Representative Men............................................................................................................................................1

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 surprise us. All mythology opens with demigods, and the circumstance

is high and poetic; that is, their genius is paramount. In the legends of the Gautama, the first men ate the earth

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

The search after the great man is the dream of 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 English 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 powerful, I would sell

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

Our religion is the love and cherishing of these patrons. The gods of fable are the shining moments of great

men. We run all our vessels into one mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism,

Mahometism, are the necessary and structural action of the human mind. The student of history is like a man

going into a warehouse to buy cloths or carpets. He fancies he has a new article. If he go to the factory, he

shall find that his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and rosettes which are found on the interior walls of the

pyramids of Thebes. Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think,

nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements had their origin from his thought. And our

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 social strengths. Our affection

toward others creates a sort of vantage or purchase which nothing will supply. I can do that by another which

I cannot do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself. Other men are lenses through which we

read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their

kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest. The stronger the nature, the more it is reactive. Let us have

the quality pure. A little genius let us leave alone. A main difference betwixt men is, whether they attend their

own affair or not. Man is that noble endogenous plant which grows, like the palm, from within outward. His

own affair, though impossible to others, he can open with celerity and in sport. It is easy to sugar to be sweet

and to nitre to be salt. We take a great deal of pains to waylay and entrap that which of itself will fall into our

hands. I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor

and difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light and in large relations, whilst they must

make painful corrections and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error. His service to us is of like sort. It

costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is 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'effet." He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.

But he must be related to us, and our life receive from him some promise of explanation. I cannot tell what I

would know; but I have observed there are persons who, in their character and actions, answer questions

which I have not skill to put. One man answers some question which none of his contemporaries put, and is

isolated. The past and passing religions and philosophies answer some other questions. Certain men affect us

as rich possibilities, but helpless to themselves and to their times, the sport perhaps of some instinct that

rules in the air; they do not speak to our want. But the great are near; we know them at sight. They satisfy

expectation and fall into place. What is good is effective, generative; makes for itself room, food and allies. A

sound apple produces seed, a hybrid does not. Is a man in his place, he is constructive, fertile, magnetic,

inundating armies with his purpose, which is thus executed. The river makes its own shores, and each

legitimate idea makes its own channels and welcome, harvests for food, institutions for expression, weapons

to fight with and disciples to explain it. The true artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after

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

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 Swedenborg saw that things were representative. Men are also

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 decimal 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.

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 created thing its lover and poet. Justice has already been done to steam, to iron, to wood, to coal, to

loadstone, to iodine, to corn and cotton; but how few materials are yet used by our arts The mass of creatures

and of qualities are still hid and expectant. It would seem as if each waited, like the enchanted princess in

fairy tales, for a destined human 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*(2), or Swedenborg, or Oerstad, before the general mind can

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 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 architecture, another. There are

advancements to numbers, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little suspected at first, when, by union with

intellect and will, they ascend into the life and reappear in conversation, character and politics.

But this comes later. We speak now only of our acquaintance with them in their own sphere and the way in

which they seem to fascinate and draw to them some genius who occupies himself with one thing, all his life

long. The possibility of 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; 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 inanimate will one day speak and reason. Unpublished nature will have its whole

secret told. Shall we say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innumerable Werners, Von Buchs and

Beaumonts, and the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in solution I know not what Berzeliuses and Davys?

Thus we sit by the fire and take hold on the poles of the earth. This quasi omnipresence supplies 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! Every ship that comes to America got its chart

from Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplane 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 mapmaker of the latitudes and

longitudes of our condition. These roadmakers 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

We are too passive in the reception of these material or semimaterial aids. We must not be sacks and

stomachs. To ascend one step, we are better served through our sympathy. Activity is contagious. Looking

where others look, and conversing with the same things, we catch the charm which lured them. Napoleon

said, "You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war." Talk much

with any man of vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit of looking at things in the same light, and

Men are helpful through the intellect and the affections. Other help I find a false appearance. If you affect to

give me bread and fire, I perceive that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves me as it found me, neither

better nor worse: but all mental and moral force is a positive good. It goes out from you, whether you will or

not, and profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot even hear of personal vigor of any kind, great power

of 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

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. 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 signal

as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us? We will never more think cheaply of ourselves, 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! What a front!

what eyes! Atlantean 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 secret of the reader's joy in literary genius. Nothing is kept back.

There is fire enough to fuse the mountain of ore. Shakespeare's principal merit may be conveyed in saying

that he of all men best understands the English language, and can say what he will. Yet these unchoked

channels and floodgates of expression are only health or fortunate constitution. Shakespeare's name suggests

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 confectioners, 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

We go to the gymnasium and the swimmingschool 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 imagination, even versatility

and concentration, as these acts expose the invisible organs and members of the mind, which respond,

member for member, to the parts of the body. For we thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose men

by their truest marks, taught, with Plato, "to choose those who can, 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 audacious 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

benefit is real because we are entitled to these enlargements, and once having passed the bounds shall never

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, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception of these

laws is a kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little through failure to see them.

Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our delight in reason degenerates into idolatry of the herald. Especially

when a mind of powerful method has instructed men, we find the examples of oppression. The dominion of

Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of Luther, of Bacon, of Locke; in religion the history of

hierarchies, of saints, and the sects which have taken the name of each founder, are in point. Alas! every man

is such a victim. The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power. It is the delight of vulgar

talent to dazzle and to blind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us from itself. True genius will not

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

advantages; he would establish a sense of immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be

cheated; as every one would discern the checks and guaranties of condition. The rich would see their

But nature brings all this about in due time. Rotation is her remedy. The soul is impatient of masters and

eager for change. Housekeepers say of a domestic who has been valuable, "She had lived with me long

enough." We are tendencies, or rather, symptoms, and none of us complete. We touch and go, and sip the

foam of many lives. Rotation is the law of nature. When nature removes a great man, people explore the

horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and

quite different field the next man will appear; not Jefferson, not Franklin, but now a great salesman, then a

roadcontractor, then a student of fishes, then a buffalohunting explorer, or a semisavage Western general.

Thus we make a stand against our rougher masters; but against the best there is a finer remedy. The power

which they communicate is not theirs. When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the

I must not forget that we have a special debt to a single class. Life is a scale of degrees. Between rank and

rank of our great men are wide intervals. Mankind have in all ages attached themselves to a few persons who

either by the quality of that idea they embodied or by the largeness of their reception were entitled to the

position of leaders and lawgivers. These teach us the qualities of primary nature, admit us to the

constitution 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;*(3) 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

mankind selects these for the highest place. Witness the multitude of statues, pictures and memorials which

How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, the service rendered by those who introduce moral truths

into the general mind? I am plagued, in all my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. If I work in my

garden and prune an appletree, 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'ane on which whoso sat

should have his desire, but a piece of the skin was gone for every wish. I go to a convention 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 Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a

law that disposes these particulars, and so certifies me of the equity which checkmates every false player,

bankrupts every selfseeker, and apprises me of my independence on any conditions of country, or time, or

human body, that man liberates me; I forget the clock. I pass out of the sore relation to persons. I am healed

of my hurts. I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible goods. Here is great

competition of rich and poor. We live in a market, where is only so much wheat, or wool, or land; and if I

have so much more, every other must have so much less. I seem to have no good without breach of good

manners. Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an 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

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; Richard 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, wellborn, rich,

handsome, eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by fascination into tributaries and supporters

of his power. Sword and staff, or talents swordlike or stafflike, 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 irresistible upward force, into our thought, destroying individualism; the power so

great that the potentate is nothing. Then he is a monarch who gives a constitution to his people; a pontiff who

preaches the equality of souls and releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an emperor who can

But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three points of service. Nature never spares the

opium or nepenthe, but wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her poppies

plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully through life, ignorant of the ruin and incapable of

seeing it, though all the world point their finger at it every day. The worthless and offensive members of

society, whose existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most illused 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, 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

selfgratulation, some figure goes by which Thersites too can love and admire. This is he that should marshal

us the way we were going. There is no end to his aid. Without Plato we should almost lose our faith in the

possibility of a reasonable book. We seem to want but one, but we want one. We love to associate with heroic

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

Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism and enable us to see other people and their

works. But there are vices and follies incident to whole populations and ages. Men resemble their

contemporaries even more than their progenitors. It is observed in old couples, or in persons who have been

housemates for a course of years, that they grow like, and if they should live long enough we should not be

able to know them apart. Nature abhors these complaisances which threaten to melt the world into a lump,

and hastens to break up such maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes on between men of one town,

of one sect, of one political party; and the ideas of the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it.

Viewed from any high point, this city of New York, yonder city of London, the Western civilization, would

seem a bundle of insanities. We keep each other in countenance and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of the

time. The shield against the stingings of conscience is the universal practice, or our contemporaries. Again, it

is very easy to be as wise and good as your companions. We learn of our contemporaries what they know

without effort, and almost through the pores of the skin. We catch it by sympathy, or as a wife arrives at the

intellectual and moral elevations of her 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,*(4) and defend us from our contemporaries. 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 from too much conversation with our mates, and exult in the

depth of nature in that direction in which he leads us. What indemnification is one great man for populations

of pigmies! Every mother wishes one son a genius, though all the rest should be mediocre. But a new danger

appears in the excess of influence of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have become

underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our help; other great men, new qualities,

counterweights and checks on each other. We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness. Every hero

becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not badhearted, 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!" 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,

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. 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 perform 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 collects 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 exclude 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 selfdefended. Nothing is more

marked than the power by which individuals are guarded from individuals, in a world where every benefactor

becomes so easily a malefactor only by continuation of his activity into places where it is not due; where

children seem so much at the mercy of their foolish parents, and where almost all men are too social and

interfering. We rightly speak of the guardian angels of children. How superior in their security from infusions

of evil persons, from vulgarity and second thought! They shed their own abundant beauty on the objects they

behold. Therefore they are not at the mercy of such poor educators as we adults. If we huff and chide them

they soon come not to mind it and get a selfreliance; and if we indulge them to folly, they learn the

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

another: not thyself, but a Platonist; not a soul, but a Christian; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian; not a poet,

but a Shakespearean. In vain, the wheels of tendency will not stop, nor will all the forces of inertia, fear, or of

love itself hold thee there. On, and forever onward! The microscope observes a monad or wheelinsect

among the infusories circulating in water. Presently a dot appears on the animal, which enlarges to a slit, and

it becomes two perfect animals. The everproceeding detachment appears not less in all thought and in

society. Children think they cannot live without their parents. But, long before they are aware of it, the black

dot has appeared and the detachment taken place. Any accident will now reveal to them their independence.

But great men: the word is injurious. Is there caste? Is there fate? What becomes of the promise to virtue?

The thoughtful youth laments the superfoetation of nature. "Generous and handsome," he says, "is your hero;

but look at yonder poor Paddy, whose country is his wheelbarrow; look at his whole nation of Paddies." Why

are the masses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few leaders,

who have sentiment, opinion, love, selfdevotion; and they make war and death sacred; but what for the

wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. It is as real a loss that others

Is it a reply to these suggestions to say, Society is a Pestalozzian school: all are teachers and pupils in turn?

We are equally served by receiving and by imparting. Men who know the same things are not long the best

company for each other. But bring to each an intelligent person of another experience, and it is as if you let

off water from a lake by cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechanical advantage, and great benefit it is to each

speaker, as he can now paint out his thought to himself. We pass very fast, in our personal moods, from

dignity to dependence. And if any appear never to assume the chair, but always to stand and serve, it is

because we do not see the company in a sufficiently long period for the whole rotation of parts to come about.

As to what we call the masses, and common men, there are no common men. All men are at last of a size;

and true art is only possible on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair play and an

open field and freshest laurels to all who have won them! But heaven reserves an equal scope for every

creature. Each is uneasy until he has produced his private ray unto the concave sphere and beheld his talent

The heroes of the hour are relatively great; of a faster growth; or they are such in whom, at the moment of

success, a quality is ripe which is then in request. Other days will demand other qualities. Some rays escape

the common observer, and want a finely adapted eye. Ask the great man if there be none greater. His

companions are; and not the less great but the more that society cannot see them. Nature never sends a great

One gracious fact emerges from these studies, that there is true ascension in our love. The reputations of the

nineteenth century will one day be quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of humanity is the real subject

whose biography is written in our annals. We must infer much, and supply many chasms in the record. The

history of the universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in all the procession of famous men,

is reason or illumination or that essence we were looking for; but is an exhibition, in some quarter, of new

possibilities. Could we one day complete the immense figure which these flagrant*(5) points compose! 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 impounded 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 origin, and publishes itself by unknown methods: the union of

all minds appears intimate; what gets admission to one, cannot be kept out of any other; the smallest

acquisition of truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so much good to the commonwealth of souls. If the

disparities of talent and position vanish 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

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 therefore 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 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 prospective, 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,

AMONG secular*(7) books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's*(8) fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he

said, "Burn the libraries; for their value is in this book." These sentences contain the culture of nations; these

are the cornerstone of schools; these are the fountainhead of literatures. A discipline it is in logic,

arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry, language, rhetoric, ontology, morals or practical wisdom. There was

never such range of speculation. Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of

thought. Great havoc makes he among our originalities. We have reached the mountain from which all these

drift boulders were detached. The Bible of the learned for twentytwo hundred years, every brisk young man

who says in succession fine things to each reluctant generation, Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke,

Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge, is some reader of Plato, translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good

things. Even the men of grander proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune (shall I say?) of

coming after this exhausting generalizer. St. Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe,

are likewise his debtors and must say after him. For it is fair to credit the broadest generalizer with all the

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato, at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon

nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he, and the thinkers of all

civilized nations are his posterity and are tinged with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly

sending up out of night, to be his men, Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation of genius; the

Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor,

Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus and Picus Mirandola. Calvinism is in his

Phaedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws all its philosophy, in its handbook of morals, the

AkhlakyJalaly, from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts. This citizen of a town in Greece is no

villager nor patriot. An Englishman reads and says, "how English!" a German "how Teutonic!" an Italian

"how Roman and how Greek!" As they say that Helen of Argos had that universal beauty that every body felt

related to her, so Plato seems to a reader in New England an American genius. His broad humanity

This range of Plato instructs us what to think of the vexed question concerning his reputed works, what are

genuine, what spurious. It is singular that wherever we find a man higher by a whole head than any of his

contemporaries, it is sure to come into doubt what are his real works. Thus Homer, Plato, Raffaelle,

Shakespeare. For these men magnetize their contemporaries, so that their companions can do for them what

they can never do for themselves; and the great man does thus live in several bodies, and write, or paint or

act, by many hands; and after some time it is not easy to say what is the authentic work of the master and

Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his own times. What is a great man but one of great affinities, who

takes up into himself all arts, sciences, all knowables, as his food? He can spare nothing; he can dispose of

every thing. What is not good for virtue, is good for knowledge. Hence his contemporaries tax him with

plagiarism. But the inventor only knows how to borrow; and society is glad to forget the innumerable

laborers who ministered to this architect, and reserves all its gratitude for him. When we are praising Plato, it

seems we are praising quotations from Solon and Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so. Every book is a quotation;

and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation

from all his ancestors. And this grasping inventor puts all nations under contribution.

Plato absorbed the learning of his times, Philolaus, Timaeus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what else; then his

master, Socrates; and finding himself still capable of a larger synthesis, beyond all example then or since,

he traveled into Italy, to gain what Pythagoras had for him; then into Egypt, and perhaps still farther East, to

import the other element, which Europe wanted, into the European mind. This breadth entitles him to stand as

the representative of philosophy. He says, in the Republic, "Such a genius as philosophers must of necessity

have, is wont but seldom in all its parts to meet in one man, but its different parts generally spring up in

different persons." Every man who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground. A

philosopher must be more than a philosopher. Plato is clothed with the powers of a poet, stands upon the

highest place of the poet, and (though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric expression), mainly is not a

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in

their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes

and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them. Plato especially has no external

biography. If he had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground them all into paint. As a

good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual

He was born 427 A.C., about the time of the death of Pericles; was of patrician connection in his times and

city, and is said to have had an early inclination for war, but, in his twentieth year, meeting with Socrates,

was easily dissuaded from this pursuit and remained for ten years his scholar, until the death of Socrates. He

then went to Megara, accepted the invitations of Dion and of Dionysius to the court of Sicily, and went

thither three times, though very capriciously treated. He traveled into Italy; then into Egypt, where he stayed

a long time; some say three, some say thirteen years. It is said he went farther, into Babylonia: this is

uncertain. Returning to Athens, he gave lessons in the Academy to those whom his fame drew thither; and

But the biography of Plato is interior. We are to account for the supreme elevation of this man in the

intellectual history of our race, how it happens that in proportion to the culture of men they become his

scholars; that, as our Jewish Bible has implanted itself in the tabletalk and household life of every man and

woman in the European and American nations, so the writings of Plato have preoccupied every school of

learning, every lover of thought, every church, every poet, making it impossible to think, on certain levels,

except through him. He stands between the truth and every man's mind, and has almost impressed language

and the primary forms of thought with his name and seal. I am struck, in reading him, with the extreme

modernness of his style and spirit. Here is the germ of that Europe we know so well, in its long history of arts

and arms; here are all its traits, already discernible in the mind of Plato, and in none before him. It has

spread itself since into a hundred histories, but has added no new element. This perpetual modernness is the

measure of merit in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled by any thing shortlived or local,

but abode by real and abiding traits. How Plato came thus to be Europe, and philosophy, and almost

This could not have happened without a sound, sincere and catholic man, able to honor, at the same time, the

ideal, or laws of the mind, and fate, or the order of nature. The first period of a nation, as of an individual, is

the period of unconscious strength. Children cry, scream and stamp with fury, unable to express their desires.

As soon as they can speak and tell their want and the reason of it, they become gentle. In adult life, whilst the

perceptions are obtuse, men and women talk vehemently and superlatively, blunder and quarrel: their

manners are full of desperation; their speech is full of oaths. As soon as, with culture, things have cleared up

a little, and they see them no longer in lumps and masses but accurately distributed, they desist from that

weak vehemence and explain their meaning in detail. If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man

would still be a beast in the forest. The same weakness and want, on a higher plane, occurs daily in the

education of ardent young men and women. "Ah! you don't understand me; I have never met with any one

who comprehends me": and they sigh and weep, write verses and walk alone, fault of power to express their

precise meaning. In a month or two, through the favor of their good genius, they meet some one so related as

to assist their volcanic estate, and, good communication being once established, they are thenceforward good

citizens. It is ever thus. The progress is to accuracy, to skill, to truth, from blind force.

There is a moment in the history of every nation, when, proceeding out of this brute youth, the perceptive

powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant, extends across

the entire scale, and, with his feet still planted on the immense forces of night, converses by his eyes and

brain with solar and stellar creation. That is the moment of adult health, the culmination of power.

Such is the history of Europe, in all points; and such in philosophy. Its early records, almost perished, are of

the immigrations from Asia, bringing with them the dreams of barbarians; a confusion of crude notions of

morals and of natural philosophy, gradually subsiding through the partial insight of single teachers.

Before Pericles came the Seven Wise Masters, and we have the beginnings of geometry, metaphysics and

ethics: then the partialists, deducing the origin of things from flux or water, or from air, or from fire, or from

mind. All mix with these causes mythologic pictures. At last comes Plato, the distributor, who needs no

barbaric point, or tattoo, or whooping; for he can define. He leaves with Asia the vast and superlative; he is

the arrival of accuracy and intelligence. "He shall be as a god to me, who can rightly divide and define."

This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the

constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the one, and the two: 1. Unity, or

Identity; and, 2. Variety. We unite all things by perceiving the law which pervades them; by perceiving the

superficial differences and the profound resemblances. But every mental act, this very perception of identity

or oneness, recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or to think

The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many effects; then for the cause of that; and again the cause, diving

still into the profound: selfassured that it shall arrive at an absolute and sufficient one, a one that shall be

all. "In the midst of the sun is the light, in the midst of the light is truth, and in the midst of truth is the

imperishable being," say the Vedas. All philosophy, of East and West, has the same centripetence. Urged by

an opposite necessity, the mind returns from the one to that which is not one, but other or many; from cause

to effect; and affirms the necessary existence of variety, the selfexistence of both, as each is involved in the

other. These strictlyblended elements it is the problem of thought to separate and to reconcile. Their

existence is mutually contradictory and exclusive; and each so fast slides into the other that we can never say

what is one, and what it is not. The Proteus is as nimble in the highest as in the lowest grounds; when we

contemplate the one, the true, the good, as in the surfaces and extremities of matter.

In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity. The raptures

of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all being in one Being. This tendency finds its highest expression in the

religious writings of the East, and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the

Vishnu Purana. Those writings contain little else than this idea, and they rise to pure and sublime strains in

The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough and the furrow are of one

stuff; and the stuff is such and so much that the variations of form are unimportant. "You are fit" (says the

supreme Krishna to a sage) "to apprehend that you are not distinct from me. That which I am, thou art, and

that also is this world, with its gods and heroes and mankind. Men contemplate distinctions, because they are

stupefied with ignorance." "The words I and mine constitute ignorance. What is the great end of all, you shall

now learn from me. It is soul, one in all bodies, pervading, uniform, perfect, preeminent over nature, exempt

from birth, growth and decay, omnipresent, made up of true knowledge, independent, unconnected with

unrealities, with name, species and the rest, in time past, present and to come. The knowledge that this spirit,

which is essentially one, is in one's own and in all other bodies, is the wisdom of one who knows the unity of

things. As one diffusive air, passing through the perforations of a flute, is distinguished as the notes of a

scale, so the nature of the Great Spirit is single, though its forms be manifold, arising from the consequences

of acts. When the difference of the investing form, as that of god or the rest, is destroyed, there is no

distinction." "The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu, who is identical with all things, and is to be

regarded by the wise as not differing from, but as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor coming; nor

is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are others, others; nor am I, I." As if he had said, "All

is for the soul, and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings; and light is whitewash;

and durations are deceptive; and form is imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy." That which the soul seeks

is resolution into being above form, out of Tartarus and out of heaven, liberation from nature.

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly backwards

to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is the

manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear

and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many. One is being; the other, intellect: one is necessity;

the other, freedom: one, rest; the other, motion: one, power; the other, distribution: one, strength; the other,

pleasure: one, consciousness; the other, definition: one, genius; the other, talent: one, earnestness; the other,

knowledge: one, possession; the other, trade: one, caste; the other, culture: one, king; the other, democracy:

and, if we dare carry these generalizations a step higher, and name the last tendency of both, we might say,

that the end of the one is escape from organization, pure science; and the end of the other is the highest

Each student adheres, by temperament and by habit, to the first or to the second of these gods of the mind. By

religion, he tends to unity; by intellect, or by the senses, to the many. A too rapid unification, and an

excessive appliance to parts and particulars, are the twin dangers of speculation.

To this partiality the history of nations corresponded. The country of unity, of immovable institutions, the

seat of a philosophy delighting in abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of a deaf,

unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this faith in the social institution of caste. On the other

side, the genius of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its philosophy was a discipline; it

is a land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the East loved infinity, the West delighted in boundaries.

European civility is the triumph of talent, the extension of system, the sharpened understanding, adaptive

skill, delight in forms, delight in manifestation, in comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens, Greece, had been

working in this element with the joy of genius not yet chilled by any foresight of the detriment of an excess.

They saw before them no sinister political economy; no ominous Malthus; no Paris or London; no pitiless

subdivision of classes, the doom of the pinmakers, the doom of the weavers, of dressers, of stockingers, of

carders, of spinners, of colliers; no Ireland; no Indian caste, superinduced by the efforts of Europe to throw it

off. The understanding was in its health and prime. Art was in its splendid novelty. They cut the Pentelican

marble as if it were snow, and their perfect works in architecture and sculpture seemed things of course, not

more difficult than the completion of a new ship at the Medford yards, or new mills at Lowell. These things

are in course, and may be taken for granted. The Roman legion, Byzantine legislation, English trade, the

saloons of Versailles, the cafes of Paris, the steammill, steamboat, steamcoach, may all be seen in

Meantime, Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in which all things are

absorbed. The unity of Asia and the detail of Europe; the infinitude of the Asiatic soul and the defining,

resultloving, machinemaking, surfaceseeking, operagoing Europe, Plato came to join, and, by contact,

to enhance the energy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia are in his brain. Metaphysics and natural

philosophy expressed the genius of Europe; he substructs the religion of Asia, as the base.

In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of the two elements. It is as easy to be great as to be small. The

reason why we do not at once believe in admirable souls is because they are not in our experience. In actual

life, they are so rare as to be incredible; but primarily there is not only no presumption against them, but the

strongest presumption in favor of their appearance. But whether voices were heard in the sky, or not; whether

his mother or his father dreamed that the infant manchild was the son of Apollo; whether a swarm of bees

settled on his lips, or not; a man who could see two sides of a thing was born. The wonderful synthesis so

familiar in nature; the upper and the under side of the medal of Jove; the union of impossibilities, which

reappears in every object; its real and its ideal power, was now also transferred entire to the consciousness

The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract truth, he saved himself by propounding the most popular of all

principles, the absolute good, which rules rulers, and judges the judge. If he made transcendental distinctions,

he fortified himself by drawing all his illustrations from sources disdained by orators and polite conversers;

from mares and puppies; from pitchers and soupladles; from cooks and criers; the shops of potters,

horsedoctors, butchers and fishmongers. He cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is resolved that the

two poles of thought shall appear in his statement. His argument and his sentence are selfimposed and

spherical. The two poles appear; yes, and become two hands, to grasp and appropriate their own.

