems, on the other hand, too 
 thin and aerial. We want some coat woven of 
 elastic steel, stout as the first and limber as the 
 second. We want a ship in these billows we inhabit. 
 An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips 
 and splinters in this storm of many elements. No, it 
 must be tight and fit to the form of man to live at all ; 
 as a shell is the architecture of a house founded on 
 the sea. The soul of man must be the type of our 
 scheme, just as the body of man is the type after 
 which a dwelling-house is built. Adaptiveness is the 
 peculiarity of human nature. We are golden aver 
 ages, volitant stabilities, compensated or periodic 
 errors, houses founded on the sea. The wise skeptic 
 wishes to have a near view of the best game and the 
 chief players ; what is best in the planet ; art and 
 nature, places and events, but mainly men. Every 
 thing that is excellent in mankind a form of grace, 
 an arm of iron, lips of persuasion, a brain of re 
 sources, every one skilful to play and win he will 
 see and judge. 
 
 The terms of admission to this spectacle are, that 
 he have a certain solid and intelligible way of living 
 of his own ; some method of answering the inevitable 
 needs of human life ; proof that he has played with 
 skill and success ; that he has evinced the temper,
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 131 
 
 stoutness, and the range of qualities which, among 
 his contemporaries and countrymen, entitle him to 
 fellowship and trust. For the secrets of life are not 
 shown except to sympathy and likeness. Men do not 
 confide themselves to boys, or coxcombs, or pedants, 
 but to their peers. Some wise limitation, as the 
 modern phrase is ; some condition between the ex 
 tremes, and having itself a positive quality ; some 
 stark and sufficient man, who is not salt or sugar, 
 but sufficiently related to the world to do justice to 
 Paris or London, and, at the same time, a vigorous 
 and original thinker, whom cities cannot overawe, 
 but who uses them, is the fit person to occupy this 
 ground of speculation. 
 
 These qualities meet in the character of Mon 
 taigne. And yet, since the personal regard which I 
 entertain for Montaigne may be unduly great, I will, 
 under the shield of this prince of egotists, offer, as 
 an apology for electing him as the representative of 
 skepticism, a word or two to explain how my love 
 began and grew for this admirable gossip. 
 
 A single odd volume of Cotton s translation of the 
 Essays remained to me from my father s library, when 
 a boy. It lay long neglected, until, after many years, 
 when I was newly escaped from college, I read the 
 book, and procured the remaining volumes. I re 
 member the delight and wonder in which I lived with 
 it. It seemed to me as if I had myself written the 
 book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my 
 thought and experience. It happened, when in Paris, 
 in 1833, that, in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise. I 
 came to a tomb of Auguste Collignon, who died in
 
 I3 2 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monu 
 ment, "lived to do right, and had formed himself to 
 virtue on the Essays of Montaigne." Some years 
 later I became acquainted with an accomplished 
 English poet, John Sterling ; and, in prosecuting my 
 correspondence, I found that, from a love of Mon 
 taigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his chateau, still 
 standing near Castellan, in Perigord, and, after two 
 hundred and fifty years, had copied from the walls of 
 his library the inscriptions which Montaigne had 
 written there. That Journal of Mr. Sterling s, pub 
 lished in the Westminster Review, Mr. Ha/litt lias 
 reprinted in the Prolegomena to his edition of the 
 Essays. I heard with pleasure that one of the newly- 
 discovered autographs of William Shakspeare was in 
 a copy of Florio s translation of Montaigne. It is the 
 only book which we certainly know to have been in 
 the poet s library. And, oddly enough, the duplicate 
 copy of Florio, which the British Museum purchased, 
 with a view of protecting the Shakspeare autograph 
 (as I was informed in the Museum), turned out to 
 have the autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. 
 Leigh Hunt relates of Lord Byron, that Montaigne 
 was the only great writer of past times whom he read 
 with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not 
 needful to be mentioned here, concurred to make this 
 old Gascon still new and immortal for me. 
 
 In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, 
 then thirty-eight years old, retired from the practice 
 of law, at Bordeaux, and settled himself on his estate. 
 Though he had been a man of pleasure, and some 
 times a courtier, his studious habits now grew on
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 133 
 
 him, and he loved the compass, staidness, and in 
 dependence of the country gentleman s life. He 
 took up his economy in good earnest, and made his 
 farms yield the most. Downright and plain-dealing, 
 and abhorring to be deceived or to deceive, he was 
 esteemed in the country for his sense and probity. In 
 the civil wars of the League, which converted every 
 house into a fort, Montaigne kept his gates open, and 
 his house without defence. All parties freely came 
 and went, his courage and honor being universally 
 esteemed. The neighboring lords and gentry brought 
 jewels and papers to him for safe-keeping. Gibbon 
 reckons, in these bigoted times, but two men of lib 
 erality in France, Henry IV. and Montaigne. 
 
 Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all 
 writers. His French freedom runs into grossness ; 
 but he has anticipated all censure by the bounty of 
 his own confessions. In his times, books were writ 
 ten to one sex only, and almost all were written in 
 Latin ; so that, in a humorist, a certain nakedness of 
 statement was permitted, which our manners, of a 
 literature addressed equally to both sexes, do not 
 allow. But though a biblical plainness, coupled 
 with a most uncanonical levity, may shut his pages 
 to many sensitive readers, yet the offence is superfi 
 cial. He parades it ; he makes the most of it ; no 
 body can think or say worse of him than he does. 
 He pretends to most of the vices ; and, if there be any 
 virtue in him, he says, it got in by stealth. There is 
 no man, in his opinion, who has not deserved hang 
 ing five or six times ; and he pretends no exception 
 in his own behalf. " Five or six as ridiculous
 
 134 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 stories," too, he says, " can be told of me, as of any 
 man living. 11 But, with all this really superfluous 
 frankness, the opinion of an invincible probity grows 
 into every reader s mind. 
 
 "When I the most strictly and religiously confess 
 myself, I find that the best virtue I have has in it 
 some tincture of vice ; and I, who am as sincere and 
 perfect a lover of virtue of that stamp as any other 
 whatever, am afraid that Plato, in his purest virtue, 
 if he had listened, and laid his ear close to himself, 
 would have heard some jarring sound of human mixt 
 ure ; but faint and remote, and only to be perceived 
 by himself." 
 
 Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color 
 or pretence of any kind. He has been in courts so 
 long as to have conceived a furious disgust at appear 
 ances ; he will indulge himself with a little cursing 
 and swearing ; he will talk with sailors and gypsies, 
 use flash and street ballads ; he has stayed in-doors 
 till he is deadly sick ; he will to the open air, though 
 it rain bullets. He has seen too much of gentlemen 
 of the long robe, until he wishes for cannibals ; and 
 is so nervous, by factitious life, that he thinks the 
 more barbarous man is, the better he is. He likes 
 his saddle. You may read theology, and grammar, 
 and metaphysics elsewhere. Whatever you get here 
 shall smack of the earth and of real life, sweet, or 
 smart, or stinging. He makes no hesitation to en 
 tertain you with the records of his disease ; and his 
 journey to Italy is quite full of that matter. He took 
 and kept this position of equilibrium. Over his 
 name he drew an emblematic pair of scales, and
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 135 
 
 wrote Que s$ais-je? under it. As I look at his effigy 
 opposite the title-page, I seem to hear him say : 
 " You may play old Poz, if you will ; you may rail and 
 exaggerate, I stand here for truth, and will not, for 
 all the states and churches and revenues and per 
 sonal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry fact, 
 as I see it ; I will rather mumble and prose about 
 what I certainly know, my house and barns ; my 
 father, my wife, and my tenants ; my old lean bald 
 pate ; my knives and forks ; what meats I eat, and 
 what drinks I prefer ; and a hundred straws just as 
 ridiculous, than I will write, with a fine crow-quill, 
 a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and 
 winter weather. I am gray and autumnal myself, 
 and think an undress, and old shoes that do not 
 pinch my feet, and old friends who do not constrain 
 me, and plain topics where I do not need to strain 
 myself and pump my brains, the most suitable. 
 Our condition as men is risky and ticklish enough. 
 One cannot be sure of himself and his fortune an 
 hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable 
 or ridiculous plight. Why should I vapor and play 
 the philosopher, instead of ballasting, the best I can, 
 this dancing balloon? So, at least, I live within 
 compass, keep myself ready for action, and can shoot 
 the gulf, at last, with decency. If there be any 
 thing farcical in such a life, the blame is not mine : 
 let it lie at fate s and nature s door." 
 
 The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining solilo 
 quy on every random topic that comes into his head ; 
 treating everything without ceremony, yet with mas 
 culine sense. There have been men with deeper
 
 136 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 insight, but, one would say, never a man with such 
 abundance of thoughts ; he is never dull, never in 
 sincere, and has the genius to make the reader care 
 for all that he cares for. 
 
 The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to 
 his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that 
 seems less written. It is the language of conversation 
 transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they 
 would bleed ; they are vascular and alive. One has 
 the same pleasure in it that we have in listening to 
 the necessary speech of men about their work, when 
 any unusual circumstance gives momentary importance 
 to the dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do 
 not trip in their speech ; it is a shower of bullets. It 
 is Cambridge men who correct themselves, and begin 
 again at every half-sentence, and, moreover, will pun 
 and refine too much, and swerve from the matter to 
 the expression. Montaigne talks with shrewdness, 
 knows the world, and books, and himself, and uses 
 the positive degree ; never shrieks, or protests, or 
 prays ; no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative ; 
 does not wish to jump out of his skin, or play any 
 antics, or annihilate space or time ; but is stout and 
 solid; tastes every moment of the clay; likes pain, 
 because it makes him feel himself, and reali/.e things; 
 as we pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. 
 He keeps the plain ; he rarely mounts or sinks ; likes 
 to feel solid ground, and the stones underneath. 
 His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration ; con 
 tented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle of the 
 road. There is but one exception in his love for 
 Socrates. In speaking of him, for once his cheek 
 flushes, and his style rises to passion.
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 137 
 
 Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of sixty, in 
 1592. When he came to die, he caused the mass to 
 be celebrated in his chamber. At the age of thirty- 
 three, he had been married. " But," he says, 
 " might I have had my own will, I would not have 
 married Wisdom herself, if she would have had me ; 
 but tis to much purpose to evade it, the common 
 custom and use of life will have it so. Most of my 
 actions are guided by example, not choice." In the 
 hour of death, he gave the same weight to custom. 
 Que scais-je ? What do I know ? 
 
 This book of Montaigne the world has indorsed, 
 by translating it into all tongues, and printing sev 
 enty-five editions of it in Europe ; and that, too, a 
 circulation somewhat chosen, namely, among court 
 iers, soldiers, princes, men of the world, and men of 
 wit and generosity. 
 
 Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, 
 and given the right and permanent expression of the 
 human mind, on the conduct of life ? 
 
 We are natural believers. Truth, or the connec 
 tion between cause and effect, alone interests us. We 
 are persuaded that a thread runs through all things ; 
 all worlds are strung on it, as beads ; and men and 
 events and life come to us only because of that 
 tli read ; they pass and repass only that we may know 
 the direction and continuity of that line. A book or 
 statement which goes to show that there is .no line, 
 but random and chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a 
 prosperity and no account of it, a hero born from a
 
 138 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 fool, a fool from a hero, dispirits us. Seen or 
 unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent makes 
 counterfeit ties : genius finds the real ones. We 
 hearken to the man of science because we anticipate 
 the sequence in natural phenomena which he un 
 covers. We love whatever affirms, connects, pre 
 serves, and dislike what scatters or pulls down. 
 One man appears whose nature is to all men s eyes 
 conserving and constructive ; his presence supposes 
 a well-ordered society, agriculture, trade, large insti 
 tutions, and empire. If these did not exist, they 
 would begin to exist through his endeavors. There 
 fore, he cheers and comforts men, who feel all this 
 in him very readily. The non-conformist and the 
 rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against 
 the existing republic, but discover to our sense no 
 plan of house or State of their own. Therefore, 
 though the town, and State, and way of living which 
 our counsellor contemplated might be a very modest 
 or musty prosperity, yet men rightly go for him, and 
 reject the reformer, so long as he comes only with 
 axe and crowbar. 
 
 But though we are natural conservers and causa- 
 tionists, and reject a sour, dumpish unbelief, the 
 skeptical class, which Montaigne represents, have 
 reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to it. 
 Every superior mind will pass through this domain 
 of equilibration I should rather say, will know 
 how to avail himself of the checks and balances in 
 nature, a> a natural weapon against the exaggeration 
 and formalism of bigots and blockheads. 
 
 Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the student
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 139 
 
 in relation to the particulars which society adores, 
 but which he sees to be reverend only in their ten 
 dency and spirit. The ground occupied by the 
 skeptic is the vestibule of the temple. Society does 
 not like to have any breath of question blown on the 
 existing order. But the interrogation of custom at 
 all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of 
 every superior mind, and is the evidence of its per 
 ception of the flowing power which remains itself in 
 all changes. 
 
 The superior mind will find itself equally at odds 
 with the evils of society, and with the projects that 
 are offered to relieve them. The wise skeptic is a 
 bad citizen ; no conservative, he sees the selfishness 
 of property, and the drowsiness of institutions. But 
 neither is he fit to work with any democratic party 
 that ever was constituted ; for parties wish every one 
 committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism. 
 His politics are those of the SouPs Errand " of Sir 
 Walter Raleigh ; or of Krishna, in the Bhagavat, 
 " There is none who is worthy of my love or 
 hatred ; " whilst he sentences law, physic, divinity, 
 commerce, and custom. He is a reformer; yet he 
 is no better member of the philanthropic association. 
 It turns out that he is not the champion of the oper 
 ative, the pauper, the prisoner, the slave. It stands 
 in his mind that our life in this world is not of quite 
 so easy interpretation as churches and school-books 
 say. He does not wish to take ground against these 
 benevolences, to play the part of devil s attorney, 
 and bla/.on every doubt and sneer that darkens the 
 sun for him. But he says, There arc doubts.
 
 140 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the 
 calendar-day of our Saint Michel de Montaigne, by 
 counting and describing these doubts or negations. 
 I wish to ferret them out of their holes, and sun them 
 a little. We must do with them as the police do 
 with old rogues, who are shown up to the public at 
 the marshal s office. They will never be so formida 
 ble when once they have been identified and regis 
 tered. But I mean honestly by them that justice 
 shall be done to their terrors. I shall not take 
 Sunday objections, made up on purpose to be put 
 down. I shall take the worst I can find, whether I 
 can dispose of them, or they of me. 
 
 I do not press the skepticism of the materialist. 
 I know the quadruped opinion will not prevail. 
 Tis of no importance what bats and oxen think. 
 The first dangerous symptom I report, is the levity of 
 intellect ; as if it were fatal to earnestness to know 
 much. Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot 
 know. The dull pray ; the geniuses are light 
 mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every 
 platform ! but intellect kills it. Nay, San Carlo, my 
 subtle and admirable friend, one of the most pene 
 trating of men, finds that all direct ascension, even 
 of lofty piety, leads to this ghastly insight, and sends 
 back the votary orphaned. My astonishing San 
 Carlo thought the lawgivers and saints infected. 
 They found the ark empty ; saw and would not tell ; 
 and tried to choke off their approaching followers 
 by saying : " Action, action, my dear fellows, is for 
 you ! " Bad as was to me this detection by San 
 Carlo, this frost in July, this blow from a bride, there
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC, 141 
 
 was still a worse ; namely, the cloy or satiety of the 
 saints. In the mount of vision, ere they have yet 
 risen from their knees, they say : " We discover that 
 this our homage and beatitude is partial and deformed : 
 \vc must fly for relief to the suspected and reviled 
 Intellect, to the Understanding, the Mephistopheles, 
 to the gymnastics of talent." 
 
 This is hobgoblin the first ; and, though it has 
 been the subject of much elegy, in our nineteenth 
 century, from Byron, Goethe, and other poets of less 
 fame, not to mention many distinguished private 
 observers, I confess it is not very affecting to 
 my imagination ; for it seems to concern the shatter 
 ing of baby-houses and crockery-shops. What 
 flutters the church of Rome, or of England, or of 
 Geneva, or of Boston, may yet be very far from 
 touching any principle of faith. I think that the 
 intellect and moral sentiment are unanimous ; and 
 that, though philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet it 
 supplies the natural checks of vice, and polarity to 
 the soul. I think that the wiser a man is, the more 
 stupendous he finds the natural and moral economy, 
 and lifts himself to a more absolute reliance. 
 
