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, and found it
deliciously sweet.
Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The world is upheld by the
veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with
them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in
our belief in such society; and actually or ideally we manage to live
with superiors. We call our children and our lands by their names. Their
names are wrought into the verbs of language, their works and effigies
are in our houses, and every circumstance of the day recalls an anecdote
of them.
The search after the great is the dream of youth and the most serious
occupation of manhood. We travel into foreign parts to find his
works--if 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 all, and buy it, and put myself on the
road to-day.
The race goes with us on their credit. The knowledge that in the city is
a man who invented the railroad raises the credit of all the citizens.
But enormous populations, if they be beggars, are disgusting, like
moving cheese, like hills of ants or of fleas--the more, the worse.
Our religion is the love and cherishing of these patrons. The gods of
fable are the shining 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 philosophy finds one
essence collected or distributed.
If now we proceed to inquire into the kinds of service we derive from
others, let us be warned of the danger of modern studies, and begin low
enough. We must not contend against love, or deny the substantial
existence of other people. I know not what would happen to us. We have
social strengths. Our affection towards others creates a sort of vantage
or purchase which nothing will supply. I can do that by another which I
cannot do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself.
Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks
those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their
kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the _otherest_. The stronger the
nature, the more it is reactive. Let us have the quality pure. A little
genius let us leave alone. A main difference betwixt men is, whether
they attend their own affair or not. Man is that noble 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 everyone can do his best thing easiest. "_Peu
de moyens, beaucoup d'effét._" He is great who is what he is from
nature, and who never reminds us of others.
But he must be related to us, and our life receive from him some promise
of explanation. I cannot tell what I would know; but I have observed
there are persons who, in their character and actions, answer questions
which I have not skill to put. One man answers some questions which none
of his contemporaries put, and is isolated. The past and passing
religions and philosophies answer some other question. Certain men
affect us as rich 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 years of strife, has nothing broader than his own
shoes.
Our common discourse respects two kinds of use or service from superior
men. Direct giving is agreeable to the early belief of men; direct
giving of material or metaphysical aid, as of health, eternal youth,
fine senses, arts of healing, magical power, and prophecy. The boy
believes there is a teacher who can sell him wisdom. Churches believe in
imputed merit. But, in strictness, we are not much cognizant of direct
serving. Man is 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 representative; first, of things, and
secondly, of ideas.
As plants convert the minerals into food for animals, so each man
converts some raw material in nature to human use. The inventors of
fire, electricity, magnetism, iron, lead, glass, linen, silk, cotton;
the makers of tools; the inventor of 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 Linnæus, 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 center for nature, running out threads of relation through
everything, 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, or Swedenborg, or Oersted, before the general mind can come to
entertain its powers.
If we limit ourselves to the first advantages: a sober grace adheres to
the mineral and botanic kingdoms, which in the highest moments comes up
as the charm of nature, the glitter of the spar, the sureness of
affinity, the veracity of angles. Light and darkness, heat and cold,
hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid, and gas, circle 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 map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes of our condition. These
road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life,
and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a new
property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.
We are too passive in the reception of these material or semi-material
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, on each occurrence, we
anticipate his thought.
Men are helpful through the intellect and the affections. Other help, I
find a false appearance. If you affect to give me bread and fire, I
perceive that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves me as
it found me, neither better nor worse; but all mental and moral force is
a positive good. It goes out from you, whether you will or not, and
profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot even hear of personal
vigor of any kind, great power of performance, without fresh resolution.
We are emulous of all that man can do. Cecil's saying of Sir Walter
Raleigh, "I know that he can toil terribly," is an electric touch. So
are Clarendon's portraits--of Hampden: "who was of an industry and
vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by the most laborious, and of
parts not to be imposed on by the most subtle and sharp, and of a
personal courage equal to his best parts;"--of Falkland: "who was so
severe an adorer of truth that he could as easily have given himself
leave to steal as to dissemble." We cannot read Plutarch without a
tingling of the blood; and I accept the saying of the Chinese Mencius:
"A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the manners of Loo are
heard of, the stupid become intelligent, and the wavering, determined."
This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard for departed men to touch
the quick like our own companions, whose names may not last as long.
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. Shakspeare'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. Shakspeare's name suggests other and
purely intellectual benefits.
Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with their medals, swords,
and armorial coats, like the addressing to a human being thoughts out of
a certain height, and presupposing his intelligence. This honor, which
is possible in personal intercourse scarcely twice in a lifetime, genius
perpetually pays; contented, if now and then, in a century, the proffer
is accepted. The indicators of the values of matter are degraded to a
sort of cooks and 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 conversed with is the show.
We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power and
beauty of the body; there is the like pleasure, and 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 again be quite the miserable pedants we
were.
The high functions of the intellect are so allied that some imaginative
power usually appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of
the first class, but especially in meditative men of an intuitive habit
of thought. This class serve us, so that they have the perception of
identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakspeare,
Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception
of these laws is a kind of meter 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
everyone would discern the checks and guaranties of condition. The rich
would see their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes and their
resources.
But nature brings all this about in due time. Rotation is her remedy.
The soul is impatient of 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; than a
road-contractor; then a student of fishes; then a buffalo-hunting
explorer, or a semi-savage Western general. Thus we make a stand against
our rougher masters; but against the best there is a finer remedy. The
power which they communicate is not theirs. When we are exalted by
ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which, also,
Plato was debtor.