Every great artist has been such by synthesis. Our strength is transitional, alternating; or, shall I say, a thread

of two strands. The seashore, sea seen from shore, shore seen from sea; the taste of two metals in contact;

and our enlarged powers at the approach and at the departure of a friend; the experience of poetic

creativeness, which is not found in staying at home, nor yet in traveling, but in transitions from one to the

other, which must therefore be adroitly managed to present as much transitional surface as possible; this

command of two elements must explain the power and the charm of Plato. Art expresses the one or the same

by the different. Thought seeks to know unity in unity; poetry to show it by variety; that is, always by an

object or symbol. Plato keeps the two vases, one of aether and one of pigment, at his side, and invariably uses

both. Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are

inexhaustibly attractive. Plato turns incessantly the obverse and the reverse of the medal of Jove.

To take an example: The physical philosophers had sketched each his theory of the world; the theory of

atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit; theories mechanical and chemical in their genius. Plato, a master of

mathematics, studious of all natural laws and causes, feels these, as second causes, to be no theories of the

world but bare inventories and lists. To the study of nature he therefore prefixes the dogma, "Let us declare

the cause which led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and compose the universe. He was good; and he who is

good has no kind of envy. Exempt from envy, he wished that all things should be as much as possible like

himself. Whosoever, taught by wise men, shall admit this as the prime cause of the origin and foundation of

the world, will be in the truth."*(9) "All things are for the sake of the good, and it is the cause of every thing

The synthesis which makes the character of his mind appears in all his talents. Where there is great compass

of wit, we usually find excellencies that combine easily in the living man, but in description appear

incompatible. The mind of Plato is not to be exhibited by a Chinese catalogue, but is to be apprehended by an

original mind in the exercise of its original power. In him the freest abandonment is united with the precision

of a geometer. His daring imagination gives him the more solid grasp of facts; as the birds of highest flight

have the strongest alar bones. His patrician polish, his intrinsic elegance, edged by an irony so subtle that it

stings and paralyzes, adorn the soundest health and strength of frame. According to the old sentence, "If Jove

With this palatial air there is, for the direct aim of several of his works and running through the tenor of them

all, a certain earnestness, which mounts, in the Republic and in the Phaedo, to piety. He has been charged

with feigning sickness at the time of the death of Socrates. But the anecdotes that have come down from the

times attest his manly interference before the people in his master's behalf, since even the savage cry of the

assembly to Plato is preserved; and the indignation towards popular government, in many of his pieces,

expresses a personal exasperation. He has a probity, a native reverence for justice and honor, and a humanity

which makes him tender for the superstitions of the people. Add to this, he believes that poetry, prophecy and

the high insight are from a wisdom of which man is not master; that the gods never philosophize, but by a

celestial mania these miracles are accomplished. Horsed on these winged steeds, he sweeps the dim regions,

visits worlds which flesh cannot enter; he saw the souls in pain, he hears the doom of the judge, he beholds

the penal metempsychosis, the Fates, with the rock and shears, and hears the intoxicating hum of their

But his circumspection never forsook him. One would say he had read the inscription on the gates of

Busyrane, "Be bold"; and on the second gate, "Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold"; and then again

had paused well at the third gate, "Be not too bold." His strength is like the momentum of a falling planet,

and his discretion the return of its due and perfect curve, so excellent is his Greek love of boundary and his

skill in definition. In reading logarithms one is not more secure than in following Plato in his flights. Nothing

can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky. He has finished his

thinking before he brings it to the reader, and he abounds in the surprises of a literary master. He has that

opulence which furnishes, at every turn, the precise weapon he needs. As the rich man wears no more

garments, drives no more horses, sits in no more chambers than the poor, but has that one dress, or

equipage, or instrument, which is fit for the hour and the need; so Plato, in his plenty, is never restricted, but

has the fit word. There is indeed no weapon in all the armory of wit which he did not possess and use, epic,

analysis, mania, intuition, music, satire and irony, down to the customary and polite. His illustrations are

poetry and his jests illustrations. Socrates' profession of obstetric art*(10) is good philosophy; and his finding

that word "cookery," and "adulatory art," for rhetoric, in the Gorgias, does us a substantial service still. No

What moderation and understatement and checking his thunder in mid volley! He has goodnaturedly

furnished the courtier and citizen with all that can be said against the schools. "For philosophy is an elegant

thing, if any one modestly meddles with it; but if he is conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts

the man." He could well afford to be generous, he, who from the sunlike centrality and reach of his vision,

had a faith without cloud. Such as his perception, was his speech: he plays with the doubt and makes the most

of it: he paints and quibbles; and by and by comes a sentence that moves the sea and land. The admirable

earnest comes not only at intervals, in the perfect yes and no of the dialogue, but in bursts of light. "I,

therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and consider how I may exhibit my soul before the

judge in a healthy condition. Wherefore, disregarding the honors that most men value, and looking to the

truth, I shall endeavor in reality to live as virtuously as I can; and when I die, to die so. And I invite all other

men, to the utmost of my power; and you too I in turn invite to this contest, which, I affirm, surpasses all

He is a great average man; one who, to the best thinking, adds a proportion and equality in his faculties, so

that men see in him their own dreams and glimpses made available and made to pass for what they are. A

great commonsense is his warrant and qualification to be the world's interpreter. He has reason, as all the

philosophic and poetic class have: but he has also what they have not, this strong solving sense to reconcile

his poetry with the appearances of the world, and build a bridge from the streets of cities to the Atlantis. He

omits never this graduation, but slopes his thought, however picturesque the precipice on one side, to an

access from the plain. He never writes in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic raptures.

Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could prostrate himself on the earth and cover his eyes whilst he

adored that which cannot be numbered, or gauged, or known, or named: that of which every thing can be

affirmed and denied: that "which is entity and nonentity." He called it superessential. He even stood ready,

as in the Parmenides, to demonstrate that it was so, that this Being exceeded the limits of intellect. No man

ever more fully acknowledged the Ineffable. Having paid his homage, as for the human race, to the

Illimitable, he then stood erect, and for the human race affirmed, "And yet things are knowable!" that is, the

Asia in his mind was first heartily honored, the ocean of love and power, before form, before will, before

knowledge, the Same, the Good, the One; and now, refreshed and empowered by this worship, the instinct of

Europe, namely, culture, returns; and he cries, "Yet things are knowable!" They are knowable, because being

from one, things correspond. There is a scale; and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind,

of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; a science of quantities,

called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences, I call it

Dialectic, which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true. It rests on the observation of identity

and diversity; for to judge is to unite to an object the notion which belongs to it. The sciences, even the best,

mathematics and astronomy, are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to

make any use of it. Dialectic must teach the use of them. "This is of that rank that no intellectual man will

enter on any study for its own sake, but only with a view to advance himself in that one sole science which

"The essence or peculiarity of man is to comprehend a whole; or that which in the diversity of sensations can

be comprised under a rational unity." "The soul which has never perceived the truth, cannot pass into the

human form."*(13) I announce to men the Intellect. I announce the good of being interpenetrated by the mind

that made nature: this benefit, namely, that it can understand nature, which it made and maketh. Nature is

good, but intellect is better: as the lawgiver is before the lawreceiver. I give you joy, O sons of men! that

truth is altogether wholesome; that we have hope to search out what might be the very self of everything. The

misery of man is to be baulked of the sight of essence and to be stuffed with conjectures; but the supreme

good is reality; the supreme beauty is reality; and all virtue and all felicity depend on this science of the real:

for courage is nothing else than knowledge; the fairest fortune that can befall man is to be guided by his

daemon to that which is truly his own. This also is the essence of justice, to attend every one his own: nay,

the notion of virtue is not to be arrived at except through direct contemplation of the divine essence. Courage

then for "the persuasion that we must search that which we do not know, will render us, beyond comparison,

better, braver and more industrious than if we thought it impossible to discover what we do not know, and

useless to search for it." He secures a position not to be commanded, by his passion for reality; valuing

Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said, Culture. He saw the institutions of Sparta and recognized, more

genially one would say than any since, the hope of education. He delighted in every accomplishment, in

every graceful and useful and truthful performance; above all in the splendors of genius and intellectual

achievement. "The whole of life, O Socrates," said Glauco, "is, with the wise, the measure of hearing such

discourses as these." What a price he sets on the feats of talent, on the powers of Pericles, of Isocrates, of

Parmenides! What price above price on the talents themselves! He called the several faculties, gods, in his

beautiful personation. What value he gives to the art of gymnastic in education; what to geometry; what to

music; what to astronomy, whose appeasing and medicinal power he celebrates! In the Timaeus he indicates

the highest employment of the eyes. "By us it is asserted that God invented and bestowed sight on us for this

purpose, that on surveying the circles of intelligence in the heavens, we might properly employ those of our

own minds, which, though disturbed when compared with the others that are uniform, are still allied to their

circulations; and that having thus learned, and being naturally possessed of a correct reasoning faculty, we

might, by imitating the uniform revolutions of divinity, set right our own wanderings and blunders." And in

the Republic, "By each of these disciplines a certain organ of the soul is both purified and reanimated which

is blinded and buried by studies of another kind; an organ better worth saving than ten thousand eyes, since

He said, Culture; but he first admitted its basis, and gave immeasurably the first place to advantages of

nature. His patrician tastes laid stress on the distinctions of birth. In the doctrine of the organic character and

disposition is the origin of caste. "Such as were fit to govern, into their composition the informing Deity

mingled gold; into the military, silver; iron and brass for husbandmen and artificers." The East confirms

itself, in all ages, in this faith. The Koran is explicit on this point of caste. "Men have their metal, as of gold

and silver. Those of you who were the worthy ones in the state of ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the

state of faith, as soon as you embrace it." Plato was not less firm. "Of the five orders of things, only four can

be taught to the generality of men." In the Republic he insists on the temperaments of the youth, as first of the

A happier example of the stress laid on nature is in the dialogue with the young Theages, who wishes to

receive lessons from Socrates. Socrates declares that if some have grown wise by associating with him, no

thanks are due to him; but, simply, whilst they were with him they grew wise, not because of him; he

pretends not to know the way of it. "It is adverse to many, nor can those be benefited by associating with me

whom the Daemon opposes; so that it is not possible for me to live with these. With many however he does

not prevent me from conversing, who yet are not at all benefited by associating with me. Such, O Theages, is

the association with me; for, if it pleases the God, you will make great and rapid proficiency: you will not, if

he does not please. Judge whether it is not safer to be instructed by some one of those who have power over

the benefit which they impart to men, than by me, who benefit or not, just as it may happen." As if he had

said, "I have no system. I cannot be answerable for you. You will be what you must. If there is love between

us, inconceivably delicious and profitable will our intercourse be; if not, your time is lost and you will only

annoy me. I shall seem to you stupid, and the reputation I have, false. Quite above us, beyond the will of you

or me, is this secret affinity or repulsion laid. All my good is magnetic, and I educate, not by lessons, but by

He said, Culture; he said, Nature; and he failed not to add, "There is also the divine." There is no thought in

any mind but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power and organizes a huge instrumentality of means.

Plato, lover of limits, loved the illimitable, saw the enlargement and nobility which come from truth itself and

good itself, and attempted as if on the part of the human intellect, once for all to do it adequate homage,

homage fit for the immense soul to receive, and yet homage becoming the intellect to render. He said then,

"Our faculties run out into infinity, and return to us thence. We can define but a little way; but here is a fact

which will not be skipped, and which to shut our eyes upon is suicide. All things are in a scale; and, begin

where we will, ascend and ascend. All things are symbolical; and what we call results are beginnings."

A key to the method and completeness of Plato is his twice bisected line. After he has illustrated the relation

between the absolute good and true and the forms of the intelligible world, he says: "Let there be a line cut in

two unequal parts. Cut again each of these two main parts, one representing the visible, the other the

intelligible world, and let these two new sections represent the bright part and the dark part of each of these

worlds. You will have, for one of the sections of the visible world, images, that is, both shadows and

reflections; for the other section, the objects of these images, that is, plants, animals, and the works of art

and nature. Then divide the intelligible world in like manner; the one section will be of opinions and

hypotheses, and the other section of truths."*(14) To these four sections, the four operations of the soul

correspond, conjecture, faith, understanding, reason. As every pool reflects the image of the sun, so every

thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the supreme Good. The universe is perforated by a

All his thought has this ascension; in Phaedrus, teaching that beauty is the most lovely of all things, exciting

hilarity and shedding desire and confidence through the universe wherever it enters, and it enters in some

degree into all things: but that there is another, which is as much more beautiful than beauty as beauty is

than chaos; namely, wisdom, which our wonderful organ of sight cannot reach unto, but which, could it be

seen, would ravish us with its perfect reality. He has the same regard to it as the source of excellence in works

of art. When an artificer, he says, in the fabrication of any work, looks to that which always subsists

according to the same; and, employing a model of this kind, expresses its idea and power in his work, it

must follow that his production should be beautiful. But when he beholds that which is born and dies, it will

Thus ever: the Banquet is a teaching in the same spirit, familiar now to all the poetry and to all the sermons of

the world, that the love of the sexes is initial, and symbolizes at a distance the passion of the soul for that

immense lake of beauty it exists to seek. This faith in the Divinity is never out of mind, and constitutes the

ground of all his dogmas. Body cannot teach wisdom; God only. In the same mind he constantly affirms that

virtue cannot be taught; that it is not a science, but an inspiration; that the greatest goods are produced to us

This leads me to that central figure which he has established in his Academy as the organ through which

every considered opinion shall be announced, and whose biography he has likewise so labored that the

historic facts are lost in the light of Plato's mind. Socrates and Plato are the double star which the most

powerful instruments will not entirely separate. Socrates again, in his traits and genius, is the best example of

that synthesis which constitutes Plato's extraordinary power. Socrates, a man of humble stem, but honest

enough; of the commonest history; of a personal homeliness so remarkable as to be a cause of wit in others:

the rather that his broad good nature and exquisite taste for a joke invited the sally, which was sure to be paid.

The players personated him on the stage; the potters copied his ugly face on their stone jugs. He was a cool

fellow, adding to his humor a perfect temper and a knowledge of his man, be he who he might whom he

talked with, which laid the companion open to certain defeat in any debate, and in debate he immoderately

delighted. The young men are prodigiously fond of him and invite him to their feasts, whither he goes for

conversation. He can drink, too; has the strongest head in Athens; and after leaving the whole party under the

table, goes away as if nothing had happened, to begin new dialogues with somebody that is sober. In short, he

He affected a good many citizenlike tastes, was monstrously fond of Athens, hated trees, never willingly

went beyond the walls, knew the old characters, valued the bores and philistines, thought every thing in

Athens a little better than anything in any other place. He was plain as a Quaker in habit and speech, affected

low phrases, and illustrations from cocks and quails, souppans and sycamorespoons, grooms and farriers,

and unnamable offices, especially if he talked with any superfine person. He had a Franklinlike wisdom.

Thus he showed one who was afraid to go on foot to Olympia, that it was no more than his daily walk within

Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears, an immense talker, the rumor ran that on one or two

occasions, in the war with Boeotia, he had shown a determination which had covered the retreat of a troop;

and there was some story that under cover of folly, he had, in the city government, when one day he chanced

to hold a seat there, evinced a courage in opposing singly the popular voice, which had wellnigh ruined him.

He is very poor; but then he is hardy as a soldier, and can live on a few olives; usually, in the strictest sense,

on bread and water, except when entertained by his friends. His necessary expenses were exceedingly small,

and no one could live as he did. He wore no under garment; his upper garment was the same for summer and

winter, and he went barefooted; and it is said that to procure the pleasure, which he loves, of talking at his

ease all day with the most elegant and cultivated young men, he will now and then return to his shop and

carve statues, good or bad, for sale. However that be, it is certain that he had grown to delight in nothing else

than this conversation; and that, under his hypocritical pretence of knowing nothing, he attacks and brings

down all the fine speakers, all the fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives or strangers from Asia Minor

and the islands. Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is so honest and really curious to know; a man who

was willingly confuted if he did not speak the truth, and who willingly confuted others asserting what was

false; and not less pleased when confuted than when confuting; for he thought not any evil happened to men

of such a magnitude as false opinion respecting the just and unjust. A pitiless disputant, who knows nothing,

but the bounds of whose conquering intelligence no man had ever reached; whose temper was imperturbable;

whose dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive; so careless and ignorant as to disarm the wariest and

draw them, in the pleasantest manner, into horrible doubts and confusion. But he always knew the way out;

knew it, yet would not tell it. No escape; he drives them to terrible choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the

Hippiases and Gorgiases with their grand reputations, as a boy tosses his balls. The tyrannous realist! Meno

has discoursed a thousand times, at length, on virtue, before many companies, and very well, as it appeared to

him; but at this moment he cannot even tell what it is, this crampfish of a Socrates has so bewitched him.

This hardheaded humorist, whose strange conceits, drollery and bonhommie diverted the young patricians,

whilst the rumor of his sayings and quibbles gets abroad every day, turns out, in the sequel, to have a

probity as invincible as his logic, and to be either insane, or at least, under cover of this play, enthusiastic in

his religion. When accused before the judges of subverting the popular creed, he affirms the immortality of

the soul, the future reward and punishment; and refusing to recant, in a caprice of the popular government

was condemned to die, and sent to the prison. Socrates entered the prison and took away all ignominy from

the place, which could not be a prison whilst he was there. Crito bribed the jailer; but Socrates would not go

out by treachery. "Whatever inconvenience ensue, nothing is to be preferred before justice. These things I

hear like pipes and drums, whose sound makes me deaf to every thing you say." The fame of this prison, the

fame of the discourses there and the drinking of the hemlock are one of the most precious passages in the

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the droll and the martyr, the keen street and market debater with

the sweetest saint known to any history at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of Plato, so capacious of

these contrasts; and the figure of Socrates by a necessity placed itself in the foreground of the scene, as the

fittest dispenser of the intellectual treasures he had to communicate. It was a rare fortune that this Aesop of

the mob and this robed scholar should meet, to make each other immortal in their mutual faculty. The strange

synthesis in the character of Socrates capped the synthesis in the mind of Plato. Moreover by this means he

was able, in the direct way and without envy to avail himself of the wit and weight of Socrates, to which

unquestionably his own debt was great; and these derived again their principal advantage from the perfect art

It remains to say that the defect of Plato in power is only that which results inevitably from his quality. He is

intellectual in his aim; and therefore, in expression, literary. Mounting into heaven, diving into the pit,

expounding the laws of the state, the passion of love, the remorse of crime, the hope of the parting soul, he

is literary, and never otherwise. It is almost the sole deduction from the merit of Plato that his writings have

not, what is no doubt incident to this regnancy of intellect in his work, the vital authority which the

screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess. There is an interval; and to

I know not what can be said in reply to this criticism but that we have come to a fact in the nature of things:

an oak is not an orange. The qualities of sugar remain with sugar, and those of salt with salt.

In the second place, he has not a system. The dearest defenders and disciples are at fault. He attempted a

theory of the universe, and his theory is not complete or selfevident. One man thinks he means this, and

another that; he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in another place. He is charged with

having failed to make the transition from ideas to matter. Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the

smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a known and accurate

expression for the world, and it should be accurate. It shall be the world passed through the mind of Plato,

nothing less. Every atom shall have the Platonic tinge; every atom, every relation or quality you knew before,

you shall know again and find here, but now ordered; not nature, but art. And you shall feel that Alexander

indeed overran, with men and horses, some countries of the planet; but countries, and things of which

countries are made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of men, have passed through this man as bread

into his body, and become no longer bread, but body: so all this mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has

clapped copyright on the world. This is the ambition of individualism. But the mouthful proves too large. Boa

constrictor has good will to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt; and biting, gets strangled:

the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth. There he perishes: unconquered nature lives on and

forgets him. So it fares with all: so must it fare with Plato. In view of eternal nature, Plato turns out to be

philosophical exercitations. He argues on this side and on that. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple,

could never tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides of every great

These things we are forced to say if we must consider the effort of Plato or of any philosopher to dispose of

nature, which will not be disposed of. No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in

explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains. But there is an injustice in assuming this ambition for

Plato. Let us not seem to treat with flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion to their intellect, have

admitted his transcendent claims. The way to know him is to compare him, not with nature, but with other

men. How many ages have gone by, and he remains unapproached! A chief structure of human wit, like

Karnac, or the medieval cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains, it requires all the breath of human faculty to

know it. I think it is trueliest seen when seen with the most respect. His sense deepens, his merits multiply,

with study. When we say, Here is a fine collection of fables; or when we praise the style, or the common

sense, or arithmetic, we speak as boys, and much of our impatient criticism of the dialectic, I suspect, is no

The criticism is like our impatience of miles, when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that a mile should

have seventeen hundred and sixty yards. The greateyed Plato proportioned the lights and shades after the

The publication, in Mr. Bohn's "Serial Library," of the excellent translations of Plato, which we esteem one of

the chief benefits the cheap press has yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a few more notes of the

elevation and bearings of this fixed star; or to add a bulletin, like the journals, of Plato at the latest dates.

Modern science, by the extent of its generalization, has learned to indemnify the student of man for the

defects of individuals by tracing growth and ascent in races; and, by the simple expedient of lighting up the

vast background, generates a feeling of complacency and hope. The human being has the saurian and the

plant in his rear. His arts and sciences, the easy issue of his brain, look glorious when prospectively beheld

from the distant brain of ox, crocodile and fish. It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind

her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu and

Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree. These were

a clear amelioration of trilobite and saurus, and a good basis for further proceeding. With this artist, time and

space are cheap, and she is insensible to what you say of tedious preparation. She waited tranquilly the

flowing periods of paleontology, for the hour to be struck when man should arrive. Then periods must pass

before the motion of the earth can be suspected; then before the map of the instincts and the cultivable powers

can be drawn. But as of races, so the succession of individual men is fatal and beautiful, and Plato has the

Plato's fame does not stand on a syllogism, or on any masterpieces of the Socratic reasoning, or on any thesis,

as for example the immortality of the soul. He is more than an expert, or a schoolman, or a geometer, or the

prophet of a peculiar message. He represents the privilege of the intellect, the power, namely, of carrying up

every fact to successive platforms and so disclosing in every fact a germ of expansion. These expansions are

in the essence of thought. The naturalist would never help us to them by any discoveries of the extent of the

universe, but is as poor when cataloguing the resolved nebula of Orion, as when measuring the angles of an

acre. But the Republic of Plato, by these expansions, may be said to require and so to anticipate the

astronomy of Laplace. The expansions are organic. The mind does not create what it perceives, any more

than the eye creates the rose. In ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing them, we only say, Here was a

more complete man, who could apply to nature the whole scale of the senses, the understanding and the

reason. These expansions or extensions consist in continuing the spiritual sight where the horizon falls on our

natural vision, and by this second sight discovering the long lines of law which shoot in every direction.

Everywhere he stands on a path which has no end, but runs continuously round the universe. Therefore every

word becomes an exponent of nature. Whatever he looks upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior senses.

His perception of the generation of contraries, of death out of life and life out of death, that law by which, in

nature, decomposition is recomposition, and putrefaction and cholera are only signals of a new creation; his

discernment of the little in the large and the large in the small; studying the state in the citizen and the citizen

in the state; and leaving it doubtful whether he exhibited the Republic as an allegory on the education of the

private soul; his beautiful definitions of ideas, of time, of form, of figure, of the line, sometimes

hypothetically given, as his defining of virtue, courage, justice, temperance; his love of the apologue, and his

apologues themselves; the cave of Trophonius; the ring of Gyges; the charioteer and two horses; the golden,

silver, brass and iron temperaments; Theuth and Thamus; and the visions of Hades and the Fates, fables

which have imprinted themselves in the human memory like the signs of the zodiac; his soliform eye and his

boniform soul;*(16) his doctrine of assimilation; his doctrine of reminiscence; his clear vision of the laws of

return, or reaction, which secure instant justice throughout the universe, instanced everywhere, but specially

in the doctrine, "what comes from God to us, returns from us to God," and in Socrates' belief that the laws

More striking examples are his moral conclusions. Plato affirms the coincidence of science and virtue; for

vice can never know itself and virtue, but virtue knows both itself and vice. The eye attested that justice was

best, as long as it was profitable; Plato affirms that it is profitable throughout; that the profit is intrinsic,

though the just conceal his justice from gods and men; that it is better to suffer injustice than to do it; that the

sinner ought to covet punishment; that the lie was more hurtful than homicide; and that ignorance, or the

involuntary lie, was more calamitous than involuntary homicide; that the soul is unwillingly deprived of true

opinions, and that no man sins willingly; that the order or proceeding of nature was from the mind to the

body, and, though a sound body cannot restore an unsound mind, yet a good soul can, by its virtue, render the

body the best possible. The intelligent have a right over the ignorant, namely, the right of instructing them.

The right punishment of one out of tune is to make him play in tune; the fine which the good, refusing to

govern, ought to pay, is, to be governed by a worse man; that his guards shall not handle gold and silver, but

shall be instructed that there is gold and silver in their souls, which will make men willing to give them every

This second sight explains the stress laid on geometry. He saw that the globe of earth was not more lawful

and precise than was the supersensible; that a celestial geometry was in place there, as a logic of lines and

angles here below; that the world was throughout mathematical; the proportions are constant of oxygen, azote

and lime; there is just so much water and slate and magnesia; not less are the proportions constant of the

This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and falsehood, delighted in revealing the real at the base of the accidental;

in discovering connection, continuity and representation everywhere, hating insulation; and appears like the

god of wealth among the cabins of vagabonds, opening power and capability in everything he touches.

