; : – Sºx & ºwe case. ** 4 Oniversity of Michigan. E. º ſº- | Cº- º tº sº R t f ！ ！！ ！！！，，， šgae**， ſae wſ ***-- -•|- Éſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſſ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!！!!!!!！!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!！!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!！!!!!!!!！!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!！·~， ， , ,t, ！ EŚ№ RSſ.ĶĒ№--· · · ·•· E8[[[[[[{{SU}\\Ñ\;| 35---- E;№ÊS)~}?· №--！ſae± E8 E 1，5%: #ff;"-ĢS`};º （ 1 / ' ·<§.t }=0|-∞E Eği?--•.--★ →· -·-* … ~ ~º:№.[]E №rð-·•ſi ：Ō （， ſ-0-'， :.*..*'ae.;Ģ\; ; ）0 £→ ） ]'; '... ）-|-:.ae·№.º E· №t.:# *A.0 •·t.·' - º.e ）· · · · * , º.##~ |- ）RȚE~^ |3||3ſ ≡-*«. }º £• *##-, ， ， , ©º £ ſë8 #7|- S！ 5• • • .' ）! E ; i ſºſā sj|- S№· į，R E* - Œ œ·- §| –！ 4 ſw º ----€ ± ºff| E+ ~t := ：º £• , ſ =|- r ≡---- C€.- - Œ œ， ,w b *=]} º ： » Zºu º á， ºſſ:iſ:№ſ| E ſaeſaeae ： sae§áë· IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTIINȚATĪſſiſſIIIIIIIIIIIIII?IIIIIIIIIII[[fy: 3 } Ł -· ،•· * ||× --} ·f *- |- * , ！.*{z &K 3, ºver ſº 2%2 - y y ..amº - / s:#}}}e Number 130 January 4, 1899 ºrizza, a wºre wºrrºr *- - - - f r = trave. a za zea …azz… º tººlººlººlºº * º - - E==sº == - F- * ~~~~ - - Re- zº ~~~~~~. *-*- *- ºt-º º Wº%3-3 --→ --> * * 2,2'ſ gº-ºº-ºº: > > ſº sº-sº-º-º-º-º-exexercºº AND OTHER ESSAYS BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON WITH NOTES | HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY BOSTON, NEW YORK, AND CHICAGO (Che incrgite pregg, Tambridge & Nºssºs 7% ºf -*= <=- - - - - - - ===== Zzzº Zatº Zzzazzºzºza ZººZººZ2&zzatºſiſ/rººtſ/tſ M º º P-A- 5 mºnº * * *s L- - / º ºil/ſittſylliſºllſ ºffiſſiliffſitiºuſ ſººnſººriſts ºrganſpºrtúzprºmuſ IIITſºtſiºſi. Single Numbers FIFTEEN CENTS Triple Numbers FORTY-FIVE CENTS Double Numbers THIRTY CENTS Quadruple Numbers FIFTY CENTS Yearly Subscription (9 Numbers) $1.35 Clje 15ibergibe Literature ºcrieg. With Introductions, Notes, Historical Sketches, and Biographical Sketches. Each regular single number, paper, 15 cents, met, postpaid. 1. Longfellow’s Evangeline.* if 2. Tuongfellow’s Courtship of Miles Standish ; Elizabeth.” 3. Longfellow’s Courtship of Miles Standish. DRAMATIZED. 4. Whittier’s Snow-Bound, and Other Poems.” fi “ 5. Whittier’s Mabel Martin, and Other IPoems.’ “ 6. Holmes’s Grandmother’s Story of Bunker Hill Battle, etc.” 7, 8, 9. Hawthorne’s Grandfather’s Chair. In three parts. if 10. Hawthorne’s Biographical Stories. With Questions.’ ” 11. Tiongfellow’s Children’s Hour, and Other Selections.” " 12. Studies in Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell. 13, 14. Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. In two parts.: 15. Lowell’s Under the Old Elm, and Other Poems. ' " 16. Bayard Taylor’s Lars: a Pastoral of Norway, etc. 17, 18. Hawthorne’s Wonder-Book. In two parts. I 19, 20. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. In two parts.f 21. Benjamin Franklin’s Boor Hichard’s Almanac, etc. 22, 23. Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales. In two parts.i 24. Washington’s Rules of Conduct, Letters, and Addresses.” 25, 26. Longfellow’s Golden Legend. In two parts.i. 27. Thoreau’s Succession of Forest Trees, Wild Apples, and Sounds. With a Biographical Sketch by R. W. EMERSON. 28. John Burroughs’s Birds and Bees.” 29. Hawthorne’s Tuittle Daffy downdilly, and Other Stories.* * 30. Iowell’s Vision of Sir Launfal, and Other Poems.” If “ 31. Holmes’s My Hunt after the Captain, and Other IPapers.” “ 32. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Speech, and Other Papers.” 33, 34, 35. Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn. In three parts.if 36. John Burroughs’s Sharp Eyes, and Other Papers.” 37. Charles Dudley Warner’s A-Blunting of the Deer, etc.'s 38. Longfellow’s Building of the Ship, and Other Poems. 39. Towell’s Books and Libraries, and Other Papers.” 40. Hawthorne’s Tales of the White Hills, and Sketches.** 41. Whittier’s Tent on the Beach, and Associated Poems. 42. Emerson’s Fortune of the Republic, American Scholar, etc.” 43. Ulysses among the Phaeacians. From BRYANT's Odyssey.” 44. Edgeworth’s Waste Not, Want Not ; and The Barring Out. 45. Macaulay’s Tays of Ancient Rome.* 46. Old Testament Stories in Scripture Tianguage. 47, 48. Fables and Folk Stories. In two parts.f 49, 50. Hans Andersen’s Stories. In two parts.: 51, 52. Washington Irving : Essays from the Sketch Book. [51] Rip Van Winkle, etc. [52.] The Voyage, etc. In two parts.: 53. Scott's Lady of the Lake. Edited by ROLFE. (Double No., 30 cents, met.) Also, in Rolfe’s Students’ Series, cloth, to Teache, s, 53 cents. 54. Bryant’s Sella, Thanatopsis, and Other Poems. * 55. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. THURBER.'s 9 & 56. Webster’s First Bunker Hill Oration, and the Oration o Adams and Jefferson. * 57. IXickens’s Christmas Carol.** 58. Tickens’s Cricket on the Hearth.** 59. Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading.” 60, 61. The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. In two parts.f 62. John Fiske’s War of Independence.S Also, bound in linen : * 25 cents. * 4 and 5 in one vol., 40 cents: likewise 6 and 31, 11 and 63, 28 and 36, 29 and 10, 30 and 15, 39 and 123, 40 and 69, 55 and 6ſ, 57 and 58, 113 and 42, 183 and 32. # Also in one vol., 40 cents. ## 1, 4, and 9 also in one vol., 50 cents; likewise 7, 8, and 9; 33, 34, and 35. § Double Number, 30 cents; linen. 40 cents These prices are met, postpaid. E-- , -r, “, 6. **-* * - 2- . * The itibergite Hliterature ºrrieg THE SUPERLATIVE AND OTHER ESSAYS --- | | ) l/ j º BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON WITH NOTES HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY Boston: 4 Park Street ; New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street Chicago : 378-388 Wabash Avenue @the ſtinergite pregg, Tambridge HoughTon, MIFFLIN & Co. are the only authorized publishers of the works of LongFELLow, WHITTIER, Lowell, Holmes, EMER- son, THoREAU, and HAwthorne. All editions which lack the imprint or authorization of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. are issued without the consent and contrary to the wishes of the authors or their heirs. CONTENTS INTRODUCTORY NotE . g ſº tº & e s tº EMERSON's CAREER ſº § wº e tº e g THE SUPERLATIVE e $ e tº ſº e e te PAGE vi USEs OF GREAT MEN . & ę & SHAKESPEARE: or, THE POET . g ſº e te ſº SoCIAL AIMs NoTES tº ſº e & © & gº ſe & wº e Copyright, 1875 and 1876, By RALPH WALDO EMERSON. Copyright, 1883, By EDWARD W. EMERSON. Copyright, 1899, By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. . Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. 17 47 '76 103 INTRODUCTORY NOTE. IN a previous number (42) of the Riverside Literature Series, a small group of Emerson’s essays was presented, and the opportunity was taken of giving a brief biographical account of the writer. In connection with this number, there- fore, only a table of dates is given for conven- ient reference by the student. Another number (118) contains a selection from Emerson's poems. Whether one is reading his prose or his poetry, one is aware of that power which expressed itself in assertion, direct or indirect, rather than in argu- ment or reasoning. It was the seer who spoke or sang in Emerson, and this advantage the reader has in listening to him, that there is no uncertain sound. Every sentence is struck out with decision and without modifications. There is thus a frosty quality in the speech which tingles the ears, and one goes through an essay as if he were taking a walk on a clear wintry morning. The group here presented, though the essays are taken from different volumes, has a general co- herence as regards the education of the young American. In more than one passage Emerson iv. INTRODUCTORY NOTE. has expressed his contempt for what he calls the “peacock” in American life, the strutting, loud- voiced style; and, in the essay on “The Superla- tive ’’ he gathers into one emphatic speech the lesson of moderation in language, dress, and manners, which both springs from, and leads to, moderation and temperance in life. The lesson, needed as it is, would be incomplete if there were not coupled with it an enthusiasm for high ideals, — the flaming torch which Emerson carried as a leader of men; and the two essays which follow, “Uses of Great Men’’ and “Shakspéare; or, The Poet,” are vivid illustrations of the generous side of Emerson's nature. The second does a special service in giving a good concrete illustration of the doctrines laid down in the first. Finally the essay on “Social Aims’ wise principles with which to enter upon the con- scious membership of society. There comes a time, 2 contains early or late, in every one’s life, when individuality asserts itself strongly, and the three earlier essays reinforce, as Emerson mainly does in his writings, the consciousness of individual worth. But, at the same time, generally, one also becomes aware that he is a member of society, and not simply one of a family, and the doctrines taught in “Social Aims ” are sound, stimulating, and corrective. Emerson provokes questions in an ingenious INTRODUCTORY NOTE. V. mind, but he does not irritate the questioning faculty. It is a good plan to read one of these essays heartily, with an abandonment to the plea- sure of listening to a courageous, wise master. It is well to read it again and again till the ideas have taken good hold of the mind; and then to challenge the assertions. Is this really so? What illustration do I find in my own practice? Does he not go too far? Is there not something to be said on the other side 2 Like Socrates, Emerson says sharply to each person, Know thyself; and one of the best results of reading his essays is to be found in the habit of reflecting soberly on one's principles in the conduct of life. A few notes will be found at the end of the number, but the speech is usually so direct as not to call for explanation. EMERSON'S CAREER. Born in Boston, May 25, 1803. Enters the Latin School, 1813. Is taken to Concord to live in the old manse, 1814. Returns to Boston, 1815. Enters Harvard College, August, 1817. Is graduated, 1821. Teaches in a school for young ladies, 1821–24. Returns to Cambridge to study divinity, 1825. Licensed to preach, October 10, 1826. Goes South for his health, November 25, 1826. Returns, June, 1827. Spends a year in Cambridge, preaching often, 1827–28. Is ordained as colleague of Rev. Henry Ware, Jr., minister of the Second Church, Boston, March 11, 1829. Is married to Ellen Louisa Tucker, September, 1829. His wife dies, 1831. Resigns his charge, December 22, 1832. Sails for Europe, December 25, 1832. Returns, September, 1833. Begins to lecture, November, 1833. Goes to Concord to live, October, 1834. Is married to Lydia Jackson, September, 1835. Secures the publication of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, 1836. Takes part in the founding of The Dial, September, 1836. Publishes Nature, September, 1836. EMERSON'S CAREER. vii Delivers his Phi Beta Kappa address on The American Scholar, August 31, 1837 (called by Dr. Holmes “our Intellectual Declaration of Independence ’’). Publishes his first series of Essays, 1841. Publishes his first volume of Poems, 1846. Makes a second visit to England, 1847. Returns to Concord, 1848. Publishes Representative Men, 1850. Publishes English Traits, 1856. Receives from Harvard the degree of LL.D., 1866. Becomes an Overseer of Harvard College, 1867. Makes a visit to California, 1871. Loses his house by fire, and it is rebuilt by friends, 1872. A third journey to Europe, October, 1872. Dies, April 27, 1882. THE SUPERLATIVE AND OTHER ESSAYS. THE SUPERLATIVE. THE doctrine of temperance is one of many degrees. It is usually taught on a low platform, but one of great necessity, - that of meats and drinks, and its importance cannot be denied and hardly exaggerated. But it is a long way from the Maine Law to the heights of absolute self-command which respect the conservatism of the entire ener- gies of the body, the mind, and the soul. I wish to point at some of its higher functions as it enters into mind and character. There is a superlative temperament which has no medium range, but swiftly oscillates from the freezing to the boiling point, and which affects the manners of those who share it with a certain des- peration. Their aspect is grimace. They go tear- ing, convulsed *g. life, – wailing, praying, ex- claiming, swearing. ‘We talk, sometimes, with peo- ple whose conversation would lead you to suppose that they had lived in a museum, where all the objects were monsters and extremes. Their good 2 THE SUPERLATIVE. people are phoenixes; their naughty are like the prophet's figs. They use the superlative of gram- mar: “most perfect,” “most exquisite,” “most horrible.” Like the French, they are enchanted, they are desolate, because you have got or have not got a shoe-string or a wafer you happen to want, — not perceiving that superlatives are diminutives, and weaken ; that the positive is the sinew of speech, the superlative the fat. If the talker lose a tooth, he thinks the universal thaw and dissolu- tion of things has come. Controvert his opinion and he cries “Persecution l’’ and reckons himself with Saint Barnabas, who was sawn in two. ” Especially we note this tendency to extremes in the pleasant excitement of horror-mongers. Is there something so deligious in disasters and pain 2 Bad news is always exaggerated, and we may chal- lenge Providence to send a fact so tragical that we cannot contrive to make it a little worse in our gossip. All this comes of poverty. We are unskilful definers. From want of skill to convey quality, we hope to move admiration by quantity. Lan- guage should aim to describe the fact. It is not enough to suggest it and magnify it. Sharper sight would indicate the true line. 'Tis very wea- risome, this straining talk, these experiences "all exquisite, intense and tremendous, – “The best I THE SUPERLATIVE. 3 ever saw ; ” “I never in my life l’” One wishes these terms gazetted and forbidden. Every favor- ite is not a cherub, nor every cat a griffin, nor each unpleasing person a dark, diabolical intriguer; nor agonies, excruciations nor ecstasies our daily bread. Horace Walpole relates that in the expecta. tion, current in London a century ago, of a great earthquake, some people provided themselves with dresses for the occasion. But one would not wear earthquake dresses or resurrection robes for a work- ing jacket, nor make a codicil to his will whenever he goes out to ride; and the secrets of death, judgment and eternity are tedious when recurring as minute-guns. Thousands of people live. and die who were never, on a single occasion, hungry or thirsty, or furious or terrified. The books say, “It made my hair stand on end ' ' Who, in our muni- cipal life, ever had such an experience 2 Indeed, I believe that much of the rhetoric of terror, – “It froze my blood,” “It made my knees knock,” etc. — most men have realized only in dreams and nightmares. Then there is an inverted superlative, or superla- tive contrary, which shivers, like Demophoön, in the sun; wants fan and parasol on the cold Friday; is tired by sleep; feeds on drugs and poisons; finds the rainbow a discoloration ; hates birds and flow- CTS, 4 THE SUPERLATIVE. The exaggeration of which I complain makes plain fact the more welcome and refreshing. It is curious that a face magnified in a concave mirror loses its expression. All this overstatement is needless. A little fact is worth a whole limbo of dreams, and I can well spare the exaggerations which appear to me screens to conceal ignorance. Among these glorifiers, the coldest stickler for names and dates and measures cannot lament his criticism and coldness of fancy. Think how much pains astronomers and opticians have taken to pro- cure an achromatic lens. Discovery in the heavens has waited for it; discovery on the face of the earth not less. I hear without sympathy the complaint of young and ardent persons that they find life no region of romance, with no enchanter, no giant, no fairies, nor even muses. I am very much indebted to my eyes, and am content that they should see the real world, always geometrically finished with- out blur or halo. The more I am engaged, with it the more it suffices. *e How impatient we are, in these northern lati- tudes, of looseness and intemperance in speech I Our measure of success is the moderation and low level of an individual’s judgment. Doctor Chan- ning's piety and wisdom had such weight that, in Boston, the popular idea of religion was whatever this eminent divine held. But I remember that THE SUPERLATIVE. 