I must not forget that we have a special debt to a single class. Life is
a scale of degrees. Between rank and rank of our great men are wide
intervals. Mankind have, in all ages, attached themselves to a few
persons, who, either by the quality of that idea they embodied, or by
the largeness of their reception, were entitled to the position of
leaders and law-givers. These teach us the qualities of primary
nature--admit us to the constitution of things. 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 realties; 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 recall their genius in every city, village, house, and ship:
"Ever their phantoms arise before us,
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;
At bed and table they lord it o'er us,
With looks of beauty, and words of good."
How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, the service
rendered by those who introduce moral truths into the general mind?--I
am plagued, in all my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. If I
work in my garden and prune an apple-tree, I am well enough entertained,
and could continue 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'âne_, 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 self-seeker, and apprises me of my
independence on any conditions of country, or time, or human body, that
man liberates me; I forget the clock. I pass out of the sore relation to
persons. I am healed of my hurts. I am made immortal by apprehending my
possession of incorruptible goods. Here is great competition of rich and
poor. We live in a market, where is only so much wheat, or wool, or
land; and if I have so much more, every other must have so much less. I
seem to have no good, without breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in
the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious
superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be
first. It is our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the
regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors. But in these new fields
there is room: here are no self-esteems, no exclusions.
I admire great men of all classes, those who stand for facts and for
thoughts; I like rough and smooth, "scourges of God" and "darlings of
the human race." I like the first Cæsar; 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,
well-born, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all
men by fascination into tributaries and supports of his power. Sword and
staff, or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on the work of the
world. But I find him greater when he can abolish himself, and all
heroes, by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of persons;
this subtilizer, and 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 spare his empire.
But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three points
of service. Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe; but, wherever she
mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her poppies
plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully through life,
ignorant of the ruin, and incapable of seeing it, though all the world
point their finger at it every day. The worthless and offensive members
of society, whose existence is a social pest, invariably think
themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never get over their
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
self-gratulation, some figure goes by which Thersites too can love and
admire. This is he that should marshal us the way we were going. There
is no end to his aid. Without Plato, we should almost lose our faith in
the possibility of a reasonable book. We seem to want but one, but we
want one. We love to associate with heroic persons, since our
receptivity is unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners
easily become great. We are all wise in capacity, though so few in
energy. There needs but one wise man in a company, and all are wise, so
rapid is the contagion.
Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism, and
enable us to see other people and their works. But there are vices and
follies 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, and defend us from our contemporaries. They are the
exceptions which we want, where all grows alike. A foreign greatness is
the antidote for cabalism.
Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much conversation
with our mates, and exult in the depth of nature in that direction in
which he leads us. What indemnification is one great man for populations
of pygmies! 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 bad-hearted, yet he
said of the good Jesus, even, "I pray you, let me never hear that man's
name again." They cry up the virtues of George Washington--"Damn George
Washington!" is the poor Jacobin's whole speech and confutation. But it
is human nature's indispensable defense. The centripetence augments the
centrifugence. We balance one man with his opposite, and the health of
the State depends on the see-saw.
There is, however, a speedy limit to the use of heroes. Every genius is
defended from approach by quantities of unavailableness. They are very
attractive, and seem at a distance our own; but we are hindered on all
sides from approach. The more we are drawn, the more we are repelled.
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 everything 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 self-defended. Nothing is more marked than the power by
which individuals are guarded from individuals, in a world where every
benefactor becomes so easily a malefactor, only by continuation of his
activity into places where it is not due; where children seem so much at
the mercy of their foolish parents, and where almost all men are too
social and interfering. We rightly speak of the guardian angels of
children. How superior in their security from infusions of evil persons,
from vulgarity and second thought! They shed their own abundant beauty
on the objects they behold. Therefore, they are not at the mercy of such
poor educators as we adults. If we huff and chide them, they soon come
not to mind it, and get a self-reliance; and if we indulge them to
folly, they learn the limitation elsewhere.
We need not fear excessive influence. A more 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 Shaksperian. In vain;
the wheels of tendency will not stop, nor will all the forces of
inertia, fear, or of love itself, hold thee there. On, and forever
onward! The microscope observes a monad or wheel-insect among the
infusories circulating in water. Presently a dot appears on the animal,
which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two perfect animals. The
ever-proceeding detachment appears not less in all thought, and in
society. Children think they cannot live without their parents. But long
before they are aware of it, the black dot has appeared, and the
detachment taken place. Any accident will now reveal to them their
independence.
But _great men_--the word is injurious. Is there caste? Is there fate?
What becomes of the promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments the
superfœtation of nature. "Generous and handsome," he says, "is your
hero; but look at yonder poor Paddy, whose country is his wheelbarrow;
look at his whole nation of Paddies." Why are the masses, from the dawn
of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few
leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love, self-devotion; and they make
war and death sacred; but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill?
The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. It is as real a loss that
others should be low as that we should be low; for we must have society.
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 also in its last nobility and exaltation.
The heroes of the hour are relatively great--of a faster growth; or they
are such, in whom, at the moment of success, a quality is ripe which is
then in request. Other days will demand other 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 man into the planet without confiding the secret to another soul.
One gracious fact emerges from these studies--that there is true
ascension in our love. The 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 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 doeth.
The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The
qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and
pass away; the qualities remain on another brow. No experience is more
familiar. Once you saw phœnixes: 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 meters 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, men, may be milder, and the
germs of love and benefit may be multiplied.