Ethical science was new and vacant when Plato could write thus: "Of all whose arguments are left to the

men of the present time, no one has ever yet condemned injustice, or praised justice, otherwise than as

respects the repute, honors and emoluments arising therefrom; while, as respects either of them in itself, and

subsisting by its own power in the soul of the possessor, and concealed both from gods and men, no one has

yet sufficiently investigated, either in poetry or prose writings, how, namely, that injustice is the greatest of

His definition of ideas, as what is simple, permanent, uniform and selfexistent, forever discriminating them

from the notions of the understanding, marks an era in the world. He was born to behold the selfevolving

power of spirit, endless, generator of new ends; a power which is the key at once to the centrality and the

evanescence of things. Plato is so centred that he can well spare all his dogmas. Thus the fact of knowledge

and ideas reveals to him the fact of eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he offers as the most probable

particular explication. Call that fanciful, it matters not: the connection between our knowledge and the abyss

He has indicated every eminent point in speculation. He wrote on the scale of the mind itself, so that all

things have symmetry in his tablet. He put in all the past, without weariness, and descended into detail with a

courage like that he witnessed in nature. One would say that his forerunners had mapped out each a farm or a

district or an island, in intellectual geography, but that Plato first drew the sphere. He domesticates the soul in

nature: man is the microcosm. All the circles of the visible heaven represent as many circles in the rational

soul. There is no lawless particle, and there is nothing casual in the action of the human mind. The names of

things, too, are fatal, following the nature of things. All the gods of the Pantheon are, by their names,

significant of a profound sense. The gods are the ideas. Pan is speech, or manifestation; Saturn, the

contemplative; Jove, the regal soul; and Mars, passion. Venus is proportion; Calliope, the soul of the world;

These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had appeared often to pious and to poetic souls; but this wellbred,

allknowing Greek geometer comes with command, gathers them all up into rank and gradation, the Euclid

of holiness, and marries the two parts of nature. Before all men, he saw the intellectual values of the moral

sentiment. He describes his own ideal, when he paints, in Timaeus, a god leading things from disorder into

order. He kindled a fire so truly in the centre that we see the sphere illuminated, and can distinguish poles,

equator and lines of latitude, every arc and node: a theory so averaged, so modulated, that you would say the

winds of ages had swept through this rhythmic structure, and not that it was the brief extempore blotting of

one shortlived scribe. Hence it has happened that a very wellmarked class of souls, namely those who

delight in giving a spiritual, that is, an ethicointellectual expression to every truth, by exhibiting an ulterior

end which is yet legitimate to it, are said to Platonize. Thus, Michael Angelo is a Platonist in his sonnets:

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and 'tis the magnitude only of Shakespeare's proper genius that hinders him from

being classed as the most eminent of this school. Swedenborg, throughout his prose poem of "Conjugal

His subtlety commended him to men of thought. The secret of his popular success is the moral aim which

endeared him to mankind. "Intellect," he said, "is king of heaven and of earth"; but in Plato, intellect is

always moral. His writings have also the sempiternal youth of poetry. For their arguments, most of them,

might have been couched in sonnets: and poetry has never soared higher than in the Timaeus and the

Phaedrus. As the poet, too, he is only contemplative. He did not, like Pythagoras, break himself with an

institution. All his painting in the Republic must be esteemed mythical, with intent to bring out, sometimes in

violent colors, his thought. You cannot institute, without peril of charlatanism.

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege for the best (which, to make emphatic, he expressed by

community of women), as the premium which he would set on grandeur. There shall be exempts of two

kinds: first, those who by demerit have put themselves below protection, outlaws; and secondly, those who

by eminence of nature and desert are out of the reach of your rewards. Let such be free of the city and above

the law. We confide them to themselves; let them do with us as they will. Let none presume to measure the

In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws a little mathematical dust in our eyes. I am sorry to see him,

after such noble superiorities, permitting the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence a little with the baser

AMONG eminent persons, those who are most dear to men are not of the class which the economist calls

producers: they have nothing in their hands; they have not cultivated corn, nor made bread; they have not led

out a colony, nor invented a loom. A higher class, in the estimation and love of this citybuilding

marketgoing race of mankind, are the poets, who, from the intellectual kingdom, feed the thought and

imagination with ideas and pictures which raise men out of the world of corn and money, and console them

for the shortcomings of the day and the meanness of labor and traffic. Then, also, the philosopher has his

value, who flatters the intellect of this laborer by engaging him with subtleties which instruct him in new

faculties. Others may build cities; he is to understand them and keep them in awe. But there is a class who

lead us into another region, the world of morals or of will. What is singular about this region of thought is

its claim. Wherever the sentiment of right comes in, it takes precedence of every thing else. For other things, I

I have sometimes thought that he would render the greatest service to modern criticism, who should draw the

line of relation that subsists between Shakespeare and Swedenborg. The human mind stands ever in

perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally of each without the other. The

reconciler has not yet appeared. If we tire of the saints, Shakespeare is our city of refuge. Yet the instincts

presently teach that the problem of essence must take precedence of all others; the questions of Whence?

What? and Whither? and the solution of these must be in a life, and not in a book. A drama or poem is a

proximate or oblique reply; but Moses, Menu, Jesus, work directly on this problem. The atmosphere of moral

sentiment is a region of grandeur which reduces all material magnificence to toys, yet opens to every wretch

that has reason the doors of the universe. Almost with a fierce haste it lays its empire on the man. In the

language of the Koran, "God said, The heaven and the earth and all that is between them, think ye that we

created them in jest, and that ye shall not return to us?" It is the kingdom of the will, and by inspiring the will,

All men are commanded by the saint. The Koran makes a distinct class of those who are by nature good, and

whose goodness has an influence on others, and pronounces this class to be the aim of creation: the other

classes are admitted to the feast of being, only as following in the train of this. And the Persian poet exclaims

The privilege of this caste is an access to the secrets and structure of nature by some higher method than by

experience. In common parlance, what one man is said to learn by experience, a man of extraordinary

sagacity is said, without experience, to divine. The Arabians say, that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali

Seena, the philosopher, conferred together; and, on parting, the philosopher said, "All that he sees, I know";

and the mystic said, "All that he knows, I see." If one should ask the reason of this intuition, the solution

would lead us into that property which Plato denoted as Reminiscence, and which is implied by the Bramins

in the tenet of Transmigration. The soul having been often born, or, as the Hindoos say, "travelling the path

of existence through thousands of births," having beheld the things which are here, those which are in heaven

and those which are beneath, there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge: no wonder that she

is able to recollect, in regard to any one thing, what formerly she knew. "For, all things in nature being linked

and related, and the soul having heretofore known all, nothing hinders but that any man who has recalled to

mind, or according to the common phrase has learned, one thing only, should of himself recover all his

ancient knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he have but courage and faint not in the midst of his

researches. For inquiry and learning is reminiscence all."*(17) How much more, if he that inquires be a holy

and godlike soul For by being assimilated to the original soul, by whom and after whom all things subsist, the

soul of man does then easily flow into all things, and all things flow into it: they mix; and he is present and

This path is difficult, secret and beset with terror. The ancients called it ecstasy or absence, a getting out of

their bodies to think. All religious history contains traces of the trance of saints, a beatitude, but without any

sign of joy; earnest, solitary, even sad; "the flight," Plotinus called it, "of the alone to the alone"; Muesiz, the

closing of the eyes, whence our word, Mystic. The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen,

Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guyon, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes to mind is

the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude comes in terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver.

and drives the man mad; or gives a certain violent bias which taints his judgment. In the chief examples of

religious illumination somewhat morbid has mingled, in spite of the unquestionable increase of mental

power. Must the highest good drag after it a quality which neutralizes and discredits it?

Shall we say, that the economical mother disburses so much earth and so much fire, by weight and meter, to

make a man, and will not add a pennyweight, though a nation is perishing for a leader? Therefore the men of

God purchased their science by folly or pain. If you will have pure carbon, carbuncle, or diamond, to make

the brain transparent, the trunk and organs shall be so much the grosser: instead of porcelain they are potter's

In modern times no such remarkable example of this introverted mind has occurred as in Emanuel

Swedenborg, born in Stockholm, in 1688. This man, who appeared to his contemporaries a visionary and

elixir of moonbeams, no doubt led the most real life of any man then in the world: and now, when the royal

and ducal Frederics, Christians and Brunswicks of that day have slid into oblivion, he begins to spread

himself into the minds of thousands. As happens in great men, he seemed, by the variety and amount of his

powers, to be a composition of several persons, like the giant fruits which are matured in gardens by the

union of four or five single blossoms. His frame is on a larger scale and possesses the advantages of size. As

it is easier to see the reflection of the great sphere in large globes, though defaced by some crack or blemish,

than in drops of water, so men of large calibre, though with some eccentricity or madness, like Pascal or

His youth and training could not fail to be extraordinary. Such a boy could not whistle or dance, but goes

grubbing into mines and mountains, prying into chemistry and optics, physiology, mathematics and

astronomy, to find images fit for the measure of his versatile and capacious brain. He was a scholar from a

child, and was educated at Upsala. At the age of twentyeight he was made Assessor of the Board of Mines

by Charles XII. In 1716, he left home for four years and visited the universities of England, Holland, France

and Germany. He performed a notable feat of engineering in 1718, at the siege of Frederikshald, by hauling

two galleys, five boats and a sloop, some fourteen English miles overland, for the royal service. In 1721 he

journeyed over Europe to examine mines and smelting works. He published in 1716 his Daedalus

Hyperboreus, and from this time for the next thirty years was employed in the composition and publication of

his scientific works. With the like force he threw himself into theology. In 1743, when he was fiftyfour

years old, what is called his illumination began. All his metallurgy and transportation of ships overland was

absorbed into this ecstasy. He ceased to publish any more scientific books, withdrew from his practical labors

and devoted himself to the writing and publication of his voluminous theological works, which were printed

at his own expense, or at that of the Duke of Brunswick or other prince, at Dresden, Leipsic, London, or

Amsterdam. Later, he resigned his office of Assessor: the salary attached to this office continued to be paid to

him during his life. His duties had brought him into intimate acquaintance with King Charles XII, by whom

he was much consulted and honored. The like favor was continued to him by his successor. At the Diet of

1751, Count Hopken says, the most solid memorials on finance were from his pen. In Sweden he appears to

have attracted a marked regard. His rare science and practical skill, and the added fame of second sight and

extraordinary religious knowledge and gifts, drew to him queens, nobles, clergy, shipmasters and people

about the ports through which he was wont to pass in his many voyages. The clergy interfered a little with the

importation and publication of his religious works, but he seems to have kept the friendship of men in power.

He was never married. He had great modesty and gentleness of bearing. His habits were simple; he lived on

bread, milk and vegetables; he lived in a house situated in a large garden; he went several times to England,

where he does not seem to have attracted any attention whatever from the learned or the eminent; and died at

London, March 29, 1772, of apoplexy, in his eightyfifth year. He is described, when in London, as a man of

a quiet, clerical habit, not averse to tea and coffee, and kind to children. He wore a sword when in full velvet

dress, and, whenever he walked out, carried a goldheaded cane. There is a common portrait of him in

The genius which was to penetrate the science of the age with a far more subtle science; to pass the bounds of

space and time, venture into the dim spiritrealm, and attempt to establish a new religion in the world,

began its lessons in quarries and forges, in the smeltingpot and crucible, in shipyards and

dissectingrooms. No one man is perhaps able to judge of the merits of his works on so many subjects. One

is glad to learn that his books on mines and metals are held in the highest esteem by those who understand

these matters. It seems that he anticipated much science of the nineteenth century; anticipated, in astronomy,

the discovery of the seventh planet, but, unhappily, not also of the eighth; anticipated the views of modern

astronomy in regard to the generation of earths by the sun; in magnetism, some important experiments and

conclusions of later students; in chemistry, the atomic theory; in anatomy, the discoveries of Schlichting,

Monro and Wilson; and first demonstrated the office of the lungs. His excellent English editor

magnanimously lays no stress on his discoveries, since he was too great to care to be original; and we are to

A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by them, and requires a long focal distance

to be seen; suggests, as Aristotle, Bacon, Selden,*(18) Humboldt, that a certain vastness of learning, or quasi

omnipresence of the human soul in nature, is possible. His superb speculation, as from a tower, over nature

and arts, without ever losing sight of the texture and sequence of things, almost realizes his own picture, in

the "Principia," of the original integrity of man. Over and above the merit of his particular discoveries, is the

capital merit of his selfequality. A drop of water has the properties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a storm.

There is beauty of a concert, as well as of a flute; strength of a host, as well as of a hero; and, in Swedenborg,

those who are best acquainted with modern books will most admire the merit of mass. One of the

missouriums and mastodons of literature, he is not to be measured by whole colleges of ordinary scholars.

His stalwart presence would flutter the gowns of an university. Our books are false by being fragmentary:

their sentences are bonmots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in

nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature; being

some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature and purposely framed to excite surprise, as

jugglers do by concealing their means. But Swedenborg is systematic and respective of the world in every

sentence; all the means are orderly given; his faculties work with astronomic punctuality, and this admirable

Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of great ideas. It is hard to say what was his own: yet his life was

dignified by noblest pictures of the universe. The robust Aristotelian method, with its breadth and

adequateness, shaming our sterile and linear logic by its genial radiation, conversant with series and degree,

with effects and ends, skilful to discriminate power from form, essence from accident, and opening, by its

terminology and definition, high roads into nature, had trained a race of athletic philosophers. Harvey had

shown the circulation of the blood; Gilbert had shown that the earth was a magnet; Descartes, taught by

Gilbert's magnet, with its vortex, spiral and polarity, had filled Europe with the leading thought of vortical

motion, as the secret of nature. Newton, in the year in which Swedenborg was born, published the

"Principia," and established the universal gravity. Malpighi,*(19) following the high doctrines of

Hippocrates, Leucippus*(20) and Lucretius, had given emphasis to the dogma that nature works in leasts,

"tota in minimis existit natura." Unrivalled dissectors, Swammerdam, Leuwenhoek, Winslow, Eustachius,

Heister, Vesalius, Boerhaave,*(21) had left nothing for scalpel or microscope to reveal in human or

comparative anatomy: Linnaeus, his contemporary, was affirming, in his beautiful science, that "Nature is

always like herself"; and, lastly, the nobility of method, the largest application of principles, had been

exhibited by Leibnitz*(22) and Christian Wolff, in cosmology; whilst Locke and Grotius had drawn the

moral argument. What was left for a genius of the largest calibre but to go over their ground and verify and

unite? It is easy to see, in these minds, the origin of Swedenborg's studies, and the suggestion of his

problems. He had a capacity to entertain and vivify these volumes of thought. Yet the proximity of these

geniuses, one or other of whom had introduced all his leading ideas, makes Swedenborg another example of

the difficulty, even in a highly fertile genius, of proving originality, the first birth and annunciation of one of

He named his favorite views the doctrine of Forms, the doctrine of Series and Degrees, the doctrine of Influx,

the doctrine of Correspondence. His statement of these doctrines deserves to be studied in his books. Not

every man can read them, but they will reward him who can. His theologic works are valuable to illustrate

these. His writings would be a sufficient library to a lonely and athletic student; and the "Economy of the

Animal Kingdom" is one of those books which, by the sustained dignity of thinking, is an honor to the human

race. He had studied spars and metals to some purpose. His varied and solid knowledge makes his style

lustrous with points and shooting spiculae of thought, and resembling one of those winter mornings when the

air sparkles with crystals. The grandeur of the topics makes the grandeur of the style. He was apt for

cosmology, because of that native perception of identity which made mere size of no account to him. In the

atom of magnetic iron he saw the quality which would generate the spiral motion of sun and planet.

The thoughts in which he lived were, the universality of each law in nature; the Platonic doctrine of the scale

or degrees; the version or conversion of each into other, and so the correspondence of all the parts; the fine

secret that little explains large, and large, little; the centrality of man in nature, and the connection that

subsists throughout all things: he saw that the human body was strictly universal, or an instrument through

which the soul feeds and is fed by the whole of matter; so that he held, in exact antagonism to the skeptics,

that "the wiser a man is, the more will he be a worshipper of the Deity." In short, he was a believer in the

Identityphilosophy, which he held not idly, as the dreamers of Berlin or Boston, but which he experimented

with and established through years of labor, with the heart and strength of the rudest Viking that his rough

This theory dates from the oldest philosophers, and derives perhaps its best illustration from the newest. It is

this, that Nature iterates her means perpetually on successive planes. In the old aphorism, nature is always

selfsimilar. In the plant, the eye or germinative point opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of

transforming the leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed. The whole art of the plant is still

to repeat leaf on leaf without end, the more or less of heat, light, moisture and food determining the form it

shall assume. In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still by a new

spine, with a limited power of modifying its form, spine on spine, to the end of the world. A poetic

anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake, being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line,

constitute a right angle; and between the lines of this mystical quadrant all animated beings find their place:

and he assumes the hairworm, the spanworm, or the snake, as the type or prediction of the spine.

Manifestly, at the end of the spine, Nature puts out smaller spines, as arms; at the end of the arms, new

spines, as hands; at the other end, she repeats the process, as legs and feet. At the top of the column she puts

out another spine, which doubles or loops itself over, as a spanworm, into a ball, and forms the skull, with

extremities again: the hands being now the upper jaw, the feet the lower jaw, the fingers and toes being

represented this time by upper and lower teeth. This new spine is destined to high uses. It is a new man on the

shoulders of the last. It can almost shed its trunk and manage to live alone, according to the Platonic idea in

the Timaeus. Within it, on a higher plane, all that was done in the trunk repeats itself. Nature recites her

lesson once more in a higher mood. The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting,

absorbing, excluding and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here in the brain is all the process of

alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting and assimilating of experience. Here again is

the mystery of generation repeated. In the brain are male and female faculties; here is marriage, here is fruit.

And there is no limit to this ascending scale, but series on series. Every thing, at the end of one use, is taken

up into the next, each series punctually repeating every organ and process of the last. We are adapted to

infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends; and in nature is no end, but every thing at the

end of one use is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial

natures. Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now

high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.

Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is good, but grander when we find chemistry only an extension of the

law of masses into particles, and that the atomic theory shows the action of chemistry to be mechanical also.

Metaphysics shows us a sort of gravitation operative also in the mental phenomena; and the terrible

tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical

ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes or marries his grandmother, then in

every twenty thousand or thirty thousand is found one man who eats shoes or marries his grandmother. What

we call gravitation, and fancy ultimate, is one fork of a mightier stream for which we have yet no name.

Astronomy is excellent; but it must come up into life to have its full value, and not remain there in globes and

spaces. The globule of blood gyrates around its own axis in the human veins, as the planet in the sky; and the

circles of intellect relate to those of the heavens. Each law of nature has the like universality; eating, sleep or

hybernation, rotation, generation, metamorphosis, vortical motion, which is seen in eggs as in planets. These

grand rhymes or returns in nature, the dear, bestknown face startling us at every turn, under a mask so

unexpected that we think it the face of a stranger, and carrying up the semblance into divine forms,

delighted the prophetic eye of Swedenborg; and he must be reckoned a leader in that revolution, which, by

giving to science an idea, has given to an aimless accumulation of experiments, guidance and form and a

I own with some regret that his printed works amount to about fifty stout octavos, his scientific works being

about half of the whole number; and it appears that a mass of manuscript still unedited remains in the royal

library at Stockholm. The scientific works have just now been translated into English, in an excellent edition.

Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the ten years from 1734 to 1744, and they remained from that

time neglected; and now, after their century is complete, he has at last found a pupil in Mr. Wilkinson, in

London, a philosophic critic, with a coequal vigor of understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord

Bacon's, who has restored his master's buried books to the day, and transferred them, with every advantage,

from their forgotten Latin into English, to go round the world in our commercial and conquering tongue. This

startling reappearance of Swedenborg, after a hundred years, in his pupil, is not the least remarkable fact in

his history. Aided it is said by the munificence of Mr. Clissold, and also by his literary skill, this piece of

poetic justice is done. The admirable preliminary discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these

volumes, throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into shade, and leave me nothing to say on their

The "Animal Kingdom" is a book of wonderful merits. It was written with the highest end, to put science

and the soul, long estranged from each other, at one again. It was an anatomist's account of the human body,

in the highest style of poetry. Nothing can exceed the bold and brilliant treatment of a subject usually so dry

and repulsive. He saw nature "wreathing through an everlasting spiral, with wheels that never dry, on axles

that never creak," and sometimes sought "to uncover those secret recesses where Nature is sitting at the fires

in the depths of her laboratory"; whilst the picture comes recommended by the hard fidelity with which it is

based on practical anatomy. It is remarkable that this sublime genius decides peremptorily for the analytic,

against the synthetic method; and, in a book whose genius is a daring poetic synthesis, claims to confine

He knows, if he only, the flowing of nature, and how wise was that old answer of Amasis*(23) to him who

bade him drink up the sea, "Yes, willingly, if you will stop the rivers that flow in." Few knew as much about

nature and her subtle manners, or expressed more subtly her goings. He thought as large a demand is made on

our faith by nature, as by miracles. "He noted that in her proceeding from first principles through her several

subordinations, there was no state through which she did not pass, as if her path lay through all things." "For

as often as she betakes herself upward from visible phenomena, or, in other words, withdraws herself inward,

she instantly as it were disappears, while no one knows what has become of her, or whither she is gone: so

The pursuing the inquiry under the light of an end or final cause gives wonderful animation, a sort of

personality to the whole writing. This book announces his favorite dogmas. The ancient doctrine of

Hippocrates, that the brain is a gland; and of Leucippus, that the atom may be known by the mass; or, in

and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim that "nature exists entire in leasts," is a favorite thought of

Swedenborg. "It is a constant law of the organic body that large, compound, or visible forms exist and subsist

from smaller, simpler and ultimately from invisible forms, which act similarly to the larger ones, but more

perfectly and more universally; and the least forms so perfectly and universally as to involve an idea

representative of their entire universe." The unities of each organ are so many little organs, homogeneous

with their compound: the unities of the tongue are little tongues; those of the stomach, little stomachs; those

of the heart are little hearts. This fruitful idea furnishes a key to every secret. What was too small for the eye

to detect was read by the aggregates; what was too large, by the units. There is no end to his application of

the thought. "Hunger is an aggregate of very many little hungers, or losses of blood by the little veins all over

the body." It is a key to his theology also. "Man is a kind of very minute heaven, corresponding to the world

of spirits and to heaven. Every particular idea of man, and every affection, yea, every smallest part of his

affection, is an image and effigy of him. A spirit may be known from only a single thought. God is the grand

The hardihood and thoroughness of his study of nature required a theory of forms also. "Forms ascend in

order from the lowest to the highest. The lowest form is angular, or the terrestrial and corporeal. The second

and next higher form is the circular, which is also called the perpetualangular, because the circumference of

a circle is a perpetual angle. The form above this is the spiral, parent and measure of circular forms: its

diameters are not rectilinear, but variously circular, and have a spherical surface for centre; therefore it is

called the perpetualcircular. The form above this is the vortical, or perpetualspiral: next, the

Was it strange that a genius so bold should take the last step also, should conceive that he might attain the

science of all sciences, to unlock the meaning of the world? In the first volume of the "Animal Kingdom," he

broaches the subject in a remarkable note: "In our doctrine of Representations and Correspondences we

shall treat of both these symbolical and typical resemblances, and of the astonishing things which occur, I

will not say in the living body only, but throughout nature, and which correspond so entirely to supreme and

spiritual things that one would swear that the physical world was purely symbolical of the spiritual world;

insomuch that if we choose to express any natural truth in physical and definite vocal terms, and to convert

these terms only into the corresponding and spiritual terms, we shall by this means elicit a spiritual truth or

theological dogma, in place of the physical truth or precept: although no mortal would have predicted that

any thing of the kind could possibly arise by bare literal transposition; inasmuch as the one precept,

considered separately from the other, appears to have absolutely no relation to it. I intend hereafter to

communicate a number of examples of such correspondences, together with a vocabulary containing the

terms of spiritual things, as well as of the physical things for which they are to be substituted. This

The fact thus explicitly stated is implied in all poetry, in allegory, in fable, in the use of emblems and in the

structure of language. Plato knew it, as is evident from his twice bisected line in the sixth book of the

Republic. Lord Bacon had found that truth and nature differed only as seal and print; and he instanced some

physical propositions, with their translation into a moral or political sense. Behmen, and all mystics, imply

this law in their dark riddlewriting. The poets, in as far as they are poets, use it; but it is known to them only

as the magnet was known for ages, as a toy. Swedenborg first put the fact into a detached and scientific

statement, because it was habitually present to him, and never not seen. It was involved, as we explained

already, in the doctrine of identity and iteration, because the mental series exactly tallies with the material

series. It required an insight that could rank things in order and series; or rather it required such rightness of

position that the poles of the eye should coincide with the axis of the world. The earth had fed its mankind

through five or six millenniums, and they had sciences, religions, philosophies, and yet had failed to see the

correspondence of meaning between every part and every other part. And, down to this hour, literature has no

book in which the symbolism of things is scientifically opened. One would say that as soon as men had the

first hint that every sensible object, animal, rock, river, air, nay, space and time, subsists not for itself, nor

finally to a material end, but as a picturelanguage to tell another story of beings and duties, other science

would be put by, and a science of such grand presage would absorb all faculties: that each man would ask of

all objects what they mean: Why does the horizon hold me fast, with my joy and grief, in this centre? Why

hear I the same sense from countless differing voices, and read one never quite expressed fact in endless

picturelanguage? Yet whether it be that these things will not be intellectually learned, or that many centuries

must elaborate and compose so rare and opulent a soul, there is no comet, rockstratum, fossil, fish,

quadruped, spider, or fungus, that, for itself, does not interest more scholars and classifiers than the meaning

But Swedenborg was not content with the culinary use of the world. In his fiftyfourth year these thoughts

held him fast, and his profound mind admitted the perilous opinion, too frequent in religious history, that he

was an abnormal person, to whom was granted the privilege of conversing with angels and spirits; and this

ecstasy connected itself with just this office of explaining the moral import of the sensible world. To a right

perception, at once broad and minute, of the order of nature, he added the comprehension of the moral laws in

their widest social aspects; but whatever he saw, through some excessive determination to form in his

constitution, he saw not abstractly, but in pictures, heard it in dialogues, constructed it in events. When he

attempted to announce the law most sanely, he was forced to couch it in parable.