 There is the power of moods, each setting at 
 naught all but its own tissue of facts and beliefs. 
 There is the power of complexions, obviously modi 
 fying the dispositions and sentiments. The beliefs 
 and unbeliefs appear to be structural ; and, as soon 
 as each man attains the poise and vivacity which 
 allow the whole machinery to play, he will not need 
 extreme examples, but will rapidly alternate all 
 opinions in his own life. Our life is March
 
 142 REPRESENTATIVE JlfE.V. 
 
 weather : savage and serene in one hour. We go 
 forth austere, dedicated, believing in the iron links 
 of Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to save our 
 life ; but a book, or a bust, or only the sound of a 
 name, shoots a spark through the nerves, and we 
 suddenly believe in will : my finger-ring shall be the 
 seal of Solomon ; fate is for imbeciles ; all is possible 
 to the resolved mind. Presently, a new experience 
 gives a new turn to our thoughts : common sense 
 resumes its tyranny; we say: "Well, the army, 
 after all, is the gate to fame, manners, and poetry ; 
 and, look you, on the whole, selfishness plants bust, 
 prunes best, makes the best commerce, and the best 
 citizen. Are the opinions of a man on right and 
 wrong, on fate and causation, at the mercy of a 
 broken sleep or an indigestion? Is his belief in (iod 
 and Duty no deeper than a stomach evidence? And 
 what guaranty for the permanence of his opinions? 
 I like not the French celerity, a new Church and 
 State once a week. This is the second negation ; 
 and I shall let it pass for what it will. As far as it 
 asserts rotation of states of mind, I suppose it sug 
 gests its own remedy; namely, in the record of larger 
 periods. What is the mean of many states ; of all 
 the states? Does the general voice of ages affirm 
 any principle, or is no community of sentiment dis 
 coverable in distant times and places? And when it 
 shows the power of self-interest, I accept that as part 
 of the divine law, and must reconcile it with aspi 
 ration the best I can. 
 
 The word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the sense 
 of mankind in all ages, that the laws of the world
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 143 
 
 do not always befriend, but often hurt and crush us. 
 Fate, in the shape of Kinde or nature, grows over us 
 like grass. We paint Time with a scythe ; Love and 
 Fortune, blind ; and Destiny, deaf. We have too 
 little power of resistance against this ferocity which 
 champs us up. What front can we make against 
 these unavoidable, victorious, maleficent forces? 
 What can I do against the influence of Race, in my 
 history? What can I do against hereditary and 
 constitutional habits, against scrofula, lymph, im 
 potence? against climate, against barbarism, in my 
 country? I can reason down or deny everything 
 except this perpetual Belly : feed he must and will, 
 and I cannot make him respectable. 
 
 But the main resistance which the affirmative im 
 pulse finds, and one including all others, is in the 
 doctrine of the Illusionists. There is a painful 
 rumor in circulation, that we have been practised 
 upon in all the principal performances of life, and free 
 agency is the emptiest name. We have been sopped 
 and drugged with the air, with food, with woman, 
 with children, with sciences, with events, which leave 
 us exactly where they found us. The mathematics, 
 His complained, leave the mind where they find it : 
 so do all sciences ; and so do all events and actions. 
 I find a man who has passed through all the sciences, 
 the churl he was ; and, through all the offices, learned, 
 civil, and social, can detect the child. We are not 
 the less necessitated to dedicate life to them. In 
 fact, we may come to accept it as the fixed rule and 
 theory of our state of education that God is a sub-
 
 144 REPRESENTATIVE MEN, 
 
 stance and his method is illusion. The Eastern sages 
 owned the goddess Yoganidra, the great illusory 
 energy of Vishnu, by whom, as utter ignorance, the 
 whole world is beguiled. 
 
 Or, shall I state it thus ? The astonishment of 
 life is the absence of any appearance of reconciliation 
 between the theory and practice of life. Reason, 
 the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended now and 
 then for a serene and profound moment, amidst the 
 hubbub of cares and works which have no direct 
 bearing on it ; is then lost for months or years, and 
 again found for an interval to be lost again. If we 
 compute it in time we may, in fifty years, have half a 
 dozen reasonable hours. But what are these cares 
 and works the better? A method in the world we 
 do not see, but tills parallelism of great and little, 
 which never react on each other nor discover the 
 smallest tendency to converge. Experiences, for 
 tunes, governings, readings, writings, are nothing 
 to the purpose ; as when a man comes into the 
 room it does not appear whether he has been fed on 
 yams or buffalo, he has contrived to get so much 
 bone and fibre as he wants, out of rice or out of snow. 
 So vast is the disproportion between the sky of law 
 and the pismire of performance under it, that whether 
 he is a man of worth or a sot is not so great a matter 
 as we say. Shall I add, as one juggle of this en 
 chantment, the stunning non-intercourse law which 
 makes cooperation impossible? The young spirit 
 pants to enter society. But all the ways of culture 
 and greatness lead to solitary imprisonment. He 
 has been often balked. He did not expect a sym-
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 145 
 
 pathy with his thought from the village, but he went 
 with it to the chosen and intelligent and found no 
 entertainment for it but mere misapprehension, dis 
 taste, and scoffing. Men are strangely mistimed and 
 misapplied ; and the excellence of each is an inflamed 
 individualism which separates him more. 
 
 There are these and more than these diseases of 
 thought which our ordinary teachers do not attempt 
 to remove. Now shall we, because a good nature 
 inclines us to virtue s side, say, There are no doubts 
 and lie for the right? Is life to be led in a brave 
 or in a cowardly manner? and is not the satisfaction 
 of the doubts essential to all manliness? Is the 
 name of virtue to be a barrier to that which is virtue ? 
 Can you not believe that a man of earnest and burly 
 habit may find small good in tea, essays, and cate 
 chism, and want a rougher instruction, want men, 
 labor, trade, farming, war, hunger, plenty, love, 
 hatred, doubt, and terror, to make things plain to 
 him ; and has he not a right to insist on being con 
 vinced in his own way? When he is convinced he 
 will be worth the pains. 
 
 Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the 
 soul ; unbelief, in denying them. Some minds are 
 incapable of skepticism. The doubts they profess to 
 entertain are rather a civility or accommodation to 
 the common discourse of their company. They may 
 well give themselves leave to speculate, for they are 
 secure of a return. Once admitted to the heaven of 
 thought, they see no relapse into night, but infinite 
 invitation on the other side. Heaven is within 
 heaven, and sky over sky, and they are encompassed
 
 146 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 with divinities. Others there are, to whom the 
 heaven is brass, and it shuts down to the surface of 
 the earth. It is a question of temperament, or of 
 more or less immersion in nature. The last class 
 must needs have a reflex or parasite faith ; not a sight 
 of realities, but an instinctive reliance on the seers 
 and believers of realities. The manners and thoughts 
 of believers astonish them, and convince them 
 that these have seen something which is hid from 
 themselves. But their sensual habit would fix the 
 believer to his last position, whilst he as inevitably 
 advances ; and presently the unbeliever, for love of 
 belief, burns the believer. 
 
 Great believers are always reckoned infidels, im 
 practicable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no 
 account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to ex 
 press his faith by a series of skepticisms. Charitable 
 souls come with their projects, and ask his coopera 
 tion. How can he hesitate? It is the rule of mere 
 comity and courtesy to agree where you can, and to 
 turn your sentence with something auspicious, and 
 not freezing and sinister. But he is forced to say : 
 " O, these things will be as they must be : what can 
 you do? These particular griefs and crimes are the 
 foliage and fruit of such trees as we see growing. It 
 is vain to complain of the leaf or the berry : cut it 
 off: it will bear another just as bad. You must begin 
 your cure lower down." The generosities of the day 
 prove an intractable element for him. The people s 
 questions are not his ; their methods are not his ; 
 and against all the dictates of good nature he is 
 driven to say, he has no pleasure in them.
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. itf 
 
 Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of 
 the divine Providence, and of the immortality of 
 the soul, his neighbors cannot put the statement so 
 that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of more 
 faith and not less. He denies out of honesty. 
 He had rather stand charged with the imbecility of 
 skepticism than with untruth. I believe, he says, 
 in the moral design of the universe ; it exists hospi 
 tably for the weal of souls ; but your dogmas seem to 
 me caricatures: why should I make believe them? 
 Will any say, this is cold and infidel ? The wise and 
 magnanimous will not say so. They will exult in 
 his far-sighted good-will, that can abandon to the 
 adversary all the ground of tradition and common 
 belief, without losing a jot of strength. It sees to 
 the end of all transgression. George Fox saw " that 
 there was an ocean of darkness and death ; but, with 
 al, an infinite ocean of light and love which flowed 
 over that of darkness. 1 
 
 The final solution in which skepticism is lost is 
 in the moral sentiment, which never forfeits its su 
 premacy. All moods may be safely tried, and their 
 weight allowed to all objections ; the moral sentiment 
 as easily outweighs them all, as any one. This is 
 the drop which balances the sea. I play with the 
 miscellany of facts, and take those superficial views 
 which we call skepticism ; but I know that they will 
 presently appear to me in that order which makes 
 skepticism impossible. A man of thought must feel 
 the thought that is parent of the universe : that the 
 masses of nature do undulate and flow. 
 
 This faith avails to the whole emergency of life
 
 148 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 and objects. The world is saturated with deity and 
 with law. He is content with just and unjust, with 
 sots and fools, with the triumph of folly and fraud. 
 He can behold with serenity the yawning gulf be 
 tween the ambition of man and his power of per 
 formance, between the demand and supply of power, 
 which makes the tragedy of all souls. 
 
 Charles Fourier announced that "the attractions 
 of man are proportioned to his destinies; in other 
 words, that every desire predicts its own satisfaction. 
 Yet all experience exhibits the reverse of this ; the 
 incompetency of power is the universal grief of young 
 and ardent minds. They accuse the divine providence 
 of a certain parsimony. It his shown the heaven 
 and earth to every child, and filled him with a desire 
 for the whole ; a desire raging, infinite ; a hunger, as 
 of space to be filled with planets ; a cry of famine, as 
 of devils for souls. Then for the satisfaction, to 
 each man is administered a single drop, a bead of 
 dew of vital power, per day, a cup as large as 
 space, and one drop of the water of life in it. Each 
 man woke in the morning, with an appetite that 
 could eat the solar system like a cake ; a spirit for 
 action and passion without bounds ; he could lay his 
 hand on the morning star ; he could try conclusions 
 with gravitation or chemistry ; but, on the first 
 motion to prove his strength, hands, feet, senses, 
 gave way, and would not serve him. He was an em 
 peror deserted by his states, and left to whistle by 
 himself, or thrust into a mob of emperors all whis 
 tling; and still the sirens sang: " The attractions 
 are proportioned to the destinies." In every house, in
 
 MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 149 
 
 the heart of each maiden and of each boy, in the soul 
 of the soaring saint, this chasm is found, between 
 the largest promise of ideal power, and the shabby 
 experience. 
 
 The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, 
 elastic, not to be surrounded. Man helps himself by 
 larger generalizations. The lesson of life is practi 
 cally to generalize ; to believe what the years and the 
 centuries say against the hours ; to resist the usur 
 pation of particulars ; to penetrate to their catholic 
 sense. Things seem to say one thing, and say the 
 reverse. The appearance is immoral ; the result is 
 moral. Things seem to tend downward, to justify 
 despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the just ; 
 and by knaves, as by martyrs, the just cause is 
 carried forward. Although knaves win in every polit 
 ical struggle, although society seems to be delivered 
 over from the hands of one set of criminals into the 
 hands of another set of criminals as fast as the gov 
 ernment is changed, and the march of civilization is 
 a train of felonies, yet general ends are somehow 
 answered. We see now events forced on which 
 seem to retard or retrograde the civility of ages. But 
 the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and 
 waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger at 
 laws ; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to 
 affect low and poor means. Through the years and 
 the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and 
 atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly 
 streams. 
 
 Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the 
 mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the dis-
 
 150 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 appearance of things he was wont to reverence, with 
 out losing his reverence ; let him learn that he is here, 
 not to work, but to be worked upon ; and that, though 
 abyss open under abyss and opinion displace opinion, 
 all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause : 
 
 " If my bark sink, tis to another sea."
 
 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET
 
 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 153 
 
 V. 
 
 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 
 
 GREAT men are more distinguished by range and 
 extent than by originality. If we require the o. iji- 
 nality which consists in weaving, like a spider, their 
 web from their own bowels ; in finding clay, and 
 making bricks, and building the house, no great men 
 are original. Nor does valuable originality consist in 
 unlikeness to other men. The hero is in the press of 
 knights and the thick of events ; and, seeing what 
 men want and sharing their desire, he adds the need 
 ful length of sight and of arm to come at the desired 
 point. The greatest genius is the most indebted 
 man. A poet is no rattle-brain, saying what comes 
 uppermost, and, because he says everything, saying, 
 at last, something good ; but a heart in unison with 
 his time and country. There is nothing whimsical 
 and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad 
 earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and 
 pointed with the most determined aim which any man 
 or class knows of in his times. 
 
 The genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and 
 will not have any individual great, except through 
 the general. There is no choice to genius. A great 
 man does not wake up on some fine morning, and
 
 154 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 say : "I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an 
 antarctic continent ; to-day I will square the circle ; 
 I will ransack botany, and find a new food for man ; 
 I have a new architecture in my mind ; I foresee a new 
 mechanic power." No, but he finds himself in the 
 river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by 
 the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. He 
 stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and 
 their hands all point in the direction in which he 
 should go. The Church has reared him amidst rites 
 and pomps, and he carries out the advice which her 
 music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her 
 chants and processions. He finds a war raging ; it 
 educates him, by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters 
 the instruction. He finds two counties groping to 
 bring coal, or flour, or fish from the place of produc 
 tion to the place of consumption, and he hits on a 
 railroad. Every master has found his materials col 
 lected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his 
 people, and in his love of the materials he wrought in. 
 What an economy of power ! and what a compensa 
 tion for the shortness of life ! All is done to his 
 hand. The world has brought him thus far on his 
 way. The human race has gone out before him, 
 sunk the hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the 
 rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all 
 have worked for him, and he enters into their labors. 
 Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, 
 out of the national feeling and history, and he would 
 have all to do for himself; his powers would be ex 
 pended in the first preparations. Great genial power, 
 Qne would almost say, consists in not being original
 
 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 155 
 
 at all ; in being altogether receptive ; in letting the 
 world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to 
 pass unobstructed through the mind. 
 
 Shakspeare s youth fell in a time when the English 
 people were importunate for dramatic entertainments. 
 The court took offence easily at political allusions, 
 and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, a 
 growing and energetic party, and the religious among 
 the Anglican church, would suppress them. But the 
 people wanted them. Inn-yards, houses without roofs, 
 and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs were 
 the ready theatres of strolling players. The peo 
 ple had tasted this new joy ; and as we could not 
 hope to suppress newspapers now, no, not by the 
 strongest party, neither then could king, prelate, 
 or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ which 
 was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch, 
 and library, at the same time. Probably king, prel 
 ate, and puritan all found their own account in it. 
 It had become, by all causes, a national interest 
 by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar 
 would have thought of treating it in an English his 
 tory, but not a whit less considerable because it 
 was cheap and of no account, like a baker s-shop. 
 The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers 
 which suddenly broke into this field : Kyd, Marlow, 
 Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Hey- 
 wood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, 
 and Fletcher. 
 
 The secure possession, by the stage, of the public 
 mind is of the first importance to the poet who works 
 for it. He loses no time in idle experiments. Here
 
 156 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 is audience and expectation prepared. In the case of 
 Shakspeare there is much more. At the time when 
 he left Stratford and went up to London, a great 
 body of stage plays, of all dates and writers, existed 
 in manuscript, and were in turn produced on the 
 boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, which the audi 
 ence will bear hearing some part of, every week : the 
 Death of Julius Caesar, and other stories out of Plu 
 tarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of English 
 history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, clown 
 to the royal Henrys, which men hear eagerly ; and a 
 string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales, and 
 Spanish voyages, which all the London prentices 
 know. All the mass has been treated, with more or 
 less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has 
 the soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no 
 longer possible to say who wrote them first. They 
 have been the property of the theatre so long, and 
 so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered 
 them, inserting a speech or a whole scene, or adding a 
 song, that no man can any longer claim copyright on 
 this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to. 
 They are not yet desired in that way. We have few 
 readers, many spectators and hearers. They had best 
 lie where they are. 
 
 Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, es 
 teemed the mass of old plays waste stock, in which 
 any experiment could be freely tried. Had the 
 prestige which hedges about a modern tragedy ex 
 isted, nothing could have been done. The rude warm 
 blood of the living England circulated in the play as 
 in street-ballads, and gave body which he wanted
 
 SHAK SPEAR E; OR, THE POET. 157 
 
 to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a 
 ground in popular tradition on which he may work, 
 and which again may restrain his art within the due 
 temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a 
 foundation for his edifice ; and, in furnishing so much 
 work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure and in 
 full strength for the audacities of his imagination. 
 In short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture 
 owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt and in 
 Greece grew up in subordination to architecture. It 
 was the ornament of the temple wall : at first a rude 
 relief carved on pediments, then the relief became 
 bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the 
 wall, the groups being still arrayed with reference to 
 the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the 
 figures ; and when at last the greatest freedom of 
 style and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius 
 of architecture still enforced a certain calmness and 
 continence in the statue. As soon as the statue 
 was begun for itself, and with no reference to the 
 temple or palace, the art began to decline : freak, ex 
 travagance, and exhibition took the place of the old 
 temperance. This balance-wheel which the sculptor 
 found in architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic 
 talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials 
 to which the people were already wonted, and which 
 had a certain excellence which no single genius, 
 however extraordinary, could hope to create. 
 
 In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did 
 owe debts in all directions, and was able to use what 
 ever he found ; and the amount of indebtedness may 
 be inferred from Malone s laborious computations in
 
 158 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of 
 Henry VI., in which "out of 6,043 line s, 1,771 were 
 written by some author preceding Shakspeare ; 2,373 
 by him on the foundation laid by his predecessors ; 
 and i, 899 were entirely his own." And the proceed 
 ing investigation hardly leaves a single drama of his 
 absolute invention. Mulone s sentence is an impor 
 tant piece of external history. In Henry VIII. I 
 think I see plainly the cropping out of the original 
 rock on which his own finer stratum was laid. The 
 first play was written by a superior, thoughtful man 
 with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines and know 
 well their cadence. See Wolsey s soliloquy and the 
 following scene with Cromwell, where, instead of 
 the metre of Shakspeare, whose secret is that the 
 thought constructs the tune, so that reading for 
 the sense will best bring out the rhythm, here the 
 lines are constructed on a given tune and the verse 
 has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play 
 contains through all its length unmistakable traits 
 of Shakspeare s hand, and some passages, as the ac 
 count of the coronation, are like autographs. What 
 is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the 
 bad rhythm. 
 
 Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better 
 fable than any invention can. If he lost any credit 
 of design he augmented his resources ; and at that 
 day our petulant demand for originality was not so 
 much pressed. There was no literature for the 
 million. The universal reading, the cheap press, 
 were unknown. A great poet who appears in illit 
 erate times absorbs into his sphere all the light
 
 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 159 
 
 which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual 
 jewel, every flower of sentiment, it is his fine office to 
 bring to his people ; and he comes to value his mem 
 ory equally with his invention. He is therefore little 
 solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived 
 whether through translation, whether through 
 tradition, whether by travel in distant countries, 
 whether by inspiration ; from whatever source, they 
 are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, 
 lie borrows very near home. Other men say wise 
 things as well as he ; only they say a good many 
 foolish things, and do not know when they have 
 spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true 
 stone, and puts it in high place wherever he finds it. 
 Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps ; of 
 Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their 
 wit. And they are librarians and historiographers as 
 well as poets. Each romancer was heir and dis 
 penser of all the hundred tales of the world, 
 
 " Presenting Thebes and Pelops line, 
 And the tale of Troy divine." 
 
 The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our 
 early literature ; and, more recently, not only Pope 
 a. i.l Dryden have been beholden to him, but, in the 
 whole society of English writers, a large unacknowl 
 edged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with 
 the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But 
 Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, 
 drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from 
 Guido cli Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Tro 
 jan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phry-
 
 I Go REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 gius, Ovid, and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, 
 and the Provencal poets are his benefactors : the 
 Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation 
 from William of Lords and John of Meung ; Troilus 
 and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino ; The Cock 
 and the Fox, from the Lais of Marie ; The Hou ; : 
 of Fame, from the French or Italian; and poor 
 Gower he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or 
 stone-quarry, out of which to build his house. 
 He steals by this apology that what he takes 
 has no worth where he finds it, and the greatest 
 where he leaves it. It has come to be practically 
 a sort of rule in literature, that a man having once 
 shown himself capable of original writing is entitled 
 thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at 
 discretion. Thought is the property of him who can 
 entertain it, and of him who can adequately place it. 
 A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed 
 thoughts ;. but as soon as we have learned what to 
 do with them they become our own. 
 
 Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is 
 retrospective. The learned member of the legislat 
 ure, at Westminster or at Washington, speaks and 
 votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and 
 the now invisible channels by which the senator is 
 made aware of their wishes, the crowd of practical 
 and knowing men who, by correspondence or con 
 versation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, 
 and estimates, and it will bereave his fine .attitude 
 and resistance of something of their impressivencss. 
 As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke 
 and Rousseau think for thousands ; and so there
 
 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. l6l 
 
 were fountains all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or 
 Milton from which they drew ; friends, lovers, books, 
 traditions, proverbs, all perished, which, if seen, 
 would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard 
 speak with authority? Did he feel himself over 
 matched by any companion? The appeal is to the 
 consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his 
 breast a Delphi whereof to ask concerning any 
 thought or thing, whether it be verily so, yea or 
 nay? and to have answer, and to rely on that? All 
 the debts which such a man could contract to other 
 wit would never disturb his consciousness of origi 
 nality ; for the ministrations of books, and of other 
 minds, are a whiff of smoke to that most private 
 reality with which he has conversed. 
 
 It is easy to see that what is best written or done 
 by genius, in the world, was no man s work, but 
 came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought 
 like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English 
 Bible is a wonderful specimen of the strength and 
 music of the English language. But it was not made 
 by one man, or at one time ; but centuries and 
 churches brought it to perfection. There never was 
 a time when there was not some translation existing. 
 The Liturgy, admired for its energy and pathos, is an 
 anthology of the piety of ages and nations, a transla 
 tion of the prayers and forms of the Catholic church, 
 these collected, too, in long periods, from the 
 prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred 
 writer all over the world. Grotius makes the like re 
 mark in respect to the Lord s Prayer, that the single 
 clauses uf which it is composed were already in use,
 
 1 62 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms. He 
 picked out the grains of gold. The nervous language 
 of the Common Law, the impressive forms of our 
 courts, and the precision and substantial truth of 
 the legal distinctions are the contribution of all the 
 sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in 
 the countries where these laws govern. The trans 
 lation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being transla 
 tion on translation. There never was a time when 
 there was none. All the truly idiomatic and 
 national phrases are kept, and all others succes 
 sively picked out, and thrown away. Something like 
 the same process had gone on, long before, with the 
 originals of these books. The world takes liberties 
 with world-books. Vedas, /Esop s Fables, Pilpay, 
 Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish 
 Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In 
 the composition of such works, the time thinks, 
 the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the 
 merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us. 
 Every book supplies its time with one good word ; 
 every municipal law, every trade, every folly of 
 the day, and the generic catholic genius who is not 
 afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the 
 originality of all stands with the next age as the 
 recorder and embodiment of his own. 
 
 We have to thank the researches of antiquaries 
 and the Shakspeare Society for ascertaining the steps 
 of the English drama, from the mysteries celebrated 
 in churches and by churchmen, and the final detach 
 ment from the Church, and the completion of secular 
 plays from Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton s
 
 SIIAK SPEAR E OA , THE POET. \(j\ 
 
 Needle, down to the possession of the stage by the 
 very pieces which Shakspeare altered, remodelled, 
 and finally made his own. Elated with success, and 
 piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they 
 have left no book-stall unsearched, no chest in a 
 garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to 
 decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the 
 hope to discover whether the boy Shakspeare poached 
 or not, whether he held horses at the theatre door, 
 whether he kept school, and why he left in his will 
 only his second-best bed to Anne Hathaway, his wife. 
 There is somewhat touching in the madness with 
 which the passing age mischooses the object on which 
 all candles shine and all eyes are turned ; the care 
 with which it registers every trifle touching Queen 
 Elizabeth, and King James, and the Essexes, Leices- 
 ters, Burleighs, and Buckinghams ; and lets pass with 
 out a single valuable note the founder of another 
 dynasty which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty 
 to be remembered the man who carries the Saxon 
 race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and 
 on whose thoughts the foremost people of the world 
 are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to 
 receive this and not another bias. A popular player 
 nobody suspected he was the poet of the human 
 race ; and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets 
 and intellectual men as from courtiers and frivolous 
 people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human 
 understanding for his times, never mentioned his 
 name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his 
 few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion 
 of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was at-
 
 164 KErKESENTATH E ME.V. 
 
 tempting. lie no doubt thought the praise he has 
 conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, 
 out of all question, the better poet of the two. 
 
 If it need wit to know wit, according to the prov 
 erb, Shakspeare s time should be capable of recog 
 nizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four years 
 after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after 
 him; and I find among his correspondents and ac 
 quaintances the following persons : Theodore Be/.a, 
 Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, Earl of Essex, 
 Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir 
 Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham 
 Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John 
 Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, 
 Arminius ; with all of whom exists some token of his 
 having communicated, without enumerating many 
 others whom doubtless he saw, Shakspeare, 
 Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Her 
 berts, Marlow, Chapman, and the rest. Since the 
 constellation of great men who appeared in Greece 
 in the time of Pericles, there was never any such 
 society; yet their genius failed them to find out the 
 best head in the universe. Our poet s mask was im 
 penetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It 
 took a century to make it suspected ; and not until two 
 centuries had passed after his death did any criticism 
 which we think adequate begin to appear. It was 
 not possible to write the history of Shakspeare till 
 now, for he is the father of German literature ; it was 
 on the introduction of Shakspeare into German by 
 Lessing, and the translation of his works by Wieland 
 and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German litera-
 
 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 165 
 
 ture was most intimately connected. It was not until 
 the nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a 
 sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet 
 could find such wondering readers. Now, literature, 
 philosophy, and thought are Shakspearized. His 
 mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do 
 not see. Our ears are educated to music by his 
 rhythm. Coleridge and Goethe are the only critics 
 who have expressed our convictions with any ade 
 quate fidelity ; but there is in all cultivated minds 
 a silent appreciation of his superlative power and 
 beauty, which, like Christianity, qualifies the period. 
 The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all di 
 rections, advertised the missing facts, offered money 
 for any information that will lead to proof, and with 
 what result? Beside some important illustration of 
 the history of the English stage, to which I have ad 
 verted, they have gleaned a few facts touching the 
 property, and dealings in regard to property, of the 
 poet. It appears that, from year to year, he owned 
 a larger share in the Blackfriars 1 Theatre ; its ward 
 robe and other appurtenances were his ; that he 
 bought an estate in his native village, with his earn 
 ings as writer and shareholder; that he lived in the 
 best house in Stratford ; was intrusted by his neigh 
 bors with their commissions in London, as of bor 
 rowing money and the like ; that he was a veritable 
 farmer. About the time when he was writing Mac 
 beth, he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of 
 Stratford, for thirty-five shillings ten pence, for corn 
 delivered to him at different times ; and, in all re 
 spects, appears as a good husband, with no reputation
 
 1 66 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 for eccentricity or excess. He was a good-natured 
 sort of man, an actor and shareholder in the theatre, 
 not in any striking manner distinguished from other 
 actors and managers. I admit the importance of this 
 information. It was well worth the pains that have 
 been taken to procure it. 
 
 But whatever scraps of information concerning his 
 condition these researches may have rescued, they 
 can shed no light upon that infinite invention which 
 is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. 
 We are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the 
 chronicle of parentage, birth, birthplace, schooling, 
 schoolmates, earning of money, marriage, publica 
 tion of books, celebrity, death ; and when we have 
 come to an end of this gossip, no ray of relation ap 
 pears between it and the goddess-born ; and it seems 
 as if, had we dipped at random into the "Modern 
 Plutarch," and read any other life there, it would 
 have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of 
 poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, 
 from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse 
 all history. Malone, Warburton, Dycc, and Collier 
 have wasted their oil. The famed theatres, Covent 
 Garden, Drury Lane, the Park and Tremont, have 
 vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, 
 and Macready dedicate their lives to this genius ; 
 him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The 
 genius knows them not. The recitation begins ; one 
 golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted 
 pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations 
 to its own inaccessible homes. I remember I went 
 once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the
 
 SIIAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 1&7 
 
 pride of the English stage ; and all I then heard, 
 and all I now remember, of the tragedian was that 
 in which the tragedian had no part : simply Ham 
 let s question to the ghost, 
 
 " What may this mean, 
 
 That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel 
 Revisit st thus the glimpses of the moon? " 
 
 That imagination which dilates the closet he writes 
 in to the world s dimension, crowds it with agents 
 in rank and order, as quickly reduces the big reality 
 to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of 
 his magic spoil for us the illusions of the greenroom. 
 Can any biography shed light on the localities into 
 which the Midsummer Night s Dream admits me? 
 Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or parish 
 recorder, sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the 
 genesis of that delicate creation? The forest of 
 Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the moon 
 light of Portia s villa, " the antres vast and desarts 
 idle " of Othello s captivity where is the third 
 cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancellor s file of 
 accounts, or private letter, that has kept one word 
 of those transcendent secrets? In fine, in this 
 drama, as in all great works of art, in the Cyclo- 
 pxan architecture of Egypt and India, in the 
 Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters, the Italian 
 painting, the ballads of Spain and Scotland, the 
 genius draws up the ladder after him when the 
 creative age goes up to heaven and gives way to a 
 new, who see the works, and ask in vain for a 
 history.
 
 1 68 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shak- 
 speare ; and even he can tell nothing, except to the 
 Shakspeare in us ; that is, to our most apprehen 
 sive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from 
 off his tripod, and give us anecdotes of his inspira 
 tions. Read the antique documents extricated, 
 analyzed, and compared by the assiduous Dycc 
 and Collier ; and now read one of those skyey 
 sentences aerolites which seem to have 
 fallen out of heaven, and which not your expe 
 rience, but the man within the breast, has accepted 
 as words of fate ; and tell me if they match ; if 
 the former account in any manner for the hitter ; 
 or which gives the most historical insight into the 
 man. 
 
 Hence, though our external history is so mea 
 gre, yet, with Shakspeare for biographer, instead 
 of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the informa 
 tion which is material, that which describes character 
 and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet 
 the man and deal with him, would most import 
 us to know. We have his recorded convictions on 
 those questions which knock for answer at every 
 heart on life and death, on love, on wealth and 
 poverty, on the prizes of life, and the ways whereby 
 we come at them ; on the characters of men, and the 
 influences, occult and open, which affect their fort 
 unes ; and on those mysterious and demoniacal 
 powers which defy our science, and which yet inter 
 weave their malice and their gift in our brightest 
 hours. Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets 
 without finding that the poet had there revealed,
 
 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 169 
 
 under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the 
 lore of friendship and of love ; the confusion of 
 sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at the 
 same time, the most intellectual, of men? What 
 trait of his private mind has he hidden in his 
 dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures 
 of the gentleman and the king, what forms and 
 humanities pleased him ; his delight in troops of 
 friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful giving. 
 Let Timon, let Warwick, let Antonio the mer 
 chant, answer for his great heart. So far from 
 Shakspeare s being the least known, he is the one 
 person, in all modern history, known to us. What 
 point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philoso 
 phy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has 
 he not settled? What mystery has he not signified 
 his knowledge of ? What office, or function, or 
 district of man s work has he not remembered? 
 What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught 
 Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer 
 than her delicacy ? What lover has he not outloved ? 
 What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman 
 has he not instructed in the rudeness of his be 
 havior? 
 
 Some able and appreciating critics think no criti 
 cism on Shakspeare valuable that does not rest 
 purely on the dramatic merit ; that he is falsely 
 judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly 
 as these critics of his dramatic merit, but still think 
 it secondary. He was a full man, who liked to talk ; 
 a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seek 
 ing vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he
 
 1 70 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 been less, we should have had to consider how well 
 he filled his place, how good a dramatist he was, 
 and he is the best in the world. But it turns out 
 that what he has to say is of that weight as to with 
 draw some attention from the vehicle ; and he is like 
 some saint whose history is to be rendered into all 
 languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pict 
 ures, and cut up into proverbs ; so that the occa 
 sion which gave the saint s meaning the form of a 
 conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is 
 immaterial, compared with the universality of its 
 application. So it fares with the wise Shakspeare 
 and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our 
 modern music ; he wrote the text of modern life : the 
 text of manners ; he drew the man of England and 
 Europe: the father of the man in America; he drew 
 the man, and described the day, and what is done in 
 it; he read the hearts of men and women, their 
 probity, and their second thought, and wiles : the 
 wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which 
 virtues and vices slide into their contraries ; he could 
 divide the mother s part from the father s part in the 
 face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of 
 freedom and of fate ; he knew the laws of repression 
 which make the police of nature ; and all the sweets 
 and all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind as 
 truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye. 
 And the importance of this wisdom of life sinks the 
 form, as, of Drama or Epic, out of notice. Tis like 
 making a question concerning the paper on which a 
 king s message is written. 
 