5 his best friend, a man of guarded lips, speaking of him in a circle of his admirers, said: “I have known him long, I have studied his character, and I believe him capable of virtue.” An eminent French journalist paid a high compliment to the Duke of Wellington, when his documents were published : “Here are twelve volumes of military dispatches, and the word glory is not found in them.” The English mind is arithmetical, values exact- ness, likes literal statement; stigmatizes any heat or hyperbole as Irish, French, Italian, and infers weakness and inconsequence of charapter in speak- ers who use it. It does not love the superlative but the positive degree. Our customary and me- chanical existence is not favorable to flights; long nights and frost hold us pretty fast to realities. The people of English stock, in all countries, are a Solid people, wearing good hats and shoes, and own- ers of land whose title-deeds are properly recorded. Their houses are of wood, and brick, and stone, not designed to reel in earthquakes, nor blow about through the air much in hurricanes, nor to be lost under sand-drifts, nor to be made bonfires of by whimsical viziers ; but to stand as commodious, rentable tenements for a century or two. All our manner of life is on a secure and moderate pattern, such as can last. Violence and extravagance are, 6 THE SUPERLATIVE. once for all, distasteful; competence, quiet, com- fort, are the agreed welfare. Ever a low style is best. “I judge by every man's truth of his degree of understanding,” said Chesterfield. And I do not know any advantage more conspicuous which a man owes to his experi- ence in markets and the Exchange, or politics, than the caution and accuracy he acquires in his report of facts. “Uncle Joel's news is always true,” said a person to me with obvious satisfaction, and said it justly ; for the old head, after deceiving and be- ing deceived many times, thinks, “What’s the use of having to unsay to-day what I said yesterday? I will not be responsible; I will not add an epi- thet. I will be as moderate as the fact, and will use the same expression, without color, which I re- ceived; and rather repeat it several times, word for word, than vary it ever so little.” The first valuable power in a reasonable mind, one would say, was the power of plain statement, or the power to receive things as they befall, and to transfer the picture of them to another mind un- altered. 'Tis a good rule of rhetoric which Schle- gel gives, – “In good prose, every word is under- scored; ” which, I suppose, means, Never italicize. Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use a short and positive speech. They are never off their centres. As soon as they swell and paint and find THE SUPERLATIVE. 7 truth not enough for them, softening of the brain has already begun. It seems as if inflation were a disease incident to too much use of words, and the remedy lay in recourse to things. I am daily struck with the forcible understatement of people who have no literary habit. The low expression is strong and agreeable. The citizen dwells in delu- sions. His dress and draperies, house and stables, occupy him. The poor countryman, having no cir- cumstance of carpets, coaches, dinners, wine and dancing in his head to confuse him, is able to look straight at you, without refraction or prismatic glo- ries, and he sees whether you see straight also, or whether your head is addled by this mixture of wines. The common people diminish: “a cold snap ; ” “it rains easy;” “good haying weather.” When a farmer means to tell you that he is doing well with his farm, he says, “I don’t work as hard as I did, and I don’t mean to.” When he wishes to condemn any treatment of soils or of stock, he says, “It won't do any good.” Under the Catskill Mountains the boy in the steamboat said, “Come up here, Tony ; it looks pretty out-of-doors.” The farmers in the region do not call particular sum- mits, as Killington, Camel's Hump, Saddle-back, etc., mountains, but only “them 'ere rises,” and reserve the word mountains for the range. 8 THE SUPER/CATIVE. I once attended a dinner given to a great state functionary by functionaries, – men of law, state, and trade. The guest was a great man in his own country and an honored diplomatist in this. His health was drunk with some acknowledgment of his distinguished services to both countries, and fol- lowed by nine cold hurrahs. There was the vicious superlative. Then the great official spoke and beat his breast, and declared that he should remember this honor to the latest moment of his existence. He was answered again by officials. Pity, thought I, they should lie so about their keen sensibility to the nine cold hurrahs and to the commonplace compliment of a dinner. Men of the world value truth, in proportion to their ability; not by its sa- credness, but for its convenience. Of such, espe- cially of diplomatists, one has a right to expect wit and ingenuity to avoid the lie if they must comply with the form. Now, I had been present, a little before, in the country at a cattle-show dinner, which followed an agricultural discourse delivered by a farmer : the discourse, to say the truth, was bad; and one of our village fathers gave at the dinner this toast : “The orator of the day: his subject deserves the attention of every farmer.” The caution of the toast did honor to our village father. I wish great lords and diplomatists had as much respect for truth. THE SUPERL21 TIVE. 9 But whilst thus everything recommends simplic- ity and temperance of action; the utmost direct- ness, the positive degree, we mean thereby that “rightly to be great is not to stir without great ar- gument.” Whenever the true objects of action ap- pear, they are to be heartily sought. Enthusiasm is the height of man; it is the passing from the human to the divine. The superlative is as good as the positive, if it be alive. If man loves the conditioned, he also loves the unconditioned. We don’t wish to sin on the other side, and to be purists, nor to check the in- vention of wit or the sally of humor. T is very different, this weak and wearisome lie, from the stimulus to the fancy which is given by a romanc- ing talker who does not mean to be exactly taken, — like the gallant skipper who complained to his owners that he had pumped the Atlantic Ocean three times through his ship on the passage, and ’t was common to strike seals and porpoises in the hold. Or what was similarly asserted of the late Lord Jeffrey, at the Scottish bar, – an attentive auditor declaring on one occasion after an argu- ment of three hours, that he had spoken the whole English language three times over in his speech. The objection to unmeasured speech is its lie. All men like an impressive fact. The astronomer shows you in his telescope the nebula of Orion, that 10 THE SUPERLATIVE. you may look on that which is esteemed the far- thest-off land in visible nature. At the Bank of England they put a scrap of paper that is worth a million pounds sterling into the hands of the vis- itor to touch. Our travelling is a sort of search for the superlatives or summits of art, — much more the real wonders of power in the human form. The arithmetic of Newton, the memory of Maglia- becchi or Mirandola, the versatility of Julius Caesar, the concentration of Bonaparte, the inspiration of Shakspeare, are sure of commanding interest and awe in every company of men. The superlative is the excess of expression. We are a garrulous, demonstrative kind of creatures, and cannot live without much outlet for all our sense and nonsense. And fit expression is so rare that mankind have a superstitious value for it, and it would seem the whole human race agree to value a man precisely in proportion to his power of ex- pression; and to the most expressive man that has existed, namely, Shakspeare, they have awarded the highest place. The expressors are the gods of the world, but the men whom these expressors revere are the solid, balanced, undemonstrative citizens who make the reserved guard, the central sense, of the world. For the luminous object wastes itself by its shining, -is luminous because it is burning up; and if the THE SUPERLATIVE. 11 powers are disposed for display, there is all the less left for use and creation. The talent sucks the substance of the man. Superlatives must be bought by too many positives. Gardens of roses must be stripped to make a few drops of otto. And these raptures of fire and frost, which indeed cleanse pedantry out of conversation and make the speech salt and biting, would cost me the days of well- being which are now so cheap to me, yet so valued. I like no deep stakes. I am a coward at gambling. I will bask in the common sun a while longer. Children and thoughtless people like exagger- ated event and activity; like to run to a house on fire, to a fight, to an execution; like to talk of a marriage, of a bankruptcy, of a debt, of a crime. The wise man shuns all this. I knew a grave man who, being urged to go to a church where a clergy- man was newly ordained, said “he liked him very well, but he would go when the interesting Sundays were over.” All rests at last on the simplicity of nature, or real being. Nothing is for the most part less es- teemed. We are fond of dress, of ornament, of accomplishments, of talents, but distrustful of health, of soundness, of pure innocence. Yet na- ture measures her greatness by what she can spare, by what remains when all superfluity and accesso- ries are shorn off. 12 THE SUPERLATIVE. Nor is there in nature itself any swell, any brag, any strain or shock, but a firm common sense through all her elephants and lions, through all her ducks and geese; a true proportion between her means and her performance. Semper sibi sim- ilis. You shall not catch her in any anomalies, nor swaggering into any monsters. In all the years that I have sat in town and forest, I never saw a winged dragon, a flying man, or a talking fish, but ever the strictest regard to rule, and an absence of all surprises. No ; nature encourages no looseness, pardons no errors; freezes punctually at 32°, boils punctually at 212°; crystallizes in water at one in- variable angle, in diamond at one, in granite at one ; and if you omit the smallest condition the ex- periment will not succeed. Her communication obeys the gospel rule, yea or nay. She never ex- patiates, never goes into the reasons. Plant beech- mast and it comes up, or it does not come up. Sow grain, and it does not come up : put lime into the soil and try again, and this time she says yea. To every question an abstemious but absolute reply. The like staidness is in her dealings with us. Na- ture is always serious, – does not jest with us. Where we have begun in folly, we are brought quickly to plain dealing. Life could not be car- ried on except by fidelity and good earnest ; and she brings the most heartless trifler to determined THE SUPERLATIVE. 13 purpose presently. The men whom she admits to her confidence, the simple and great characters, are uniformly marked by absence of pretension and by understatement. The old and the modern sages of clearest insight are plain men, who have held them- selves hard to the poverty of nature. The firmest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed, but where they speak and think and do what they must, because they are so and not otherwise. But whilst the basis of character must be sim- plicity, the expression of character, it must be re- membered, is, in great degree, a matter of climate. In the temperate climates there is a temperate speech, in torrid climates an ardent one. Whilst in Western nations the superlative in conversation is tedious and weak, and in character is a capital defect, nature delights in showing us that in the East it is animated, it is pertinent, pleasing, poetic. Whilst she appoints us to keep within the sharp boundaries of form as the condition of our strength, she creates in the East the uncontrollable yearning to escape from limitation into the vast and bound- less; to use a freedom of fancy which plays with all the works of nature, great or minute, galaxy or grain of dust, as toys and words of the mind; in- culcates the tenet of a beatitude to be found in es- 14 THE SUPERLATIVE. cape from all organization and all personality, and makes ecstasy an institution. Religion and poetry are all the civilization of the Arab. “The ground of Paradise,” said Moham- med, “is extensive, and the plants of it are hallelu- jahs.” Religion and poetry: the religion teaches an inexorable destiny; it distinguishes only two days in each man’s history, the day of his lot, and the day of judgment. The religion runs into ascet- icism and fate. The costume, the articles in which wealth is displayed, are in the same extremes. Thus the diamond and the pearl, which are only accidental and secondary in their use and value to us, are proper to the oriental world. The diver dives a beggar and rises with the price of a king- dom in his hand. A bag of sequins, a jewel, a bal- sam, a single horse, constitute an estate in coun- tries where insecure institutions make every one desirous of concealable and convertible property. Shall I say, further, that the orientals excel in costly arts, in the cutting of precious stones, in working in gold, in weaving on hand-looms costly stuffs from silk and wool, in spices, in dyes and drugs, henna, otto and camphor, and in the train- ing of slaves, elephants and camels, — things which are the poetry and superlative of commerce. On the other hand, – and it is a good illustra. tion of the difference of genius, – the European THE SUPERLATIVE. 