Modern psychology offers no similar example of a deranged balance. The principal powers continued to

maintain a healthy action, and to a reader who can make due allowance in the report for the reporter's

peculiarities, the results are still instructive, and a more striking testimony to the sublime laws he announced

than any that balanced dulness could afford. He attempts to give some account of the modus of the new state,

affirming that "his presence in the spiritual world is attended with a certain separation, but only as to the

intellectual part of his mind, not as to the will part"; and he affirms that "he sees, with the internal sight, the

things that are in another life, more clearly than he sees the things which are here in the world."

Having adopted the belief that certain books of the Old and New Testaments were exact allegories, or written

in the angelic and ecstatic mode, he employed his remaining years in extricating from the literal, the universal

sense. He had borrowed from Plato the fine fable*(24) of "a most ancient people, men better than we and

dwelling nigher to the gods"; and Swedenborg added that they used the earth symbolically; that these, when

they saw terrestrial objects, did not think at all about them, but only about those which they signified. The

correspondence between thoughts and things henceforward occupied him. "The very organic form resembles

the end inscribed on it." A man is in general and in particular an organized justice or injustice, selfishness or

gratitude. And the cause of this harmony he assigned in the Arcana: "The reason why all and single things, in

the heavens and on earth, are representative, is because they exist from an influx of the Lord, through

heaven." This design of exhibiting such correspondences, which, if adequately executed, would be the poem

of the world, in which all history and science would play an essential part, was narrowed and defeated by the

exclusively theologic direction which his inquiries took. His perception of nature is not human and universal,

but is mystical and Hebraic. He fastens each natural object to a theologic notion; a horse signifies carnal

understanding; a tree, perception; the moon, faith; a cat means this; an ostrich that; an artichoke this other;

and poorly tethers every symbol to a several ecclesiastic sense. The slippery Proteus is not so easily caught.

In nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable parts, as each particle of matter circulates in turn

through every system. The central identity enables any one symbol to express successively all the qualities

and shades of real being. In the transmission of the heavenly waters, every hose fits every hydrant. Nature

avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Every thing

must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition to understand any thing rightly.

His theological bias thus fatally narrowed his interpretation of nature, and the dictionary of symbols is yet to

be written. But the interpreter whom mankind must still expect, will find no predecessor who has approached

Swedenborg styles himself in the titlepage of his books, "Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ"; and by force of

intellect, and in effect, he is the last Father in the Church, and is not likely to have a successor. No wonder

that his depth of ethical wisdom should give him influence as a teacher. To the withered traditional church,

yielding dry catechisms, he let in nature again, and the worshipper, escaping from the vestry of verbs and

texts, is surprised to find himself a party to the whole of his religion. His religion thinks for him and is of

universal application. He turns it on every side; it fits every part of life, interprets and dignifies every

circumstance. Instead of a religion which visited him diplomatically three or four times, when he was born,

when he married, when he fell sick and when he died, and, for the rest, never interfered with him, here was

a teaching which accompanied him all day, accompanied him even into sleep and dreams; into his thinking,

and showed him through what a long ancestry his thoughts descend; into society, and showed by what

affinities he was girt to his equals and his counterparts; into natural objects, and showed their origin and

meaning, what are friendly, and what are hurtful; and opened the future world by indicating the continuity of

the same laws. His disciples allege that their intellect is invigorated by the study of his books.

There is no such problem for criticism as his theological writings, their merits are so commanding, yet such

grave deductions must be made. Their immense and sandy diffuseness is like the prairie or the desert, and

their incongruities are like the last deliration. He is superfluously explanatory, and his feeling of the

ignorance of men, strangely exaggerated. Men take truths of this nature very fast. Yet he abounds in

assertions, he is a rich discoverer, and of things which most import us to know. His thought dwells in

essential resemblances, like the resemblance of a house to the man who built it. He saw things in their law, in

likeness of function, not of structure. There is an invariable method and order in his delivery of his truth, the

habitual proceeding of the mind from inmost to outmost. What earnestness and weightiness, his eye never

roving, without one swell of vanity, or one look to self in any common form of literary pride! a theoretic or

speculative man, but whom no practical man in the universe could affect to scorn. Plato is a gownsman; his

garment, though of purple, and almost skywoven, is an academic robe and hinders action with its

voluminous folds. But this mystic is awful to Caesar. Lycurgus himself would bow.

The moral insight of Swedenborg, the correction of popular errors, the announcement of ethical laws, take

him out of comparison with any other modern writer and entitle him to a place, vacant for some ages, among

the lawgivers of mankind. That slow but commanding influence which he has acquired, like that of other

religious geniuses, must be excessive also, and have its tides, before it subsides into a permanent amount. Of

course what is real and universal cannot be confined to the circle of those who sympathize strictly with his

genius, but will pass forth into the common stock of wise and just thinking. The world has a sure chemistry,

by which it extracts what is excellent in its children and lets fall the infirmities and limitations of the grandest

That metempsychosis which is familiar in the old mythology of the Greeks, collected in Ovid and in the

Indian Transmigration, and is there objective, or really takes place in bodies by alien will, in Swedenborg's

mind has a more philosophic character. It is subjective, or depends entirely upon the thought of the person.

All things in the universe arrange themselves to each person anew, according to his ruling love. Man is such

as his affection and thought are. Man is man by virtue of willing, not by virtue of knowing and

understanding. As he is, so he sees. The marriages of the world are broken up. Interiors associate all in the

spiritual world. Whatever the angels looked upon was to them celestial. Each Satan appears to himself a man;

to those as bad as he, a comely man; to the purified, a heap of carrion. Nothing can resist states: every thing

gravitates: like will to like: what we call poetic justice takes effect on the spot. We have come into a world

which is a living poem. Every thing is as I am. Bird and beast is not bird and beast, but emanation and

effluvia of the minds and wills of men there present. Every one makes his own house and state. The ghosts

are tormented with the fear of death and cannot remember that they have died. They who are in evil and

falsehood are afraid of all others. Such as have deprived themselves of charity, wander and flee: the societies

which they approach discover their quality and drive them away. The covetous seem to themselves to be

abiding in cells where their money is deposited, and these to be infested with mice. They who place merit in

good works seem to themselves to cut wood. "I asked such, if they were not wearied? They replied, that they

He delivers golden sayings which express with singular beauty the ethical laws; as when he uttered that

famed sentence, that "In heaven the angels are advancing continually to the springtime of their youth, so that

the oldest angel appears the youngest": "The more angels, the more room": "The perfection of man is the love

of use": "Man, in his perfect form, is heaven": "What is from Him, is Him": "Ends always ascend as nature

descends." And the truly poetic account of the writing in the inmost heaven, which, as it consists of inflexions

according to the form of heaven, can be read without instruction. He almost justifies his claim to preternatural

vision, by strange insights of the structure of the human body and mind. "It is never permitted to any one, in

heaven, to stand behind another and look at the back of his head; for then the influx which is from the Lord is

disturbed." The angels, from the sound of the voice, know a man's love; from the articulation of the sound,

In the "Conjugal Love," he has unfolded the science of marriage. Of this book one would say that with the

highest elements it has failed of success. It came near to be the Hymn of Love, which Plato attempted in the

"Banquet"; the love, which, Dante says, Casella*(25) sang among the angels in Paradise; and which, as

rightly celebrated, in its genesis, fruition and effect, might well entrance the souls, as it would lay open the

genesis of all institutions, customs and manners. The book had been grand if the Hebraism had been omitted

and the law stated without Gothicism, as ethics, and with that scope for ascension of state which the nature of

things requires. It is a fine Platonic development of the science of marriage; teaching that sex is universal,

and not local; virility in the male qualifying every organ, act, and thought; and the feminine in woman.

Therefore in the real or spiritual world the nuptial union is not momentary, but incessant and total; and

chastity not a local, but a universal virtue; unchastity being discovered as much in the trading, or planting, or

speaking, or philosophizing, as in generation; and that, though the virgins he saw in heaven were beautiful,

the wives were incomparably more beautiful, and went on increasing in beauty evermore.

Yet Swedenborg, after his mode, pinned his theory to a temporary form. He exaggerates the circumstance of

marriage; and though he finds false marriages on earth, fancies a wiser choice in heaven. But of progressive

souls, all loves and friendships are momentary. Do you love me? means, Do you see the same truth? If you

do, we are happy with the same happiness: but presently one of us passes into the perception of new truth;

we are divorced, and no tension in nature can hold us to each other. I know how delicious is this cup of

love, I existing for you, you existing for me; but it is a child's clinging to his toy; an attempt to eternize the

fireside and nuptial chamber; to keep the picturealphabet through which our first lessons are prettily

conveyed. The Eden of God is bare and grand: like the outdoor landscape remembered from the evening

fireside, it seems cold and desolate whilst you cower over the coals, but once abroad again, we pity those who

can forego the magnificence of nature for candlelight and cards. Perhaps the true subject of the "Conjugal

Love" is Conversation whose laws are profoundly set forth. It is false, if literally applied to marriage. For

God is the bride or bridegroom of the soul. Heaven is not the pairing of two, but the communion of all souls.

We meet, and dwell an instant under the temple of one thought, and part, as though we parted not, to join

another thought in other fellowships of joy. So far from there being anything divine in the low and

proprietary sense of Do you love me? it is only when you leave and lose me by casting yourself on a

sentiment which is higher than both of us, that I draw near and find myself at your side; and I am repelled if

you fix your eye on me and demand love. In fact, in the spiritual world we change sexes every moment. You

love the worth in me; then I am your husband: but it is not me, but the worth, that fixes the love; and that

worth is a drop of the ocean of worth that is beyond me. Meantime I adore the greater worth in another, and

so become his wife. He aspires to a higher worth in another spirit, and is wife or receiver of that influence.

Whether from a selfinquisitorial habit that he grew into from jealousy of the sins to which men of thought

are liable, he has acquired, in disentangling and demonstrating that particular form of moral disease, an

acumen which no conscience can resist. I refer to his feeling of the profanation of thinking to what is good,

"from scientifics." "To reason about faith, is to doubt and deny." He was painfully alive to the difference

between knowing and doing, and this sensibility is incessantly expressed. Philosophers are, therefore, vipers,

cockatrices, asps, hemorrhoids, presters, and flying serpents; literary men are conjurors and charlatans.

But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that here we find the seat of his own pain. Possibly Swedenborg

paid the penalty of introverted faculties. Success, or a fortunate genius, seems to depend on a happy

adjustment of heart and brain; on a due proportion, hard to hit, of moral and mental power, which perhaps

obeys the law of those chemical ratios which make a proportion in volumes necessary to combination, as

when gases will combine in certain fixed rates, but not at any rate. It is hard to carry a full cup; and this man,

profusely endowed in heart and mind, early fell into dangerous discord with himself. In his Animal Kingdom

he surprised us by declaring that he loved analysis, and not synthesis; and now, after his fiftieth year, he falls

into jealousy of his intellect; and though aware that truth is not solitary nor is goodness solitary, but both

must ever mix and marry, he makes war on his mind, takes the part of the conscience against it, and, on all

occasions, traduces and blasphemes it. The violence is instantly avenged. Beauty is disgraced, love is

unlovely, when truth, the half part of heaven, is denied, as much as when a bitterness in men of talent leads to

satire and destroys the judgment. He is wise, but wise in his own despite. There is an air of infinite grief and

the sound of wailing all over and through this lurid universe. A vampyre sits in the seat of the prophet and

turns with gloomy appetite to the images of pain. Indeed, a bird does not more readily weave its nest, or a

mole bore into the ground, than this seer of the souls substructs a new hell and pit, each more abominable

than the last, round every new crew of offenders. He was let down through a column that seemed of brass, but

it was formed of angelic spirits, that he might descend safely amongst the unhappy, and witness the vastation

of souls and hear there, for a long continuance, their lamentations: he saw their tormentors, who increase and

strain pangs to infinity; he saw the hell of the jugglers, the hell of the assassins, the hell of the lascivious; the

hell of robbers, who kill and boil men; the infernal tun of the deceitful; the excrementitious hells; the hell of

the revengeful, whose faces resembled a round, broad cake, and their arms rotate like a wheel. Except

These books should be used with caution. It is dangerous to sculpture these evanescing images of thought.

True in transition, they become false if fixed. It requires, for his just apprehension, almost a genius equal to

his own. But when his visions become the stereotyped language of multitudes of persons of all degrees of age

and capacity, they are perverted. The wise people of the Greek race were accustomed to lead the most

intelligent and virtuous young men, as part of their education, through the Eleusinian mysteries, wherein,

with much pomp and graduation, the highest truths known to ancient wisdom were taught. An ardent and

contemplative young man, at eighteen or twenty years, might read once these books of Swedenborg, these

mysteries of love and conscience, and then throw them aside for ever. Genius is ever haunted by similar

dreams, when the hells and the heavens are opened to it. But these pictures are to be held as mystical, that is,

as a quite arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth, not as the truth. Any other symbol would be as good;

Swedenborg's system of the world wants central spontaneity; it is dynamic, not vital, and lacks power to

generate life. There is no individual in it. The universe is a gigantic crystal, all whose atoms and laminae lie

in uninterrupted order and with unbroken unity, but cold and still. What seems an individual and a will, is

none. There is an immense chain of intermediation, extending from centre to extremes, which bereaves every

agency of all freedom and character. The universe, in his poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only

reflects the mind of the magnetizer. Every thought comes into each mind by influence from a society of

spirits that surround it, and into these from a higher society, and so on. All his types mean the same few

things. All his figures speak one speech. All his interlocutors Swedenborgize. Be they who they may, to this

complexion must they come at last. This Charon ferries them all over in his boat; kings, counsellors,

cavaliers, doctors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane, King George II, Mahomet, or whomsoever, and all

gather one grimness of hue and style. Only when Cicero comes by, our gentle seer sticks a little at saying he

talked with Cicero, and with a touch of human relenting remarks, "one whom it was given me to believe was

Cicero"; and when the soi disant Roman opens his mouth, Rome and eloquence have ebbed away, it is plain

theologic Swedenborg like the rest. His heavens and hells are dull; fault of want of individualism. The

thousandfold relation of men is not there. The interest that attaches in nature to each man, because he is

right by his wrong, and wrong by his right; because he defies all dogmatizing and classification, so many

allowances and contingencies and futurities are to be taken into account; strong by his vices, often paralyzed

by his virtues; sinks into entire sympathy with his society. This want reacts to the centre of the system.

Though the agency of "the Lord" is in every line referred to by name, it never becomes alive. There is no

lustre in that eye which gazes from the centre and which should vivify the immense dependency of beings.

The vice of Swedenborg's mind is its theological determination. Nothing with him has the liberality of

universal wisdom, but we are always in a church. That Hebrew muse, which taught the lore of right and

wrong to men, had the same excess of influence for him it has had for the nations. The mode, as well as the

essence, was sacred. Palestine is ever the more valuable as a chapter in universal history, and ever the less an

available element in education. The genius of Swedenborg, largest of all modern souls in this department of

thought, wasted itself in the endeavor to reanimate and conserve what had already arrived at its natural term,

and, in the great secular Providence, was retiring from its prominence, before Western modes of thought and

expression. Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of

to the moral sentiment, which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities, in its bosom.

The excess of influence shows itself in. the incongruous importation of a foreign rhetoric. "What have I to

do," asks the impatient reader, "with jasper and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony; what with arks and

passovers, ephahs and ephods; what with lepers and emerods; what with heaveofferings and unleavened

bread, chariots of fire, dragons crowned and horned, behemoth and unicorn? Good for Orientals, these are

nothing to me. The more learning you bring to explain them, the more glaring the impertinence. The more

coherent and elaborate the system, the less I like it. I say, with the Spartan, 'Why do you speak so much to the

purpose, of that which is nothing to the purpose?'*(26) My learning is such as God gave me in my birth and

habit, in the delight and study of my eyes and not of another man's. Of all absurdities, this of some foreigner

proposing to take away my rhetoric and substitute his own, and amuse me with pelican and stork, instead of

thrush and robin; palmtrees and shittimwood, instead of sassafras and hickory, seems the most needless."

Locke said, "God, when he makes the prophet, does not unmake the man." Swedenborg's history points the

remark. The parish disputes in the Swedish church between the friends and foes of Luther and Melancthon,

concerning "faith alone" and "works alone," intrude themselves into his speculations upon the economy of the

universe, and of the celestial societies. The Lutheran bishop's son, for whom the heavens are opened, so that

he sees with eyes and in the richest symbolic forms the awful truth of things, and utters again in his books, as

under a heavenly mandate, the indisputable secrets of moral nature, with all these grandeurs resting upon

him, remains the Lutheran bishop's son; his judgments are those of a Swedish polemic, and his vast

enlargements purchased by adamantine limitations. He carries his controversial memory with him in his visits

to the souls. He is like Michael Angelo, who, in his frescoes, put the cardinal who had offended him to roast

under a mountain of devils; or like Dante, who avenged, in vindictive melodies, all his private wrongs; or

perhaps still more like Montaigne's parish priest, who, if a hailstorm passes over the village, thinks the day

of doom is come, and the cannibals already have got the pip. Swedenborg confounds us not less with the

pains of Melancthon and Luther and Wolfius, and his own books, which he advertises among the angels.

Under the same theologic cramp, many of his dogmas are bound. His cardinal position in morals is that evils

should be shunned as sins. But he does not know what evil is, or what good is, who thinks any ground

remains to be occupied, after saying that evil is to be shunned as evil. I doubt not he was led by the desire to

insert the element of personality of Deity. But nothing is added. One man, you say, dreads erysipelas, show

him that this dread is evil: or, one dreads hell, show him that dread is evil. He who loves goodness, harbors

angels, reveres reverence and lives with God. The less we have to do with our sins the better. No man can

afford to waste his moments in compunctions. "That is active duty," say the Hindoos, "which is not for our

bondage; that is knowledge, which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness."

Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious theologic limitation, is his Inferno. Swedenborg has devils.

Evil, according to old philosophers, is good in the making. That pure malignity can exist is the extreme

proposition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained by a rational agent; it is atheism; it is the last profanation.

To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology arrived, that Swedenborg admitted no conversion for evil

spirits! But the divine effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself to grass and flowers;

and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true. Burns, with the

has the advantage of the vindictive theologian. Every thing is superficial and perishes but love and truth only.

The largest is always the truest sentiment, and we feel the more generous spirit of the Indian Vishnu, "I am

the same to all mankind. There is not one who is worthy of my love or hatred. They who serve me with

adoration, I am in them, and they in me. If one whose ways are altogether evil serve me alone, he is as

respectable as the just man; he is altogether well employed; he soon becometh of a virtuous spirit and

For the anomalous pretension of Revelations of the other world, only his probity and genius can entitle it to

any serious regard. His revelations destroy their credit by running into detail. If a man say that the Holy

Ghost has informed him that the Last judgment (or the last of the judgments) took place in 1757; or that the

Dutch, in the other world, live in a heaven by themselves, and the English in a heaven by themselves; I reply

that the Spirit which is holy is reserved, taciturn, and deals in laws. The rumors of ghosts and hobgoblins

gossip and tell fortunes. The teachings of the high Spirit are abstemious, and, in regard to particulars,

negative. Socrates's Genius did not advise him to act or to find, but if he purposed to do somewhat not

advantageous, it dissuaded him. "What God is," he said, "I know not; what he is not, I know." The Hindoos

have denominated the Supreme Being, the "Internal Check." The illuminated Quakers explained their Light,

not as somewhat which leads to any action, but it appears as an obstruction to any thing unfit. But the right

examples are private experiences, which are absolutely at one on this point. Strictly speaking, Swedenborg's

revelation is a confounding of planes, a capital offence in so learned a categorist. This is to carry the law of

surface into the plane of substance, to carry individualism and its fopperies into the realm of essences and

The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an early syllable to

answer the longings of saints, the fears of mortals. We should have listened on our knees to any favorite,

who, by stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts into parallelism with the celestial currents and could hint

to human ears the scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul. But it is certain that it must tally with

what is best in nature. It must not be inferior in tone to the already known works of the artist who sculptures

the globes of the firmament and writes the moral law. It must be fresher than rainbows, stabler than

mountains, agreeing with flowers, with tides and the rising and setting of autumnal stars. Melodious poets

shall be hoarse as street ballads when once the penetrating keynote of nature and spirit is sounded, the

earthbeat, seabeat, heartbeat, which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood, and

In this mood we hear the rumor that the seer has arrived, and his tale is told. But there is no beauty, no

heaven: for angels, goblins. The sad muse loves night and death and the pit. His Inferno is mesmeric. His

spiritual world bears the same relation to the generosities and joys of truth of which human souls have

already made us cognizant, as a man's bad dreams bear to his ideal life. It is indeed very like, in its endless

power of lurid pictures, to the phenomena of dreaming, which nightly turns many an honest gentleman,

benevolent but dyspeptic, into a wretch, skulking like a dog about the outer yards and kennels of creation.

When he mounts into the heaven, I do not hear its language. A man should not tell me that he has walked

among the angels; his proof is that his eloquence makes me one. Shall the archangels be less majestic and

sweet than the figures that have actually walked the earth? These angels that Swedenborg paints give us no

very high idea of their discipline and culture: they are all country parsons: their heaven is a fete champetre, an

evangelical picnic, or French distribution of prizes to virtuous peasants. Strange, scholastic, didactic,

passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes of souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and visits doleful

hells as a stratum of chalk or hornblende! He has no sympathy. He goes up and down the world of men, a

modern Rhadamanthus in goldheaded cane and peruke, and with nonchalance and the air of a referee,

distributes souls. The warm, manyweathered, passionatepeopled world is to him a grammar of

hieroglyphs, or an emblematic freemason's procession. How different is Jacob Behmen! he is tremulous with

emotion and listens awestruck, with the gentlest humanity, to the Teacher whose lessons he conveys; and

when he asserts that, "in some sort, love is greater than God," his heart beats so high that the thumping

against his leathern coat is audible across the centuries. 'Tis a great difference. Behmen is healthily and

beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mystical narrowness and incommunicableness. Swedenborg is

It is the best sign of a great nature that it opens a foreground, and, like the breath of morning landscapes,

invites us onward. Swedenborg is retrospective, nor can we divest him of his mattock and shroud. Some

minds are for ever restrained from descending into nature; others are for ever prevented from ascending out

of it. With a force of many men, he could never break the umbilical cord which held him to nature, and he did

It is remarkable that this man, who, by his perception of symbols, saw the poetic construction of things and

the primary relation of mind to matter, remained entirely devoid of the whole apparatus of poetic expression,

which that perception creates. He knew the grammar and rudiments of the MotherTongue, how could he

not read off one strain into music? Was he like Saadi, who, in his vision, designed to fill his lap with the

celestial flowers, as presents for his friends; but the fragrance of the roses so intoxicated him that the skirt

dropped from his hands? or is reporting a breach of the manners of that heavenly society? or was it that he

saw the vision intellectually, and hence that chiding of the intellectual that pervades his books? Be it as it

may, his books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level. In his profuse and

accurate imagery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. We wander forlorn in a lacklustre landscape. No bird

ever sang in all these gardens of the dead. The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the

disease, and like a hoarse voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of warning. I think, sometimes, he will not be

read longer. His great name will turn a sentence. His books have become a monument. His laurel so largely

mixed with cypress, a charnelbreath so mingles with the temple incense, that boys and maids will shun the

Yet in this immolation of genius and fame at the shrine of conscience, is a merit sublime beyond praise. He

lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. He elected goodness as the clue to which the soul must cling in all this

labyrinth of nature. Many opinions conflict as to the true centre. In the shipwreck, some cling to running

rigging, some to cask and barrel, some to spars, some to mast; the pilot chooses with science, I plant myself

here; all will sink before this; "he comes to land who sails with me." Do not rely on heavenly favor, or on

compassion to folly, or on prudence, on common sense, the old usage and main chance of men: nothing can

keep you, not fate, nor health, nor admirable intellect; none can keep you, but rectitude only, rectitude for

ever and ever! And with a tenacity that never swerved in all his studies, inventions, dreams, he adheres to this

brave choice. I think of him as of some transmigrating votary of Indian legend, who says "Though I be dog,

or jackal, or pismire, in the last rudiments of nature, under what integument or ferocity, I cleave to right, as

Swedenborg has rendered a double service to mankind, which is now only beginning to be known. By the

science of experiment and use, he made his first steps: he observed and published the laws of nature; and

ascending by just degrees from events to their summits and causes, he was fired with piety at the harmonies

he felt, and abandoned himself to his joy and worship. This was his first service. If the glory was too bright

for his eyes to bear, if he staggered under the trance of delight, the more excellent is the spectacle he saw, the

realities of being which beam and blaze through him, and which no infirmities of the prophet are suffered to

obscure; and he renders a second passive service to men, not less than the first, perhaps, in the great circle of

being, and, in the retributions of spiritual nature, not less glorious or less beautiful to himself.