 Shakspeare is as much out of the category of emi-
 
 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. l>Jl 
 
 nent authors as he is out of the crowd. He is in 
 conceivably wise ; the others conceivably. A good 
 reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato s brain, and 
 think from thence ; but not into Shakspeare s. We 
 are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for 
 creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can imag 
 ine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety 
 compatible with an individual self, the subtilest of 
 authors, and only just within the possibility of 
 authorship. With this wisdom of life is the equal 
 endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He 
 clothed the creatures of his legend with form and 
 sentiments, as if they were people who had lived 
 under his roof; and few real men have left such 
 distinct characters as these fictions. And they 
 spoke in language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his 
 talents never seduced him into an ostentation, nor 
 did he harp on one string. An omnipresent human 
 ity co-ordinates all his faculties. Give a man of 
 talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently 
 appear. He has certain observations, opinions, 
 topics, which have some accidental prominence, and 
 which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this 
 part, and starves that other part, consulting not the 
 fitness of the thing, but his fitness and strength. 
 But Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no importunate 
 topic ; but all is duly given : no veins, no curiosities ; 
 no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he ; 
 he has no discoverable egotism ; the great he tells 
 greatly, the small subordinately. He is wise with 
 out emphasis or assertion ; he is strong, who lifts the 
 land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the
 
 172 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes 
 as well to do the one as the other. This makes that 
 equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and 
 love-songs ; a merit so incessant, that each reader is 
 incredulous of the perception of other readers. 
 
 This power of expression, or of transferring the 
 inmost truth of things into music and verse, makes 
 him the type of the poet, and has added a new prob 
 lem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him 
 into natural history, as a main production of the 
 globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliora 
 tions. Things were mirrored in his poetry without 
 loss or blur ; he could paint the fine with precision, 
 the great with compass; the tragic and the comic in 
 differently, and without any distortion or favor. He 
 carried his powerful execution into minute details, to 
 a hair point ; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as 
 firmly as he draws a mountain ; and yet these, like 
 nature s, will bear the scrutiny of the solar mi 
 croscope. 
 
 In short, he is the chief example to prove that 
 more or less of production, more or fewer pictures is 
 a thing indifferent. He had the power to make one 
 picture. Daguerre learned how to let one flower 
 etch its image on his plate of iodine ; and then pro 
 ceeds at leisure to etch a million. There are always 
 objects ; but there was never representation. Here 
 is perfect representation, at last ; and now let the 
 world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe 
 can be given for the making of a Shakspeare ; but 
 the possibility of the translation of things into song 
 is demonstrated.
 
 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 1 73 
 
 His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. 
 The sonnets, though their excellence is lost in the 
 splendor of the dramas, are as inimitable as they ; 
 and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit of the 
 piece ; like the tone of voice of some incomparable 
 person, so is this a speech of poetic beings, and any 
 clause as unproducible now as a whole poem. 
 
 Though the speeches in the play and single lines 
 have a beauty which tempts the ear to pause on them 
 for their euphuism, yet the sentence is so loaded with 
 meaning, and so linked with its foregoers and fol 
 lowers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are 
 as admirable as his ends ; every subordinate inven 
 tion, by which he helps himself to connect some 
 irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is not 
 reduced to dismount and walk, because his horses 
 are running off with him in some distant direction : 
 he always rides. 
 
 The finest poetry was first experience ; but the 
 thought has suffered a transformation since it was 
 an experience. Cultivated men often attain a good 
 degree of skill in writing verses ; but it is easy to 
 read, through their poems, their personal history; 
 any one acquainted with parties can name every fig 
 ure : this is Andrew, and that is Rachel. The sense 
 thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, 
 and not yet a butterfly. In the poet s mind the fact 
 has gone quite over into the new element of thought, 
 ancl has lost all that is exuvial. This generosity 
 abides with Shakspeare. We say, from the truth 
 and closeness of his pictures, that he knows the les 
 son by heart. Yet there is not a trace of egotism.
 
 174 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. 
 I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can 
 be a poet, for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, 
 not for its obligation but for its grace ; he delights 
 in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light 
 that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy 
 and hilarity, he sheds over the universe. Epicurus 
 relates that poetry hath such charms that a lover 
 might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And 
 the true bards have been noted for their firm and 
 cheerful temper. Homer lies in sunshine ; Chaucvr 
 is glad and erect; and Saadi says, " It was rumored 
 abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do 
 with repentance ?" Not less sovereign and cheerful. 
 much more sovereign and cheerful is the tone of 
 Shakspeare. His name suggests joy and emancipa 
 tion to the heart of men. If he should appear in any 
 company of human souls, who would not march in 
 his troop? He touches nothing that does not bor 
 row health and longevity from his festal style. 
 
 And now, how stands the account of man with 
 this bard and benefactor, when in solitude, shut 
 ting our ears to the reverberations of his fame, we 
 seek to strike the balance? Solitude lias austere- 
 lessons; it can teach us to spare both heroes and 
 poets; and it weighs Shakspeare also, and fin N 
 him to share the halfness and imperfection <>t hu 
 manity. 
 
 Shakspeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the 
 splendor of meaning that plays over the visible 
 world ; knew that a tree had another use th.in
 
 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 175 
 
 for apples, and corn another than for meal, and 
 the ball of the earth than for tillage and roads ; 
 that these things bore a second and finer harvest 
 to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and 
 conveying in all their natural history a certain 
 mute commentary on human life. Shakspeare 
 employed them as colors to compose his picture. 
 He rested in their beauty ; and never took the 
 step which seemed inevitable to such genius ; 
 namely, to explore the virtue which resides in 
 these symbols, and imparts this power: what is 
 that which they themselves say? He converted 
 the elements, which waited on his command, into 
 entertainments. He was master of the revels to 
 mankind. Is it not as if one should have, through 
 majestic powers of science, the comets given into 
 his hand, or the planets and their moons, and 
 should draw them from their orbits to glare with 
 the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and 
 advertise in all towns : " Very superior pyrotechny 
 this evening ! " Are the agents of nature, and 
 the power to undertand them, worth no more 
 than a street serenade, or the breath of a cigar? 
 One remembers again the trumpet-text in the 
 Koran: "The heavens and the earth, and all 
 that is between them, think ye we have created 
 them in jest ? " As long as the question is of 
 talent and mental power, the world of men has 
 not his equal to show. But when the question 
 is to life, and its materials, and its auxiliaries, how 
 does he profit me? What does it signify? It is 
 but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer-Night s
 
 176 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 Dream, or a Winter Evening s Tale; what sig 
 nifies another picture more or less? The Egyptian 
 verdict of the Shakspeare Societies comes to mind, 
 that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot 
 marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men 
 have led lives in some sort of keeping with their 
 thought ; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he 
 been less, had he reached only the common meas 
 ure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cer 
 vantes, we might leave the fact in the twilight of 
 human fate ; but, that this man of men, he who 
 gave to the science of mind a new and larger sub 
 ject than had ever existed, and planted the standard 
 of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos, 
 that he should not be wise for himself, it must 
 even go into the world s history, that the best poet 
 led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for 
 the public amusement. 
 
 Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, 
 German, and Swede, beheld the same objects ; they 
 also saw through them that which was contained. 
 And to what purpose? The beauty straightway 
 vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding 
 mountainous duty ; an obligation, a sadness, as of 
 piled mountains, fell on them, and life became 
 ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim s progress, a probation, 
 beleaguered round with doleful histories of Adam s 
 fall and curse behind us ; with doomsdays and 
 purgatorial and penal fires before us ; and the 
 heart of the seer and the heart of the listener sank 
 in them. 
 
 It must be conceded that these are half-views of
 
 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 177 
 
 half-men. The world still wants its poet-priest, a 
 reconciler, who shall not trifle, with Shakspeare the 
 player, nor shall grope in graves, with Swedenborg 
 the mourner ; but who shall see, speak, and act 
 with equal inspiration. For knowledge will brighten 
 the sunshine ; right is more beautiful than private 
 affection ; and love is compatible with universal 
 wisdom.
 
 NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE 
 WORLD 
 
 (179)
 
 NAPOLEON. 
 
 VI. 
 
 NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE 
 WORLD. 
 
 AMONG the eminent persons of the nineteenth cent 
 ury, Bonaparte is far the best known, and the most 
 powerful, and owes his predominance to the fidelity 
 with which he expresses the tone of thought and be 
 lief, the aims of the masses of active and cultivated 
 men. It is Swedenborg s theory, that every organ 
 is made up of homogeneous particles, or, as it is 
 sometimes expressed, every whole is made of simi 
 lars ; that is, the lungs are composed of infinitely 
 small lungs, the liver of infinitely small livers, the 
 kidney of little kidneys, etc. Following this analogy, 
 if any man is found to carry with him the power and 
 affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is France, if 
 Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom 
 he sways are little Napoleons. 
 
 In our society there is a standing antagonism be 
 tween the conservative and the democratic classes ; 
 between those who have made their fortunes and the 
 young and the poor who have fortunes to make ; be 
 tween the interests of dead labor that is, the labor 
 of hands long ago still in the grave, which labor is 
 now entombed in money stocks, or in land and
 
 lS2 RErRESE<\ 7 TATIVE MEX. 
 
 buildings owned by idle capitalists, and the in 
 terests of living labor which seeks to possess itself 
 of land and buildings, and money stocks. The first 
 class is timid, selfish, illiberal, hating innovation, and 
 continually losing numbers by death. The second 
 class is selfish also, encroaching, bold, self-reiving, 
 always outnumbering the other, and recruiting its 
 numbers every hour by births. It desires to keep 
 open every avenue to the competition of all, and to 
 multiply avenues, the class of business men in 
 America, in England, in France, and throughout 
 Europe, the class of industry and skill. Napoleon is 
 its representative. The instinct of active, brave, able 
 men throughout the middle class everywhere has 
 pointed out Napoleon as the incarnate Democrat. 
 He had their virtues and their vices; above all, he 
 had their spirit or aim. That tendency is material, 
 pointing at a sensual success, and employing the 
 richest and most various means to that end ; conver 
 sant with mechanical powers ; highly intellectual, 
 widely and accurately learned and skilful, but subor 
 dinating all intellectual and spiritual forces into means 
 to a material success. To be the rich man is the end. 
 "God has granted," says the Koran, "to every 
 people a prophet in its own tongue. 1 " Paris, and 
 London, and New York, the spirit of commerce, of 
 money, and material power, were also to have their 
 prophet, and Bonaparte was qualified and sent. 
 
 Every one of the million readers of anecdotes, or 
 memoirs, or lives of Napoleon, delights in the page 
 because he studies in it his own history. Napoleon 
 is thoroughly modern, and, at the highest point of
 
 NAPOLEON. 183 
 
 his fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers, 
 He is no saint, to use his own word, "no capu 
 chin, 11 and he is no hero, in the high sense. The 
 man in the street finds in him the qualities and powers 
 of other men in the street. He finds him, like him 
 self, by birth a citizen, who, by very intelligible merits, 
 arrived at such a commanding position that he could 
 indulge all those tastes which the common man pos 
 sesses, but is obliged to conceal and deny : good 
 society, good books, fast travelling, dress, dinners, 
 sen-ants without number, personal weight, the exe 
 cution of his ideas, the standing in the attitude of a 
 benefactor to all persons about him, the refined en 
 joyments of pictures, statues, music, palaces, and 
 conventional honors, precisely what is agreeable to 
 the heart of every man in the nineteenth century, this 
 powerful man possessed. 
 
 It is true that a man of Napoleon^ truth of adap 
 tation to the mind of the masses around him becomes 
 not merely representative, but actually a monopolizer 
 and usurper of other minds. Thus Mirabeau plagia 
 rized every good thought, every good word that was 
 spoken in France. Dumont relates that he sat in the 
 gallery of the Convention and heard Mirabeau make 
 a speech. It struck Dumont that he could fit it with 
 a peroration which he wrote in pencil immediately 
 and showed it to Lord Elgin, who sat by him. Lord 
 Elgin approved it, and Dumont, in the evening, 
 showed it to Mirabeau. Mirabeau read it, pronounced 
 it admirable, and declared he would incorporate it 
 into his harangue to-morrow, to the Assembly. " It 
 is impossible," said Dumont, " as, unfortunately, I
 
 184 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 have shown it to Lord Elgin." " If you have shown 
 it to Lord Elgin and to fifty persons beside, I shall 
 still speak it to-morrow." And he did speak it with 
 much effect at the next day s session. For Mirabcau 
 with his overpowering personality felt that these 
 things which his presence inspired were as much his 
 own as if he had said them, and that his adoption of 
 them gave them their weight. Much more absolute 
 and centralizing was the successor to Mirabeau s 
 popularity, and to much more than his predominance 
 in France. Indeed, a man of Napoleon s stamp al 
 most ceases to have a private speech and opinion. 
 He is so largely receptive and is so placed that he 
 comes to be a bureau for all the intelligence, wit, and 
 power of the age and country, He gains the battle ; 
 he makes the code ; he makes the system of weights 
 and measures ; he levels the Alps ; he builds the road. 
 All distinguished engineers, savans, statists, report 
 to him ; so, likewise, do all good heads in every kind ; 
 he adopts the best measures, sets his stamp on them ; 
 and not these alone, but on every happy and memo 
 rable expression. Every sentence spoken by Napo 
 leon and every line of his writing deserves reading, 
 as it is the sense of France. 
 
 Bonaparte was the idol of common men, because 
 he had in transcendent degree the qualities and powers 
 of common men. There is a certain satisfaction in 
 coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for 
 we get rid of cant and hypocrisy. Bonaparte wrought, 
 in common with that great class he represented, for 
 power and wealth, but Bonaparte, specially, with 
 out any scruple as to the means. All the senti-
 
 NAPOLEON. 185 
 
 ments which embarrass men s pursuit of these objects, 
 he set aside. The sentiments were for women and 
 children. Fontanes, in 1804, expressed Napoleon s 
 own sense, when, in behalf of the Senate, he ad 
 dressed him, "Sire, the desire of perfection is 
 the worst disease that ever afflicted the human 
 mind." The advocates of liberty and of progress 
 are "ideologists;" a word of contempt often in 
 his mouth: " Necker is an ideologist;" "Lafay 
 ette is an ideologist." 
 
 An Italian proverb, too well known, declares that, 
 " if you would succeed, you must not be too good." 
 It is an advantage, within certain limits, to have 
 renounced the dominion of the sentiments of piety, 
 gratitude, and generosity ; since, what was an im 
 passable bar to us, and still is to others, becomes a 
 convenient weapon for our purposes ; just as the 
 river which was a formidable barrier, winter trans 
 forms into the smoothest of roads. 
 
 Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and 
 affections, and would help himself with his hands 
 and his head. With him is no miracle, and no 
 magic. He is a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, 
 in earth, in roads, in buildings, in money, and in 
 troops, and a very consistent and wise master-work 
 man. He is never weak and literary, but acts with 
 the solidity and the precision of natural agents. 
 He has not lost his native sense and sympathy with 
 things. Men give way before such a man, as before 
 natural events. To be sure, there are men enough 
 who are immersed in things, as farmers, smiths, 
 sailors, and mechanics generally ; and we know how
 
 1 86 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 real and solid such men appear in the presence of 
 scholars and grammarians ; but these men ordinarily 
 lack the power of arrangement, and are like hands 
 without a head. But Bonaparte superadded to this 
 mineral and animal force, insight and generalization, 
 so that men saw in him combined the natural and 
 the intellectual power, as if the sea and land had 
 taken flesh and begun to cipher. Therefore the 
 land and sea seem to presuppose him. He came 
 unto his own, and they received him. This cipher 
 ing operative knows what he is working with and 
 what is the product. He knew the properties of 
 gold and iron, of wheels and ships, of troops and 
 diplomatists, and required that each should do after 
 its kind. 
 
 The art of war was the game in which he exerted 
 his arithmetic. It consisted, according to him, in 
 having always more forces than the enemy, on the 
 point where the enemy is attacked, or where he 
 attacks ; and his whole talent is strained by endless 
 manreuvre and evolution, to march always on the 
 enemy at an angle, and destroy his forces in detail. 
 It is obvious that a very small force, skilfully and 
 rapidly manoeuvring, so as always to bring two men 
 against one at the point of engagement, will be an 
 overmatch for a much larger body of men. 
 