15 nations, and, in general, all nations in proportion to their civilization, understand the manufacture of iron. One of the meters of the height to which any civility rose is the skill in the fabric of iron. Universally, the better gold, the worse man. The political economist defies us to show any gold-mine country that is traversed by good roads: or a shore where pearls are found on which good schools are erected. The European civility, or that of the positive degree, is established by coal-mines, by ventilation, by irrigation and every skill — in hav- ing water cheap and pure, by iron, by agriculture for bread-stuffs, and manufacture of coarse and family cloths. Our modern improvements have been in the invention of friction matches; of India- rubber shoes; of the famous two parallel bars of iron; then of the air-chamber of Watt, and of the judicious tubing of the engine, by Stephenson, in order to the construction of locomotives. Meantime, Nature, who loves crosses and mix- tures, makes these two tendencies necessary each to the other, and delights to re-enforce each peculiar- ity by imparting the other. The Northern genius finds itself singularly refreshed and stimulated by the breadth and luxuriance of Eastern imagery and modes of thinking, which go to check the pedantry of our inventions and the excess of our detail. There is no writing which has more electric power 16 THE SUPERLATIVE. to unbind and animate the torpid intellect than the bold Eastern muse. If it come back however to the question of final superiority, it is too plain that there is no question that the star of empire rolls West: that the warm sons of the Southeast have bent the neck under the yoke of the cold temperament and the exact under. standing of the Northwestern races. USES OF GREAT MEN. IT is natural to believe in great men. If the companions 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 Gau- tama, the first men ate the earth and found it deli- ciously 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 re- calls an anecdote of them. The search after the great man is the dream of 18 USES OF GREAT MEN. *. youth and the most serious occupation of manhood. We travel into foreign parts to find his works, – if possible, to get a glimpse of him. But we are put off with fortune instead. You say, the Eng- lish are practical; the Germans are hospitable; in Valencia the climate is delicious; and in the hills of the Sacramento 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 power- ful, I would sell all and buy it, and put myself on the road to-day. The race goes with us on their credit. The knowledge 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 disgusting, 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, Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the neces- sary 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 USES OF GREAT MEN. 19 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 purifi- cation 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. 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 substantial existence of other people. I know not what would happen to us. We have so- cial strengths. Our affection towards others cre- ates a sort of vantage or purchase which nothing will supply. I can do that by another which I can- not 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 20 USES OF GREAT MEN. own affair or not. Man is that noble endogenous plant which grows, like the palm, from within out- ward. 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 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. “Peu de moyens, beaucoup d’effét.” 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, an- swer questions which I have not skill to put. One man answers some question which none of his con- temporaries put, and is isolated. The past and USES OF GREAT MEN. 21 passing religions and philosophies answer some other question. Certain men affect us as rich pos- sibilities, 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 ar- mies 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, weap- ons to fight with and disciples to explain it. The true artist has the planet for his pedestal ; the ad- venturer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his own shoes. Our common discourse respects two kinds of use 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 22 USES OF GREAT MEN. endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical compared with the discoveries 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 universe. Serving others is serving us. I must absolve 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 sec- ondly, of ideas. As plants convert the minerals into food for animals, so each man converts some raw material in nature to human use. The inventors of fire, electricity, 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 district of nature, whose agent and interpreter he is ; as Linnaeus, of plants; Huber, of bees; Fries, of lichens; Van Mons, of pears; Dalton, of atomic forms; Euclid, of lines; Newton, of fluxions. USES OF GREAT MEN. 23 A man is a centre for nature, running out threads of relation through every thing, fluid and solid, material 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 cre- ated 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 expec- tant. It would seem as if each waited, like the enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined human deliverer. 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 entertain 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, the sureness of affinity, the veracity of angles. Light and darkness, heat and cold, hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid and gas, circle 24 USES OF GREAT MEN. us round in a wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable quarrel, beguile the day of life. The eye repeats every day 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 archi- tecture, another. There are advancements to num- bers, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little sus- pected 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 interpretation lies in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual 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; USES OF GREAT MEN. 25 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 representative, but participant. Like can only be known 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. Animated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate zinc, of zinc. Their quality makes his career; and he can variously publish their virtues, because they compose him. Man, made of the dust of the world, does not forget his origin; and all that is yet inan- imate will one day speak and reason. Unpublished nature will have its whole secret told. Shall we say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innu- merable Werners, Von Buchs and Beaumonts, and the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in solution I know not what Berzeliuses and Davys 2 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 immense 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! 26 USES OF GREAT MEN. Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Ho- mer. Every carpenter who shaves with a fore- plane 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, moralist, theologian, and every man, inasmuch as he has 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 con- tagious. Looking where others look, and convers- ing 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 vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit of looking at things in the same light, and on each occurrence we anticipate his thought. Men are helpful through the intellect and the USES OF GREAT MEN. 27 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 performance, 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 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 an adorer of truth, that he could as easily have given himself leave to steal, as to dissemble.” We cannot read Plutarch without a tingling of the blood; and I accept the saying of the Chinese Mencius: “A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the manners of Loo are heard of, the stupid become in- telligent, and the wavering, determined.” This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard for departed men to touch the quick like our own companions, whose names may not last as long. : . º Q Q w : 9. * : º º : 28 USES OF GREAT MEN. What is he whom I never think of ? Whilst in every solitude are those who succor our genius and stimulate us in wonderful manners. There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can, and, by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so sig- nal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us? We will never more think cheaply of our- selves, or of life. We are piqued to some purpose, and the industry of the diggers on the railroad will not again shame us. Under this head too falls that homage, very pure as I think, which all ranks pay to the hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus down to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear the shouts in the street! The people cannot see him enough. They delight in a man. Here is a head and a trunk 1 What a front' what eyes! Atlan- tean shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, 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 obstructed, runs also much higher, and is the se- cret of the reader's joy in literary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is fire enough to fuse the mountain of ore. Shakspeare's principal merit may be conveyed in saying that he of all men best understands the English language, and can say tº dº tº • *e e Ke g tº º º •,• º ſº USES OF GREAT MEN. 29 what he will. Yet these unchoked channels and floodgates of expression are only health or fortu- nate constitution. 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 certain 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 con- fectioners, on the appearance of the 'indicators of ideas. Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, 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 witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; as feats of memory, of mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the transmutings of the imag- ination, even versatility and concentration, — as these acts expose the invisible organs and members 30 USES OF GREAT MEN. 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, without aid from the eyes or any other sense, proceed to truth and to being.” Foremost among these activities 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 indeterminate size and inspires an auda- cious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit. And this bene- fit is real because we are entitled to these enlarge- ments, 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, Shak- speare, Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception of these laws is a USES OF GREAT MEN. 31 kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little through failure to see them. Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our de- light in reason degenerates into idolatry of the herald. Especially when a mind of powerful method has instructed men, we find the examples of oppression. The dominion of Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of Luther, of Ba- con, of Locke ;—in religion the history of hie- rarchies, 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 impoverish, 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 consciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to unobserved ad- vantages; 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 see their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes and their resources. But nature brings all this about in due time. Rotation is her remedy. The soul is impatient of 32 USES OF GREAT MEN. 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 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 suc- cessor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field the next man will appear; not Jef- ferson, 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 communi- cate 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 large- ness of their reception were entitled to the posi- tion of leaders and law-givers. These teach us the qualities of primary nature, — admit us to the con. USES OF GREAT MEN. 33 stitution of things. We 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; I 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 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 man- kind 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 34 USES OF GREAT MEN. truths into the general mind 7 – 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 indefinitely in the like occupation. But it comes to mind that a day is gone, and I have got this precious nothing 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 peau d'áne on which whoso sat should have his desire, but a piece of the skin was gone for every wish. I go to a con- vention of philanthropists. Do what I 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 Caro- lina or Cuba, but who announces a law that dis- poses 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 USES OF GREAT MEN. 35 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 injurious 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,” and “Darlings of the human race.” I like the first Caesar; and Charles V., of Spain; and Charles XII., of Sweden; Rich- ard Plantagenet; and Bonaparte, in France. I applaud a sufficient man, an officer equal to his office; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master standing firm on legs of iron, well-born, rich, hand- Some, eloquent, 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, irrespective of persons, this subtilizer and irresist- ible upward force, into our thought, destroying in- 36 USES OF GREAT MEN. dividualism; 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 minute. ness, 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 them- selves the most ill-used people alive, and never get over their astonishment 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 conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or 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, USES OF GREAT MEN. 37 but uses what spark of perception and faculty is left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over the absurdities of all the rest. Difference 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 marshall us the way we were going. There is no end to his aid. With- out 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 persons, 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 company 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 inci- dent to whole populations and ages. Men resem- ble their contemporaries even more than their pro- genitors. It is observed in old couples, or in per- sons who have been housemates for a course of years, that they grow like, and if they should live 38 USES OF GREAT MEN. long enough we should not be able to know them apart. Nature abhors these complaisances which threaten to melt the world into a lump, and has- tens 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 civiliza- tion, would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep each other in countenance and exasperate by emu- lation 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 with- out effort, and almost through the pores of the skin. We catch it by sympathy, or as a wife ar- rives at the intellectual and moral elevations of her husband. 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 con- temporaries. They are the exceptions which we want, where all grows like. A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism. Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves USES OF GREAT MEN. 39 from too much conversation with our mates, and ex- ult 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 ex- cess of influence of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have become under- lings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our help ; – other great men, new quali- ties, counterweights and checks on each other. We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness. Ev- ery 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 that man's name again.” They cry up the virtues of George Washington, — “Damn George Washington 1 ° is the poor Jacobin's whole speech and confutation. But it is human nature's indispensable defence. The centripetence augments the centrifugence. 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 heroes. Every genius is defended from approach by quantities of unavailableness. They are very attractive, 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. 40 USES OF GREAT MEN. 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 certain virtues and powers not communicable to other men, and sending it to per- form one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote “Not transferable” and “Good for this trip only,” on these garments 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, that each threatens to become the other; but the law of individuality col- lects its secret strength: you are you, and I am I, and so we remain. For nature wishes every thing 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 indi- viduals, 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 chil- USES OF GREAT MEN. 41 dren 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 guar- dian angels of children. How superior in their se- curity from infusions of evil persons, from vulgar- ity 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-reli- ance; and if we indulge them to folly, they learn the limitation elsewhere. We need not fear excessive influence. A more generous 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 greater than the wretched pride which is guarding its own skirts. Be an- other: 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 in- ertia, fear, or of love itself hold thee there. On, and forever onward! The microscope observes a monad or wheel-insect among the infusories circu- 42 USES OF GREAT MEN. lating in water. Presently a dot appears on the animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two perfect animals. The ever-proceeding detach- ment appears not less in all thought and in society. Children think they cannot live without their par- ents. 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 2 The thoughtful youth laments the superfoetation of nature. ‘Generous and hand- some, 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-de- votion; 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 trag- edy. It is as real a loss that others should be low as that we should be low ; for we must have Society. Is it a reply to these suggestions to say, Society is a Pestalozzian School: all are teachers and pu- USES OF GREAT MEN. 43 pils 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 mechan- ical 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 produced his private ray unto the con- cave sphere and beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation. 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 quali- 44 USES OF GREAT MEN. ties. 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 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 rep- utations 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 writ- ten in our annals. We must infer much, and sup- ply many chasms in the record. The history of the universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemoni- cal. No man, in all the procession of famous men, is reason or illumination or that essence we were looking for ; but is an exhibition, in some quarter, of new possibilities. Could we one day complete the immense figure which these flagrant points com- pose | The study of many individuals leads us to an elemental region wherein the individual is lost, or wherein all touch by their summits. Thought and feeling that break out there cannot be im- pounded by any fence of personality. This is the key to the power of the greatest men, -their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality of mind travels by night and by day, in concentric circles from its ori- USES OF GREAT MEN. 45 gin, and publishes itself by unknown methods: the union of all minds appears intimate; what gets ad- mission 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 the disparities of talent and position van- ish when the individuals are seen in the duration which is necessary to complete the career of each, even more 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 exhibit them have now more, now less, and pass away; the qualities remain on another brow. No experience is more familiar. Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone; the world is not there- fore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is sacred, and you may still read them transferred 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 46 USES OF GREAT MEN. 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 delegated quality. All that respects the individual is temporary and prospec- tive, like the individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a catholic 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 mind and will. The opaque self becomes transparent 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 multi- plied. SHAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. GREAT men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving, like a spi- der, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay and making bricks and building the house; no great men are original. Nor does valuable origi- nality 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 de- sire, he adds the needful 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, be- cause he says every thing, saying at last something good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing whimsical and fantas- tic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions and point- ed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times. 48 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 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 gen- ius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning and 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 neces- sities 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 edu- cates 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 pro- duction to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad. Every master has found his materials collected, 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 l and what a compensation for the shortness of life All is done to his hand. The world has brought SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 49 him thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hol- lows 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 feel- ing and history, and he would have all to do for himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great genial power, one would al- most say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass un- obstructed through the mind. Shakspeare's youth fell in a time when the Eng- lish people were importunate for dramatic enter- tainments. The court took offence easily at politi- cal 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 extempora- neous enclosures at country fairs were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now, - no, not by the strong- est party, - neither then could king, prelate, or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ which was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch 50 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. and library, at the same time. Probably king, prelate and puritan, all found their own account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national inter- est, — by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating it in an English history, - 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, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. The secure possession, by the stage, of the pub- lic mind, is of the first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in idle experiments. Here 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 audience will bear hearing some part of, every week; the Death of Julius Caesar, and other stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of English history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the royal Henries, which men hear eagerly ; and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales and Spanish SHAKSPEARE, OR, THE POET. 51 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 add- ing a song, that no man can any longer claim copy- right in 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 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 52 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the tem- ple. Sculpture in Egypt and in Greece grew up in subordination to architecture. It was the orna- ment 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 arranged 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 calm- ness 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, extravagance and exhibition took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irri- tability of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the people were al- ready 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 whatever he found; and the amount of indebted- ness may be inferred from Malone's laborious com- putations in regard to the First, Second and Third parts of Henry VI., in which, “out of 6,043 lines, SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 53 1,771 were written by some author preceding Shak- speare, 2,873 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors, and 1,899 were entirely his own.” And the proceeding investigation hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's sentence is an important 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 account 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 54 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. press, were unknown. A great poet who appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is any where radiating. Every intel- lectual jewel, every flower of sentiment it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes to value his memory 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 coun- tries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he 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 per- haps; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are librarians and his- toriographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser 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 and Dryden have been beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowl- SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 55 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 di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio and the Provençal poets are his benefac- tors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meung : Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Ur- bino : The Cock and the Fox, from the Lais of Marie: The House 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 writ- ing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writ- ings of others at discretion. Thought is the proper. ty 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 OWIſle Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is 56 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. retrospective. The learned member of the legisla. ture, 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 impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau think, for thousands; and so there 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 overmatched by any companion? The ap- peal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his breast a Delphi whereof to ask con- cerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily so, yea or may ? and to have answer, and to rely on that? All the debts which such a man could con- tract to other wit would never disturb his conscious- ness of originality; 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, SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 57 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 translation of the prayers and forms of the Catholic church, – these collected, too, in long periods, from the prayers and medita- tions of every saint and sacred writer all over the world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect to the Lord's Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is composed were already in use in the time of Christ, in the Rabbinical forms. He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous lan- guage 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 gov- ern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excel- lence by being translation on translation. There never was a time when there was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and all others successively picked out and thrown away. 58 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. Something like the same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, AEsop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Ili- ad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of such works the time thinks, the market thinks, the ma- son, 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 cath- olic 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 OWIle 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 detachment from the church, and the comple- tion of secular plays, from Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton's 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 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 59 damp and worms, so keen was the hope to dis- cover 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 Ann 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 touch- ing Queen Elizabeth and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs and Buckinghams. and lets pass without 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 inspira- tion 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 sus- pected he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intel- lectual men as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human un- derstanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspi- cion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise 60 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 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 acquaintances, the following persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, the 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, Al- bericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of his having commu- nicated, without enumerating many others whom doubtless he saw, -Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, the two Herberts, 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 impenetra- ble. 