EVERY FACT is related on one side to sensation, and on the other to morals. The game of thought is, on the

appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side. Nothing so

thin but has these two faces, and when the observer has seen the obverse, he turns it over to see the reverse.

Life is a pitching of this penny, heads or tails. We never tire of this game, because there is still a slight

shudder of astonishment at the exhibition of the other face, at the contrast of the two faces. A man is flushed

with success, and bethinks himself what this good luck signifies. He drives his bargain in the street; but it

occurs that he also is bought and sold. He sees the beauty of a human face, and searches the cause of that

beauty, which must be more beautiful. He builds his fortunes, maintains the laws, cherishes his children; but

he asks himself, Why? and whereto? This head and this tail are called, in the language of philosophy, Infinite

and Finite; Relative and Absolute; Apparent and Real; and many fine names beside.

Each man is born with a predisposition to one or the other of these sides of nature; and it will easily happen

that men will be found devoted to one or the other. One class has the perception of difference, and is

conversant with facts and surfaces, cities and persons, and the bringing certain things to pass; the men of

talent and action. Another class have the perception of identity, and are men of faith and philosophy, men of

Each of these riders drives too fast. Plotinus believes only in philosophers; Fenelon, in saints; Pindar and

Byron, in poets. Read the haughty language in which Plato and the Platonists speak of all men who are not

devoted to their own shining abstractions: other men are rats and mice. The literary class is usually proud and

exclusive. The correspondence of Pope and Swift describes mankind around them as monsters; and that of

It is easy to see how this arrogance comes. The genius is a genius by the first look he casts on any object. Is

his eye creative? Does he not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design? he will presently undervalue

the actual object. In powerful moments, his thought has dissolved the works of art and nature into their

causes, so that the works appear heavy and faulty. He has a conception of beauty which the sculptor cannot

embody. Picture, statue, temple, railroad, steamengine, existed first in an artist's mind, without flaw,

mistake, or friction, which impair the executed models. So did the Church, the State, college, court, social

circle, and all the institutions. It is not strange that these men, remembering what they have seen and hoped of

ideas, should affirm disdainfully the superiority of ideas. Having at some time seen that the happy soul will

carry all the arts in power, they say, Why cumber ourselves with superfluous realizations? and like dreaming

beggars they assume to speak and act as if these values were already substantiated.

On the other part, the men of toil and trade and luxury, the animal world, including the animal in the

philosopher and poet also, and the practical world, including the painful drudgeries which are never excused

to philosopher or poet any more than to the rest, weigh heavily on the other side. The trade in our streets

believes in no metaphysical causes, thinks nothing of the force which necessitated traders and a trading planet

to exist: no, but sticks to cotton, sugar, wool and salt. The ward meetings, on election days, are not softened

by any misgiving of the value of these ballotings. Hot life is streaming in a single direction. To the men of

this world, to the animal strength and spirits, to the men of practical power, whilst immersed in it, the man of

Things always bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence. No man acquires property without

acquiring with it a little arithmetic also. In England, the richest country that ever existed, property stands for

more, compared with personal ability, than in any other. After dinner, a man believes less, denies more:

verities have lost some charm. After dinner, arithmetic is the only science: ideas are disturbing, incendiary,

follies of young men, repudiated by the solid portion of society: and a man comes to be valued by his athletic

and animal qualities. Spence relates that Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey Kneller one day, when his nephew, a

Guinea trader, came in. "Nephew," said Sir Godfrey, "you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men in

the world." "I don't know how great men you may be," said the Guinea man, "but I don't like your looks. I

have often bought a man much better than both of you, all muscles and bones, for ten guineas." Thus the men

of the senses revenge themselves on the professors and repay scorn for scorn. The first had leaped to

conclusions not yet ripe, and say more than is true; the others make themselves merry with the philosopher,

and weigh man by the pound. They believe that mustard bites the tongue, that pepper is hot, frictionmatches

incendiary, revolvers are to be avoided, and suspenders hold up pantaloons; that there is much sentiment in a

chest of tea; and a man will be eloquent, if you give him good wine. Are you tender and scrupulous, you

and when he advised a young scholar, perplexed with foreordination and freewill, to get well drunk. "The

nerves," says Cabanis, "they are the man." My neighbor, a jolly farmer, in the tavern barroom, thinks that

the use of money is sure and speedy spending. For his part, he says, he puts his down his neck and gets the

The inconvenience of this way of thinking is that it runs into indifferentism and then into disgust. Life is

eating us up. We shall be fables presently. Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence. Life's well

enough, but we shall be glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad to have us. Why should we fret and

drudge? Our meat will taste tomorrow as it did yesterday, and we may at last have had enough of it. "Ah,"

said my languid gentleman at Oxford, "there's nothing new or true, and no matter."

With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans; our life is like an ass led to market by a bundle of hay being

carried before him; he sees nothing but the bundle of hay. "There is so much trouble in coming into the

world," said Lord Bolingbroke, "and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly

worthwhile to be here at all." I knew a philosopher of this kidney who was accustomed briefly to sum up his

experience of human nature in saying, "Mankind is a damned rascal":*(27) and the natural corollary is pretty

The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the scoffer expressing the

worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two, the skeptic,

namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance.

He will not go beyond his card. He sees the onesidedness of these men of the street; he will not be a

Gibeonite; he stands for the intellectual faculties, a cool head and whatever serves to keep it cool; no

unadvised industry, no unrewarded selfdevotion, no loss of the brains in toil. Am I an ox, or a dray? You

are both in extremes, he says. You that will have all solid, and a world of piglead, deceive yourselves

grossly. You believe yourselves rooted and grounded on adamant; and yet, if we uncover the last facts of our

knowledge, you are spinning like bubbles in a river, you know not whither or whence, and you are bottomed

and capped and wrapped in delusions. Neither will he be betrayed to a book and wrapped in a gown. The

studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is

without sleep, the day a fear of interruption, pallor, squalor, hunger and egotism. If you come near them and

see what conceits they entertain, they are abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some

dream; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme, built on a truth, but destitute of

proportion in its presentment, of justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer to embody

But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I know that human strength is not in extremes, but in avoiding

extremes. I, at least, will shun the weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth. What is the use of

pretending to powers we have not? What is the use of pretending to assurances we have not, respecting the

other life? Why exaggerate the power of virtue? Why be an angel before your time? These strings, wound up

too high, will snap. If there is a wish for immortality, and no evidence, why not say just that? If there are

conflicting evidences, why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid thinker to make up his mind,

yea or nay, why not suspend the judgment? I weary of these dogmatizers. I tire of these hacks of routine,

who deny the dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand here to try the case. I am here to consider, skopein, to

consider how it is. I will try to keep the balance true. Of what use to take the chair and glibly rattle off

theories of society, religion and nature, when I know that practical objections lie in the way, insurmountable

by me and by my mates? Why so talkative in public, when each of my neighbors can pin me to my seat by

arguments I cannot refute? Why pretend that life is so simple a game, when we know how subtle and elusive

the Proteus*(28) is? Why think to shut up all things in your narrow coop, when we know there are not one or

two only, but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike? Why fancy that you have all the truth in your

Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which any thing more than

an approximate solution can be had? Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning

of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in? And the

reply of Socrates, to him who asked whether he should choose a wife, still remains reasonable, that "whether

he should choose one or not, he would repent it." Is not the State a question? All society is divided in opinion

on the subject of the State. Nobody loves it; great numbers dislike it and suffer conscientious scruples to

allegiance; and the only defence set up, is the fear of doing worse in disorganizing. Is it otherwise with the

Church? Or, to put any of the questions which touch mankind nearest, shall the young man aim at a leading

part in law, in polities, in trade? It will not be pretended that a success in either of these kinds is quite

coincident with what is best and inmost in his mind. Shall he then, cutting the stays that hold him fast to the

social state, put out to sea with no guidance but his genius? There is much to say on both sides. Remember

the open question between the present order of "competition" and the friends of "attractive and associated

labor." The generous minds embrace the proposition of labor shared by all; it is the only honesty; nothing else

is safe. It is from the poor man's hut alone that strength and virtue come: and yet, on the other side, it is

alleged that labor impairs the form and breaks the spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, "We have

no thoughts." Culture, how indispensable! I cannot forgive you the want of accomplishments; and yet culture

will instantly impair that chiefest beauty of spontaneousness. Excellent is culture for a savage; but once let

him read in the book, and he is no longer able not to think of Plutarch's heroes. In short, since true fortitude of

understanding consists "in not letting what we know be embarrassed by what we do not know," we ought to

secure those advantages which we can command, and not risk them by clutching after the airy and

unattainable. Come, no chimeras! Let us go abroad; let us mix in affairs; let us learn and get and have and

climb. "Men are a sort of moving plants, and, like trees, receive a great part of their nourishment from the air.

If they keep too much at home, they pine." Let us have a robust, manly life; let us know what we know, for

certain; what we have, let it be solid and seasonable and our own. A world in the hand is worth two in the

This then is the right ground of the skeptic, this of consideration, of selfcontaining; not at all of unbelief;

not at all of universal denying, nor of universal doubting, doubting even that he doubts; least of all of

scoffing and profligate jeering at all that is stable and good. These are no more his moods than are those of

religion and philosophy. He is the considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting stock, husbanding his

means, believing that a man has too many enemies than that he can afford to be his own foe; that we cannot

give ourselves too many advantages in this unequal conflict, with powers so vast and unweariable ranged on

one side, and this little conceited vulnerable popinjay that a man is, bobbing up and down into every danger,

on the other. It is a position taken up for better defence, as of more safety, and one that can be maintained;

and it is one of more opportunity and range: as, when we build a house, the rule is to set it not too high nor

The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility. The Spartan and Stoic schemes are too stark and

stiff for our occasion. A theory of Saint John, and of nonresistance, seems, on the other hand, too thin and

aerial. We want some coat woven of elastic steel, stout as the first and limber as the second. We want a ship

in these billows we inhabit. An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and splinters in this storm of

many elements. No, it must be tight, and fit to the form of man, to live at all; as a shell must dictate the

architecture of a house founded on the sea. The soul of man must be the type of our scheme, just as the body

of man is the type after which a dwellinghouse is built. Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature. We

are golden averages, volitant stabilities, compensated or periodic errors, houses founded on the sea. The wise

skeptic wishes to have a near view of the best game and the chief players; what is best in the planet; art and

nature, places and events; but mainly men. Every thing that is excellent in mankind, a form of grace, an arm

of iron, lips of persuasion, a brain of resources, every one skilful to play and win, he will see and judge.

The terms of admission to this spectacle are, that he have a certain solid and intelligible way of living of his

own; some method of answering the inevitable needs of human life; proof that he has played with skill and

success; that he has evinced the temper, stoutness and the range of qualities which, among his contemporaries

and countrymen, entitle him to fellowship and trust. For the secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy

and likeness. Men do not confide themselves to boys, or coxcombs, or pedants, but to their peers. Some wise

limitation, as the modern phrase is; some condition between the extremes, and having, itself, a positive

quality; some stark and sufficient man, who is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently related to the world to do

justice to Paris or London, and, at the same time, a vigorous and original thinker, whom cities can not

overawe, but who uses them, is the fit person to occupy this ground of speculation.

These qualities meet in the character of Montaigne. And yet, since the personal regard which I entertain for

Montaigne may be unduly great, I will, under the shield of this prince of egotists, offer, as an apology for

electing him as the representative of skepticism, a word or two to explain how my love began and grew for

A single odd volume of Cotton's translation of the Essays remained to me from my father's library, when a

boy. It lay long neglected, until, after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the book,

and procured the remaining volumes. I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to

me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and

experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise, I came to a tomb of

Auguste Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixtyeight years, and who, said the monument, "lived to do

right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of Montaigne." Some years later, I became acquainted

with an accomplished English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence, I found that, from

a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his chateau, still standing near Castellan, in Perigord, and,

after two hundred and fifty years, had copied from the walls of his library the inscriptions which Montaigne

had written there. That Journal of Mr. Sterling's, published in the Westminster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has

reprinted in the Prolegomena to his edition of the Essays. I heard with pleasure that one of the

newlydiscovered autographs of William Shakespeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne. It

is the only book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's library. And, oddly enough, the duplicate

copy of Florio, which the British Museum purchased with a view of protecting the Shakespeare autograph (as

I was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the autograph of Ben Jonson in the flyleaf. Leigh Hunt

relates of Lord Byron, that Montaigne was the only great writer of past times whom he read with avowed

satisfaction. Other coincidences, not needful to be mentioned here, concurred to make this old Gascon still

In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, then thirtyeight years old, retired from the practice of law at

Bordeaux, and settled himself on his estate. Though he had been a man of pleasure and sometimes a courtier,

his studious habits now grew on him, and he loved the compass, staidness and independence of the country

gentleman's life. He took up his economy in good earnest, and made his farms yield the most. Downright and

plaindealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to deceive, he was esteemed in the country for his sense and

probity. In the civil wars of the League, which converted every house into a fort, Montaigne kept his gates

open and his house without defence. All parties freely came and went, his courage and honor being

universally esteemed. The neighboring lords and gentry brought jewels and papers to him for safekeeping.

Gibbon reckons, in these bigoted times, but two men of liberality in France, Henry IV and Montaigne.

Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. His French freedom runs into grossness; but he has

anticipated all censure by the bounty of his own confessions. In his times, books were written to one sex only,

and almost all were written in Latin; so that in a humorist a certain nakedness of statement was permitted,

which our manners, of a literature addressed equally to both sexes, do not allow. But though a biblical

plainness coupled with a most uncanonical levity may shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the

offence is superficial. He parades it: he makes the most of it: nobody can think or say worse of him than he

does. He pretends to most of the vices; and, if there be any virtue in him, he says, it got in by stealth. There is

no man, in his opinion, who has not deserved hanging five or six times; and he pretends no exception in his

own behalf. "Five or six as ridiculous stories," too, he says, "can be told of me, as of any man living." But,

with all this really superfluous frankness, the opinion of an invincible probity grows into every reader's mind.

"When I the most strictly and religiously confess myself, I find that the best virtue I have has in it some

tincture of vice; and I, who am as sincere and perfect a lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever,

am afraid that Plato, in his purest virtue, if he had listened and laid his ear close to himself, would have heard

some jarring sound of human mixture; but faint and remote and only to be perceived by himself."

Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color or pretence of any kind. He has been in courts so long as to

have conceived a furious disgust at appearances; he will indulge himself with a little cursing and swearing; he

will talk with sailors and gipsies, use flash and street ballads; he has stayed indoors till he is deadly sick; he

will to the open air, though it rain bullets. He has seen too much of gentlemen of the long robe, until he

wishes for cannibals; and is so nervous, by factitious life, that he thinks the more barbarous man is, the better

he is. He likes his saddle. You may read theology, and grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. Whatever you

get here shall smack of the earth and of real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging. He makes no hesitation to

entertain you with the records of his disease, and his journey to Italy is quite full of that matter. He took and

kept this position of equilibrium. Over his name he drew an emblematic pair of scales, and wrote Que scais

je? under it. As I look at his effigy opposite the titlepage, I seem to hear him say, "You may play old Poz, if

you will; you may rail and exaggerate, I stand here for truth, and will not, for all the states and churches and

revenues and personal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I see it; I will rather mumble and prose

about what I certainly know, my house and barns; my father, my wife and my tenants; my old lean bald

pate; my knives and forks; what meats I eat and what drinks I prefer, and a hundred straws just as

ridiculous, than I will write, with a fine crowquill, a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and winter

weather. I am gray and autumnal myself, and think an undress and old shoes that do not pinch my feet, and

old friends who do not constrain me, and plain topics where I do not need to strain myself and pump my

brains, the most suitable. Our condition as men is risky and ticklish enough. One cannot be sure of himself

and his fortune an hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight. Why should I

vapor and play the philosopher, instead of ballasting, the best I can, this dancing balloon? So, at least, I live

within compass, keep myself ready for action, and can shoot the gulf at last with decency. If there be

anything farcical in such a life, the blame is not mine; let it lie at fate's and nature's door."

The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on every random topic that comes into his head; treating

every thing without ceremony, yet with masculine sense. There have been men with deeper insight; but, one

would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts: he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius

The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less

written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they

are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it that he feels in listening to the necessary speech of

men about their work, when any unusual circumstance gives momentary importance to the dialogue. For

blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip in their speech; it is a shower of bullets. It is Cambridge men who

correct themselves and begin again at every half sentence, and, moreover, will pun, and refine too much, and

swerve from the matter to the expression. Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books and

himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no

superlative: does not wish to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time, but is stout

and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain because it makes him feel himself and realize things; as

we pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel

solid ground and the stones underneath. His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented,

selfrespecting and keeping the middle of the road. There is but one exception, in his love for Socrates. In

Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of sixty, in 1592. When he came to die he caused the mass to be

celebrated in his chamber. At the age of thirtythree, he had been married. "But," he says, "might I have had

my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if she would have had me: but 'tis to much purpose

to evade it, the common custom and use of life will have it so. Most of my actions are guided by example, not

choice." In the hour of death, he gave the same weight to custom. Que scais je? What do I know?

This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed by translating it into all tongues and printing seventyfive

editions of it in Europe; and that, too, a circulation somewhat chosen, namely among courtiers, soldiers,

Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, and given the right and permanent expression of the human

We are natural believers. Truth, or the connection between cause and effect, alone interests us. We are

persuaded that a thread runs through all things: all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and men, and events, and

life, come to us only because of that thread: they pass and repass only that we may know the direction and

continuity of that line. A book or statement which goes to show that there is no line, but random and chaos, a

calamity out of nothing, a prosperity and no account of it, a hero born from a fool, a fool from a hero,

dispirits us. Seen or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent makes counterfeit ties; genius finds the real ones.

We hearken to the man of science, because we anticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which he

uncovers. We love whatever affirms, connects, preserves; and dislike what scatters or pulls down. One man

appears whose nature is to all men's eyes conserving and constructive; his presence supposes a wellordered

society, agriculture, trade, large institutions and empire. If these did not exist, they would begin to exist

through his endeavors. Therefore he cheers and comforts men, who feel all this in him very readily. The

nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover

to our sense no plan of house or state of their own. Therefore, though the town and state and way of living,

which our counsellor contemplated, might be a very modest or musty prosperity, yet men rightly go for him,

But though we are natural conservers and causationists, and reject a sour, dumpish unbelief, the skeptical

class, which Montaigne represents, have reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to it. Every superior

mind will pass through this domain of equilibration, I should rather say, will know how to avail himself of

the checks and balances in nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration and formalism of bigots and

Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the student in relation to the particulars which society adores, but

which he sees to be reverend only in their tendency and spirit. The ground occupied by the skeptic is the

vestibule of the temple. Society does not like to have any breath of question blown on the existing order. But

the interrogation of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every superior mind, and is the

evidence of its perception of the flowing power which remains itself in all changes.

The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of society and with the projects that are

offered to relieve them. The wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no conservative, he sees the selfishness of property

and the drowsiness of institutions. But neither is he fit to work with any democratic party that ever was

constituted; for parties wish every one committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism. His politics are

those of the "Soul's Errand" of Sir Walter Raleigh; or of Krishna, in the Bhagavat, "There is none who is

worthy of my love or hatred"; whilst he sentences law, physic, divinity, commerce and custom. He is a

reformer; yet he is no better member of the philanthropic association. It turns out that he is not the champion

of the operative, the pauper, the prisoner, the slave. It stands in his mind that our life in this world is not of

quite so easy interpretation as churches and schoolbooks say. He does not wish to take ground against these

benevolences, to play the part of devil's attorney, and blazon every doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for

I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the calendarday of our Saint Michel de Montaigne, by counting

and describing these doubts or negations. I wish to ferret them out of their holes and sun them a little. We

must do with them as the police do with old rogues, who are shown up to the public at the marshal's office.

They will never be so formidable when once they have been identified and registered. But I mean honestly by

them, that justice shall be done to their terrors. I shall not take Sunday objections, made up on purpose to be

put down. I shall take the worst I can find, whether I can dispose of them or they of me.

I do not press the skepticism of the materialist. I know the quadruped opinion will not prevail. 'Tis of no

importance what bats and oxen think. The first dangerous symptom I report is, the levity of intellect; as if it

were fatal to earnestness to know much. Knowledge is the knowing that we can not know. The dull pray; the

geniuses are light mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect kills it. Nay, San

Carlo,*(29) my subtle and admirable friend, one of the most penetrating of men, finds that all direct

ascension, even of lofty piety, leads to this ghastly insight and sends back the votary orphaned. My

astonishing San Carlo thought the lawgivers and saints infected. They found the are empty; saw, and would

not tell; and tried to choke off their approaching followers, by saying, "Action, action, my dear fellows, is for

you!" Bad as was to me this detection by San Carlo, thisfrost in July, this blow from a bride, there was still a

worse, namely the cloy or satiety of the saints. In the mount of vision, ere they have yet risen from their

knees, they say, "We discover that this our homage and beatitude is partial and deformed: we must fly for

relief to the suspected and reviled Intellect, to the Understanding, the Mephistopheles, to the gymnastics of

This is hobgoblin the first; and though it has been the subject of much elegy in our nineteenth century, from

Byron, Goethe and other poets of less fame, not to mention many distinguished private observers, I confess

it is not very affecting to my imagination; for it seems to concern the shattering of babyhouses and

crockeryshops. What flutters the Church of Rome, or of England, or of Geneva, or of Boston, may yet be

very far from touching any principle of faith. I think that the intellect and moral sentiment are unanimous;

and that though philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet it supplies the natural checks of vice, and polarity to the

soul. I think that the wiser a man is, the more stupendous he finds the natural and moral economy, and lifts

There is the power of moods, each setting at nought all but its own tissue of facts and beliefs. There is the

power of complexions, obviously modifying the dispositions and sentiments. The beliefs and unbeliefs

appear to be structural; and as soon as each man attains the poise and vivacity which allow the whole

machinery to play, he will not need extreme examples, but will rapidly alternate all opinions in his own life.

Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour. We go forth austere, dedicated, believing in the

iron links of Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to save our life: but a book, or a bust, or only the sound of

a name, shoots a spark through the nerves, and we suddenly believe in will: my fingerring shall be the seal

of Solomon; fate is for imbeciles; all is possible to the resolved mind. Presently a new experience gives a new

turn to our thoughts: common sense resumes its tyranny; we say, "Well, the army, after all, is the gate to

fame, manners and poetry: and, look you, on the whole, selfishness plants best, prunes best, makes the best

commerce and the best citizen." Are the opinions of a man on right and wrong, on fate and causation, at the

mercy of a broken sleep or an indigestion? Is his belief in God and Duty no deeper than a stomach evidence?

And what guaranty for the permanence of his opinions? I like not the French celerity, a new Church and

State once a week. This is the second negation; and I shall let it pass for what it will. As far as it asserts

rotation of states of mind, I suppose it suggests its own remedy, namely in the record of larger periods. What

is the mean of many states; of all the states? Does the general voice of ages affirm any principle, or is no

community of sentiment discoverable in distant times and places? And when it shows the power of

selfinterest, I accept that as part of the divine law and must reconcile it with aspiration the best I can.

The word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the sense of mankind, in all ages, that the laws of the world do not

always befriend, but often hurt and crush us. Fate, in the shape of Kinde or nature, grows over us like grass.

We paint Time with a scythe; Love and Fortune, blind; and Destiny, deaf. We have too little power of

resistance against this ferocity which champs us up. What front can we make against these unavoidable,

victorious, maleficent forces? What can I do against the influence of Race, in my history? What can I do

against hereditary and constitutional habits; against scrofula, lymph, impotence? against climate, against

barbarism, in my country? I can reason down or deny every thing, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must

But the main resistance which the affirmative impulse finds, and one including all others, is in the doctrine of

the Illusionists. There is a painful rumor in circulation that we have been practised upon in all the principal

performances of life, and free agency is the emptiest name. We have been sopped and drugged with the air,

with food, with woman, with children, with sciences, with events, which leave us exactly where they found

us. The mathematics, 'tis complained, leave the mind where they find it: so do all sciences; and so do all

events and actions. I find a man who has passed through all the sciences, the churl he was; and, through all

the offices, learned, civil and social, can detect the child. We are not the less necessitated to dedicate life to

them. In fact we may come to accept it as the fixed rule and theory of our state of education, that God is a

substance, and his method is illusion. The Eastern sages owned the goddess Yoganidra, the great illusory

Or shall I state it thus? The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between

the theory and practice of life. Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, now and then, for a serene

and profound moment amidst the hubbub of cares and works which have no direct bearing on it; is then lost

for months or years, and again found for an interval, to be lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in

fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable hours. But what are these cares and works the better? A method in

the world we do not see, but this parallelism of great and little, which never react on each other, nor discover

the smallest tendency to converge. Experiences, fortunes, governings, readings, writings, are nothing to the

purpose; as when a man comes into the room it does not appear whether he has been fed on yams or buffalo,

he has contrived to get so much bone and fibre as he wants, out of rice or out of snow. So vast is the

disproportion between the sky of law and the pismire of performance under it, that whether he is a man of

worth or a sot is not so great a matter as we say. Shall I add, as one juggle of this enchantment, the stunning

nonintercourse law which makes cooperation impossible? The young spirit pants to enter society. But all

the ways of culture and greatness lead to solitary imprisonment. He has been often baulked. He did not expect

a sympathy, with his thought from the village, but he went with it to the chosen and intelligent, and found no

entertainment for it, but mere misapprehension, distaste and scoffing. Men are strangely mistimed and

misapplied; and the excellence of each is an inflamed individualism which separates him more.