 The times, his constitution, and his early circum 
 stances, combined to develop this pattern democrat. 
 He had the virtues of his class, and the conditions 
 for their activity. That common sense, which no 
 sooner respects any end, than it finds the means to 
 effect it ; the delight in the. use of means ; in the
 
 NAPOLEON. 187 
 
 choice, simplification, and combining of means; the 
 directness and thoroughness of his work ; the prudence 
 with which all was seen, and the energy with which 
 all was done, make him the natural organ and head 
 of what I may almost call, from its extent, the 
 modern party. 
 
 * Nature must have far the greatest share in every 
 success, and so in his. Such a man was wanted, 
 and such a man was born ; a man of stone and 
 iron, capable of sitting on horseback sixteen or sev 
 enteen hours, of going many days together without 
 rest or food, except by snatches, and with the speed 
 and spring of a tiger in action ; a man not embarrassed 
 by any scruples ; compact, instant, selfish, prudent, 
 and of a perception which did not suffer itself to be 
 balked or misled by any pretences of others, or any 
 superstition, or any heat or haste of his own. " My 
 hand of iron, 1 he said, " was not at the extremity of my 
 arm ; it was immediately connected with my head." 
 He respected the power of nature and fortune, and as 
 cribed to it his superiority, instead of valuing himself, 
 like inferior men, on his opinionativeness, and wag 
 ing war wjth nature. His favorite rhetoric lay in 
 allusion to his star ; and he pleased himself, as well 
 as the people, when he styled himself the " Child 
 of Destiny." "They charge me," he said, "with 
 the commission of great crimes : men of my stamp 
 do not commit crimes. Nothing has been more 
 simple than my elevation ; tis in vain to ascribe it 
 to intrigue or crime : it was owing to the peculiarity 
 of the times, and to my reputation of having fought 
 well against the enemies of my country. I have
 
 1 88 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 always marched with the opinion of great masses, 
 and with events. Of what use, then, would crimes 
 be to me?" Again he said, speaking of his son, 
 My son cannot replace me; I could not replace 
 myself. I am the creature of circumstances." 
 
 He had a directness of action never before com 
 bined with so much comprehension. He is a realist, 
 terrific to all talkers and confused truth-obscuring 
 persons. He sees where the matter hinges, throws 
 himself on the precise point of resistance, and slights 
 all other considerations. He is strong in the right 
 manner; namely, by insight. He never blundered 
 into victory, but won his battles in his head, before 
 he won them on the field. His principal means are 
 in himself. He asks counsel of no other. In 1796 
 he writes to the Directory: "I have conducted the 
 campaign without consulting any one. I should have 
 done no good, if I had been under the necessity of 
 conforming to the notions of another person. I have 
 gained some advantages over superior forces, and 
 when totally destitute of everything, because, in the 
 persuasion that your confidence was reposed in me, 
 my actions were as prompt as my thoughts." 
 
 History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility 
 of kings and governors. They are a class of persons 
 much to be pitied, for they know not what they 
 should do. The weavers strike for bread ; and the 
 king and his ministers, not knowing what to do, 
 meet them with bayonets. But Napoleon under 
 stood his business. Here was a man who, in each 
 moment and emergency, knew what to do next. It 
 is an immense comfort and refreshment to the spirits,
 
 NAPOLEON. 189 
 
 not only of kings but of citizens. Few men have any 
 next ; they live from hand to mouth, without plan, 
 and are ever at the end of their line, and, after each 
 action, wait for an impulse from abroad. Napoleon 
 had been the first man of the world, if his ends had 
 been purely public. As he is, he inspires confidence 
 and vigor by the extraordinary unity of his action. 
 He is firm, sure, self-denying, self-postponing, sacri 
 ficing everything to his aim, money, troops, gen 
 erals, and his own safety also, to his aim ; not misled, 
 like common adventurers, by the splendor of his own 
 means. " Incidents ought not to govern policy," he 
 said, " but policy, incidents." " To be hurried away 
 by every event is to have no political system at all. " 
 His victories were only so many doors, and he never 
 for a moment lost sight of his way onward in the 
 dazzle and uproar of the present circumstance. He 
 knew what to do, and he flew to his mark. He 
 would shorten a straight line to come at his object. 
 Horrible anecdotes may, no doubt, be collected from 
 his history, of the price at which he bought his suc 
 cesses ; but he must not therefore be set down as 
 cruel, but only as one who knew no impediment to 
 his will ; not bloodthirsty, not cruel, but woe to 
 what thing or person stood in his way ! Not blood 
 thirsty, but not sparing of blood, and pitiless. He 
 saw only the object : the obstacle must give way. 
 " Sire, General Clarke can not combine with Gen 
 eral Junot, for the dreadful fire of the Austrian 
 battery." - Let him carry the battery." " Sire, 
 every regiment that approaches the heavy artillery is 
 sacrificed: Sire, what orders?" " Forward, for-
 
 190 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 ward! Seruzicr, a colonel of artillery, gives, in 
 his Military Memoirs, the following sketch of a scene 
 after the battle of Austerlitz : "At the moment in 
 which the Russian army was making its retreat, pain 
 fully, but in good order, on the ice of the lake, the 
 Emperor Napoleon came riding at full speed toward 
 the artillery. You are losing time, he cried ; 
 fire upon these masses : they must be engulfed ; fire 
 upon the ice ! The order remained unexecuted for 
 ten minutes. In vain several officers and myself 
 were placed on the slope of a hill to produce the 
 effect : their balls and mine rolled upon the ice, with 
 out breaking it up. Seeing that, I tried a simple 
 method of elevating light howitzers. The almost 
 perpendicular fall of the heavy projectiles produced 
 the desired effect. My method was immediately 
 followed by the adjoining batteries, and in less than 
 no time we buried" some " thousands of Russians 
 and Austrians under the waters of the lake." 
 
 In the plenitude of his resources every obstacle 
 seemed to vanish. " There shall be no Alps," he 
 said; and he built his perfect roads, climbing by 
 graded galleries their steepest precipices until Italy 
 was as open to Paris as any town in France. He 
 laid his bones to and wrought for his crown. Having 
 decided what was to be done, he did that with might 
 and main. He put out all his strength. He risked 
 everything and spared nothing, neither ammunition, 
 nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor himself. 
 
 We like to see everything do its office after its 
 
 1 As I quote at second hand, and cannot procure Seruzicr, I 
 dare nut adopt the high figure I find.
 
 NAPOLEON. 191 
 
 kind, whether it be a milch-cow or a rattlesnake; 
 and if fighting be the best mode of adjusting na 
 tional differences (as large majorities of men seem 
 to agree), certainly Bonaparte was right in making 
 it thorough. " The grand principle of war," he said, 
 was that an army ought always to be ready, by 
 clay and by night, and at all hours, to make all the 
 resistance it is capable of making." He never econo 
 mized his ammunition, but on a hostile position 
 rained a torrent of iron shells, balls, grape-shot 
 to annihilate all defence. On any point of resist 
 ance he concentrated squadron on squadron in over 
 whelming numbers until it was swept out of existence. 
 To a regiment of horse-chasseurs at Lobenstein, two 
 days before the battle of Jena, Napoleon said : " My 
 lads, you must not fear death ; when soldiers brave 
 death they drive him into the enemy s ranks." In 
 the fury of assault he no more spared himself. He 
 went to the edge of his possibility. It is plain that 
 in Italy he did what he could and all that he could. 
 He came several times within an inch of ruin ; and 
 his own person was all but lost. He was flung into 
 the marsh at Arcola. The Austrians were between 
 him and his troops in the melee and he was brought 
 off with desperate efforts. At Lonato and at other 
 places he was on the point of being taken prisoner. 
 He fought sixty battles. He had never enough. 
 Each victory was a new weapon. " My power would 
 fall were I not to support it by new achievements. 
 Conquest has made me what I am, and conquest must 
 maintain me." He felt, with every wise man, that 
 as much life is needed for conservation as for crea-
 
 192 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 lion. We are always in peril, always in a bad plight, 
 just on the edge of destruction, and only to be saved 
 by invention and courage. 
 
 This vigor was guarded and tempered by the cold 
 est prudence and punctuality. A thunderbolt in the 
 attack, he was found invulnerable in his intrench- 
 ments. His very attack was never the inspiration 
 of courage but the result of calculation. His idea of 
 the best defence consists in being still the attacking 
 party. "My ambition," he says, "was great, but 
 was of a cold nature." In one of his conversations 
 with Las Cases he remarked : " As to moral courage 
 I have rarely met with thetwo-o clock-in-the-morning 
 kind : I mean unprepared courage, that which is 
 necessary on an unexpected occasion; and which, in 
 spite of the most unforeseen events, leaves full free 
 dom of judgment and decision ; " and he did not 
 hesitate to declare that he was himself eminently en 
 dowed with this " two-o clock-in-the-morning cour 
 age," and that he had met with few persons equal to 
 himself in this respect. 
 
 Everything depended on the nicety of his com 
 binations, and the stars were not more punctual 
 than his arithmetic. His personal attention de 
 scended to the smallest particulars. "At Monte- 
 bello I ordered Kellermann to attack with eight 
 hundred horse, and with these he separated the six 
 thousand Hungarian grenadiers, before the very 
 eyes of the Austrian cavalry. This cavalry was half 
 a league off, and required a quarter of an hour to 
 arrive on the field of action ; and I have observed 
 that it is always these quarters of an hour that decide
 
 NAPOLEON. 193 
 
 the fate of a battle." " Before he fought a battle, 
 Bonaparte thought little about what he should do in 
 case of success, but a great deal about what he 
 should do in case of a reverse of fortune." The 
 same prudence and good sense mark all his behavior. 
 His instructions to his secretary at the Tuilleries are 
 worth remembering: "During the night, enter my 
 chamber as seldom as possible. Do not awake me 
 when you have any good news to communicate ; with 
 that there is no hurry. But when you bring bad news, 
 rouse me instantly, for then there is not a moment 
 to be lost." It was a whimsical economy of the 
 same kind which dictated his practice, when general 
 in Italy, in regard to his burdensome correspondence. 
 He directed Bourrienne to leave all letters unopened 
 for three weeks, and then observed with satisfaction 
 how large a part of the correspondence had thus dis 
 posed of itself, and no longer required an answer. 
 His achievement of business was immense, and en 
 larges the known powers of man. There have been 
 many working kings, from Ulysses to William of 
 Orange, but none who accomplished a tithe of this 
 man s performance. 
 
 To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the ad 
 vantage of having been born to a private and humble 
 fortune. In his later days he had the weakness of 
 wishing to add to his crowns and badges the pre 
 scription of aristocracy ; but he knew his debt to his 
 austere education, and made no secret of his con 
 tempt for the born kings, and for " the hereditary 
 asses," as he coarsely styled the Bourbons. He 
 said that, " in their exile, they had learned nothing,
 
 194 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 and forgot nothing." Bonaparte had passed through 
 all the degrees of military service, but also was citi 
 zen before he was emperor, and so has the key to 
 citizenship. His remarks and estimates discover the 
 information and justness of measurement of the 
 middle class. Those who had to deal with him 
 found that he was not to be imposed upon, but could 
 cipher as well as another man. This appears in all 
 parts of his Memoirs, dictated at St. Helena. When 
 the expenses of the empress, of his household, of 
 his palaces, had accumulated great debts, Napoleon 
 examined the bills of the creditors himself, detected 
 overcharges and errors, and reduced the claims by 
 considerable sums. 
 
 His grand weapon, namely, the millions whom he 
 directed, he owed to the representative character 
 which clothed him. He interests us as he stands for 
 France and for Europe ; and he exists as captain 
 and king, only as far as the Revolution, or the 
 interest of the industrious masses, found an organ 
 and a leader in him. In the social interests he 
 knew the meaning and value of labor, and threw 
 himself naturally on that side. I like an incident 
 mentioned by one of his biographers at St. Helena : 
 " When walking with Mrs. Balcombe, some servants, 
 carrying heavy boxes, passed by on the road, and 
 Mrs. Balcombe desired them, in rather an angry tone, 
 to keep back. Napoleon interfered, saying, Respect 
 the burden, Madam. 1 " In the time of the empire 
 he directed attention to the improvement and em 
 bellishment of the markets of the capital. " The 
 market-place," he said, " is the Louvre of the com-
 
 NAPOLEON. 195 
 
 mon people." The principal works that have survived 
 him are his magnificent roads. He filled the troops 
 with his spirit, and a sort of freedom and companion 
 ship grew up between him and them, which the 
 forms of his court never permitted between the offi 
 cers and himself. They performed under his eye 
 iat which no others could do. The best document 
 of his relation to his troops is the order of the day 
 on the morning of the battle of Austerlitz, in which 
 Napoleon promises the troops that he will keep his 
 person out of reach of fire. This declaration, which 
 is the reverse of that ordinarily made by generals 
 and sovereigns on the eve of a battle, sufficiently 
 explains the devotion of the army to their leader. 
 
 But though there is in particulars this identity 
 between Napoleon and the mass of the people, his 
 real strength lay in their conviction that he was their 
 representative in his genius and aims, not only when 
 he courted, but when he controlled and even when 
 he decimated them by his conscriptions. He knew 
 as well as any Jacobin in France how to philosophize 
 on liberty and equality ; and when allusion was 
 made to the precious blood of centuries, which was 
 spilled by the killing of the Due d Enghien, he sug 
 gested, " Neither is my blood ditch-water." The 
 people felt that no longer the throne was occupied 
 and the land sucked of its nourishment by a small 
 class of legitimates, secluded from all community 
 with the children of the soil, and holding the ideas 
 and superstitions of a long-forgotten state of society. 
 Instead of that vampire, a man of themselves held in 
 the Tuilleries knowledge and ideas like their own,
 
 196 REPRESENTATIVE MEN". 
 
 opening, of course, to them and their children, all 
 places of power and trust. The day of sleepy, selfish 
 policy, ever narrowing the means and opportunities 
 of young men, was ended, and a day of expansion 
 and demand was come. A market for all the powers 
 and productions of man was opened ; brilliant pri/.es 
 glittered in the eyes of youth and talent. The old, 
 iron-bound, feudal France was changed into a young 
 Ohio or New York ; and those who smarted under 
 the immediate rigors of the new monarch pardoned 
 them, as the necessary severities of the military 
 system which had driven out the oppressor. And 
 even when the majority of the people had begun to 
 ask whether they had really gained anything under 
 the exhausting levies of men and money of the new 
 master, the whole talent of the country, in every 
 rank and kindred, took his part, and defended him as 
 its natural patron. In 1814, when advised to rely 
 on the higher classes, Napoleon said to those around 
 him : " Gentlemen, in the situation in which I stand, 
 my only nobility is the rabble of the Faubourgs. 1 
 
 Napoleon met this natural expectation. The 
 necessity of his position required a hospitality to 
 every sort of talent, and its appointment to trusts ; 
 and his feeling went along with this policy. Like 
 every superior person, he undoubtedly felt a desire 
 for men and compeers, and a wish to measure his 
 power with other masters, and an impatience of fools 
 and underlings. In Italy he sought for men, and 
 found none. "Good God!" he said, "how rare 
 men are ! There are eighteen millions in Italy, and 
 I have with difficulty found two, Daudolo and
 
 NAPOLEON. 197 
 
 Melzi." In later years, with larger experience, his 
 respect for mankind was not increased. In a 
 moment of bitterness he said to one of his oldest 
 friends: "Men deserve the contempt with which 
 they inspire me. I have only to put some gold lace 
 on the coat of my virtuous republicans, and they imme 
 diately become just what I wish them. 1 " This im 
 patience at levity was, however, an oblique tribute of 
 respect to those able persons who commanded his 
 regard, not only when he found them friends and 
 coadjutors, but also when they resisted his will. 
 He could not confound Fox and Pitt, Carnot, Lafay 
 ette, and Bernadotte with the danglers of his court ; 
 and, in spite of the detraction which his systematic 
 egotism dictated toward the great captains who con 
 quered with and for him, ample acknowledgments 
 are made by him to Lannes, Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix, 
 Massena, Murat, Ney, and Augereau. If he felt 
 himself their patron, and the founder of their for 
 tunes, as when he said, " I made my generals out of 
 mud, he could not hide his satisfaction in receiving 
 from them a seconding and support commensurate 
 with the grandeur of his enterprise. In the Russian 
 cimpaign he was so much impressed by the courage 
 and resources of Marshal Ney that he said : "I have 
 two hundred millions in my coffers, and I would give 
 them all for Ney. 1 The characters which he has 
 drawn of several of his marshals are discriminating, 
 and, though they did not content the insatiable 
 vanity of French officers, are, no doubt, substan 
 tially just. And, in fact, every species of merit was 
 sought and advanced under his government. " I
 
 198 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 know," he said, " the depth and draught of water of 
 every one of my generals." Natural power was sure 
 to be well received at his court. Seventeen men, in 
 his time, were raised from common soldiers to the 
 rank of king, marshal, duke, or general ; and the 
 crosses of his Legion of Honor were given to per 
 sonal valor, and not to family connection. " When 
 soldiers have been baptized in the fire of a battle 
 field, they have all one rank in my eyes." 
 