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 criti- cism which we think adequate begin to appear. It SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 61 was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare till now; for he is the father of German literature : it was with the introduction of Shakspeare into German, by Lessing, and the translation of his works by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German literature was most intimately connected. It was not until the nineteenth cen- tury, whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering readers. Now, literature, philoso- phy 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 crit- ics who have expressed our convictions with any adequate 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 illustra- tion of the history of the English stage, to which I have adverted, 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' 62 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. Theatre: its wardrobe and other appurtenances were his : that he bought an estate in his native vil- lage with his earnings as writer and shareholder ; that he lived in the best house in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbors with their commissions in London, as of borrowing money, and the like ; that he was a veritable farmer. About the time when he was writing Macbeth, he sues Philip Rog- ers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty- five shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different times; and in all respects appears as a good husband, with no reputation 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 in- formation. 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, birth-place, schooling, school-mates, earning of money, mar- riage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears between it and the goddess- SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 63 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 rain- bow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce and Collier, have wasted their oil. The famed theatres, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park and Tremont have vainly assisted. Bet- terton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean and Macready ded- icate 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 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 Hamlet’s ques- tion 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 real- ity to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks 64 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green- room. Can any biography shed light on the local- ities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream ad- mits me? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate in Strat- ford, the genesis of that delicate creation ? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the moonlight of Portia's villa, “the antres vast and desarts idle * of Othello's captivity, - where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancel- lor'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 Cyclopaean architecture of Egypt and India, in the Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters, the Italian painting, the Ballads of Spain and Scot- land, - the Genius draws up the ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new age, which sees the works and asks in vain for a history. 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 inspi- rations. Read the antique documents extricated, analyzed and compared by the assiduous Dyce and Collier, and now read one of these skyey SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 65 sentences, – aerolites, – which seem to have fallen out of heaven, and which not your experience 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 latter; or which gives the most historical insight into the man. Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet, with Shakspeare for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the information 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 fortunes; and on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science and which yet in- terweave their malice and their gift in our bright- est hours. Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets without finding that the poet had there revealed, 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 2 What trait of his private mind has he 66 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased him ; his de- light in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let Antonio the merchant 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 philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of 7 What office, or function, or district of man’s work, has he not remembered 2 What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon 2 What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved ? What sage has he not outseen 2 What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his be- havior 2 Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism 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, seeking vent, found the drama next SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 67 at hand. Had he 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 withdraw 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 pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion 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 68 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. as the landscape lies on the eye. And the impor- tance 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 eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably 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 imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self, - the subtilest of authors, and only just within the pos- sibility 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 humanity co-ordinates all his fac- ulties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has cer. tain observations, opinions, topics, which have SHAKSPEARE, OR, THE POET. 69 some accidental prominence, and which he dis- poses 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 curiosi- ties; no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no manner- ist is he he has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort and by the 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 problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and amelio- rations. Things were mirrored in his poetry with- out loss or blur: he could paint the fine with pre- cision, the great with compass, the tragic and the comic indifferently and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into 70 SEHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 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 microscope. 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 proceeds at leisure to etch a million. There are always objects; but there was never represen- tation. 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 Shaks- peare; but the possibility of the translation of things into song is demonstrated. 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 incom- parable person, so is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now as a whole poem. Though the speeches in the plays, 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 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 71 foregoers and followers, that the logician is satis- fied. His means are as admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, 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 the parties can name every figure; 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, and 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 lesson by heart. Yet there is not a trace of egotism. 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 72 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the uni- verse. 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; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, “It was rumored abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with repentance 2° Not less sovereign and cheerful, - much more sov- ereign and cheerful, is the tone of Shakspeare. His name suggests joy and emancipation to the heart of men. If he should appear in any com- pany of human souls, who would not march in his troop 2 He touches nothing that does not borrow 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 2 Solitude has austere lessons; it can teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs Shakspeare also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection of humanity. Shakspeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 73 these things bore a second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and convey- ing 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 im- parts this power : — what is that which they them- selves 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 fire- works on a holiday night, and advertise in all towns, “Very superior pyrotechny this evening ”? Are the agents of nature, and the power to under- stand them, worth no more than a street serenade, or the breath of a cigar 7 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 auxili- aries, how does he profit me? What does it sig- 74 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. nify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer. Night's Dream, or 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 can not 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 measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, 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 subject 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 SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 75 fall and curse behind us; with doomsdays and pur- gatorial 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 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. SOCIAL AIMS. –0- MUCH ill-natured criticism has been directed on American manners. I do not think it is to be re- sented. Rather, if we are wise, we shall listen and mend. Our critics will then be our best friends, though they did not mean it. But in every sense the subject of manners has a constant interest to thoughtful persons. Who does not delight in fine manners ? Their charm cannot be predicted or overstated. 'T is perpetual promise of more than can be fulfilled. It is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to apprecia- tion of those arts. It is even true that grace is more beautiful than beauty. Yet how impossible to overcome the obstacle of an unlucky tempera- ment and acquire good manners, unless by living with the well-bred from the start; and this makes the value of wise forethought to give ourselves and our children as much as possible the habit of culti- vated society. + 'Tis an inestimable hint that I owe to a few per- sons of fine manners, that they make behavior the very first sign of force, — behavior, and not per- SOCIAL AIMS. 77 formance, or talent, or, much less, wealth. Whilst almost everybody has a supplicating eye turned on events and things and other persons, a few natures are central and forever unfold, and these alone charm us. He whose word or deed you cannot predict, who answers you without any supplication in his eye, who draws his determination from within, and draws it instantly, - that man rules. The staple figure in novels is the man of aplomb, who sits, among the young aspirants and desperates, quite sure and compact, and, never sharing their affections or debilities, hurls his word like a bullet when occasion requires, knows his way, and carries his points. They may scream or applaud, he is never engaged or heated. Napoleon is the type of this class in modern history; Byron's heroes in poetry. But we for the most part are all drawn into the charivari ; we chide, lament, cavil, and re- criminate. I think Hans Andersen’s story of the cobweb cloth woven so fine that it was invisible, – woven for the king's garment, — must mean manners, which do really clothe a princely nature. Such a one can well go in a blanket, if he would. In the gymnasium or on the sea-beach his superiority does not leave him. But he who has not this fine gar- ment of behavior is studious of dress, and then not less of house and furniture and pictures and gar- 78 SOCIAL AIMS. dens, in all which he hopes to lie perdu, and not be exposed. “Manners are stronger than laws.” Their vast convenience I must always admire. The perfect defence and isolation which they effect makes an in- superable protection. Though the person so clothed wrestle with you, or swim with you, lodge in the same chamber, eat at the same table, he is yet a thousand miles off, and can at any moment finish with you. Manners seem to say, You are you, and I am I. In the most delicate natures, fine temperament and culture build this impassable wall. Balzac finely said: “Kings themselves cannot force the exquisite politeness of distance to capitulate, hid behind its shield of bronze.” Nature values manners. See how she has pre- pared for them. Who teaches manners of majesty, of frankness, of grace, of humility, - who but the adoring aunts and cousins that surround a young child 2 The babe meets such courting and flattery as only kings receive when adult ; and, trying ex- periments, and at perfect leisure with these posture- masters and flatterers all day, he throws himself into all the attitudes that correspond to theirs. Are they humble? he is composed. Are they eager? he is nonchalant. Are they encroaching? he is dignified and inexorable. And this scene is daily repeated in hovels as well as in high houses. SOCIAL AIMS. 79 " Nature is the best posture-master. An awkward man is graceful when asleep, or when hard at work, or agreeably amused. The attitudes of children are gentle, persuasive, royal, in their games and in their house-talk and in the street, before they have learned to cringe. 'Tis impossible but thought disposes the limbs and the walk, and is masterly or secondary. No art can contravene it or conceal it. Give me a thought, and my hands and legs and voice and face will all go right. And we are awkward for want of thought. The inspiration is Scanty, and does not arrive at the extremities. It is a commonplace of romances to show the ungainly manners of the pedant who has lived too long in college. Intellectual men pass for vulgar, and are timid and heavy with the elegant. But if the elegant are also intellectual, instantly the hesi- tating scholar is inspired, transformed, and exhibits the best style of manners. An intellectual man, though of feeble spirit, is instantly reinforced by being put into the company of scholars, and, to the surprise of everybody, becomes a lawgiver. We think a man unable and desponding. It is only that he is misplaced. Put him with new compan- ions, and they will find in him excellent qualities, unsuspected accomplishments, and the joy of life. 