There are these, and more than these diseases of thought, which our ordinary teachers do not attempt to

remove. Now shall we, because a good nature inclines us to virtue's side, say, There are no doubts, and lie

for the right? Is life to be led in a brave or in a cowardly manner? and is not the satisfaction of the doubts

essential to all manliness? Is the name of virtue to be a barrier to that which is virtue? Can you not believe

that a man of earnest and burly habit may find small good in tea, essays and catechism, and want a rougher

instruction, want men, labor, trade, farming, war, hunger, plenty, love, hatred, doubt and terror to make things

plain to him; and has he not a right to insist on being convinced in his own way? When he is convinced, he

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them. Some minds are incapable

of skepticism. The doubts they profess to entertain are rather a civility or accommodation to the common

discourse of their company. They may well give themselves leave to speculate, for they are secure of a return.

Once admitted to the heaven of thought, they see no relapse into night, but infinite invitation on the other

side. Heaven is within heaven, and sky over sky, and they are encompassed with divinities. Others there are

to whom the heaven is brass, and it shuts down to the surface of the earth. It is a question of temperament, or

of more or less immersion in nature. The last class must needs have a reflex or parasite faith; not a sight of

realities, but an instinctive reliance on the seers and believers of realities. The manners and thoughts of

believers astonish them and convince them that these have seen something which is hid from themselves. But

their sensual habit would fix the believer to his last position, whilst he as inevitably advances; and presently

Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account.

The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms. Charitable souls come with

their projects and ask his cooperation. How can he hesitate? It is the rule of mere comity and courtesy to

agree where you can, and to turn your sentence with something auspicious, and not freezing and sinister. But

he is forced to say, "O, these things will be as they must be: what can you do? These particular griefs and

crimes are the foliage and fruit of such trees as we see growing. It is vain to complain of the leaf or the berry;

cut it off, it will bear another just as bad. You must begin your cure lower down." The generosities of the day

prove an intractable element for him. The people's questions are not his; their methods are not his; and

against all the dictates of good nature he is driven to say he has no pleasure in them.

Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of the divine Providence and of the immortality of the soul, his

neighbors can not put the statement so that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of more faith, and not less. He

denies out of honesty. He had rather stand charged with the imbecility of skepticism, than with untruth. I

believe, he says, in the moral design of the universe; it exists hospitably for the weal of souls; but your

dogmas seem to me caricatures: why should I make believe them? Will any say, This is cold and infidel? The

wise and magnanimous will not say so. They will exult in his farsighted goodwill that can abandon to the

adversary all the ground of tradition and common belief, without losing a jot of strength. It sees to the end of

all transgression. George Fox saw that there was "an ocean of darkness and death; but withal an infinite ocean

The final solution in which skepticism is lost, is in the moral sentiment, which never forfeits its supremacy.

All moods may be safely tried, and their weight allowed to all objections: the moral sentiment as easily

outweighs them all, as any one. This is the drop which balances the sea. I play with the miscellany of facts,

and take those superficial views which we call skepticism; but I know that they will presently appear to me in

that order which makes skepticism impossible. A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the

This faith avails to the whole emergency of life and objects. The world is saturated with deity and with law.

He is content with just and unjust, with sots and fools, with the triumph of folly and fraud. He can behold

with serenity the yawning gulf between the ambition of man and his power of performance, between the

Charles Fourier announced that "the attractions of man are proportioned to his destinies"; in other words, that

every desire predicts its own satisfaction. Yet all experience exhibits the reverse of this; the incompetency of

power is the universal grief of young and ardent minds. They accuse the divine Providence of a certain

parsimony. It has shown the heaven and earth to every child and filled him with a desire for the whole; a

desire raging, infinite; a hunger, as of space to be filled with planets; a cry of famine, as of devils for souls.

Then for the satisfaction, to each man is administered a single drop, a bead of dew of vital power, per day,

a cup as large as space, and one drop of the water of life in it. Each man woke in the morning with an appetite

that could eat the solar system like a cake; a spirit for action and passion without bounds; he could lay his

hand on the morning star; he could try conclusions with gravitation or chemistry; but, on the first motion to

prove his strength, hands, feet, senses, gave way and would not serve him. He was an emperor deserted by

his states, and left to whistle by himself, or thrust into a mob of emperors, all whistling: and still the sirens

sang, "The attractions are proportioned to the destinies." In every house, in the heart of each maiden and of

each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found, between the largest promise of ideal power,

The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man helps himself by larger

generalizations. The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say,

against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to

say one thing, and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral; the result is moral. Things seem to tend

downward, to justify despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the just; and by knaves as by martyrs the just

cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be

delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the

government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow

answered. We see, now, events forced on which seem to retard or retrograde the civility of ages. But the

worldspirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger at laws: and

so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries,

through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.

Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance

of things he was wont to reverence without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work but

to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last

GREAT MEN are more distinguished by range and tent than by originality. If we require the originality

which consists in weaving, like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay and making bricks

and building the house; no great men are original. Nor does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other

men. The hero is in the press of knights and the thick of events; and seeing what men want and sharing their

desire, he adds the 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 rattlebrain, saying what comes uppermost, and, because he says every

thing, saying at last something good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing

whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions

and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.

The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have any individual great, except through the

general. There is no choice to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning and say, "I am

full of life, I will go to sea and find an Antarctic continent: today I will square the circle: I will ransack

botany and find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power":

no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of

his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and their hands all point in the

direction in which he should go. The Church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the

advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her chants and processions. He finds a

war raging: it educates him, by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two counties

groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of production 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! and what a compensation

for the shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him thus far on his way. The human

race has gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets,

artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their labors. Choose any other thing, out of the

line of tendency, out of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for himself: his powers

would be expended in the first preparations. Great genial power, one would almost 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

Shakespeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were importunate for dramatic entertainments.

The court took offence easily at political allusions and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, a growing

and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican church, would suppress them. But the people

wanted them. Innyards, houses without roofs, and extemporaneous 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 strongest party, neither then could king, prelate, or puritan, alone or

united, suppress an organ which was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch and library, at the same

time. Probably king, prelate and puritan, all found their own account in it. It had become, by all causes, a

national interest, by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating it in

an English history, but not a whit less considerable because it was cheap and of no account, like a

baker'sshop. 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,

The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the first importance to the poet who works for it.

He loses no time in idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the case of Shakespeare

there is much more. At the time when he left Stratford and went up to London, a great body of stageplays 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 voyages, which all the London 'prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or

less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer

possible to say who wrote them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so long, and so many rising

geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a speech or a whole scene, or adding a song, that no man

can any longer claim copyright 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.

Shakespeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old plays waste stock, in which any

experiment could be freely tried. Had the prestige which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing

could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England circulated in the play, as in streetballads,

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 owes to his legend what

sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt and in Greece grew up in subordination to architecture. It

was the ornament of the temple wall: at first a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief became bolder

and a head or arm was projected from the wall; the groups being still 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 calmness and continence in the

statue. As soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began

to decline: freak, extravagance and exhibition took the place of the old temperance. This balancewheel,

which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the accumulated

dramatic materials to which the people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence which no

In point of fact it appears that Shakespeare did owe debts in all directions, and was able to use whatever he

found; and the amount of indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's laborious computations in regard to

the First, Second and Third parts of Henry VI, in which, "out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some

author preceding Shakespeare, 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors, and 1899 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 Shakespeare, 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 Shakespeare'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.

Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any invention can. If he lost any credit of design,

he augmented his resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was not so much pressed.

There was no literature for the million. The universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet

who appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is any where radiating. Every

intellectual 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 countries,

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 perhaps; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that

all wit was their wit. And they are librarians and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir

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 unacknowledged 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,*(30) 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 Provencal poets are his benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only

judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of

Urbino: 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 brickkiln or stonequarry out of which to build his house. He steals

by this apology, that what he takes has no worth where he finds it and the greatest where he leaves it. It has

come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man having once shown himself capable of original

writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of

him who can entertain it and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of

borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them they become our own.

Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The learned member of the legislature, 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 conversation, 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 appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his breast

a Delphi whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to have

answer, and to rely on that? All the debts which such a man could contract to other wit would never disturb

his consciousness of originality; for the ministrations of books and of other minds are a whiff of smoke to

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no man's work, but came by

wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible is a

wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language. But it was not made by one man, or at

one time; but centuries and churches brought it to perfection. There never was a time when there was not

some translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of ages

and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the Catholic church, these collected, too, in long

periods, from the prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer all over the world. Grotius makes

the like 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 language of

the Common Law, the impressive forms of our courts and the precision and substantial truth of the legal

distinctions, are the contribution of all the sharpsighted, strongminded men who have lived in the countries

where these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence 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. Something like the same process had gone on, long before,

with the originals of these books. The world takes liberties with worldbooks. Vedas, Aesop's Fables, Pilpay,

Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the

composition of such works the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the

farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every

trade, every folly of the day; and the generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his

originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his own.

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakespeare 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 completion of secular plays, from Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton's Needle, down

to the possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakespeare altered, remodelled and finally made his

own. Elated with success and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no bookstall

unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms,

so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy Shakespeare poached or not, whether he held horses at the

theatre door, whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his secondbest bed to Ann Hathaway,

There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age mischooses the object on which all

candles shine and all eyes are turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen Elizabeth

and King James, and the Essexes, 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 inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the

foremost people of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not

another bias. A popular player; nobody suspected he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was

kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon, who took the

inventory of the human understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have

strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he

was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out

If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakespeare's time should be capable of recognizing it.

Sir Henry Wotton was born four years after Shakespeare, and died twentythree 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,

Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of his having communicated,

without enumerating many others whom doubtless he saw, Shakespeare, 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 impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near.

It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his death, did any

criticism which we think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to write the history of Shakespeare till

now; for he is the father of German literature: it was with the introduction of Shakespeare 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 century, whose speculative genius is a sort of

living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering readers.*(31) Now, literature,

philosophy and thought are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see.

Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed

our convictions with any adequate fidelity: but there is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his

The Shakespeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised the missing facts, offered money for any

information that will lead to proof, and with what result? Beside some important illustration of the history of

the English stage, to which I have 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'

Theatre: its wardrobe and other appurtenances were his: that he bought an estate in his native village 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 Rogers, in the boroughcourt of Stratford, for

thirtyfive 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 goodnatured sort of man, an actor and

shareholder in the theatre, not in any striking manner distinguished from other actors and managers. I admit

the importance of this information. It was well worth the pains that have been taken to procure it.

But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these researches may have rescued, they can

shed no light upon that infinite invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We are very

clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates,

earning of money, marriage, 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 goddessborn; and it seems as if, had we dipped at

random into the "Modern Plutarch," and read any other life there, it would have fitted the poems as well. It is

the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past

and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce and Collier have wasted their oil. The famed theatres,

Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park and Tremont have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean

and Macready dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey and express. The genius

knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry

and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I remember I went once to see the

Hamlet of a famed performer, the 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 question to the ghost:

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world's dimension, crowds it with agents in rank

and order, as quickly reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his magic spoil

for us the illusions of the greenroom. Can any biography shed light on the localities into which the

Midsummer Night's Dream admits me? Did Shakespeare confide to any notary or parish recorder, sacristan,

or surrogate in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone

Castle, the moonlight of Portia's villa, "the antres vast and desarts idle" of Othello's captivity, where is the

third cousin, or grandnephew, the chancellor's file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one word of

those transcendent secrets? In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art, in the Cyclopean architecture

of Egypt and India, in the Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters, the Italian painting, the Ballads of Spain

and Scotland, the Genius draws up the ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives

Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakespeare in

us, that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod and give us

anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents extricated, analyzed and compared by the

assiduous Dyce and Collier, and now read one of these skyey 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

Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet, with Shakespeare 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 interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours.

Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that

are no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the most

susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men? What trait of his private mind has he hidden

in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, what forms and

humanities pleased him; his delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let

Warwick, let Antonio the merchant answer for his great heart. So far from Shakespeare'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? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered?

What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her

delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not

Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare 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 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 Shakespeare and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern

music: he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and Europe; the

father of the man in America; he drew the man, and described the day, and what is done in it: he read the

hearts of men and women, their probity, and their second thought and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and the

transitions by which virtues and vices slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother's part from the

father's part in the face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws

of repression which make the police of nature: and all the sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his

mind as truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life sinks

the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. 'Tis like making a question concerning the paper on which a

Shakespeare 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 Shakespeare's. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare 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 possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life is the equal

endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and

sentiments as if they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct

characters as these fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced

him into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent humanity coordinates all his

faculties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain

observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit.

He crams this part and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and

strength. But Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no

curiosities; no cowpainter, no birdfancier, no mannerist 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 lovesongs; a merit so incessant that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other

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 ameliorations. Things were

mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur: he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass, the

tragic and the comic indifferently and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into

minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet

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 representation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let the world of figures sit for their

portraits. No recipe can be given for the making of a Shakespeare; but the possibility of the translation of

His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though their excellence is lost in the splendor of

the dramas, are as inimitable as they; and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit of the piece; like the tone

of voice of some incomparable person, so is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible

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 foregoers and followers,

that the logician is satisfied. 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 Shakespeare. We say, from the truth and closeness of his pictures, that he knows the

One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a

poet, for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation but for its grace: he delights in the world,

in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds

over the universe. Epicurus relates that poetry hath such charms that a lover might forsake his mistress to

partake of them. And the true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies in

sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, "It was rumored abroad that I was penitent; but what had

I to do with repentance?" Not less sovereign and cheerful, much more sovereign and cheerful, is the tone of

Shakespeare. His name suggests joy and emancipation to the heart of men. If he should appear in any

company of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches nothing that does not borrow health

And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and benefactor, when, in solitude, shutting our ears to

the reverberations of his fame, we seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere lessons; it can teach us to

spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs Shakespeare also, and finds him to share the halfness and

Shakespeare, 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 these things bore a second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts,

and conveying in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life. Shakespeare employed

them as colors to compose his picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the step which seemed

inevitable to such genius, namely to explore the virtue which resides in these symbols and imparts this

power: what is that which they themselves say? He converted the elements which waited on his command,

into entertainments. He was master of the revels to mankind. Is it not as if one should have, through majestic

powers of science, the comets given into his hand, or the planets and their moons, and should draw them from

their orbits to glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all towns, "Very

superior pyrotechny this evening"? Are the agents of nature, and the power to understand them, worth no

more than a street serenade, or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again the trumpettext in the Koran,

"The heavens and the earth and all that is between them, think ye we have created them in jest?" As long as

the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. But when the question

is, to life and its materials and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it signify? It is but a Twelfth

Night, or MidsummerNight's Dream, or Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies another picture more or less?

The Egyptian verdict of the Shakespeare 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

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, allexcluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on

them, and life became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress, a probation, beleaguered round with doleful

histories of Adam's fall and curse behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial and penal fires before us; and

It must be conceded that these are halfviews of halfmen. The world still wants its poetpriest, a reconciler,

who shall not trifle, with Shakespeare 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.

AMONG the eminent persons of the nineteenth century, Bonaparte is far the best known and the most

powerful; and owes his predominance to the fidelity with which he expresses the tone of thought and belief,

the aims of the masses of active and cultivated men. It is Swedenborg's theory that every organ is made up of

homogeneous particles; or as it is sometimes expressed, every whole is made of similars; that is, the lungs are

composed of infinitely small lungs; the liver, of infinitely small livers; the kidney, of little kidneys, etc.

Following this analogy, if any man is found to carry with him the power and affections of vast numbers, if

Napoleon is France, if Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom he sways are little Napoleons.

In our society there is a standing antagonism between the conservative and the democratic classes; between

those who have made their fortunes, and the young and the poor who have fortunes to make; between the

interests of dead labor, that is, the labor of hands long ago still in the grave, which labor is now entombed in

money stocks, or in land and buildings owned by idle capitalists, and the interests of living labor, which

seeks to possess itself of land and buildings and money stocks. The first class is timid, selfish, illiberal, hating

innovation, and continually losing numbers by death. The second class is selfish also, encroaching, bold,

selfrelying, always outnumbering the other and recruiting its numbers every hour by births. It desires to

keep open every avenue to the competition of all, and to multiply avenues: the class of business men in

America, in England, in France and throughout Europe; the class of industry and skill. Napoleon is its

representative. The instinct of active, brave, able men, throughout the middle class everywhere, has pointed

out Napoleon as the incarnate Democrat. He had their virtues and their vices; above all, he had their spirit or

aim. That tendency is material, pointing at a sensual success and employing the richest and most various

means to that end; conversant with mechanical powers, highly intellectual, widely and accurately learned and

skilful, but subordinating all intellectual and spiritual forces into means to a material success. To be the rich

man, is the end. "God has granted," says the Koran, "to every people a prophet in its own tongue." Paris and

London and New York, the spirit of commerce, of money and material power, were also to have their

Every one of the million readers of anecdotes or memoirs or lives of Napoleon, delights in the page, because

he studies in it his own history. Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and, at the highest point of his fortunes, has

the very spirit of the newspapers. He is no saint, to use his own word, "no capuchin," and he is no hero, in

the high sense. The man in the street finds in him the qualities and powers of other men in the street. He finds

him, like himself, by birth a citizen, who, by very intelligible merits, arrived at such a commanding position

that he could indulge all those tastes which the common man possesses but is obliged to conceal and deny:

good society, good books, fast travelling, dress, dinners, servants without number, personal weight, the

execution of his ideas, the standing in the attitude of a benefactor to all persons about him, the refined

enjoyments of pictures, statues, music, palaces and conventional honors, precisely what is agreeable to the

It is true that a man of Napoleon's truth of adaptation to the mind of the masses around him, becomes not

merely representative but actually a monopolizer and usurper of other minds. Thus Mirabeau plagiarized

every good thought, every good word that was spoken in France. Dumont relates that he sat in the gallery of

the Convention and heard Mirabeau make a speech. It struck Dumont that he could fit it with a peroration,

which he wrote in pencil immediately, and showed it to Lord Elgin, who sat by him. Lord Elgin approved it,

and Dumont, in the evening, showed it to Mirabeau. Mirabeau read it, pronounced it admirable, and declared

he would incorporate it into his harangue tomorrow, to the Assembly. "It is impossible," said Dumont, "as,

unfortunately, I have shown it to Lord Elgin." "If you have shown it to Lord Elgin and to fifty persons beside,

I shall still speak it tomorrow": and he did speak it, with much effect, at the next day's session. For

Mirabeau, with his overpowering personality, felt that these things which his presence inspired were as much

his own as if he had said them, and that his adoption of them gave them their weight. Much more absolute

and centralizing was the successor to Mirabeau's popularity and to much more than his predominance in

France. Indeed, a man of Napoleon's stamp almost ceases to have a private speech and opinion. He is so

largely receptive, and is so placed, that he comes to be a bureau for all the intelligence, wit and power of the

age and country. He gains the battle; he makes the code; he makes the system of weights and measures; he

levels the Alps; he builds the road. All distinguished engineers, savans, statists, report to him: so likewise do

all good heads in every kind: he adopts the best measures, sets his stamp on them, and not these alone, but on

every happy and memorable expression. Every sentence spoken by Napoleon and every line of his writing,

Bonaparte was the idol of common men because he had in transcendent degree the qualities and powers of

common men. There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid

of cant and hypocrisy. Bonaparte wrought, in common with that great class he represented, for power and

wealth, but Bonaparte, specially, without any scruple as to the means. All the sentiments which embarrass

men's pursuit of these objects, he set aside. The sentiments were for women and children. Fontanes, in 1804,

expressed Napoleon's own sense, when in behalf of the Senate he addressed him, "Sire, the desire of

perfection is the worst disease that ever afflicted the human mind." The advocates of liberty and of progress

are "ideologists"; a word of contempt often in his mouth; "Necker is an ideologist": "Lafayette is an

An Italian proverb, too well known, declares that "if you would succeed, you must not be too good." It is an

advantage, within certain limits, to have renounced the dominion of the sentiments of piety, gratitude and

generosity; since what was an impassable bar to us, and still is to others, becomes a convenient weapon for

our purposes; just as the river which was a formidable barrier, winter transforms into the smoothest of roads.

Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and affections, and would help himself with his hands and his

head. With him is no miracle and no magic. He is a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in

buildings, in money and in troops, and a very consistent and wise masterworkman. He is never weak and

literary, but acts with the solidity and the precision of natural agents. He has not lost his native sense and

sympathy with things. Men give way before such a man, as before natural events. To be sure there are men

enough who are immersed in things, as farmers, smiths, sailors and mechanics generally; and we know how

real and solid such men appear in the presence of scholars and grammarians: but these men ordinarily lack

the power of arrangement, and are like hands without a head. But Bonaparte superadded to this mineral and

animal force, insight and generalization, so that men saw in him combined the natural and the intellectual

power, as if the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to cipher. Therefore the land and sea seem to

presuppose him. He came unto his own and they received him. This ciphering operative knows what he is

working with and what is the product. He knew the properties of gold and iron, of wheels and ships, of troops

The art of war was the game in which he exerted his arithmetic. It consisted, according to him, in having

always more forces than the enemy, on the point where the enemy is attacked, or where he attacks: and his

whole talent is strained by endless manoeuvre and evolution, to march always on the enemy at an angle, and

destroy his forces in detail. It is obvious that a very small force, skilfully and rapidly manoeuvring so as

always to bring two men against one at the point of engagement, will be an overmatch for a much larger body

The times, his constitution and his early circumstances combined to develop this pattern democrat. He had

the virtues of his class and the conditions for their activity. That commonsense which no sooner respects

any end than it finds the means to effect it; the delight in the use of means; in the choice, simplification and

combining of means; the directness and thoroughness of his work; the prudence with which all was seen and

the energy with which all was done, make him the natural organ and head of what I may almost call, from its

Nature must have far the greatest share in every success, and so in his. Such a man was wanted, and such a

man was born; a man of stone and iron, capable of sitting on horseback sixteen or seventeen hours, of going

many days together without rest or food except by snatches, and with the speed and spring of a tiger in action;

a man not embarrassed by any scruples; compact, instant, selfish, prudent, and of a perception which did not

suffer itself to be baulked or misled by any pretences of others, or any superstition or any heat or haste of his

own. "My hand of iron," he said, "was not at the extremity of my arm, it was immediately connected with my

head." He respected the power of nature and fortune, and ascribed to it his superiority, instead of valuing

himself, like inferior men, on his opinionativeness, and waging war with nature. His favorite rhetoric lay in

allusion to his star; and he pleased himself, as well as the people, when he styled himself the "Child of

Destiny." "They charge me," he said, "with the commission of great crimes: men of my stamp do not commit

crimes. Nothing has been more simple than my elevation, 'tis in vain to ascribe it to intrigue or crime; it was

owing to the peculiarity of the times and to my reputation of having fought well against the enemies of my

country. I have always marched with the opinion of great masses and with events. Of what use then would

crimes be to me?" Again he said, speaking of his son, "My son can not replace me; I could not replace

He had a directness of action never before combined with so much comprehension. He is a realist, terrific to

all talkers and confused truthobscuring persons. He sees where the matter hinges, throws himself on the

precise point of resistance, and slights all other considerations. He is strong in the right manner, namely by

insight. He never blundered into victory, but won his battles in his head before he won them on the field. His

principal means are in himself. He asks counsel of no other. In 1796 he writes to the Directory: "I have

conducted the campaign without consulting any one. I should have done no good if I had been under the

necessity of conforming to the notions of another person. I have gained some advantages over superior forces

and when totally destitute of every thing, because, in the persuasion that your confidence was reposed in me,

History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings and governors. They are a class of persons much

to be pitied, for they know not what they should do. The weavers strike for bread, and the king and his

ministers, knowing not what to do, meet them with bayonets. But Napoleon understood his business. Here

was a man who in each moment and emergency knew what to do next. It is an immense comfort and

refreshment to the spirits, not only of kings, but of citizens. Few men have any next; they live from hand to

mouth, without plan, and are ever at the end of their line, and after each action wait for an impulse from

abroad. Napoleon had been the first man of the world, if his ends had been purely public. As he is, he inspires

confidence and vigor by the extraordinary unity of his action. He is firm, sure, selfdenying, selfpostponing,

sacrificing every thing, money, troops, generals, and his own safety also, to his aim; not misled, like

common adventurers, by the splendor of his own means. "Incidents ought not to govern policy," he said, "but

policy, incidents." "To be hurried away by every event is to have no political system at all." His victories

were only so many doors, and he never for a moment lost sight of his way onward, in the dazzle and uproar

of the present circumstance. He knew what to do, and he flew to his mark. He would shorten a straight line to

come at his object. Horrible anecdotes may no doubt be collected from his history, of the price at which he

bought his successes; but he must not therefore be set down as cruel, but only as one who knew no

impediment to his will; not bloodthirsty, not cruel, but woe to what thing or person stood in his way! Not

bloodthirsty, but not sparing of blood, and pitiless. He saw only the object: the obstacle must give way.

"Sire, General Clarke can not combine with General Junot, for the dreadful fire of the Austrian battery."