 When a natural king becomes a titular king, 
 everybody is pleased and satisfied. The Revolution 
 entitled the strong populace of the Faubourg St. An- 
 toine, and every horse-boy and powder-monkey in 
 the army, to look on Napoleon as flesh of his flesh, 
 and the creature of his party ; but there is something 
 in the success of grand talent which enlists a uni 
 versal sympathy. For, in the prevalence of sense 
 and spirit over stupidity and malversation, all reason 
 able men have an interest ; and, as intellectual beings, 
 we feel the air purified by the electric shock when 
 material force is overthrown by intellectual energies. 
 As soon as we are removed out of the reach of local 
 and accidental partialities, man feels that Napoleon 
 fights for him ; these are honest victories ; this strong 
 steam-engine does our work. Whatever appeals to 
 the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits 
 of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liber 
 ates us. This capacious head, revolving and disposing 
 sovereignly trains of affairs, and animating such 
 multitudes of agents ; this eye, which looked through 
 Europe ; this prompt invention ; this inexhaustible re 
 source : what events! what romantic pictures! what
 
 NArOLEON. 199 
 
 strange situations! when spying the Alps, by a 
 sunset in the Sicilian sea ; drawing up his army for 
 battle, insight of the Pyramids, and saying to his 
 troops: "From the tops of those pyramids, forty 
 centuries look down on you ; " fording the Red Sea ; 
 wading in the gulf of the Isthmus of Suez. On the 
 shore of Ptolemais, gigantic projects agitated him. 
 " Had Acre fallen, I should have changed the face 
 of the world." His army on the night of the battle 
 of Austerlitz, which was the anniversary of his in 
 auguration as Emperor, presented him with a bouquet 
 of forty standards taken in the fight. Perhaps it is 
 a little puerile, the pleasure he took in making these 
 contrasts glaring ; as when he pleased himself with 
 making kings wait in his antechambers, at Tilsit, at 
 Paris, and at Erfurt. 
 
 We cannot, in the universal imbecility, indecision, 
 and indolence of men, sufficiently congratulate our 
 selves on this strong and ready actor, who took 
 occasion by the beard, and showed us how much 
 may be accomplished by the mere force of such 
 virtues as all men possess in less degrees ; namely, 
 by punctuality, by personal attention, by courage, 
 and thoroughness. " The Austrians," he said, " do 
 not know the value of time." I should cite him, in 
 his earlier years, as a model of prudence. His power 
 does not consist in any wild or extravagant force ; in 
 any enthusiasm, like Mahomet s ; or singular power 
 of persuasion ; but in the exercise of common sense 
 on each emergency, instead of abiding by rules and 
 customs. The lesson he teaches is that which vigor 
 always teaches, that there is always room for it.
 
 200 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 To what heaps of cowardly doubts is not that man s 
 life an answer ! When he appeared, it was the 
 belief of all military men that there could be nothing 
 new in war; as it is the belief of men to-day that 
 nothing new can be undertaken in politics, or in 
 church, or in letters, or in trade, or in farming, or in 
 our social manners and customs ; and as it is, at all 
 times, the belief of society that the world is used up. 
 But Bonaparte knew better than society ; and, more 
 over, knew that he knew better. I think all men 
 know better than they do ; know that the institutions 
 we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles ; 
 but they dare not trust their presentiments. Bona 
 parte relied on his own sense, and did not care a 
 bean for other people s. The world treated his 
 novelties just as it treats everybody s novelties, 
 made infinite objection ; mustered all the impedi 
 ments ; but he snapped his finger at their objections, 
 "What creates great difficulty, he remarks, "in 
 the profession of the land-commander, is the neces 
 sity of feeding so many men and animals. If he 
 allows himself to be guided by the commissaries he 
 will never stir, and all his expeditions will fail." An 
 example of his common sense is what he says of the 
 passage of the Alps in winter, which all writers, one 
 repeating after the other, had described as imprac 
 ticable. "The winter," says Napoleon, "is not the 
 most unfavorable season for the passage of lofty 
 mountains. The snow is then firm, the weather 
 settled, and there is nothing to fear from avalanches, 
 the real and only danger to be apprehended in the 
 Alps. On those high mountains, there are often
 
 NAPOLEON. 201 
 
 very fine days in December, of a dry cold, with ex 
 treme calmness in the air." Read his account, too, 
 of the way in which battles are gained. " In all 
 battles, a moment occurs when the bravest troops, 
 after having made the greatest efforts, feel inclined 
 to run. That terror proceeds from a want of confi 
 dence in their own courage ; and it only requires a 
 slight opportunity, a pretence, to restore confidence 
 to them. The art is to give rise to the opportunity, 
 and to invent the pretence. At Arcola I won the 
 battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized that 
 moment of lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, and 
 gained the day with this handful. You see that two 
 armies are two bodies which meet, and endeavor to 
 frighten each other : a moment of panic occurs, and 
 that moment must be turned to advantage. When a 
 man has been present in many actions, he distin 
 guishes that moment without difficulty : it is as easy 
 as casting up an addition." 
 
 This deputy of the nineteenth century added to 
 his gifts a capacity for speculation on general topics. 
 He delighted in running through the range of prac 
 tical, of literary, and of abstract questions. His 
 opinion is always original, and to the purpose. On 
 the voyage to Egypt, he liked, after dinner, to fix on 
 three or four persons to support a proposition, and 
 as many to oppose it. He gave a subject, and the 
 discussions turned on questions of religion, the 
 different kinds of government, and the art of war. 
 One day he asked whether the planets were in 
 habited. On another, what was the age of the 
 world. Then he proposed to consider the proba-
 
 202 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 bility of the destruction of the globe, either by 
 water or by fire ; at another time, the truth or fallacy 
 of presentiments, and the interpretation of dreams. 
 He was very fond of talking of religion. In 1806 
 he conversed with Fournicr, bishop of Montpellier, 
 on matters of theology. There were two points on 
 which they could not agree; vi/,., that of hell, and 
 that of salvation out of the pale of the church. 
 The Emperor told Josephine that lie disputed like a 
 devil on these two points, on which the bishop was 
 inexorable. To the philosophers he readily yielded 
 all that was proved against religion as the work of 
 men and time ; but he would not hear of mate 
 rialism. One fine night, on deck, amid a clatter of 
 materialism, Bonaparte pointed to the stars, and 
 said : " You may talk as long as you please, gen 
 tlemen, but who made all that?" He delighted in 
 the conversation of men of science, particularly of 
 Monge and Berthollet ; but the men of letters he 
 slighted; "they were manufacturers of phrases." 
 Of medicine, too, he was fond of talking, and with 
 those of its practitioners whom he most esteemed, 
 with Corvisart at Paris, and with Antonomarchi 
 at St. Helena. "Believe me," he said to the last, 
 "we had better leave off all these remedies: life is 
 a fortress which neither you nor I know anything 
 about. Why throw obstacles in the way of its 
 defence? Its own means are superior to all the 
 apparatus of your laboratories. Corvisart candidly 
 agreed with me, that all your filthy mixtures are 
 good for nothing. Medicine is a collection of un 
 certain prescriptions, the results of which, taken
 
 NAPOLEON. 203 
 
 collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind. 
 Water, air, and cleanliness are the chief articles in 
 my pharmacopoeia." 
 
 His Memoirs, dictated to Count Montholon and 
 General Gourgaud, at St. Helena, have great value, 
 after all the deduction that, it seems, is to be made 
 from them, on account of his known disingenu- 
 ousncss. He has the good-nature of strength and 
 conscious superiority. I admire his simple, clear nar 
 rative of his battles ; good as Caesar s ; his good- 
 natured and sufficiently respectful account of Marshal 
 Wurmser and his other antagonists ; and his own 
 equality as a writer to his varying subject. The 
 most agreeable portion is the Campaign in Egypt. 
 
 He had hours of thought and wisdom. In inter 
 vals of leisure, either in the camp or the palace, 
 Napoleon appears as a man of genius, directing on 
 abstract questions the native appetite for truth and 
 the impatience of words he was wont to show in 
 war. He could enjoy every play of invention, a 
 romance, a ban mot, as well as a stratagem in a 
 campaign. He delighted to fascinate Josephine and 
 her ladies, in a dim-lighted apartment, by the terrors 
 of a fiction, to which his voice and dramatic power 
 lent every addition. 
 
 I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the mid 
 dle class of modern society ; of the throng who fill 
 the markets, shops, counting-houses, manufactories, 
 ships, of the modern world, aiming to be rich. He 
 was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the 
 internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the invent 
 or of means, the opener of doors and markets, the
 
 204 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 subverter of monopoly and abuse. Of course, the 
 rich and aristocratic did not like him. England, the 
 centre of capital, and Rome and Austria, centres of 
 tradition and genealogy, opposed him. The con 
 sternation of the dull and conservative classes, the 
 terror of the foolish old men and old women of the 
 Roman conclave, who in their despair took hold 
 of anything, and would cling to red-hot iron, the 
 vain attempts of statists to amuse and deceive him, 
 of the emperor of Austria to bribe him ; and the 
 instinct of the young, ardent, and active men, every 
 where, which pointed him out as the giant of the 
 middle class, make his history bright and command 
 ing. He had the virtues of the masses of his con 
 stituents : he had also their vices. I am sorry that 
 the brilliant picture has its reverse. But that is the 
 fatal quality which we discover in our pursuit of 
 wealth, that it is treacherous, and is bought by the 
 breaking or weakening of the sentiments : and it is 
 inevitable that we should find the same fact in the 
 history of this champion, who proposed to himself 
 simply a brilliant career, without any stipulation or 
 scruple concerning the means. 
 
 Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous 
 sentiments. The highest-placed individual in the 
 most cultivated age and population of the world, 
 he has not the merit of common truth and honesty. 
 He is unjust to his generals ; egotistic, and monopo 
 lizing; meanly stealing the credit of their great 
 actions from Kellermann, from Bernadotte ; intrigu 
 ing to involve his faithful Junot in hopeless bank 
 ruptcy, in order to drive him to a distance from
 
 NAPOLEON. 205 
 
 Paris, because the familiarity of his manners offends 
 the new pride of his throne. He is a boundless 
 liar. The official paper, his " Moniteurs." and all 
 his bulletins, are proverbs for saying what he wished 
 to be believed; and worse, he sat, in his prema 
 ture old age, in his lonely island, coldly falsifying 
 facts, and dates, and characters, and giving to his 
 tory a theatrical eclat. Like all Frenchmen, he has 
 a passion for stage effect. Every action that breathes 
 of generosity is poisoned by this calculation. His 
 star, his love of glory, his doctrine of the immortality 
 of the soul, are all French. " I must dazzle and 
 astonish. If I were to give the liberty of the press, 
 my power could not last three days." To make a 
 great noise is his favorite design. " A great reputa 
 tion is a great noise : the more there is made, the 
 farther off it is heard. Laws, institutions, monu 
 ments, nations, all fall ; but the noise continues, and 
 resounds in after ages." His doctrine of immortality 
 is simply fame. His theory of influence is not flat 
 tering. " There are two levers for moving men, 
 interest and fear. Love is a silly infatuation, depend 
 upon it. Friendship is but a name. I love nobody. 
 I do not even love my brothers : perhaps Joseph, c 
 little, from habit, and because he is my elder; and 
 Duroc, I love him too; but why? because his 
 character pleases me : he is stern and resolute, and, 
 I believe, the fellow never shed a tear. For my 
 part, I know very well that I have no true friends. 
 As long as I continue to be what I am, I may have 
 as many pretended friends as I please. Leave sen 
 sibility to women ; but men should be firm in heart
 
 206 REPRESENTATIVE MEX. 
 
 and purpose, or they should have nothing to do with 
 war and government." He was thoroughly unscru 
 pulous. He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown, 
 and poison, as his interest dictated. He had no 
 generosity, but mere vulgar hatred ; he was intensely 
 selfish ; he was perfidious ; he cheated at cards ; he 
 was a prodigious gossip, and opened letters, and 
 delighted in his infamous police, and rubbed his 
 hands with joy when he had intercepted some mor 
 sel of intelligence concerning the men and women 
 about him, boasting that "he knew everything;" 
 and interfered with the cutting the dresses of the 
 women ; and listened after the hurrahs and the com 
 pliments of the street, incognito. His manners we- re 
 coarse. He treated women with low familiarity. lie 
 had the habit of pulling their ears and pinching their 
 cheeks when he was in good humor, and of pulling the 
 ears and whiskers of men, and of striking and horse 
 play with them, to his last clays. It does not appear 
 that he listened at key-holes, or, at least, that lie was 
 caught at it. In short, when you have penetrate d 
 through all the circles of power and splendor, vi.u 
 were not dealing with a gentleman, at last, but wiili 
 an impostor and a rogue ; and he fully deserves the 
 epithet of Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter. 
 
 In describing the two parties into which modern 
 society divides itself, the democrat and the con 
 servative, I said Bonaparte represents the demo 
 crat, or the party of men of business, against the 
 stationary or conservative party. I omitted then to 
 say, what is material to the statement : namely, that
 
 NAPOLEON. 207 
 
 these two parties differ only as young and old. The 
 democrat is a young conservative ; the conservative 
 is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat 
 ripe and gone to seed, because both parties stand 
 on the one ground of the supreme value of property, 
 \vhich one endeavors to get, and the other to keep. 
 IJonaparte may be said to represent the whole history of 
 this party, its youth and its age ; yes, and with poetic 
 justice, its fate, in his own. The counter-revolution, 
 the counter-party, still waits for its organ and repre 
 sentative, in a lover and a man of truly public and 
 universal aims. 
 
 Here was an experiment, under the most favorable 
 conditions, of the powers of intellect without con 
 science. Never was such a leader so endowed, and 
 so weaponed ; never leader found such aids and fol 
 lowers. And what was the result of this vast talent 
 and power, of these immense armies, burned cities, 
 squandered treasures, immolated millions of men, of 
 this demoralized Europe? It came to no result. All 
 passed away, like the smoke of his artillery, and left 
 no trace. He left France smaller, poorer, feebler, 
 than he found it ; and the whole contest for freedom 
 vras to be begun again. The attempt was, in prin 
 ciple, suicidal. France served him with life, and 
 Kmb, and estate, as long as it could identify its in 
 terest with him ; but when men saw that after vic 
 tory was another war ; after the destruction of armies, 
 new conscriptions ; and they who had toiled so des 
 perately were never nearer to the reward, they 
 could not spend what they had earned, nor repose 
 on their down-beds, nor strut in their chateaux,
 
 20S REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 they deserted him. Men found that his absorbing 
 egotism was deadly to all other men. It resembled 
 the torpedo, which inflicts a succession of shocks on 
 any one who takes hold of it, producing spasms 
 which contract the muscles of the hand, so that the 
 man cannot open his fingers ; and the animal in 
 flicts new and more violent shocks, until he paralyzes 
 and kills his victim. So this exorbitant egotist nar 
 rowed, impoverished, and absorbed the power and 
 existence of those who served him ; and the universal 
 cry of France and of Europe in 1814 was, " enough 
 of him ; " " assez de Bonaparte. "^ 
 
 It was not Bonaparte s fault. He did all that in 
 him lay to live and thrive without moral principle. 
 It was the nature of things, the eternal law of man 
 and of the world, which balked and ruined him ; 
 and the result, in a million experiments, will be the 
 same. Every experiment, by multitudes or by indi 
 viduals, that has a sensual and selfish aim will fail. 
 The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient as the per 
 nicious Napoleon. As long as our civilization is es 
 sentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, 
 it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave 
 us sick ; there will be bitterness in our laughter ; and 
 our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good 
 profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and 
 which serves all men.
 
 GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 
 
 (209)
 
 GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 211 
 
 VII. 
 
 GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 
 
 I FIND a provision in the constitution of the 
 world for the writer or secretary who is to report 
 the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that 
 everywhere throbs and works. His office is a re 
 ception of the facts into the mind, and then a 
 selection of the eminent and characteristic experi 
 ences. 
 