'T is a great point in a gallery, how you hang pic- tures; and not less in society, how you seat your 80 ASOCIAL AIMS. party. The circumstance of circumstance is timing and placing. When a man meets his accurate mate, society begins, and life is delicious. What happiness they give, – what ties they form | Whilst one man by his manners pins me to the wall, with another I walk among the stars. One man can, by his voice, lead the cheer of a reg- iment ; another will have no following. Nature made us all intelligent of these signs, for our safety and our happiness. Whilst certain faces are illu- mined with intelligence, decorated with invitation, others are marked with warnings: certain voices are hoarse and truculent ; sometimes they even bark. There is the same difference between heavy and genial manners as between the perceptions of octogenarians and those of young girls who see everything in the twinkling of an eye. Manners are the revealers of secrets, the betray- ers of any disproportion or want of symmetry in mind and character. It is the law of our constitu- tion that every change in our experience instantly indicates itself on our countenance and carriage, as the lapse of time tells itself on the face of a clock. We may be too obtuse to read it, but the record is there. Some men may be obtuse to read it, but Some men are not obtuse and do read it. In Bor- row’s “Lavengro,” the gypsy instantly detects, by his companion's face and behavior, that some good SOCIAL AIMS. 81 fortune has befallen him, and that he has money. We say, in these days, that credit is to be abolished in trade: is it? When a stranger comes to buy goods of you, do you not look in his face and an- swer according to what you read there? Credit is to be abolished? Can't you abolish faces and charac- ter, of which credit is the reflection? As long as men are born babes they will live on credit for the first fourteen or eighteen years of their life. Every innocent man has in his countenance a promise to pay, and hence credit. Less credit will there be? You are mistaken. There will always be more and more. Character must be trusted; and just in proportion to the morality of a people will be the expansion of the credit system. There is even a little rule of prudence for the young experimenter which Dr. Franklin omitted to set down, yet which the youth may find useful, - Do not go to ask your debtor the payment of a debt on the day when you have no other resource. He will learn by your air and tone how it is with you, and will treat you as a beggar. But work and starve a little longer. Wait till your affairs go better and you have other means at hand; you will then ask in a different tone, and he will treat your claim with entire respect. Now we all wish to be graceful, and do justice to ourselves by our manners; but youth in America is 82 SOCIAL AIMS. wont to be poor and hurried, not at ease, or not in society where high behavior could be taught. But the sentiment of honor and the wish to serve make all our pains superfluous. Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy. Self-command is the main elegance. “Keep cool, and you command everybody,” said St. Just ; and the wily old Talleyrand would still say, Surtout, messieurs, pas de zéle, – “Above all, gentlemen, no heat.” Why have you statues in your hall, but to teach you that, when the door-bell rings, you shall sit like them. “Eat at your table as you would eat at the table of the king,” said Confucius. It is an excellent custom of the Quakers, if only for a school of manners, –the silent prayer before meals. It has the effect to stop mirth, and introduce a moment of reflection. After the pause, all resume their usual intercourse from a vantage-ground. What a check to the violent manners which some- times come to the table, – of wrath, and whin- ing, and heat in trifles! 'T is a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration. A lady loses as soon as she admires too easily and too much. In man or woman, the face and the person lose power when they are on the strain to express admiration. A man makes his inferiors his superi- ors by heat. Why need you, who are not a gossip, SOCIAL AIMS. 83 talk as a gossip, and tell eagerly what the neighbors or the journals say? State your opinion without apology. The attitude is the main point, assuring your companion that, come good news or come bad, you remain in good heart and good mind, which is the best news you can possibly communicate. Self-control is the rule. You have in you there a noisy, sensual savage, which you are to keep down, and turn all his strength to beauty. For example, what a seneschal and detective is laughter | It seems to require several generations of education to train a squeaking or a shouting habit out of a man. Sometimes, when in almost all expressions the Choctaw and the slave have been worked out of him, a coarse nature still betrays itself in his contemptible squeals of joy. It is necessary for the purification of drawing-rooms that these entertain- ing explosions should be under strict control. Lord Chesterfield had early made this discovery, for he says, “I am sure that since I had the use of my reason, no human being has ever heard me laugh.” I know that there go two to this game, and, in the presence of certain formidable wits, savage nature must sometimes rush out in some disorder. To pass to an allied topic, one word or two in regard to dress, in which our civilization instantly shows itself. No nation is dressed with more good sense than ours. And everybody sees certain moral 84 SOCIAL AIMS. benefit in it. When the young European emigrant, after a summer's labor, puts on for the first time a new coat, he puts on much more. His good and becoming clothes put him on thinking that he must behave like people who are so dressed; and silently and steadily his behavior mends. But quite another class of our own youth I should remind, of dress in general, that some people need it and others need it not. Thus a king or a general does not need a fine coat, and a commanding person may save himself all solicitude on that point. There are al- ways slovens in State Street or Wall Street, who are not less considered. If a man have manners and talent he may dress roughly and carelessly. It is only when mind and character slumber that the dress can be seen. If the intellect were always awake, and every noble sentiment, the man might go in huckaback or mats, and his dress would be admired and imitated. Remember George Her- bert's maxim, “This coat with my discretion will be brave.” If, however, a man has not firm nerves and has keen sensibility, it is perhaps a wise econ- omy to go to a good shop and dress himself irre- proachably. He can then dismiss all care from his mind, and may easily find that performance an ad- dition of confidence, a fortification that turns the scale in social encounters, and allows him to go gayly into conversations where else he had been SOCIAL AIMS. 85 dry and embarrassed. I am not ignorant, — I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that “the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.” Thus much for manners: but we are not content with pantomime ; we say, This is only for the eyes. We want real relations of the mind and the heart; we want friendship; we want knowledge; we want virtue; a more inward existence to read the history of each other. Welfare requires one or two com- panions of intelligence, probity, and grace, to wear out life with, – persons with whom we can speak a few reasonable words every day, by whom we can measure ourselves, and who shall hold us fast to good sense and virtue; and these we are always in search of. He must be inestimable to us to whom we can say what we cannot say to ourselves. Yet now and then we say things to our mates, or hear things from them, which seem to put it out of the power of the parties to be strangers again. “Ei- ther death or a friend,” is a Persian proverb. I suppose I give the experience of many when I give my own. A few times in my life it has happened to me to meet persons of so good a nature and so good breeding that every topic was open and dis- cussed without possibility of offence, — persons who could not be shocked. One of my friends said in 86 SOCIAL AIMS. speaking of certain associates, “There is not one of them but I can offend at any moment.” But to the company I am now considering, were no ter- rors, no vulgarity. All topics were broached, - life, love, marriage, sex, hatred, suicide, magic, the- ism, art, poetry, religion, myself, thyself, all selves, and whatever else, with a security and vivacity which belonged to the nobility of the parties and to their brave truth. The life of these persons was conducted in the same calm and affirmative man- ner as their discourse. Life with them was an ex- periment continually varied, full of results, full of grandeur, and by no means the hot and hurried business which passes in the world. The delight in good company, in pure, brilliant, social atmosphere; the incomparable satisfaction of a society in which everything can be safely said, in which every mem- ber returns a true echo, in which a wise freedom, an ideal republic of sense, simplicity, knowledge, and thorough good-meaning abide, – doubles the value of life. It is this that justifies to each the jealousy with which the doors are kept. Do not look sourly at the set or the club which does not choose you. Every highly-organized person knows the value of the social barriers, since the best soci- ety has often been spoiled to him by the intrusion of bad companions. He of all men would keep the right of choice sacred, and feel that the exclusions SOCIAL AIMS. 87 are in the interest of the admissions, though they happen at this moment to thwart his wishes. The hunger for company is keen, but it must be discriminating, and must be economized. 'Tis a de- fect in our manners that they have not yet reached the prescribing a limit to visits. That every well- dressed lady or gentleman should be at liberty to exceed ten minutes in his or her call on serious people, shows a civilization still rude. A universal etiquette should fix an iron limit after which a mo. ment should not be allowed without explicit leave granted on request of either the giver or receiver of the visit. There is inconvenience in such strict- ness, but vast inconvenience in the want of it. To trespass on a public servant is to trespass on a nation's time. Yet presidents of the United States are afflicted by rude Western and Southern gossips (I hope it is only by them) until the gossip's im- measurable legs are tired of sitting; then he strides out and the nation is relieved. It is very certain that sincere and happy conver- sation doubles our powers; that in the effort to un- fold our thought to a friend we make it clearer to ourselves, and surround it with illustrations that help and delight us. It may happen that each hears from the other a better wisdom than any one else will ever hear from either. But these ties are taken care of by Providence to each of us. A wise 88 SOCIAL AIMS. man once said to me that “all whom he knew, met:”—meaning that he need not take pains to introduce the persons whom he valued to each other: they were sure to be drawn together as by gravitation. The soul of a man must be the ser- vant of another. The true friend must have an attraction to whatever virtue is in us. Our chief want in life, – is it not somebody who can make us do what we can 2 And we are easily great with the loved and honored associate. We come out of our eggshell existence and see the great dome arch- ing over us; see the zenith above and the nadir under us. Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to con- vert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense. You are to be missionary and carrier of all that is good and no- ble. Virtues speak to virtues, vices to vices, – each to their own kind in the people with whom we deal. If you are suspiciously and dryly on your guard, so is he or she. If you rise to frankness and generosity, they will respect it now or later. In this art of conversation, Woman, if not the queen and victor, is the lawgiver. If every one recalled his experiences, he might find the best in the speech of superior women; — which was better than song, and carried ingenuity, character, wise counsel and affection, as easily as the wit with f SOCIAL AIMS. 89 which it was adorned. They are not only wise themselves, they make us wise. No one can be a master in conversation who has not learned much from women; their presence and inspiration are essential to its success. Steele said of his mistress, that “to have loved her was a liberal education.” Shenstone gave no bad account of this influence in his description of the French woman : “There is a quality in which no woman in the world can com- pete with her, — it is the power of intellectual irri- tation. She will draw wit out of a fool. She strikes with such address the chords of self-love, that she gives unexpected vigor and agility to fancy, and electrifies a body that appeared non-electric.” Cole- ridge esteems cultivated women as the depositaries and guardians of “English undefiled; ” and Lu- ther commends that accomplishment of “pure Ger- man speech " of his wife. Madame de Staël, by the unanimous consent of all who knew her, was the most extraordinary con- verser that was known in her time, and it was a time full of eminent men and women; she knew all distinguished persons in letters or society in Eng- land, Germany, and Italy, as well as in France; though she said, with characteristic nationality, “Conversation, like talent, exists only in France.” Madame de Staël valued nothing but conversation. When they showed her the beautiful Lake Leman, 90 SOCIAL AIMS. she exclaimed, “O for the gutter of the Rue de Bac l’” the street in Paris in which her house stood. And she said one day, seriously, to M. Molé, “If it were not for respect to human opinions, I would not open my window to see the Bay of Naples for the first time, whilst I would go five hundred leagues to talk with a man of genius whom I had not seen.” Sainte-Beuve tells us of the privileged circle at Coppet, that after making an excursion one day, the party returned in two coaches from Chambéry to Aix, on the way to Coppet. The first coach had many rueful accidents to relate, – a terrific thun- der-storm, shocking roads, and danger and gloom to the whole company. The party in the second coach, on arriving, heard this story with surprise; — of thunder-storm, of steeps, of mud, of danger, they knew nothing; no, they had forgotten earth, and breathed a purer air : such a conversation be- tween Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier and Benjamin Constant and Schlegel ! they were all in a state of delight. The intoxication of the conversation had made them insensible to all no- tice of weather or rough roads. Madame de Tessé said, “If I were Queen, I should command Mad- ame de Staël to talk to me every day.” Conversa- tion fills all gaps, supplies all deficiencies. What a good trait is that recorded of Madame de Main- tenon, that, during dinner, the servant slipped to SOCIAL AIMS. 91 her side, “Please, madame, one anecdote more, for there is no roast to-day.” Politics, war, party, luxury, avarice, fashion, are all asses with loaded panniers to serve the kitchen of Intellect, the king. There is nothing that does not pass into lever or weapon. And yet there are trials enough of nerve and character, brave choices enough of taking the part of truth and of the oppressed against the oppressor, in privatest circles. A right speech is not well to be distinguished from action. Courage to ask ques- tions; courage to expose our