"Let him carry the battery." "Sire, every regiment that approaches the heavy artillery is sacrificed: Sire,

what orders?" "Forward, forward!" Seruzier, a colonel of artillery, gives, in his "Military Memoirs," the

following sketch of a scene after the battle of Austerlitz. "At the moment in which the Russian army was

making its retreat, painfully, but in good order, on the ice of the lake, the Emperor Napoleon came riding at

full speed toward the artillery. 'You are losing time,' he cried; 'fire upon those masses; they must be engulfed:

fire upon the ice!' The order remained unexecuted for ten minutes. In vain several officers and myself were

placed on the slope of a hill to produce the effect: their balls and mine rolled upon the ice without breaking it

up. Seeing that, I tried a simple method of elevating light howitzers. The almost perpendicular fall of the

heavy projectiles produced the desired effect. My method was immediately followed by the adjoining

batteries, and in less than no time we buried" some "thousands of Russians and Austrians under the waters of

In the plenitude of his resources, every obstacle seemed to vanish. "There shall be no Alps," he said; and he

built his perfect roads, climbing by graded galleries their steepest precipices, until Italy was as open to Paris

as any town in France. He laid his bones to, and wrought for his crown. Having decided what was to be done,

he did that with might and main. He put out all his strength. He risked every thing and spared nothing, neither

We like to see every thing do its office after its kind, whether it be a milchcow or a rattlesnake; and if

fighting be the best mode of adjusting national differences, (as large majorities of men seem to agree,)

certainly Bonaparte was right in making it thorough. The grand principle of war, he said, was that an army

ought always to be ready, by day and by night and at all hours, to make all the resistance it is capable of

making. He never economized his ammunition, but, on a hostile position, rained a torrent of iron, shells,

balls, grapeshot, to annihilate all defence. On any point of resistance he concentrated squadron on

squadron in overwhelming numbers until it was swept out of existence. To a regiment of horsechasseurs at

Lobenstein, two days before the battle of Jena, Napoleon said, "My lads, you must not fear death; when

soldiers brave death, they drive him into the enemy's ranks." In the fury of assault, he no more spared

himself. He went to the edge of his possibility. It is plain that in Italy he did what he could, and all that he

could. He came, several times, within an inch of ruin; and his own person was all but lost. He was flung into

the marsh at Arcola. The Austrians were between him and his troops, in the melee, and he was brought off

with desperate efforts. At Lonato, and at other places, he was on the point of being taken prisoner. He fought

sixty battles. He had never enough. Each victory was a new weapon. "My power would fall, were I not to

support it by new achievements. Conquest has made me what I am, and conquest must maintain me." He felt,

with every wise man, that as much life is needed for conservation as for creation. We are always in peril,

always in a bad plight, just on the edge of destruction and only to be saved by invention and courage.

This vigor was guarded and tempered by the coldest prudence and punctuality. A thunderbolt in the attack, he

was found invulnerable in his intrenchments. His very attack was never the inspiration of courage, but the

result of calculation. His idea of the best defence consists in being still the attacking party. "My ambition," he

says, "was great, but was of a cold nature." In one of his conversations with Las Cases, he remarked, "As to

moral courage, I have rarely met with the twoo'clockinthemorning kind: I mean unprepared courage;

that which is necessary on an unexpected occasion, and which, in spite of the most unforeseen events, leaves

full freedom of judgment and decision": and he did not hesitate to declare that he was himself eminently

endowed with this twoo'clockinthemorning courage, and that he had met with few persons equal to

Every thing depended on the nicety of his combinations, and the stars were not more punctual than his

arithmetic. His personal attention descended to the smallest particulars. "At Montebello, I ordered

Kellermann to attack with eight hundred horse, and with these he separated the six thousand Hungarian

grenadiers, before the very eyes of the Austrian cavalry. This cavalry was half a league off and required a

quarter of an hour to arrive on the field of action, and I have observed that it is always these quarters of an

hour that decide the fate of a battle." "Before he fought a battle, Bonaparte thought little about what he should

do in case of success, but a great deal about what he should do in case of a reverse of fortune." The same

prudence and good sense mark all his behavior. His instructions to his secretary at the Tuileries are worth

remembering. "During the night, enter my chamber as seldom as possible. Do not awake me when you have

any good news to communicate; with that there is no hurry. But when you bring bad news, rouse me

instantly, for then there is not a moment to be lost." It was a whimsical economy of the same kind which

dictated his practice, when general in Italy, in regard to his burdensome correspondence. He directed

Bourrienne to leave all letters unopened for three weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how large a part

of the correspondence had thus disposed of itself and no longer required an answer. His achievement of

business was immense, and enlarges the known powers of man. There have been many working kings, from

Ulysses to William of Orange, but none who accomplished a tithe of this man's performance.

To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the advantage of having been born to a private and humble fortune.

In his later days he had the weakness of wishing to add to his crowns and badges the prescription of

aristocracy; but he knew his debt to his austere education, and made no secret of his contempt for the born

kings, and for "the hereditary asses," as he coarsely styled the Bourbons. He said that "in their exile they had

learned nothing, and forgot nothing." Bonaparte had passed through all the degrees of military service, but

also was citizen before he was emperor, and so has the key to citizenship. His remarks and estimates discover

the information and justness of measurement of the middle class. Those who had to deal with him found that

he was not to be imposed upon, but could cipher as well as another man. This appears in all parts of his

Memoirs, dictated at St. Helena. When the expenses of the empress, of his household, of his palaces, had

accumulated great debts, Napoleon examined the bills of the creditors himself, detected overcharges and

His grand weapon, namely the millions whom he directed, he owed to the representative character which

clothed him. He interests us as he stands for France and for Europe; and he exists as captain and king only as

far as the Revolution, or the interest of the industrious masses, found an organ and a leader in him. In the

social interests, he knew the meaning and value of labor, and threw himself naturally on that side. I like an

incident mentioned by one of his biographers at St. Helena. "When walking with Mrs. Balcombe, some

servants, carrying heavy boxes, passed by on the road, and Mrs. Balcombe desired them, in rather an angry

tone, to keep back. Napoleon interfered, saying 'Respect the burden, Madam.'" In the time of the empire he

directed attention to the improvement and embellishment of the markets of the capital. "The marketplace,"

he said, "is the Louvre of the common people." The principal works that have survived him are his

magnificent roads. He filled the troops with his spirit, and a sort of freedom and companionship grew up

between him and them, which the forms of his court never permitted between the officers and himself. They

performed, under his eye, that which no others could do. The best document of his relation to his troops is the

order of the day on the morning of the battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon promises the troops that he will

keep his person out of reach of fire. This declaration, which is the reverse of that ordinarily made by generals

and sovereigns on the eve of a battle, sufficiently explains the devotion of the army to their leader.

But though there is in particulars this identity between Napoleon and the mass of the people, his real strength

lay in their conviction that he was their representative in his genius and aims, not only when he courted, but

when he controlled, and even when he decimated them by his conscriptions. He knew, as well as any Jacobin

in France, how to philosophize on liberty and equality; and when allusion was made to the precious blood of

centuries, which was spilled by the killing of the Duc d'Enghien, he suggested, "Neither is my blood

ditchwater." The people felt that no longer the throne was occupied and the land sucked of its nourishment,

by a small class of legitimates, secluded from all community with the children of the soil, and holding the

ideas and superstitions of a longforgotten state of society. Instead of that vampyre, a man of themselves

held, in the Tuileries, knowledge and ideas like their own, opening of course to them and their children all

places of power and trust. The day of sleepy, selfish policy, ever narrowing the means and opportunities of

young men, was ended, and a day of expansion and demand was come. A market for all the powers and

productions of man was opened; brilliant prizes glittered in the eyes of youth and talent. The old, ironbound,

feudal France was changed into a young Ohio or New York; and those who smarted under the immediate

rigors of the new monarch, pardoned them as the necessary severities of the military system which had driven

out the oppressor. And even when the majority of the people had begun to ask whether they had really gained

any thing under the exhausting levies of men and money of the new master, the whole talent of the country,

in every rank and kindred, took his part and defended him as its natural patron. In 1814, when advised to rely

on the higher classes, Napoleon said to those around him, "Gentlemen, in the situation in which I stand, my

Napoleon met this natural expectation. The necessity of his position required a hospitality to every sort of

talent, and its appointment to trusts; and his feeling went along with this policy. Like every superior person,

he undoubtedly felt a desire for men and compeers, and a wish to measure his power with other masters, and

an impatience of fools and underlings. In Italy, he sought for men and found none. "Good God!" he said,

"how rare men are! There are eighteen millions in Italy, and I have with difficulty found two, Dandolo and

Melzi." In later years, with larger experience, his respect for mankind was not increased. In a moment of

bitterness he said to one of his oldest friends, "Men deserve the contempt with which they inspire me. I have

only to put some goldlace on the coat of my virtuous republicans and they immediately become just what I

wish them." This impatience at levity was, however, an oblique tribute of respect to those able persons who

commanded his regard not only when he found them friends and coadjutors but also when they resisted his

will. He could not confound Fox and Pitt, Carnot, Lafayette and Bernadotte, with the danglers of his court;

and in spite of the detraction which his systematic egotism dictated toward the great captains who conquered

with and for him, ample acknowledgments are made by him to Lannes, Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix, Massena,

Murat, Ney and Augereau. If he felt himself their patron and the founder of their fortunes, as when he said, "I

made my generals out of mud," he could not hide his satisfaction in receiving from them a seconding and

support commensurate with the grandeur of his enterprise. In the Russian campaign he was so much

impressed by the courage and resources of Marshal Ney, that he said, "I have two hundred millions in my

coffers, and I would give them all for Ney." The characters which he has drawn of several of his marshals are

discriminating, and though they did not content the insatiable vanity of French officers, are no doubt

substantially just. And in fact every species of merit was sought and advanced under his government. "I

know," he said, "the depth and draught of water of every one of my generals." Natural power was sure to be

well received at his court. Seventeen men in his time were raised from common soldiers to the rank of king,

marshal, duke, or general; and the crosses of his Legion of Honor were given to personal valor, and not to

family connexion. "When soldiers have been baptized in the fire of a battlefield, they have all one rank in my

When a natural king becomes a titular king, every body is pleased and satisfied. The Revolution entitled the

strong populace of the Faubourg St. Antoine, and every horseboy and powdermonkey in the army, to look

on Napoleon as flesh of his flesh and the creature of his party: but there is something in the success of grand

talent which enlists an universal sympathy. For in the prevalence of sense and spirit over stupidity and

malversation, all reasonable men have an interest; and as intellectual beings we feel the air purified by the

electric shock, when material force is overthrown by intellectual energies. As soon as we are removed out of

the reach of local and accidental partialities, Man feels that Napoleon fights for him; these are honest

victories; this strong steamengine does our work. Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the

ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages us and liberates us. This capacious head, revolving

and disposing sovereignly trains of affairs, and animating such multitudes of agents; this eye, which looked

through Europe; this prompt invention; this inexhaustible resource: what events! what romantic pictures!

what strange situations! when spying the Alps, by a sunset in the Sicilian sea; drawing up his army for battle

in sight of the Pyramids, and saying to his troops, "From the tops of those pyramids, forty centuries look

down on you"; fording the Red Sea; wading in the gulf of the Isthmus of Suez. On the shore of Ptolemais,

gigantic projects agitated him. "Had Acre fallen, I should have changed the face of the world." His army, on

the night of the battle of Austerlitz, which was the anniversary of his inauguration as Emperor, presented him

with a bouquet of forty standards taken in the fight. Perhaps it is a little puerile, the pleasure he took in

making these contrasts glaring; as when he pleased himself with making kings wait in his antechambers, at

We can not, in the universal imbecility, indecision and indolence of men, sufficiently congratulate ourselves

on this strong and ready actor, who took occasion by the beard, and showed us how much may be

accomplished by the mere force of such virtues as all men possess in less degrees; namely, by punctuality, by

personal attention, by courage and thoroughness. "The Austrians," he said, "do not know the value of time." I

should cite him, in his earlier years, as a model of prudence. His power does not consist in any wild or

extravagant force; in any enthusiasm like Mahomet's, or singular power of persuasion; but in the exercise of

commonsense on each emergency, instead of abiding by rules and customs. The lesson he teaches is that

which vigor always teaches; that there is always room for it. To what heaps of cowardly doubts is not that

man's life an answer. When he appeared it was the belief of all military men that there could be nothing new

in war; as it is the belief of men today that nothing new can be undertaken in politics, or in church, or in

letters, or in trade, or in farming, or in our social manners and customs; and as it is at all times the belief of

society that the world is used up. But Bonaparte knew better than society; and moreover knew that he knew

better. I think all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend are

gocarts and baubles; but they dare not trust their presentiments. Bonaparte relied on his own sense, and did

not care a bean for other people's. The world treated his novelties just as it treats everybody's novelties,

made infinite objection, mustered all the impediments; but he snapped his finger at their objections. "What

creates great difficulty," he remarks, "in the profession of the landcommander, is the necessity of feeding so

many men and animals. If he allows himself to be guided by the commissaries he will never stir, and all his

expeditions will fail." An example of his commonsense is what he says of the passage of the Alps in winter,

which all writers, one repeating after the other, had described as impracticable. "The winter," says Napoleon,

"is not the most unfavorable season for the passage of lofty mountains. The snow is then firm, the weather

settled, and there is nothing to fear from avalanches, the real and only danger to be apprehended in the Alps.

On these high mountains there are often very fine days in December, of a dry cold, with extreme calmness in

the air." Read his account, too, of the way in which battles are gained. "In all battles a moment occurs when

the bravest troops, after having made the greatest efforts, feel inclined to run. That terror proceeds from a

want of confidence in their own courage, and it only requires a slight opportunity, a pretence, to restore

confidence to them. The art is, to give rise to the opportunity and to invent the pretence. At Arcola I won the

battle with twentyfive horsemen. I seized that moment of lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, and gained

the day with this handful. You see that two armies are two bodies which meet and endeavor to frighten each

other; a moment of panic occurs, and that moment must be turned to advantage. When a man has been

present in many actions, he distinguishes that moment without difficulty: it is as easy as casting up an

This deputy of the nineteenth century added to his gifts a capacity for speculation on general topics. He

delighted in running through the range of practical, of literary and of abstract questions. His opinion is always

original and to the purpose. On the voyage to Egypt he liked, after dinner, to fix on three or four persons to

support a proposition, and as many to oppose it. He gave a subject, and the discussions turned on questions of

religion, the different kinds of government, and the art of war. One day he asked whether the planets were

inhabited? On another, what was the age of the world? Then he proposed to consider the probability of the

destruction of the globe, either by water or by fire: at another time, the truth or fallacy of presentiments, and

the interpretation of dreams. He was very fond of talking of religion. In 1806 he conversed with Fournier,

bishop of Montpellier, on matters of theology. There were two points on which they could not agree, viz. that

of hell, and that of salvation out of the pale of the church. The Emperor told Josephine that he disputed like a

devil on these two points, on which the bishop was inexorable. To the philosophers he readily yielded all that

was proved against religion as the work of men and time, but he would not hear of materialism. One fine

night, on deck, amid a clatter of materialism, Bonaparte pointed to the stars, and said, "You may talk as long

as you please, gentlemen, but who made all that?" He delighted in the conversation of men of science,

particularly of Monge and Berthollet; but the men of letters he slighted; they were "manufacturers of

phrases." Of medicine too he was fond of talking, and with those of its practitioners whom he most

esteemed, with Corvisart at Paris, and with Antonomarchi at St. Helena. "Believe me," he said to the last,

"we had better leave off all these remedies: life is a fortress which neither you nor I know any thing about.

Why throw obstacles in the way of its defence? Its own means are superior to all the apparatus of your

laboratories. Corvisart candidly agreed with me that all your filthy mixtures are good for nothing. Medicine is

a collection of uncertain prescriptions, the results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful to

mankind. Water, air and cleanliness are the chief articles in my pharmacopoeia."

His memoirs, dictated to Count Montholon and General Gourgaud at St. Helena, have great value, after all

the deduction that it seems is to be made from them on account of his known disingenuousness. He has the

goodnature of strength and conscious superiority. I admire his simple, clear narrative of his battles; good

as Caesar's; his goodnatured and sufficiently respectful account of Marshal Wurmser and his other

antagonists; and his own equality as a writer to his varying subject. The most agreeable portion is the

He had hours of thought and wisdom. In intervals of leisure, either in the camp or the palace, Napoleon

appears as a man of genius directing on abstract questions the native appetite for truth and the impatience of

words he was wont to show in war. He could enjoy every play of invention, a romance, a bon mot, as well as

a strategem in a campaign. He delighted to fascinate Josephine and her ladies, in a dimlighted apartment, by

the terrors of a fiction to which his voice and dramatic power lent every addition.

I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society; of the throng who fill the

markets, shops, countinghouses, manufactories, ships, of the modern world, aiming to be rich. He was the

agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the

opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse. Of course the rich and aristocratic did not

like him. England, the centre of capital, and Rome and Austria, centres of tradition and genealogy, opposed

him. The consternation of the dull and conservative classes, the terror of the foolish old men and old women

of the Roman conclave, who in their despair took hold of any thing, and would cling to redhot iron, the

vain attempts of statists to amuse and deceive him, of the emperor of Austria to bribe him; and the instinct of

the young, ardent and active men every where, which pointed him out as the giant of the middle class, make

his history bright and commanding. He had the virtues of the masses of his constituents: he had also their

vices. I am sorry that the brilliant picture has its reverse. But that is the fatal quality which we discover in our

pursuit of wealth, that it is treacherous, and is bought by the breaking or weakening of the sentiments; and it

is inevitable that we should find the same fact in the history of this champion, who proposed to himself

simply a brilliant career, without any stipulation or scruple concerning the means.

Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous sentiments. The highestplaced individual in the most

cultivated age and population of the world, he has not the merit of common truth and honesty. He is unjust

to his generals; egotistic and monopolizing; meanly stealing the credit of their great actions from Kellermann,

from Bernadotte; intriguing to involve his faithful Junot in hopeless bankruptcy, in order to drive him to a

distance from Paris, because the familiarity of his manners offends the new pride of his throne. He is a

boundless liar. The official paper, his "Moniteur," and all his bulletins, are proverbs for saying what he

wished to be believed; and worse, he sat, in his premature old age, in his lonely island, coldly falsifying

facts and dates and characters, and giving to history a theatrical eclat. Like all Frenchmen he has a passion for

stage effect. Every action that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this calculation. His star, his love of

glory, his doctrine of the immortality of the soul, are all French. "I must dazzle and astonish. If I were to give

the liberty of the press, my power could not last three days." To make a great noise is his favorite design. "A

great reputation is a great noise: the more there is made, the farther off it is heard. Laws, institutions,

monuments, nations, all fall; but the noise continues, and resounds in after ages." His doctrine of immortality

is simply fame. His theory of influence is not flattering. "There are two levers for moving men, interest and

fear. Love is a silly infatuation, depend upon it. Friendship is but a name. I love nobody. I do not even love

my brothers: perhaps Joseph a little, from habit, and because he is my elder; and Duroc, I love him too; but

why? because his character pleases me: he is stern and resolute, and I believe the fellow never shed a tear.

For my part I know very well that I have no true friends. As long as I continue to be what I am, I may have as

many pretended friends as I please. Leave sensibility to women; but men should be firm in heart and purpose,

or they should have nothing to do with war and government." He was thoroughly unscrupulous. He would

steal, slander, assassinate, drown and poison, as his interest dictated. He had no generosity, but mere vulgar

hatred; he was intensely selfish; he was perfidious; he cheated at cards; he was a prodigious gossip, and

opened letters, and delighted in his infamous police, and rubbed his hands with joy when he had intercepted

some morsel of intelligence concerning the men and women about him, boasting that "he knew every thing";

and interfered with the cutting the dresses of the women; and listened after the hurrahs and the compliments

of the street, incognito. His manners were coarse. He treated women with low familiarity. He had the habit of

pulling their ears and pinching their cheeks when he was in good humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers

of men, and of striking and horseplay with them, to his last days. It does not appear that he listened at

keyholes, or at least that he was caught at it. In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of

power and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last; but with an impostor and a rogue; and he

In describing the two parties into which modern society divides itself, the democrat and the conservative, I

said, Bonaparte represents the democrat, or the party of men of business, against the stationary or

conservative party. I omitted then to say, what is material to the statement, namely that these two parties

differ only as young and old. The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The

aristocrat is the democrat ripe and gone to seed; because both parties stand on the one ground of the

supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep. Bonaparte may be said to

represent the whole history of this party, its youth and its age; yes, and with poetic justice its fate, in his own.

The counterrevolution, the counterparty, still waits for its organ and representative, in a lover and a man of

Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the powers of intellect without conscience.

Never was such a leader so endowed and so weaponed; never leader found such aids and followers. And what

was the result of this vast talent and power, of these immense armies, burned cities, squandered treasures,

immolated millions of men, of this demoralized Europe? It came to no result. All passed away like the smoke

of his artillery, and left no trace. He left France smaller, poorer, feebler, than he found it; and the whole

contest for freedom was to be begun again. The attempt was in principle suicidal. France served him with life

and limb and estate, as long as it could identify its interest with him; but when men saw that after victory was

another war; after the destruction of armies, new conscriptions; and they who had toiled so desperately were

never nearer to the reward, they could not spend what they had earned, nor repose on their downbeds, nor

strut in their chateaux, they deserted him. Men found that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other

men. It resembled the torpedo, which inflicts a succession of shocks on any one who takes hold of it,

producing spasms which contract the muscles of the hand, so that the man can not open his fingers; and the

animal inflicts new and more violent shocks, until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So this exorbitant egotist

narrowed, impoverished and absorbed the power and existence of those who served him; and the universal

It was not Bonaparte's fault. He did all that in him lay to live and thrive without moral principle. It was the

nature of things, the eternal law of man and of the world which baulked and ruined him; and the result, in a

million experiments, will be the same. Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual

and selfish aim, will fail. The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient as the pernicious Napoleon. As long as our

civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our

riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that

I FIND a provision in the constitution of the world for the writer, or secretary, who is to report the doings of

the miraculous spirit of life that everywhere throbs and works. His office is a reception of the facts into the

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended

by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river its channel in the soil; the

animal its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its

sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints, in characters

more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows

and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the round is all memoranda and

signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to the intelligent.

In nature, this selfregistration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal. It neither exceeds nor

comes short of the fact. But nature strives upward; and, in man, the report is something more than print of the

seal. It is a new and finer form of the original. The record is alive, as that which it recorded is alive. In man,

the memory is a kind of lookingglass, which, having received the images of surrounding objects, is touched

with life, and disposes them in a new order. The facts do not lie in it inert; but some subside and others shine;

so that we soon have a new picture, composed of the eminent experiences. The man cooperates. He loves to

communicate; and that which is for him to say lies as a load on his heart until it is delivered. But, besides the

universal joy of conversation, some men are born with exalted powers for this second creation. Men are born

to write. The gardener saves every slip and seed and peachstone: his vocation is to be a planter of plants.

Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model and

sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes

that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.

Nothing so broad, so subtle, or so dear, but comes therefore commended to his pen, and he will write. In his

eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported. In conversation,

in calamity, he finds new materials; as our German poet said, "Some god gave me the power to paint what I

suffer." He draws his rents from rage and pain. By acting rashly, he buys the power of talking wisely.

Vexations and a tempest of passion only fill his sail; as the good Luther writes, "When I am angry, I can pray

well and preach well": and, if we knew the genesis of fine strokes of eloquence, they might recall the

complaisance of Sultan Amurath, who struck off some Persian heads, that his physician, Vesalius, might see

the spasms in the muscles of the neck. His failures are the preparation of his victories. A new thought or a

crisis of passion apprises him that all that he has yet learned and written is exoteric, is not the fact, but some

rumor of the fact. What then? Does he throw away the pen? No; he begins again to describe in the new light

which has shined on him, if, by some means, he may yet save some true word. Nature conspires. Whatever

can be thought can be spoken, and still rises for utterance, though to rude and stammering organs. If they can

not compass it, it waits and works, until at last it moulds them to its perfect will and is articulated.

This striving after imitative expression, which one meets every where, is significant of the aim of nature, but

is mere stenography. There are higher degrees, and nature has more splendid endowments for those whom

she elects to a superior office; for the class of scholars or writers, who see connection where the multitude see

fragments, and who are impelled to exhibit the facts in order, and so to supply the axis on which the frame of

things turns. Nature has dearly at heart the formation of the speculative man, or scholar. It is an end never lost

sight of, and is prepared in the original casting of things. He is no permissive or accidental appearance, but an

organic agent, one of the estates of the realm, provided and prepared from of old and from everlasting, in the

knitting and contexture of things. Presentiments, impulses, cheer him. There is a certain heat in the breast

which attends the perception of a primary truth, which is the shining of the spiritual sun down into the shaft

of the mine. Every thought which dawns on the mine, in the moment of its emergence announces its own

If he have his incitements, there is, on the other side, invitation and need enough of his gift. Society has, at all

times, the same want, namely of one sane man with adequate powers of expression to hold up each object of

monomania in its right relations. The ambitious and mercenary bring their last new mumbojumbo, whether

tariff, Texas, railroad, Romanism, mesmerism, or California; and, by detaching the object from its relations,

easily succeed in making it seen in a glare; and a multitude go mad about it, and they are not to be reproved

or cured by the opposite multitude who are kept from this particular insanity by an equal frenzy on another

crotchet. But let one man have the comprehensive eye that can replace this isolated prodigy in its right

neighborhood and bearings, the illusion vanishes, and the returning reason of the community thanks the

The scholar is the man of the ages, but he must also wish with other men to stand well with his

contemporaries. But there is a certain ridicule, among superficial people, thrown on the scholars or clerisy,

which is of no import unless the scholar heed it. In this country, the emphasis of conversation and of public

opinion commends the practical man; and the solid portion of the community is named with significant

respect in every circle. Our people are of Bonaparte's opinion concerning ideologists. Ideas are subversive of

social order and comfort, and at last make a fool of the possessor. It is believed, the ordering a cargo of goods

from New York to Smyrna, or the running up and down to procure a company of subscribers to set agoing

five or ten thousand spindles, or the negotiations of a caucus and the practising on the prejudices and facility

of countrypeople to secure their votes in November, is practical and commendable.