 Nature will be reported. All things are engaged 
 in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, 
 goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock 
 leaves its scratches on the mountain ; the river, its 
 channel in the soil ; the animal, its bones in the 
 stratum ; the fern and leaf, their modest epitaph in 
 the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in 
 the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the 
 snow, or along the ground, but prints, in charac 
 ters more or less lasting, a map of its march. 
 Every act of the man inscribes itself in the mem 
 ories of his fellows, and in his own manners and 
 face. The air is full of sounds ; the sky, of tokens ; 
 the ground is all memoranda and signatures ; and 
 every object covered over with hints, which speak 
 to the intelligent.
 
 212 REPRESENTATIVE JlfElV. 
 
 In nature this self-registration is incessant, and 
 the narrative is the print of the seal. It neither 
 exceeds nor comes short of the fact. But nature 
 strives upward ; and, in man, the report is some 
 thing more than print of the seal. It is a new and 
 finer form of the original. The record is alive, 
 as that which it recorded is alive. In man, the 
 memory is a kind of looking-glass, which, having 
 received the images of surrounding objects, is 
 touched with life, and disposes them in a new 
 order. The facts which transpired do not lie in 
 it inert; but some subside, and others shine, so 
 that soon we have a new picture, composed of the 
 eminent experiences. The man cooperates. He 
 loves to communicate; and that which is for him 
 to say lies as a load on his heart until it is deliv 
 ered. But, besides the universal joy of conversa 
 tion, some men are born with exalted powers for 
 this second creation. Men are born to write. 
 The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and 
 peach-stone ; his vocation is to be a planter of 
 plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. 
 Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him 
 as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts 
 it all nonsense that they say that some things 
 are undescribable. He believes that all that can 
 be thought can be written, first or last : and he 
 would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it. 
 Nothing so broad, so subtle, or so dear but comes 
 therefore commended to his pen and he will 
 write. In his eyes, a man is the faculty of report 
 ing, and the universe is the possibility of being
 
 GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 213 
 
 reported. In conversation, in calamity, he finds 
 new materials; as our German poet said, "Some 
 god gave me the power to paint what I suffer." 
 He draws his rents from rage and pain. By acting 
 rashly, he buys the power of talking wisely. 
 Vexations and a tempest of passion only fill his 
 sail; as the good Luther writes, "When I am 
 angry, I can pray well and preach well ; " and, 
 if we knew the genesis of fine strokes of elo 
 quence, they might recall the complaisance of 
 Sultan Amurath, who struck off some Persian 
 heads that his physician, Vesalius, might see the 
 spasms in the muscles of the neck. His failures 
 are the preparation of his victories. A new 
 thought or a crisis of passion apprises him that 
 all that he has yet learned and written is exoteric, 
 is not the fact, but some rumor of the fact. 
 What then? Does he throw away the pen? No, 
 he begins again to describe in the new light 
 which has shined on him, if, by some means, 
 he may yet save some true word. Nature con 
 spires. Whatever can be thought can be spoken, 
 and still rises for utterance, though to rude and 
 stammering organs. If they cannot compass it, 
 it waits and works, until, at last, it moulds them 
 to its perfect will, and is articulated. 
 
 This striving after imitative expression, which 
 one meets everywhere, is significant of the aim 
 of nature, but is mere stenography. There are 
 higher degrees, and nature has more splendid 
 endowments for those whom she elects to a supe 
 rior office; for the class of scholars or writers who
 
 214 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 see connection where the multitude see fragments, 
 and who are impelled to exhibit the facts in order, 
 and so to supply the axis on which the frame of 
 things turns. Nature has dearly at heart the for 
 mation of the speculative man or scholar. It is an 
 end never lost sight of, and is prepared in tlvj 
 original casting of things. He is no permissive 
 or accidental appearance, but an organic agent, 
 one of the estates of the realm, provided and pre 
 pared from of old and from everlasting, in the knit 
 ting and contexture of tilings. Presentiments, 
 impulses, cheer him. There is a certain heat in 
 the breast, which attends the perception of a pri 
 mary truth which is the shining of the spiritual sun 
 down into the shaft of the mine. Every thought 
 which dawns on the mind, in the moment of its 
 emergence, announces its own rank, whether it is 
 some whimsey, or whether it is a power. 
 
 If he have his incitements, there is, on the other 
 side, invitation and need enough of his gift. Society 
 has, at all times, the same want ; namely, of one 
 sane man with adequate powers of expression to hold 
 up each object of monomania in its right relations. 
 The ambitious and mercenary bring their last new 
 mumbo-jumbo, whether tariff, Texas, railroad, 
 Romanism, mesmerism, or California, and by de 
 taching the object from its relations, easily succeed 
 in making it seen in a glare ; and a multitude go mad 
 about it, and they are not to be reproved or cured by 
 the opposite multitude, who are kept from this par 
 ticular insanity by an equal frenzy on another crotchet. 
 But let on^- man have the comprehensive eye that can
 
 GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 215 
 
 replace this isolated prodigy in its right neighbor 
 hood and bearings, the illusion vanishes, and the 
 returning reason of the community thanks the reason 
 of the monitor. 
 
 The scholar is the man of the ages, but he must 
 also wish with other men to stand well with his con 
 temporaries. But there is a certain ridicule, among 
 superficial people, thrown on the scholars or clerisy, 
 which is of no import, unless the scholar heed it. In 
 this country, the emphasis of conversation and of 
 public opinion commends the practical man ; and 
 the solid portion of the community is named with 
 significant respect in every circle. Our people are of 
 Bonaparte s opinion concerning ideologists. Ideas 
 are subversive of social order and comfort, and at 
 last make a fool of the possessor. It is believed the 
 ordering a cargo of goods from New York to Smyrna ; 
 or the running up and down to procure a company 
 of subscribers to set a-going five or ten thousand 
 spindles ; or the negotiations of a caucus, and the 
 practising on the prejudices and facility of country- 
 people, to secure their votes in November, is prac 
 tical and commendable. 
 
 If I were to compare action of a much higher strain 
 with a life of contemplation, I should not venture to 
 pronounce with much confidence in favor of the 
 former. Mankind have such a deep stake in inward 
 illumination, that there is much to be said by the 
 hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and 
 prayer. A certain partiality, a headiness, and loss 
 of balance is the tax which all action must pay. 
 Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. Men s
 
 21 6 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 actions are too strong for them. Show me a man 
 who has acted, and who has not been the victim and 
 slave of his action. What they have done commits 
 and enforces them to do the same again. The first 
 act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacra- 
 ment. The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in 
 some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave 
 to the form, and lose the aspiration. The Quaker 
 has established Quakerism, the Shaker lias estab 
 lished his monastery and his dance ; and although 
 each prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, 
 which is anti-spiritual. But where are his new things 
 of to-day? In actions of enthusiasm this drawback 
 appears ; but in those lower activities, which have no 
 higher aim than to make us more comfortable and 
 more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that 
 steal and lie, actions that divorce the specu 
 lative from the practical faculty, and put a ban 
 on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else 
 but drawback and negation. The Hindoos write 
 in their sacred books : " Children only, and not the 
 Ijarned, speak of the speculative and the practical 
 faculties as two. They are but one, for both obtain 
 the selfsame end, and the place which is gained by 
 the followers of the one is gained by the followers of 
 the other. That man seeth, who seeth that the 
 speculative and the practical doctrines are one." For 
 great action must draw on the spiritual nature. The 
 measure of action is the sentiment from which it pro 
 ceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the 
 most private circumstance. 
 
 This disparagement will i .1 come from the leaders,
 
 GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 21 J 
 
 but from inferior persons. The robust gentlemen 
 who stand at the head of the practical class share 
 the ideas of the time, and have too much sympathy 
 with the speculative class. It is not from men ex 
 cellent in any kind, that disparagement of any other 
 is to be looked for. With such, Talleyrand s ques 
 tion is ever the main one; not, is he rich? is he 
 committed? is he well-meaning? has he this or that 
 faculty? is he of the movement; is he of the estab 
 lishment? but, Is he anybody? does he stand for 
 something? He must be good of his kind. That 
 is all that Talleyrand, all that State street, all that 
 the common sense of mankind asks. Be real and 
 admirable, not as we know, but as you know. Able 
 men do not care in what kind a man is able, so only 
 that he is able. A master likes a master, and does 
 not stipulate whether it be orator, artist, craftsman, 
 or king. 
 
 Society has really no graver interest than the well- 
 being of the literary class. And it is not to be 
 denied that men are cordial in their recognition and 
 welcome of intellectual accomplishments. Still the 
 writer does not stand with us on any commanding 
 ground. I think this to be his own fault. A pound 
 passes for a pound. There have been times when 
 he was a sacred person : he wrote Bibles ; the first 
 hymns ; the codes ; the epics ; tragic songs ; Sibyl 
 line verses ; Chaldean oracles ; Laconian sentences, 
 inscribed on temple walls. Every word was true, 
 and woke the nations to new life. He wrote without 
 levity and without choice. Every word was carved 
 before his eyes into the earth and the sky ; and the
 
 2lS REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 sun and stars were only letters of the same pur 
 port, and of no more necessity. ISut how can he be 
 honored, when he does not honor himself; when he 
 loses himself in the crowd ; when he is no longer 
 the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy 
 opinion of a reckless public ; when he must sustain 
 with shameless advocacy some bad government, or 
 must bark, all the year round, in opposition ; or 
 write conventional criticism or profligate novels ; or, 
 at any rate, write without thought, and without 
 recurrence, by day and by night, to the sources of 
 inspiration? 
 
 Some reply to these questions may be furnished 
 by looking over the list of men of literary genius in 
 our. age. Among these no more instructive name 
 occurs than that of Goethe, to represent the powers 
 and duties of the scholar or writer. 
 
 I described Bonaparte as a representative of the 
 popular external life and aims of the nineteenth cent 
 ury. Its other half, its poet, is Goethe, a man 
 quite domesticated in the century, breathing its air, 
 enjoying its fruits, impossible at any earlier time, 
 and taking away, by his colossal parts, the reproach 
 of weakness, which, but for him, would lie on thj 
 intellectual works of the period. He appears at a 
 time when a general culture has spread itself, and 
 has smoothed down all sharp individual traits ; 
 when, in the absence of heroic characters, a 
 social comfort and cooperation have come in. 
 There is no poet, but scores of poetic writers ; 
 no Columbus, but hundreds of post-captains, with 
 transit-telescope, barometer, and concentrated soup
 
 GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 219 
 
 and pemmican ; no Demosthenes, no Chatham, 
 but any number of clever parliamentary and fo 
 rensic debaters ; no prophet or saint, but colleges 
 of divinity ; no learned man, but learned societies, 
 a cheap press, reading-rooms, and book-clubs 
 without number. There was never such a mis 
 cellany of facts. The world extends itself like 
 American trade. We conceive Greek or Roman life 
 life in the middle ages to be a simple and com 
 prehensible affair ; but modern life to respect a 
 multitude of things, which is distracting. 
 
 Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity: 
 hundred-handed, Argus-eyed, able and happy to cope 
 with this rolling miscellany of facts and sciences, and, 
 by his own versatility, to dispose of them with ease ; 
 a manly mind, unembarrassed by the variety of coats 
 of convention with which life had got encrusted, 
 easily able by his subtlety to pierce these, and to 
 draw his strength from nature, with which he lived 
 in full communion. What is strange, too, he lived 
 in a small town, in a petty state, in a defeated state, 
 and in a time when Germany played no such leading 
 part in the world s affairs as to swell the bosom of 
 her sons with any metropolitan pride, such as might 
 have cheered a French, or English, or, once, a Ro 
 man, or Attic genius. Yet there is no trace of pro 
 vincial limitation in his muse. He is not a debtor 
 to his position, but was born with a free and con 
 trolling genius. 
 
 The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is a phi 
 losophy of literature set in poetry ; the work of one 
 who found himself the master of histories, mytholo-
 
 220 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 gies, philosophies, sciences, and national literatures, 
 in the encyclopaedical manner in which modern eru 
 dition, with its international intercourse of the whole 
 earth s population, researches into Indian, Etruscan, 
 and all Cyclopaian arts, geology, chemistry, astron 
 omy ; and every one of these kingdoms assuming a 
 certain aerial and poetic character, by reason of the 
 multitude. One looks at a king with reverence; but 
 if one should chance to be at a congress of kings, the 
 eye would take liberties with the peculiarities of each. 
 These are not wild miraculous songs, but elaborate 
 forms, to which the poet has confided the results of 
 eighty years of observation. This reflective and crit 
 ical wisdom makes the poem more truly the flower of 
 this time. It dates itself. Still he is a poet, poet 
 of a prouder laurel than any contemporary, and, under 
 this plague of microscopes (for he seems to see out 
 of every pore of his skin), strikes the harp with a 
 hero s strength and grace. 
 
 The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence. 
 In the menstruum of this man s wit, the past and the 
 present ages, and their religions, politics, and modes 
 of thinking, are dissolved into archetypes and ideas. 
 What new mythologies sail through his head ! The 
 Greeks said that Alexander went as far as Chaos ; 
 Cioethe went only the other day as far; and one step 
 farther he hazarded, and brought himself safe back. 
 There is a heart-cheering freedom in his speculation. 
 The immense horizon which journeys with us lends 
 its majesty to trifles, and to matters of convenience 
 and necessity, as to solemn and festal performances. 
 He was the soul of his century. If that was learned,
 
 GOETHE; OR THE WRITER. 221 
 
 and had become, by population, compact organiza 
 tion, and drill of parts, one great exploring expedi 
 tion, accumulating a glut of facts and fruits too fast 
 for any hitherto-existing savans to classify, this man s 
 mind had ample chambers for the distribution of all. 
 He had a power to unite the detached atoms again 
 by their own law. He has clothed our modern exist 
 ence with poetry. Amid littleness and detail, he 
 detected the genius of life, the old cunning Proteus, 
 nestling close beside us, and showed that the dulness 
 and prose we ascribe to the age was only another of 
 his masks : 
 
 " His very flight is presence in disguise ; " 
 
 that he had put off a gay uniform for a fatigue-dress, 
 and was not a whit less vivacious or rich in Liver 
 pool or the Hague, than once in Rome or Antioch. 
 He sought him in public squares and main streets, 
 in boulevards and hotels ; and in the solidest king 
 dom of routine and the senses he showed the lurk 
 ing daemonic power, that in actions of routine a 
 thread of mythology and fable spins itself; and this, 
 by tracing the pedigree of every usage and practice, 
 every institution, utensil, and means, home to its 
 origin in the structure of man. He had an extreme 
 impatience of conjecture and of rhetoric. " I have 
 guesses enough of my own ; if a man write a book, 
 let him set down only what he knows. 11 He writes 
 in the plainest and lowest tone, omitting a great deal 
 more than he writes, and putting ever a thing for a 
 word. He has explained the distinction between
 
 222 REPRESENTATIVE MEN, 
 
 the antique and the modern spirit and art. He has 
 denned art, its scope and laws. He has said the 
 best things about nature that ever were said. He 
 treats nature as the old philosophers, as the seven 
 wise masters did, and, with whatever loss of 
 French tabulation and dissection, poetry and hu 
 manity remain to us ; and they have some doctoral 
 skill. Eyes are better, on the whole, than telescopes 
 or microscopes. He has contributed a key to many 
 parts of nature, through the rare turn of unity and 
 simplicity in his mind. Thus Goethe suggested the 
 leading idea of modern botany, that a leaf, or the 
 eye of a leaf, is the unit of botany, and that every 
 part of the plant is only a transformed leaf to meet 
 a new condition ; and, by varying the conditions, a 
 leaf may be converted into any other organ, and any 
 other organ into a leaf. In like manner, in oste 
 ology, he assumed that one vertebra of the spine 
 might be considered the unit of the skeleton : the 
 head was only the uppermost vertebra transformed. 
 " The plant goes from knot to knot, closing, at last, 
 with the flower and the seed. So the tapeworm, 
 the caterpillar, goes from knot to knot, and closes 
 with the head. Man and the higher animals are 
 built up through the vertebrae, the powers being 
 concentrated in the head." In optics, again, he re 
 jected the artificial theory of seven colors, and con 
 sidered that every color was the mixture of light and 
 darkness in new proportions. It is really of very 
 little consequence what topic he writes upon. He 
 sees at every pore, and has a certain gravitation 
 towards truth. He will realize what you say. He
 
 GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 223 
 
 hates to be trifled with, and to be made to say over 
 again some old wife s fable, that has had possession 
 of men s faith these thousand years. He may as 
 well see if it is true as another. He sifts it. I am 
 here, lie would say, to be the measure and judge of 
 these things. Why should I take them on trust? 
 And, therefore, what he says of religion, of passion, 
 of marriage, of manners, of property, of paper 
 money, of periods of belief, of omens, of luck, or 
 whatever else, refuses to be forgotten. 
 