ignorance. The great gain is, not to shine, not to conquer your compan- ion, — then you learn nothing but conceit, — but to find a companion who knows what you do not; to tilt with him and be overthrown, horse and foot, with utter destruction of all your logic and learn- ing. There is a defeat that is useful. Then you can see the real and the counterfeit, and will never accept the counterfeit again. You will adopt the art of war that has defeated you. You will ride to battle horsed on the very logie which you found ir- resistible. You will accept the fertile truth, in- stead of the solemn customary lie. Let nature bear the expense. The attitude, the tone, is all. Let our eyes not look away, but meet. Let us not look east and west for materials of con- versation, but rest in presence and unity. A just 92 SOCIAL AIMS. feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, “I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it.” The main point is to throw yourself on the truth, and say, with Newton, “There 's no contending against facts.” When Molyneux fancied that the observations of the nutation of the earth's axis de- stroyed Newton’s theory of gravitation, he tried to break it softly to Sir Isaac, who only answered, “It may be so, there’s no arguing against facts and experiments.” But there are people who cannot be cultivated, — people on whom speech makes no impression; swainish, morose people, who must be kept down and quieted as you would those who are a little tipsy; others, who are not only swainish, but are prompt to take oath that swainishness is the only culture; and though their odd wit may have some salt for you, your friends would not relish it. Bolt these out. And I have seen a man of genius who made me think that if other men were like him co- SOCIAL AIMS. 93 operation were impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy 2 Here is centrality and penetration, strong understanding, and the higher gifts, the insight of the real, or from the real, and the moral rectitude which belongs to it: but all this and all his re- sources of wit and invention are lost to me in every experiment that I make to hold intercourse with his mind; always some weary, captious paradox to fight you with, and the time and temper wasted. And beware of jokes; too much temperance cannot be used: inestimable for sauce, but corrupting for food, we go away hollow and ashamed. As soon as the company give in to this enjoyment, we shall have no Olympus. True wit never made us laugh. Mahomet seems to have borrowed by anticipation of several centuries a leaf from the mind of Swe- denborg, when he wrote in the Koran : — “On the day of resurrection, those who have indulged in ridicule will be called to the door of Paradise, and have it shut in their faces when they reach it. Again, on their turning back, they will be called to another door, and again, on reaching it, will see it closed against them ; and so on, ad infinitum, without end.” Shun the negative side. Never worry people with your contritions, nor with dismal views of politics or society. Never name sickness: even if you could trust yourself on that perilous topic, 94 SOCIAL AIMS. beware of unmuzzling a valetudinarian, who will soon give you your fill of it. The law of the table is Beauty, - a respect to the common soul of all the guests. Everything is unseasonable which is private to two or three or any portion of the company. Tact never vio- lates for a moment this law; never intrudes the orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a tariff of expenses, or professional privacies; as we say, we never “talk shop’’ before company. Lov- ers abstain from caresses and haters from insults whilst they sit in one parlor with common friends. Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people's opinions. See how it lies there in you; and if there is no counsel, offer none. What we want is not your activity or interference with your mind, but your content to be a vehicle of the sim- ple truth. The way to have large occasional views, as in a political or social crisis, is to have large habitual views. When men consult you, it is not that they wish you to stand tip toe and pump your brains, but to apply your habitual view, your wis- dom, to the present question, forbearing all pedan- tries and the very name of argument; for in good conversation parties don’t speak to the words, but to the meanings of each other. Manners first, then conversation. Later, we see that as life was not in manners. So it is not in SOCIAL AIMS. 95 talk. Manners are external; talk is occasional; these require certain material conditions, human labor for food, clothes, house, tools, and, in short, plenty and ease, – since only so can certain finer and finest powers appear and expand. In a whole nation of Hottentots there shall not be one valuable man, – valuable out of his tribe. In every million of Europeans or of Americans there shall be thou- sands who would be valuable on any spot on the globe. The consideration the rich possess in all societies is not without meaning or right. It is the approval given by the human understanding to the act of creating value by knowledge and labor. It is the sense of every human being that man should have this dominion of nature, should arm himself with tools and force the elements to drudge for him and give him power. Every one must seek to secure his independence; but he need not be rich. The old Confucius in China admitted the benefit, but stated the limitation: “If the search for riches were sure to be successful, though I should become a groom with whip in hand to get them, I will do so. As the search may not be successful, I will follow after that which I love.” There is in America a general conviction in the minds of all mature men, that every young man of good faculty and good habits can by perseverance attain to an adequate 96 SOCIAL AIMS. estate; if he have a turn for business, and a quick eye for the opportunities which are always offering for investment, he can come to wealth, and in such good season as to enjoy as well as transmit it. Every human society wants to be officered by a best class, who shall be masters instructed in all the great arts of life; shall be wise, temperate, brave, public men, adorned with dignity and accom- plishments. Every country wishes this, and each has taken its own method to secure such service to the state. In Europe, ancient and modern, it has been attempted to secure the existence of a superior class by hereditary nobility, with estates transmitted by primogeniture and entail. But in the last age, this system has been on its trial, and the verdict of mankind is pretty nearly pronounced. That method secured permanence of families, firmness of cus- toms, a certain external culture and good taste; gratified the ear with preserving historic names: but the heroic father did not surely have heroic sons, and still less surely heroic grandsons; wealth and ease corrupted the race. In America, the necessity of clearing the forest, laying out town and street, and building every house and barn and fence, then church and town- house, exhausted such means as the Pilgrims brought, and made the whole population poor; and the like necessity is still found in each new SOCIAL AIMS. 97 settlement in the Territories. These needs gave their character to the public debates in every vil- lage and State. I have been often impressed at our country town-meetings with the accumulated virility, in each village, of five or six or eight or ten men, who speak so well, and so easily handle the affairs of the town. I often hear the business of a little town (with which I am most familiar) dis- cussed with a clearness and thoroughness, and with a generosity too, that would have satisfied me had it been in one of the larger capitals. I am sure each one of my readers has a parallel experience. And every one knows that in every town or city is always to be found a certain number of public- spirited men who perform, unpaid, a great amount of hard work in the interest of the churches, of schools, of public grounds, works of taste and refine- ment. And as in civil duties, so in social power and duties. Our gentlemen of the old school, that is, of the school of Washington, Adams, and Ham- ilton, were bred after English types, and that style of breeding furnished fine examples in the last gen- eration; but, though some of us have seen such, I doubt they are all gone. But nature is not poorer to-day. With all our haste, and slipshod ways, and flippant self-assertion, I have seen examples of new grace and power in address that honor the country. It was my fortune not long ago, with my eyes di. 98 SOCIAL AIMS. rected on this subject, to fall in with an American to be proud of. I said never was such force, good meaning, good sense, good action, combined with such domestic lovely behavior, such modesty and persistent preference for others. Wherever he moved he was the benefactor. It is of course that he should ride well, shoot well, sail well, keep house well, administer affairs well; but he was the best talker, also, in the company: what with a per- petual practical wisdom, with an eye always to the working of the thing, what with the multitude and distinction of his facts (and one detected continu- ally that he had a hand in everything that has been done), and in the temperance with which he parried all offence and opened the eyes of the per- son he talked with without contradicting him. Yet I said to myself, How little this man suspects, with his sympathy for men and his respect for lettered and scientific people, that he is not likely, in any company, to meet a man superior to himself. And I think this is a good country that can bear such a creature as he is. The young men in America at this moment take little thought of what men in England are thinking or doing. That is the point which decides the wel- fare of a people; which way does it look? If to any other people, it is not well with them. If occu- pied in its own affairs and thoughts and men, with SOCIAL AIMS. 99 a heat which excludes almost the notice of any other people, – as the Jews, the Greeks, the Per- sians, the Romans, the Arabians, the French, the English, at their best times have been, - they are sublime; and we know that in this abstraction they are executing excellent work. Amidst the calami- ties which war has brought on our country this one benefit has accrued, - that our eyes are withdrawn from England, withdrawn from France, and look homeward. We have come to feel that “by our- selves our safety must be bought; ” to know the vast resources of the continent, the good-will that is in the people, their conviction of the great moral advantages of freedom, social equality, education and religious culture, and their determination to hold these fast, and, by them, to hold fast the coun- try and penetrate every square mile of it with this American civilization. The consolation and happy moment of life, aton- ing for all short-comings, is sentiment; a flame of affection or delight in the heart, burning up sud- denly for its object; — as the love of the mother for her child; of the child for its mate; of the youth for his friend; of the scholar for his pursuit; of the boy for sea-life, or for painting, or in the passion for his country; or in the tender-hearted philan- thropist to spend and be spent for some romantic charity, as Howard for the prisoner, or John Brown 100 SOCIAL AIMS. for the slave. No matter what the object is, so it be good, this flame of desire makes life sweet and tolerable. It reinforces the heart that feels it, makes all its acts and words gracious and interest- ing. Now society in towns is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimental- ists, – talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having. They have, they tell you, an intense love of nature; poetry, - O, they adore poetry, - and roses, and the moon, and the cavalry regiment, and the governor; they love liberty, “dear liberty!” they worship virtue, “dear vir- tue!” Yes, they adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel; we shiver with cold. A little experience acquaints us with the unconvertibility of the senti- mentalist, the soul that is lost by mimicking soul. Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment 2 Was ever one converted 2 The innocence and ignorance of the patient is the first difficulty; he believes his disease is blooming health. A rough realist or a phalanx of realists would be prescribed; but that is like proposing to mend your bad road with dia- monds. Then poverty, famine, war, imprisonment, . : 3.: SOCIAL AIMS. 101 might be tried. Another cure would be to fight fire with fire, to match a sentimentalist with a sen- timentalist. I think each might begin to suspect that something was wrong. Would we codify the laws that should reign in households, and whose daily transgression annoys and mortifies us and degrades our household life, we must learn to adorn every day with sacrifices. Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. Temperance, courage, love, are made up of the same jewels. Listen to every prompting of honor. “As soon as sacrifice becomes a duty and necessity to the man, I see no limit to the horizon which opens before me.” " Of course those people, and no others, interest us, who believe in their thought, who are absorbed, if you please to say so, in their own dream. They only can give the key and leading to better society: those who delight in each other only because both delight in the eternal laws; who forgive nothing to each other ; who, by their joy and homage to these, are made incapable of conceit, which destroys al- most all the fine wits. Any other affection be- tween men than this geometric one of relation to the same thing, is a mere mush of materialism. These are the bases of civil and polite society; namely, manners, conversation, lucrative labor, and * Ernest Renan. 