If I were to compare action of a much higher strain with a life of contemplation, I should not venture to

pronounce with much confidence in favor of the former. Mankind have such a deep stake in inward

illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer.

A certain partiality, a headiness and loss of balance, is the tax which all action must pay. Act, if you like,

but you do it at your peril. Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has

not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same

again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his

aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form and lose the aspiration. The

Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and although

each prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is antispiritual. But where are his new things of

today? In actions of enthusiasm this drawback appears, but in those lower activities, which have no higher

aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly; in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie,

actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is

nothing else but drawback and negation. The Hindoos write in their sacred books, "Children only, and not the

learned, speak of the speculative and the practical faculties as two. They are but one, for both obtain the

selfsame end, and the place which is gained by the followers of the one is gained by the followers of the

other. That man seeth, who seeth that the speculative and the practical doctrines are one." For great action

must draw on the spiritual nature. The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The

This disparagement will not come from the leaders, but from inferior persons. The robust gentlemen who

stand at the head of the practical class, share the ideas of the time, and have too much sympathy with the

speculative class. It is not from men excellent in any kind that disparagement of any other is to be looked for.

With such, Talleyrand's question is ever the main one; not, is he rich? is he committed? is he wellmeaning?

has he this or that faculty? is he of the movement? is he of the establishment? but, Is he anybody? does he

stand for something? He must be good of his kind. That is all that Talleyrand, all that Statestreet, all that the

commonsense of mankind asks. Be real and admirable, not as we know, but as you know. Able men do not

care in what kind a man is able, so only that he is able. A master likes a master, and does not stipulate

Society has really no graver interest than the wellbeing of the literary class. And it is not to be denied that

men are cordial in their recognition and welcome of intellectual accomplishments. Still the writer does not

stand with us on any commanding ground. I think this to be his own fault. A pound passes for a pound. There

have been times when he was a sacred person: he wrote Bibles, the first hymns, the codes, the epics, tragic

songs, Sibylline verses, Chaldean oracles, Laconian sentences, inscribed on temple walls. Every word was

true, and woke the nations to new life. He wrote without levity and without choice. Every word was carved

before his eyes into the earth and the sky; and the sun and stars were only letters of the same purport and of

no more necessity. But how can he be honored when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in a

crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless

public; when he must sustain with shameless advocacy some bad government, or must bark, all the year

round, in opposition; or write conventional criticism, or profligate novels, or at any rate write without

thought, and without recurrence by day and by night to the sources of inspiration?

Some reply to these questions may be furnished by looking over the list of men of literary genius in our age.

Among these no more instructive name occurs than that of Goethe to represent the powers and duties of the

I described Bonaparte as a representative of the popular external life and aims of the nineteenth century. Its

other half, its poet, is Goethe, a man quite domesticated in the century, breathing its air, enjoying its fruits,

impossible at any earlier time, and taking away, by his colossal parts, the reproach of weakness which but for

him would lie on the intellectual works of the period. He appears at a time when a general culture has spread

itself and has smoothed down all sharp individual traits; when, in the absence of heroic characters, a social

comfort and cooperation have come in. There is no poet, but scores of poetic writers; no Columbus, but

hundreds of postcaptains, with transittelescope, barometer and concentrated soup and pemmican; no

Demosthenes, no Chatham, but any number of clever parliamentary and forensic debaters; no prophet or

saint, but colleges of divinity; no learned man, but learned societies, a cheap press, readingrooms and

bookclubs without number. There was never such a miscellany of facts. The world extends itself like

American trade. We conceive Greek or Roman life, life in the Middle Ages, to be a simple and

comprehensible affair; but modern life to respect a multitude of things, which is distracting.

Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity; hundredhanded, Arguseyed, able and happy to cope with

this rolling miscellany of facts and sciences, and by his own versatility to dispose of them with ease; a manly

mind, unembarrassed by the variety of coats of convention with which life had got encrusted, easily able by

his subtlety to pierce these and to draw his strength from nature, with which he lived in full communion.

What is strange too, he lived in a small town, in a petty state, in a defeated state, and in a time when Germany

played no such leading part in the world's affairs as to swell the bosom of her sons with any metropolitan

pride, such as might have cheered a French, or English, or once, a Roman or Attic genius. Yet there is no

trace of provincial limitation in his muse. He is not a debtor to his position, but was born with a free and

The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is a philosophy of literature set in poetry; the work of one who found

himself the master of histories, mythologies, philosophies, sciences and national literatures, in the

encyclopaedical manner in which modern erudition, with its international intercourse of the whole earth's

population, researches into Indian, Etruscan and all Cyclopean arts; geology, chemistry, astronomy; and

every one of these kingdoms assuming a certain aerial and poetic character, by reason of the multitude. One

looks at a king with reverence; but if one should chance to be at a congress of kings, the eye would take

liberties with the peculiarities of each. These are not wild miraculous songs, but elaborate forms to which the

poet has confided the results of eighty years of observation. This reflective and critical wisdom makes the

poem more truly the flower of this time. It dates itself. Still, he is a poet, poet of a prouder laurel than any

contemporary, and, under this plague of microscopes (for he seems to see out of every pore of his skin),

The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence. In the menstruum of this man's wit, the past and the

present ages, and their religions, politics and modes of thinking, are dissolved into archetypes and ideas.

What new mythologies sail through his head! The Greeks said that Alexander went as far as Chaos; Goethe

went, only the other day, as far; and one step farther he hazarded, and brought himself safe back.

There is a heartcheering freedom in his speculation. The immense horizon which journeys with us lends its

majesty to trifles and to matters of convenience and necessity, as to solemn and festal performances. He was

the soul of his century. If that was learned, and had become, by population, compact organization and drill of

parts, one great Exploring Expedition, accumulating a glut of facts and fruits too fast for any

hithertoexisting savans to classify, this man's mind had ample chambers for the distribution of all. He had

a power to unite the detached atoms again by their own law. He has clothed our modern existence with

poetry. Amid littleness and detail, he detected the Genius of life, the old cunning Proteus, nestling close

beside us, and showed that the dulness and prose we ascribe to the age was only another of his masks:

that he had put off a gay uniform for a fatigue dress, and was not a whit less vivacious or rich in Liverpool

or the Hague than once in Rome or Antioch. He sought him in public squares and main streets, in boulevards

and hotels; and, in the solidest kingdom of routine and the senses, he showed the lurking daemonic power;

that, in actions of routine, a thread of mythology and fable spins itself: and this, by tracing the pedigree of

every usage and practice, every institution, utensil and means, home to its origin in the structure of man. He

had an extreme impatience of conjecture and of rhetoric. "I have guesses enough of my own; if a man write a

book, let him set down only what he knows." He writes in the plainest and lowest tone, omitting a great deal

more than he writes, and putting ever a thing for a word. He has explained the distinction between the antique

and the modern spirit and art. He has defined art, its scope and laws. He has said the best things about nature

that ever were said. He treats nature as the old philosophers, as the seven wise masters did, and, with

whatever loss of French tabulation and dissection, poetry and humanity remain to us; and they have some

doctoral skill. Eyes are better on the whole than telescopes or microscopes. He has contributed a key to many

parts of nature, through the rare turn for unity and simplicity in his mind. Thus Goethe suggested the leading

idea of modern botany, that a leaf or the eye of a leaf is the unit of botany, and that every part of a plant is

only a transformed leaf to meet a new condition; and, by varying the conditions, a leaf may be converted into

any other organ, and any other organ into a leaf. In like manner, in osteology, he assumed that one vertebra of

the spine might be considered as the unit of the skeleton: the head was only the uttermost vertebrae

transformed. "The plant goes from knot to knot, closing at last with the flower and the seed. So the

tapeworm, the caterpillar, goes from knot to knot and closes with the head. Man and the higher animals are

built up through the vertebrae, the powers being concentrated in the head." In optics again he rejected the

artificial theory of seven colors, and considered that every color was the mixture of light and darkness in new

proportions. It is really of very little consequence what topic he writes upon. He sees at every pore, and has a

certain gravitation towards truth. He will realize what you say. He hates to be trifled with and to be made to

say over again some old wife's fable that has had possession of men's faith these thousand years. He may as

well see if it is true as another. He sifts it. I am here, he would say, to be the measure and judge of these

things. Why should I take them on trust? And therefore what he says of religion, of passion, of marriage, of

manners, of property, of papermoney, of periods of belief, of omens, of luck, or whatever else, refuses to be

Take the most remarkable example that could occur of this tendency to verify every term in popular use. The

Devil had played an important part in mythology in all times. Goethe would have no word that does not cover

a thing. The same measure will still serve: "I have never heard of any crime which I might not have

committed." So he flies at the throat of this imp. He shall be real; he shall be modern; he shall be European;

he shall dress like a gentleman, and accept the manners, and walk in the streets, and be well initiated in the

life of Vienna and of Heidelberg in 1820, or he shall not exist. Accordingly, he stripped him of mythologic

gear, of horns, cloven foot, harpoon tail, brimstone and bluefire, and instead of looking in books and

pictures, looked for him in his own mind, in every shade of coldness, selfishness and unbelief that, in crowds

or in solitude, darkens over the human thought, and found that the portrait gained reality and terror by every

thing he added and by every thing he took away. He found that the essence of this hobgoblin which had

hovered in shadow about the habitations of men ever since there were men, was pure intellect, applied, as

always there is a tendency, to the service of the senses: and he flung into literature, in his Mephistopheles,

the first organic figure that has been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the Prometheus.

I have no design to enter into any analysis of his numerous works. They consist of translations, criticism,

dramas, lyric and every other description of poems, literary journals and portraits of distinguished men. Yet I

Wilhelm Meister is a novel in every sense, the first of its kind, called by its admirers the only delineation of

modern society, as if other novels, those of Scott for example, dealt with costume and condition, this with

the spirit of life. It is a book over which some veil is still drawn. It is read by very intelligent persons with

wonder and delight. It is preferred by some such to Hamlet, as a work of genius. I suppose no book of this

century can compare with it in its delicious sweetness, so new, so provoking to the mind, gratifying it with so

many and so solid thoughts, just insights into life and manners and characters; so many good hints for the

conduct of life, so many unexpected glimpses into a higher sphere, and never a trace of rhetoric or dulness. A

very provoking book to the curiosity of young men of genius, but a very unsatisfactory one. Lovers of light

reading, those who look in it for the entertainment they find in a romance, are disappointed. On the other

hand, those who begin it with the higher hope to read in it a worthy history of genius, and the just award of

the laurel to its toils and denials, have also reason to complain. We had an English romance here, not long

ago, professing to embody the hope of a new age and to unfold the political hope of the party called "Young

England," in which the only reward of virtue is a seat in Parliament and a peerage. Goethe's romance has a

conclusion as lame and immoral. George Sand, in Consuelo and its continuation, has sketched a truer and

more dignified picture. In the progress of the story, the characters of the hero and heroine expand at a rate

that shivers the porcelain chesstable of aristocratic convention: they quit the society and habits of their rank,

they lose their wealth, they become the servants of great ideas and of the most generous social ends; until at

last the hero, who is the centre and fountain of an association for the rendering of the noblest benefits to the

human race, no longer answers to his own titled name; it sounds foreign and remote in his ear. "I am only

man," he says; "I breathe and work for man"; and this in poverty and extreme sacrifices. Goethe's hero, on the

contrary, has so many weaknesses and impurities and keeps such bad company, that the sober English public,

when the book was translated, were disgusted. And yet it is so crammed with wisdom, with knowledge of the

world and with knowledge of laws; the persons so truly and subtly drawn, and with such few strokes, and not

a word too much, the book remains ever so new and unexhausted, that we must even let it go its way and be

willing to get what good from it we can, assured that it has only begun its office and has millions of readers

The argument is the passage of a democrat to the aristocracy, using both words in their best sense. And this

passage is not made in any mean or creeping way, but through the hall door. Nature and character assist, and

the rank is made real by sense and probity in the nobles. No generous youth can escape this charm of reality

The ardent and holy Novalis characterized the book as "thoroughly modern and prosaic; the romantic is

completely levelled in it; so is the poetry of nature; the wonderful. The book treats only of the ordinary affairs

of men: it is a poeticized civic and domestic story. The wonderful in it is expressly treated as fiction and

enthusiastic dreaming": and yet, what is also characteristic, Novalis soon returned to this book, and it

What distinguishes Goethe for French and English readers is a property which he shares with his nation, a

habitual reference to interior truth. In England and in America there is a respect for talent; and, if it is exerted

in support of any ascertained or intelligible interest or party, or in regular opposition to any, the public is

satisfied. In France there is even a greater delight in intellectual brilliancy for its own sake. And in all these

countries, men of talent write from talent. It is enough if the understanding is occupied, the taste propitiated,

so many columns, so many hours, filled in a lively and creditable way. The German intellect wants the

French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a

certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German

public asks for a controlling sincerity. Here is activity of thought; but what is it for? What does the man

Talent alone can not make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which by birth and

quality is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not

otherwise; holding things because they are things. If he can not rightly express himself today, the same

things subsist and will open themselves tomorrow. There lies the burden on his mind, the burden of truth

to be declared, more or less understood; and it constitutes his business and calling in the world to see those

facts through, and to make them known. What signifies that he trips and stammers; that his voice is harsh or

hissing; that his method or his tropes are inadequate? That message will find method and imagery,

articulation and melody. Though he were dumb it would speak. If not, if there be no such God's word in the

It makes a great difference to the force of any sentence whether there be a man behind it or no. In the learned

journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some

moneyed corporation, or some dangler who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for

somebody. But through every clause and part of speech of a right book I meet the eyes of the most

determined of men; his force and terror inundate every word; the commas and dashes are alive; so that the

In England and America, one may be an adept in the writings of a Greek or Latin poet, without any poetic

taste or fire. That a man has spent years on Plato and Proclus, does not afford a presumption that he holds

heroic opinions, or undervalues the fashions of his town. But the German nation have the most ridiculous

good faith on these subjects: the student, out of the lectureroom, still broods on the lessons; and the

professor can not divest himself of the fancy that the truths of philosophy have some application to Berlin and

Munich. This earnestness enables them to outsee men of much more talent. Hence almost all the valuable

distinctions which are current in higher conversation have been derived to us from Germany. But whilst men

distinguished for wit and learning, in England and France, adopt their study and their side with a certain

levity, and are not understood to be very deeply engaged, from grounds of character, to the topic or the part

they espouse, Goethe, the head and body of the German nation, does not speak from talent, but the truth

shines through: he is very wise, though his talent often veils his wisdom. However excellent his sentence is,

he has somewhat better in view. It awakens my curiosity. He has the formidable independence which

converse with truth gives: hear you, or forbear, his fact abides; and your interest in the writer is not confined

to his story and he dismissed from memory when he has performed his task creditably, as a baker when he

has left his loaf; but his work is the least part of him. The old Eternal Genius who built the world has

I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from which genius has spoken. He has not

worshipped the highest unity; he is incapable of a selfsurrender to the moral sentiment. There are nobler

strains in poetry than any he has sounded. There are writers poorer in talent, whose tone is purer, and more

touches the heart. Goethe can never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to pure truth; but to truth for

the sake of culture. He has no aims less large than the conquest of universal nature, of universal truth, to be

his portion: a man not to be bribed, nor deceived, nor overawed; of a stoical selfcommand and selfdenial,

and having one test for all men, What can you teach me? All possessions are valued by him for that only;

He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts and sciences and events; artistic, but not artist; spiritual, but

not spiritualist. There is nothing he had not right to know: there is no weapon in the armory of universal

genius he did not take into his hand, but with peremptory heed that he should not be for a moment prejudiced

by his instruments. He lays a ray of light under every fact, and between himself and his dearest property.

From him nothing was hid, nothing withholden. The lurking daemons sat to him, and the saint who saw the

daemons; and the metaphysical elements took form. "Piety itself is no aim, but only a means whereby

through purest inward peace we may attain to highest culture." And his penetration of every secret of the fine

arts will make Goethe still more statuesque. His affections help him, like women employed by Cicero to

worm out the secret of conspirators. Enmities he has none. Enemy of him you may be, if so you shall teach

him aught which your goodwill can not, were it only what experience will accrue from your ruin. Enemy

and welcome, but enemy on high terms. He can not hate anybody; his time is worth too much.

Temperamental antagonisms may be suffered, but like feuds of emperors, who fight dignifiedly across

His autobiography, under the title of Poetry and Truth out of my Life, is the expression of the idea now

familiar to the world through the German mind, but a novelty to England, Old and New, when that book

appeared that a man exists for culture; not for what he can accomplish, but for what can be accomplished in

him. The reaction of things on the man is the only noteworthy result. An intellectual man can see himself as a

third person; therefore his faults and delusions interest him equally with his successes. Though he wishes to

prosper in affairs, he wishes more to know the history and destiny of man; whilst the clouds of egotists

This idea reigns in the Dichtung und Wahrheit and directs the selection of the incidents; and nowise the

external importance of events, the rank of the personages, or the bulk of incomes. Of course the book affords

slender materials for what would be reckoned with us a Life of Goethe; few dates, no correspondence, no

details of offices or employments, no light on his marriage; and a period of ten years, that should be the most

active in his life, after his settlement at Weimar, is sunk in silence. Meantime certain love affairs that came to

nothing, as people say, have the strangest importance: he crowds us with details: certain whimsical

opinions, cosmogonies and religions of his own invention, and especially his relations to remarkable minds

and to critical epochs of thought: these he magnifies. His Daily and Yearly Journal, his Italian Travels, his

Campaign in France and the historical part of his Theory of Colors, have the same interest. In the last, he

rapidly notices Kepler, Roger Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Voltaire, etc.; and the charm of this portion of the

book consists in the simplest statement of the relation betwixt these grandees of European scientific history

and himself; the mere drawing of the lines from Goethe to Kepler, from Goethe to Bacon, from Goethe to

Newton. The drawing of the line is, for the time and person, a solution of the formidable problem, and gives

pleasure when Iphigenia and Faust do not, without any cost of invention comparable to that of Iphigenia and

This lawgiver of art is not an artist. Was it that he knew too much, that his sight was microscopic and

interfered with the just perspective, the seeing of the whole? He is fragmentary; a writer of occasional poems

and of an encyclopaedia of sentences. When he sits down to write a drama or a tale, he collects and sorts his

observations from a hundred sides, and combines them into the body as fitly as he can. A great deal refuses to

incorporate: this he adds loosely as letters of the parties, leaves from their journals, or the like. A great deal

still is left that will not find any place. This the bookbinder alone can give any cohesion to; and hence,

notwithstanding the looseness of many of his works, we have volumes of detached paragraphs, aphorisms,

I suppose the worldly tone of his tales grew out of the calculations of selfculture. It was the infirmity of an

admirable scholar, who loved the world out of gratitude; who knew where libraries, galleries, architecture,

laboratories, savans and leisure were to be had, and who did not quite trust the compensations of poverty and

nakedness. Socrates loved Athens; Montaigne, Paris; and Madame de Stael said she was only vulnerable on

that side (namely, of Paris). It has its favorable aspect. All the geniuses are usually so illassorted and sickly

that one is ever wishing them somewhere else. We seldom see anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live.

There is a slight blush of shame on the cheek of good men and aspiring men, and a spice of caricature. But

this man was entirely at home and happy in his century and the world. None was so fit to live, or more

heartily enjoyed the game. In this aim of culture, which is the genius of his works, is their power. The idea of

absolute, eternal truth, without reference to my own enlargement by it, is higher. The surrender to the torrent

of poetic inspiration is higher; but compared with any motives on which books are written in England and

America, this is very truth, and has the power to inspire which belongs to truth. Thus has he brought back to a

Goethe, coming into an overcivilized time and country, when original talent was oppressed under the load

of books and mechanical auxiliaries and the distracting variety of claims, taught men how to dispose of this

mountainous miscellany and make it subservient. I join Napoleon with him, as being both representatives of

the impatience and reaction of nature against the morgue of conventions, two stern realists, who, with their

scholars, have severally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and seeming, for this time and for all time.

This cheerful laborer, with no external popularity or provocation, drawing his motive and his plan from his

own breast, tasked himself with stints for a giant, and without relaxation or rest, except by alternating his

It is the last lesson of modern science that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few

elements, but by the highest complexity. Man is the most composite of all creatures; the wheelinsect, volvox

globator, is at the other extreme. We shall learn to draw rents and revenues from the immense patrimony of

the old and the recent ages. Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence of all times; that the disadvantages

of any epoch exist only to the fainthearted. Genius hovers with his sunshine and music close by the darkest

and deafest eras. No mortgage, no attainder, will hold on men or hours. The world is young: the former great

men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world. The

secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of

modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality and a purpose; and first, last,

[Notes from the Centenary Edition of Emerson's Complete Works, edited by his son, Edward Waldo

* Jacob Behmen, or Boehme, a Silesian of humble birth in the sixteenth century, a mystic whose writings

later attracted much attention. Mr. Emerson was early interested in his works and often mentions them.

*(2) William Gilbert (15401603), the greatest man of science of Queen Elizabeth's reign, especially noted

*(5) flagrant: a Latinism suggesting that, in the general dimness, the outlines of the human world may be

*(6) The constant security of Mr Emerson's belief in Evolution in its highest sense appears hear as elsewhere

in his prose and verse, and also his belief in the genius of mankind, which is another word for Universal

*(7) The less usual use of "secular," in its strict classical sense, to mean "that live through the ages."

*(15) What Mr. Emerson says here of Plato, and also earlier, "He cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is

resolved that the two poles of thought shall appear in his statement," cannot but recall his own method of

presenting in turn different facets of the gem of truth. Churchman and Agnostic can easily find good weapons

for argument in his works. Dr. Holmes says of this passage, "Some will smile at hearing him say this of

another." It illustrates the felicity of the Doctor's remark that Emerson holds up the mirror to his characters at

*(16) ...his soliform eye and his boniform soul: Dr. Holmes says, "These two quaint adjectives are from the

*(17) From Plato's Meno, where, as also in the Phaedrus, the doctrines of Reminiscence is brought forward,

*(18) John Selden (15841654), jurist, antiquarian, orientalist, author. His TableTalk was published in

*(19) Marcello Malpighi of Bologna (16281694) is considered a founder of microscopic anatomy.

*(20) Leucippus: in the 5th century B.C. Leucippus held an atomic theory later expounded by Lucretius in his

*(21) Swammerdam... Boerhaave: Swammerdam, a brilliant Dutch naturalist of the 17th century, was

especially noted for his minute studies of the viscera and system of injection of vessels. Leuwenhoek, his

countryman and contemporary, made notable discoveries with regard to capillary circulation and the blood

corpuscles of man and animals... Winslow was a Dane, but worked in Paris, and wrote on purely descriptive

anatomy. Eustachius of Salerno was a brilliant investigator of human structure, especially of the ear and

viscera, though less reputed that the great Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius, who was persecuted for

daring to teach the real facts of human anatomy in face of the mistaken authority of Galen. Heister was also

an anatomist. Herman Boerhaave (16881738), born in Holland and educated at the University of Leyden...

He studied philosophy and medicine and became a distinguished practitioner and writer mainly on medical

*(22) Leibnitz: the maxim of the broad and highminded Leibnitz (16461715), "Everything is for the best in

*(23) The "flowing of nature" is the old doctrine of Heracleitus. The answer of Amasis, King of Egypt, is

*(24) In the Timaeus it is told that Solon heard from Egyptian priests this account of the great Athenians of

the first State, which was destroyed by an earthquake thousands of years earlier.

*(25) Casella: Dante's friend, the beautiful singer, whom meeting, in Purgatory, he besought to sing. Casella

*(26) One of the examples of Laconic speech given by Plutarch in the Life of Lycurgus.

*(27) I knew a philosopher... "Mankind is a damned rascal": this was the remark of Emerson's neighbor, a

*(28) The Proteus: Mr. Emerson recognized Nature's secret of Identity through all fugitive forms in the fable

of the seagod Proteus, who, when caught sleeping by a mortal, took shapes of beasts, of serpents, of fire, to

disconcert his captor, yet, if held fast in spite of all, must answer his questions.

*(29) San Carlo: the valued friend here alluded to, Mr. Charles K. Newcomb, was of a sensitive and beautiful

character, a mystic, but with the Hamlet temperament to such an extent that he was paralyzed for all action by

the tenderness of his conscience and the power with which all sides of a question presented themselves to him

in turn. He was a member of the Brooks Farm Community, a welcome but rare visitor at Mr. Emerson's

house, and when he came he brought his writings, which interested his host greatly. I think they never came

to publication, except a few papers in the Dial. His sense of duty sent him to the war for the Union in the

ranks. He remained a bachelor all his life and in his last years lived much abroad.

*(30) The dates of Lydgate and Caxton show a mistake as to Emerson's use of them. Caxton, following

Chaucer, when he introduced the printing press to England, printed his poems and those of Lydgate, who was

*(31) While writing this, Mr. Emerson was surrounded by persons paralyzed for active life in the common

world by the doubts of conscience or entangled in overfinespun webs of their intellect.

*(32) This line is probably a translation from some Arabic or Persian source, from the connection in which it

*(33) Xenien: from the Greek, was used by Goethe and Schiller to denote epigrams.