 Take the most remarkable example that could oc 
 cur of this tendency to verify every term in popular 
 use. The devil had played an important part in 
 mythology in all times. Goethe would have no word 
 that does not cover a thing. The same measure will 
 still serve : "I have never heard of any crime which 
 I might not have committed." So he flies at the 
 throat of this imp. He shall be real; he shall be 
 modern ; he shall be European ; he shall dress like a 
 gentleman, and accept the manners, and walk in the 
 streets, and be well initiated in the life of Vienna 
 and of Heidelberg, in 1820, or he shall not exist. 
 Accordingly, he stripped him of mythologic gear, of 
 horns, cloven foot, harpoon tail, brimstone, and 
 blue-fire, and, instead of looking in books and pict 
 ures, looked for him in his own mind, in every 
 shade of coldness, selfishness, and unbelief that, in 
 crowds or in solitude, darkens over the human 
 thought, and found that the portrait gained reality 
 and terror by everything he added, and by every 
 thing he took away. He found that the essence of 
 this hobgoblin, which had hovered in shadow about
 
 224 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 the habitations of men ever since there were men, 
 was pure intellect applied as always there is a 
 tendency to the service of the senses ; and he 
 flung into literature, in his Mephistopheles, the first 
 organic figure that has been added for some ages, 
 and which will remain as long as the Prometheus. 
 
 I have no design to enter into any analysis of his 
 numerous works. They consist of translations, criti 
 cism, dramas, lyric and every other description of 
 poems, literary journals, and portraits of distinguished 
 men. Yet I cannot omit to specify the Wilhelm 
 Meister. 
 
 Wilhelm Meister is a novel in every sense, the first 
 of its kind, called by its admirers the only delineation 
 of modern society, as if other novels, those of 
 Scott, for example, dealt with costume and condition, 
 this with the spirit of life. It is a book over which 
 sdme veil is still drawn. It is read by very intelli 
 gent persons with wonder and delight. It is pre 
 ferred by some such to Hamlet, as a work of genius. 
 I suppose no book of this century can compare with 
 it in its delicious sweetness, so new, so provoking to 
 the mind, gratifying it with so many and so solid 
 thoughts, just insights into life, and manners, and 
 characters ; so many good hints for the conduct of 
 life, so many unexpected glimpses into a higher 
 sphere, and never a trace of rhetoric or dulness. A 
 very provoking book to the curiosity of young men 
 of genius, but a very unsatisfactory one. Lovers of 
 light reading, those who look in it for the entertain 
 ment they find in a romance, are disappointed. 
 On the other hand, those who begin it with the
 
 GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 22$ 
 
 higher hope to read in it a worthy history of genius, 
 and the just award of the laurel to its toils and 
 denials, have also reason to complain. We had an 
 English romance here, not long ago, professing to 
 embody the hope of a new age, and to unfold the 
 political hope of the party called " Young England," 
 in which the only reward of virtue is a seat in Parlia 
 ment and a peerage. Goethe s romance has a con 
 clusion as lame and immoral. George Sand, in 
 Consuelo and its continuation, has sketched a truer 
 and more dignified picture. In the progress of the 
 story, the characters of the hero and heroine expand 
 at a rate that shivers the porcelain chess-table of 
 aristocratic convention : they quit the society and 
 habits of their rank ; they lose their wealth ; they be 
 come the servants of great ideas and of the most 
 generous social ends ; until at last the hero, who is 
 the centre and fountain of an association for the ren 
 dering of the noblest benefits to the human race, no 
 longer answers to his own titled name it sounds 
 foreign and remote in his ear. " I am only man, 1 
 he says ; "I breathe and work for man," and this in 
 poverty and extreme sacrifices. Goethe s hero, on 
 the contrary, has so many weaknesses and impuri 
 ties, and keeps such bad company, that the sober 
 English public, when the book was translated, were 
 disgusted. And yet it is so crammed with wisdom, 
 with knowledge of the world, and with knowledge of 
 laws ; the persons so truly and subtly drawn, and 
 with such few strokes, and not a word too much, the 
 book remains ever so new and unexhausted, that we 
 must even let it go its way, and be willing to get
 
 226 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 what good from it we can, assured that it has only 
 begun its office, and has millions of readers yet to 
 serve. 
 
 The argument is the passage of a democrat to the 
 aristocracy, using both words in their best sense. 
 And this passage is not made in any mean or creep 
 ing way, but through the hall door. Nature and 
 character assist, and the rank is made real by sense 
 and probity in the nobles. No generous youth can 
 escape this charm of reality in the book, so that it is 
 highly stimulating to intellect and courage. 
 
 The ardent and holy Novalis characterized the 
 book as thoroughly modern and prosaic; the ro 
 mantic is completely levelled in it ; so is the poetry 
 of nature ; the wonderful. The book treats only of 
 the ordinary affairs of men : it is a poeticized civic 
 and domestic story. The wonderful in it is expressly 
 treated as fiction and enthusiastic dreaming ; " and 
 yet, what is also characteristic, Novalis soon returned 
 to this book, and it remained his favorite reading to 
 the end of his life. 
 
 What distinguishes Goethe for French and Eng 
 lish readers is a property which he shares with his 
 nation, a habitual reference to interior truth. In 
 England and in America there is a respect for 
 talent ; and if it is exerted in support of any ascer 
 tained or intelligible interest or party, or in regular 
 opposition to any, the public is satisfied. In F ranee 
 there is even a greater delight in intellectual brill 
 iancy, for its own sake. And in all these coun 
 tries men of talent write from talent. It is enough 
 if the understanding is occupied, the taste propi-
 
 GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 22/ 
 
 tiatecl, so many columns, so many hours, filled in 
 a lively and creditable way. The German intellect 
 wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical 
 understanding of the English and the American ad 
 venture ; but has a certain probity which never 
 rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, 
 To what end? A German public asks for a control 
 ling sincerity. Here is activity of thought ; but 
 what is it for? What does the man mean ? Whence, 
 whence all these thoughts? 
 
 Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must 
 be a man behind the book ; a personality which, by 
 birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there 
 set forth, and which exists to see and state things 
 so, and not otherwise ; holding things because they 
 are things. If he cannot rightly express himself to 
 day, the same things subsist, and will open them 
 selves to-morrow. There lies the burden on his 
 mind, the burden of truth to be declared, more 
 or less understood ; and it constitutes his business 
 and calling in the world, to see those facts through, 
 and to make them known. What signifies that he 
 trips and stammers ; that his voice is harsh or hiss 
 ing ; that his method or his tropes are inadequate ? 
 That message will find method and imagery, articula 
 tion and melody. Though he \vere dumb, it would 
 speak. If not, if there be no such God s word in 
 the man, what care we how adroit, how fluent, 
 how brilliant he is? 
 
 It makes a great difference to the force of any 
 sentence whether there be a man behind it or no. 
 In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper,
 
 228 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 I discern no form ; only some irresponsible shadow ; 
 oftener some moneyed corporation, or some dangler, 
 who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, 
 to pass for somebody. But through every clause 
 and part of speech of a right book I meet the eyes 
 of the most determined of men : his force and terror 
 inundate every word ; the commas and dashes are 
 alive, so that the writing is athletic and nimble, 
 can go far and live long. 
 
 In England and America one may be an adept in 
 the writing of a Greek or Latin poet, without any 
 poetic taste or fire. That a man has spent years on 
 Plato and Proclus does not afford a presumption 
 that he holds heroic opinions, or undervalues the 
 fashions of his town. But the German nation have 
 the most ridiculous good faith on these subjects. 
 The student, out of the lecture-room, still broods on 
 the lessons ; and the professor cannot divest himself 
 of the fancy that the truths of philosophy have some 
 application to Berlin and Munich. This earnestness 
 enables them to outsee men of much more talent. 
 Hence, almost all the valuable distinctions which are 
 current in higher conversation have been derived to 
 us from Germany. But whilst men distinguished 
 for wit and learning in England and France adopt 
 their study and their side with a certain levity, and 
 are not understood to be very deeply engaged, from 
 grounds of character, to the topic or the part they 
 espouse, Goethe, the head and body of the German 
 nation, does not speak from talent, but the truth 
 shines through ; he is very wise, though his talent 
 often veils his wisdom. However excellent his sen-
 
 GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 229 
 
 tence is, he has somewhat better in view. It 
 awakens my curiosity. He has the formidable in 
 dependence which converse with truth gives : hear 
 you, or forbear, his fact abides ; and your interest 
 in the writer is not confined to his story, and he dis 
 missed from memory, when he has performed his 
 task creditably, as a baker when he has left his loaf; 
 but his work is the least part of him. The old 
 Eternal Genius who built the world has confided 
 himself more to this man than to any other. I dare 
 not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds 
 from which genius has spoken. He has not wor 
 shipped the highest unity ; he is incapable of a self- 
 surrender to the moral sentiment. There are nobler 
 strains in poetry than any he has sounded. There 
 are writers poorer in talent, whose tone is purer, and 
 more touches the heart. Goethe can never be dear 
 to men. His is not even the devotion to pure truth, 
 but to truth for the sake of culture. He has no aims 
 less large than the conquest of universal nature, of 
 universal truth, to be his portion ; a man not to be 
 bribed, nor deceived, nor overawed ; of a stoical self- 
 command and self-denial, and having one test for all 
 men, What can yon teach me ? All possessions are 
 valued by him for that only: rank, privileges, health, 
 time, being itself. 
 
 He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts, 
 and sciences, and events ; artistic, but not artist ; 
 spiritual, but not spiritualist. There is nothing he 
 had not right to know ; there is no weapon in the 
 armory of universal genius he did not take into his 
 hand, but with peremptory heed that he should not
 
 230 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 be for a moment prejudiced by his instruments. He 
 lays a ray of light under every fact, and between him 
 self and his dearest property. From him nothing was 
 hid, nothing withholden. The lurking daemons sat 
 to him, and the saint who saw the daemons ; and 
 the metaphysical elements took form. " Piety itself 
 is no aim, but only a means, whereby through purest 
 inward peace we may attain to highest culture. 
 And his penetration of every secret of the fine arts 
 will make Goethe still more statuesque. His affec 
 tions help him, like women employed by Cicero to 
 worm out the secret of conspirators. Enmities he 
 has none. Enemy of him you may be, if so you 
 shall teach him aught which your good-will cannot, 
 
 were it only what experience will accrue from your 
 ruin. Enemy and welcome, but enemy on high terms. 
 He cannot hate anybody ; his time is worth too much. 
 Temperamental antagonisms may be suffered, but like 
 feuds of emperors, who fight dignifiedly across king 
 doms. 
 
 His autobiography, under the title of " Poetry and 
 Truth out of my Life, 11 is the expression of the idea 
 
 now familiar to the world through the German 
 mind, but a novelty to England, Old and New, when 
 that book appeared that a man exists for culture; 
 not for what he can accomplish, but for what can be 
 accomplished in him. The reaction of things on the 
 man is the only noteworthy result. An intellectual 
 man can see himself as a third person ; therefore his 
 faults and delusions interest him equally with his suc 
 cesses. Though he wishes to prosper in affairs, he 
 wishes more to know the history and destiny of man ;
 
 GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 231 
 
 whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him are 
 only interested in a low success. 
 
 This idea reigns in the Dichtung und Wahr- 
 heit, and directs the selection of the incidents, 
 and nowise the external importance of events, the 
 rank of the personages, or the bulk of incomes. Of 
 course, the book affords slender materials for what 
 would be reckoned with us a " Life of Goethe," few 
 dates ; no correspondence ; no details of offices or 
 employments ; no light on his marriage ; and a 
 period of ten years, that should be the most active 
 in his life, after his settlement at Weimar, is sunk in 
 silence. Meantime, certain love-affairs, that came 
 to nothing, as people say, have the strangest im 
 portance ; he crowds us with details, certain whim 
 sical opinions, cosmogonies, and religions of his own 
 invention, and especially his relations to remarka 
 ble minds and to critical epochs of thought : these 
 he magnifies. His "Daily and Yearly Journal," 
 his "Italian Travels," his "Campaign in France," 
 and the historical part of his " Theory of Colors," 
 have the same interest. In the last, he rapidly 
 notices Kepler, Roger Bacon, Galileo, Newton, 
 Voltaire, etc. ; and the charm of this portion of 
 the book consists in the simplest statement of the 
 relation betwixt these grandees of European scientific 
 history and himself; the mere drawing of the lines 
 from Goethe to Kepler, from Goethe to Bacon, from 
 Goethe to Newton. The drawing of the line is for 
 the time and person, a solution of the formidable 
 problem, and gives pleasure when Iphigenia and 
 Faust do not, without any cost of invention com 
 parable to that of Iphigenia and Faust.
 
 232 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 This lawgiver of art is not an artist. Was it that 
 he knew too much, that his sight was microscopic, 
 and interfered with the just perspective, the seeing 
 of the whole? He is fragmentary; a writer of oc 
 casional poems, and of an encyclopaedia of sentences. 
 When he sits down to write a drama or a tale, he 
 collects and sorts his observations from a hundred 
 sides, and combines them into the body as fitly as 
 he can. A great deal refuses to incorporate ; this he 
 adds loosely, as letters of the parties, leaves from 
 their journals, or the like. A great deal still is left 
 that will not find any place. This the bookbinder 
 alone can give any cohesion to ; and hence, notwith 
 standing the looseness of many of his works, we 
 have volumes of detached paragraphs, aphorisms, 
 Xenien, etc. 
 
 I suppose the worldly tone of his tales grew out 
 of the calculations of self-culture. It was the in 
 firmity of an admirable scholar, who loved the world 
 out of gratitude ; who knew where libraries, galleries, 
 architecture, laboratories, savans, and leisure were 
 to be had, and who did not quite trust the compen 
 sations of poverty and nakedness. Socrates loved 
 Athens ; Montaigne, Paris ; and Madame de Stae l 
 said she was only vulnerable on that side (namely, 
 of Paris). It has its favorable aspect. All the 
 geniuses are usually so ill-assorted and sickly, that 
 one is ever wishing them somewhere else. We 
 seldom see anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to 
 live. There is a slight blush of shame on the check 
 of good men and aspiring men, and a spice of carica 
 ture. But this man was entirely at home and happy
 
 GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 233 
 
 in his century and the world. None was so fit to 
 live, or more heartily enjoyed the game. In this 
 aim of culture, which is the genius of his works, is 
 their power. The idea of absolute, eternal truth, 
 without reference to my own enlargement by it, is 
 higher. The surrender to the torrent of poetic in 
 spiration is higher ; but, compared with any motives 
 on which books are written in England and America, 
 this is very truth, and has the power to inspire which 
 belongs to truth. Thus has he brought back to a 
 book some of its ancient might and dignity. 
 
 Goethe, coming into an over-civilized time and 
 country, when original talent was oppressed under 
 the load of books and mechanical auxiliaries and 
 the distracting variety of claims, taught men how 
 to dispose of this mountainous miscellany, and make 
 it subservient. I join Napoleon with him, as being 
 both representatives of the impatience and reaction 
 of nature against the morgue of conventions, two 
 stern realists, who, with their scholars, have severally 
 set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and seem 
 ing, for this time, and for all time. This cheerful 
 laborer, with no external popularity or provocation, 
 drawing his motive and his plan from his own breast, 
 tasked himself with stints for a giant, and, without 
 relaxation or rest, except by alternating his pursuits, 
 worked on for eighty years with the steadiness of his 
 first zeal. 
 
 It is the last lesson of modern science, that the 
 highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by 
 few elements, but by the highest complexity. i\Ian 
 is the most composite of all creatures : the wheel-
 
 234 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 
 insect, volvox giobator, is at the other extreme. We 
 shall learn to draw rents and revenues from the 
 immense patrimony of the old and the recent ages. 
 Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence of all 
 times ; that the disadvantages of any epoch exist 
 only to the faint-hearted. Genius hovers with his 
 sunshine and music close by the darkest and deafest 
 eras. No mortgage, no attainder, will hold on men 
 or hours. The world is young; the former great 
 men call to us affectionately. We too must write 
 Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly 
 world. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction 
 to exist for us ; to realize all that we know ; in the 
 high refinement of modern life, in arts, in sciences, 
 in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a 
 purpose ; and first, last, midst, and without end, to 
 honor every truth by use. 
 
 THE END.
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 000 755 283 9
 
 J 
 ; 
 
 
 
 
 -^ /*< 
 
 
 " 
 
 
 
 
 
 wp 
 
 ^ 
 
 "V 
 
 ..