102 SOCIAL AIMS. public action; whether political, or in the leading of social institutions. We have much to regret, much to mend, in our society; but I believe that with all liberal and hopeful men there is a firm faith in the beneficent results which we really en- joy ; that intelligence, manly enterprise, good educa- tion, virtuous life and elegant manners have been and are found here, and, we hope, in the next gen- eration will still more abound. NOTES. THE SUPERLATIVE. This essay was contributed to The Century Magazine for February, 1882, and is contained in the tenth volume of the Riverside Edition of Emerson's collected writings. PAGE 1. The Maine Law is the popular name for one of the earliest attempts at enforcing total abstinence from intoxicating drinks by legislative enactment. A law for prohibiting drinking-shops and tippling-houses was passed in the State of Maine in 1851, at the instance especially of Neal Dow, then governor of the state. PAGE 3. The legend of Demophoon makes him to have been immersed in fire in his infancy in order to secure im- mortality for him. PAGE 4. William Ellery Channing, a Unitarian divine (1780–1842), was a great figure in Boston when Emerson was a young man, and the dominant force in ethics. Page 6. Lord Chesterfield was an English nobleman of the eighteenth century, who, in a time of great artificiality, had the reputation of a sagacious philosopher, but whose Letters to his Son breathe the stifling air of mere world- liness. There were two Schlegels, brothers, whose writings had been translated into English and published in Bohn's Li- brary, and were much read in Emerson’s prime : Augustus William Schlegel, best known by his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, and Frederick Schlegel, by his Philosophy of History. PAGE 10. Magliabecchi (pronounced mālyābek'kee), an 104 INOTES. Italian scholar, a poor man who attracted the attention of Duke Cosimo III. of Florence, and was made by him his librarian. He had an extraordinary memory for the very words of the books he read. He amassed a library, which he bequeathed to Florence. Miran'dola was also a Florentine, a scholar who devoted himself, in the days of the Renaissance, to Plato. PAGE 12. Semper sibi similis = Nature is ever the same to herself. “The gospel rule, yea or nay.” See Matthew v. 37. PAGE 15. “There is no writing which has more electric power to unbind and animate the torpid intellect than the bold Eastern muse.” Emerson is a signal example of the Western mind which has been stimulated by Oriental phi- losophy and literature. It was in his day that a great ac- cession of Eastern lore came to the West through the translations first made by Sir William Jones at the end of the last century, and followed by others, and his Poems especially show how he was magnetized by Orientalism. Uses oF GREAT MEN. This essay and the one following are from Representative Men, the fourth volume of Emerson's writings. The vol- ume opens with “Uses of Great Men,” and, the doctrine being established, there follow essays on Plato ; or, The Philosopher. Swedenborg; or, The Mystic. Montaigne; or, The Skeptic. Shakspeare ; or, The Poet. Napoleon ; or, The Man of the World. Goethe ; or, The Writer. PAGE 17. Gautama, the founder of the Buddhists. NOTES. 105 PAGE 20. “Peu de moyens, beaucoup d’effet” = The less the means, the greater the effect. PAGE 22. Behmen (1575–1624) was a German mystic, and Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a Swedish philosopher whose doctrines were accepted by a society calling itself the New Church, but popularly known as Swedenborgians. The positive assertions of Swedenborg took a form as authorita- tive to many as a direct revelation from God, and in Emer- son's early life the visions and views of Swedenborg found a ready acceptance among his neighbors. Emerson's paper on him is sympathetic and critical. PAGE 23. “Gilbert, or Swedenborg, or Oersted.” Emer- son, in his writings, takes great delight in calling in the witness of great men to his doctrines. The list at the foot of the previous page is an example of his manner of calling up names. Oersted (Ör'stéd) was a Danish electro-mag- netist (1777–1851). Gilbert may be Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the navigator and half-brother to Sir Walter Raleigh. Longfellow has sung in clear tones the stirring tale of Gil- bert’s death. PAGE 25. “Werners, Won Buchs, and Beaumonts . . . Berzeliuses and Davys.” Here Emerson has made a group of scientists. Werner was a German mineralogist; Von Buch was a German geologist; Beaumont, Elie de Beaumont, a French geologist ; Berzelius, a Swedish chemist, and Sir Humphry Davy a noted English chemist, who invented the safety lamp. PAGE 27. “Clarendon’s portraits.” Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon (1608–1674), was Lord Chancellor of England, but his greatest fame rests on his History of the Rebellion, which commences with the reign of Charles I. and concludes with the return of Charles II. in 1660. Its merit is less in its historical value than in its literary form, and its 106 MOTES. admirable delineation of character. It was written unmis- takably from the royalist point of view, but is generous to the adversaries of the crown. PAGE 29. “Mathematical combination.” There was a remarkable boy whom Emerson very likely had in mind, as he probably witnessed some of his feats, Zerah Colburn, who astonished New Englanders by his marvellous power of immediate computation of involved arithmetical problems. PAGE 34. Peau d'âne = ass’s skin. PAGE 35. “Scourge of God” was the name applied to the Hunnish king Attila in the fifth century and to Genseric, king of the Vandals of the same period. Vespasian, the Roman emperor, was called the Darling of Mankind. PAGE 37. Thersites is the snarling scoffer in the Iliad who gets thumped for his harsh jesting. PAGE 41. A Cartesian, or follower of Descartes, a French philosopher of the seventeenth century. PAGE 42. Emerson wrote when the great immigration of the Irish to America was at the flood, and the peasants who came over were doing the hard work of making railroads, and fetching and carrying. As Saint Patrick was the patron saint of Ireland, Paddy became the playful name of the Irishman, as John of an Englishman and Jonathan of an American. Pestalozzi (pêstālot'see) was a German schoolmaster who accomplished great reforms in educational matters. One of his reforms, which still has a lingering existence, was the monitor system, by which one pupil was set to teach another. SHAKSPEARE ; or, THE PoET. It would be a capital exercise for one to annotate this essay by reference to other statements about Shakspeare, NOTES. 107 which Emerson has made. The index in the final volume of the Riverside Edition will point to the passages where he is named. PAGE 54. Saadi, a Persian poet of the twelfth century, who furnished Emerson with a basis for more than one poem. PAGE 59. What was Ben Jonson's praise of Shakspeare 2 PAGE 60. Here is a catalogue of worthies, and each man's history is worth searching out. Better still is it to know something of the work of each. PAGE 64. In what plays are the forest of Arden 2 Scone castle 2 Portia’s villa 2 PAGE 66. Talma was a French tragedian and contem- porary of Napoleon, who took kingly parts and had the air of an ancient statue. SOCIAL AIMS. The second essay in the eighth volume, which bears the general title, Letters and Social Aims. PAGE 77. Hans Andersen's story is that entitled The Em- peror's New Clothes. Emerson gets a new meaning out of the parable, but one that seems to ignore the actual fact of the story. PAGE 80. George Borrow, an Englishman, was an eccen- tric wanderer, who, with a commission as a colporteur, made racy observations on life as he saw it from his vagrant point of view. He wrote The Bible in Spain, The Zincali, or an Account of the Gipsies in Spain, Lavengro, and other books. PAGE 84. The maxim quoted from George Herbert (1593– 1632) is from that poet's The Church Porch. The whole stanza reads : — “In clothes, cheap handsomeness doth bear the bell, Wisdom 's a trimmer thing than shop e'er gave. Say not then, This with that lace will do well ; 108 NOTES. But, This with my discretion will be brave. Much curiousness is a perpetual wooing : Nothing, with labor; folly, long a doing.” PAGE 89. The passage in Steele to which Emerson refers is in The Tatler, where Steele says of Lady Elizabeth Hast- ings: “Though her mien carries much more invitation than command, to behold her is an immediate check to loose be- havior; to love her was a liberal education.” To the several commendations by Steele, Shenstone, Cole- ridge and Luther might be added De Quincey’s observation, in his essay on Style, that the best letter-writing is by un- married Englishwomen above twenty-five, “who combine more of intelligence, cultivation and thoughtfulness, than any other [class] in Europe.” PAGE 90. Coppet, not far from Geneva, in Switzerland, was the home of Madame de Staël's father, Baron Necker, and here she held her literary court. PAGE 98. Though Emerson does not name him, there is little doubt that this “American to be proud of ’’ was Mr. John Murray Forbes, of Milton, Massachusetts, whose death in old age, in 1898, called out many tributes to the memory of a man of great force in politics, and especially in the war for the Union. g Qilje littberglöc Literature ºstricg, Each regular single number, paper, 15 cents, net, postpaid. 63. Ilongfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride, and Other Poems.” 64, 65, 66. Tales from Shakespeare. CHARLEs and MARY L.AMB. In three parts. [Also, in one volume, linem, 50 cents, met.] 67. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.” & 68. Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, The Traveller, etc.” 69. Hawthorne’s Old Manse, and A Few Mosses.” 70. A Selection from Whittier’s Child Life in Hºoetry.** 71. A Selection from Whittler’s Chlld Life in Prose.** 2. Milton’s L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas, etc.” 73. Tennyson’s Enoch Arden, and Other Poems.” 74. Gray’s Elegy, etc.; Cowper's John Gilpin, etc. 75. Scudder’s George Washington. § 76. Wordsworth’s On the Intimations of Immortality, etc. 77. Burns’s Cotter’s Saturday Night, and Other Poems. 78. Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield.S 79. Lamb’s Old China, and Other Essays of Elia. 80. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, etc.; Campbell’s Lochiel’s Warning, etc.” 81. Holmes’s Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.S$ §2. Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. SSS 83. George Eliot's Silas Marner.S 84. Dana’s Two Years before the Mast. §§§ 85. Hughes's Tom Brown’s School Days.S$ 86. Scott's Ivanhoe $$$ 87. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.S$$ 88. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. SSS 89. Swift’s Gulliver’s Voyage to Lilliput.” + 90. Swift’s Gulliver’s Voyage to Brobding nag.” 91. Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables.S$$ 92. Burroughs’s A Bunch of Herbs, and Other Papers. 93. Shakespeare’s As You Like It.* ** Also, bound in linen : * 25 cents. * 11 and 63 in one vol., 40 cents; like- wise, 40 and 69, 55 and 67, 70 and 71, 72 and 94, 89 and 90 ; 93 and 106. # Also in one vol., 40 cents. § Double Number, 30 cents; linem, 40 cents. SS Triple Num- ber, 4.5 cents; linen, 50 cents. §§§ Quadruple Number, 50 cents, linen, 60 cents. These prices an eitet, postpaid. EXTRA NUJ/BERS. A American Authors and Their Birthdays. Programmes and Sug- gestions for the Celebration of the Birthdays of Authors. By A. S. Roe. B Portraits and Biographies of 20 American Authors. C A. Longfellow Night. For Catholic Schools and Societies. D Literature in School. Essays by HoRACE E. SCUDDER. JE Harriet Beecher Stowe. Dialogues and Scenes. F' Longfellow Leaflets. (E - - - - ach a Double Number. 30 cents, met; G. Whittier Leaflets. linen, 40 cents, net.) Poems and Prose II EIolmes Leaflets. sº ºn, or in or * . . tº O Lowell Leaflets. Passages for Reading and Recitation. I The Riverside Manual for Teachers. Suggestions and Illus- trative Lessons leading up to Primary Reading. By I. F. HALL. K The Riverside Primer and Reader. (Special Number.) Paper covers, with cloth back, 25 cents, met ; in strong linem binding, 30 cents, met. L The Riverside Song Book. 120 Classic American Poems set to Standard Music. (Special Number, 30 cents, net ; boards, 40 cents, net.) M Lowell’s Fable for Critics. (Double Number, 30 cents, met.) N Selections from the Writings of Eleven American Authors. P The Hiawatha Primer. (Special Number.) Based on Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, and designed for use as the child's first book in read- ing. By Florence Holbrook. Cloth only, 40 cents, net. Q Selections from the Writings of Eleven English Authors. Cbe libergipe Literature series. Each regular single number, paper, 15 cents, net, postpaid. 94, Milton’s Paradise Lost. Books I.-III.” 95, 96, 97,98. Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. In four parts. (The four parts also bound in one volume, lutem, 60 cents, met.) 99. Tennyson’s Coming of Arthur, and Other Idylls of the King. 100. Burke's Conciliation with the Colonies. Edited by R. ANDER- SEN, A. M.” 101. Homer’s Iliad. Dooks I., VI, XXII., and XXIV. POPE,% 102. Macaulay’s Essays on Johnson and Goldsmith.* 103. Macaulay’s Essay on Milton.* 104. Macaulay’s Ilife and Writings of Addison.* Nos. 102, 103, and 104 are edited by WILLIAM P. TRENT. 105. Carlyle’s Essay on Bulns. Edited by GEORGE R. Noy Es. * 106. Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Edited by RICHARD GRANT WHITE, and furnished with Additional Notes by HELEN GRAY CoNE.*** 107, 108. Grimms' German Household Tales. In two parts.f 109. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Edited by W. V. MooDY.S 110. De Quincey’s Flight of a Tartar Tribe. Edited by M. H. TURK.” 111. Tennyson’s Princess. Edited by ROLFF. (IDouble No., 30 cents, net.) Also, whº Rolfe's Students' Serves, cloth, to Teachers, 53 cents. 112. Virgil’s AEneid. Books I.-III. Translated by C. P. CRANCH. 113. Poems from the Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed- ited, with an Introduction and Notes, by GEORGE H. BROWNE.* 114. Old Greek Folk Stories. Told Anew by Jose, PHINE PRESTON PEABODY. With an Index of Mythology.* 115. Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Other Poems. 116. Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Edited by RICHARD GRANT WHITE, and furnished with Additional Notes by HELEN GRAY CONE. § 117, 118. Stories from the Arabian Nights. With an Introductory Note. (The two parts also bound in one volume, lamen, 40 cents, met.) 119. Poe’s Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher, etc.” 120. Poe’s Gold-Bug, 'I'he Purloined Letter, and Other Tales.** Nos. 119, 120 are edited by WILLIAM P. TRENT. 121. The Great Debate : Hayne’s Speech.** 122. The Great Debate : Webster’s Reply to Hayne.** Nos. 121, 122 are edited by LINDSAY Sw IFT. 123. Lowell’s Dermocracy, and Other Papers.” 124. Aldrich’s Baby Bell, The Little Violinist, etc. 125. Dryden’s Palamon and Arcite. Edited by ARTHUR GILMAN.” 126. The King of the Golden River, by JoHN RUSKIN ; etc.” 127. Reats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, and Other Poems. 128. Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems. 129. Plato's The Judgment of Socrates: being The Apology, Crito, and the closing scene of Phaedo. Translated by PAUL E. MoRE. 130. Emerson’s The Superlative, and Other Essays. 131. Emerson’s Nature, and Compensation. Edited by EDWARD W. EMERSON. 132. Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, and Other Poems. Edited by LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 133. Carl Schurz’s Abraham Lincoln.” 134. Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. Edited by Rolf E. (Double # 30 cents, net.) Also in Rolfe's Students’ Series, cloth, to Teachers, 53 C67??.S. 135. Chºº's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,” and an Intro- UlO51 OI!. 136. Chaucer’s Knight’s and Nun’s Priests’ Tales.** Nos. 135 and 136 are edited by FRANK J. MATHER, JR. Also, bound in linen : * 25 cents. ** 39 and 123 in one vol., 40 cents; like- wise 72 and 94, 93 and 106, 113 and 42, 119 and 120, 121 and 122, 133 and 32, 135 and 136. # Also in one vol., 40 cents. § Double Number, paper, 30 cents; linen, 40 cents. These prices are net, postpaid. Other numbers in preparation. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. * * 3 * : ***g, ... * ... . . . - ----------- * :----. --------- *—º:---- -** * ––––3. |Illuſ DD NOT REMOVE DR | MUTILATE CARD y * : - & * ... * -- - | s w * 5 … , , ， , , …, ... t º t.º.: „ ! … .• • • • • • • •）›）………………….……………. … … , ， ， … . …š . • • • • • • •