or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms
that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of
every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to
do. It is directness,--the instant performing of that which he ought.
The thoughtful man says, you differ from me in opinion and methods; but
do you not see that I cannot think or act otherwise than I do? that my
way of living is organic? And to be really strong we must adhere to
our own means. On organic action all strength depends. Hear what women
say of doing a task by sheer force of will: it costs them a fit of
sickness. Plutarch relates that the Pythoness who tried to prophesy
without command in the Temple at Delphi, though she performed the
usual rites, and inhaled the air of the cavern standing on the tripod,
fell into convulsions, and died. Undoubtedly there is a temperamental
courage, a warlike blood, which loves a fight, does not feel itself
except in a quarrel, as one sees in wasps, or ants, or cocks, or cats.
The like vein appears in certain races of men and in individuals of
every race. In every school there are certain fighting boys; in every
society, the contradicting men; in every town, bravoes and bullies,
better or worse dressed, fancy-men, patrons of the cock-pit and the
ring. Courage is temperamental, scientific, ideal. Swedenborg has left
this record of his king: “Charles XII., of Sweden, did not know what
that was which others called fear, nor what that spurious valor and
daring that is excited by inebriating draughts, for he never tasted
any liquid but pure water. Of him we may say, that he led a life more
remote from death, and in fact lived more, than any other man.” It was
told of the Prince of Condé, “that there not being a more furious man
in the world, danger in fight never disturbs him more than just to make
him civil, and to command in words of great obligation to his officers
and men, and without any the least disturbance to his judgment or
spirit.” Each has his own courage, as his own talent; but the courage
of the tiger is one, and of the horse another. The dog that scorns to
fight, will fight for his master. The llama that will carry a load if
you caress him, will refuse food and die if he is scourged. The fury
of onset is one, and of calm endurance another. There is a courage of
the cabinet as well as a courage of the field; a courage of manners in
private assemblies, and another in public assemblies; a courage which
enables one man to speak masterly to a hostile company, whilst another
man who can easily face a cannon’s mouth dares not open his own.
There is a courage of a merchant in dealing with his trade, by which
dangerous turns of affairs are met and prevailed over. Merchants
recognize as much gallantry, well judged too, in the conduct of a wise
and upright man of business, in difficult times, as soldiers in a
soldier.
There is a courage in the treatment of every art by a master in
architecture, in sculpture, in painting, or in poetry, each cheering
the mind of the spectator or receiver as by true strokes of genius,
which yet nowise implies the presence of physical valor in the artist.
This is the courage of genius, in every kind. A certain quantity of
power belongs to a certain quantity of faculty. The beautiful voice at
church goes sounding on, and covers up in its volume, as in a cloak,
all the defects of the choir. The singers, I observe, all yield to it,
and so the fair singer indulges her instinct, and dares, and dares,
because she knows she can.
It gives the cutting edge to every profession. The judge puts his
mind to the tangle of contradictions in the case, squarely accosts
the question, and, by not being afraid of it, by dealing with it as
business which must be disposed of, he sees presently that common
arithmetic and common methods apply to this affair. Perseverance
strips it of all peculiarity, and ranges it on the same ground as
other business. Morphy played a daring game in chess: the daring was
only an illusion of the spectator, for the player sees his move to be
well fortified and safe. You may see the same dealing in criticism;
a new book astonishes for a few days, takes itself out of common
jurisdiction, and nobody knows what to say of it: but the scholar is
not deceived. The old principles which books exist to express are more
beautiful than any book; and out of love of the reality he is an expert
judge how far the book has approached it and where it has come short.
In all applications ’tis the same power,--the habit of reference to
one’s own mind, as the home of all truth and counsel, and which can
easily dispose of any book because it can very well do without all
books. When a confident man comes into a company magnifying this or
that author he has freshly read, the company grow silent and ashamed of
their ignorance. But I remember the old professor, whose searching mind
engraved every word he spoke on the memory of the class, when we asked
if he had read this or that shining novelty, “No, I have never read
that book”; instantly the book lost credit, and was not to be heard of
again.
Every creature has a courage of his constitution fit for his
duties:--Archimedes, the courage of a geometer to stick to his diagram,
heedless of the siege and sack of the city; and the Roman soldier his
faculty to strike at Archimedes. Each is strong, relying on his own,
and each is betrayed when he seeks in himself the courage of others.
Captain John Brown, the hero of Kansas, said to me in conversation,
that “for a settler in a new country, one good, believing,
strong-minded man is worth a hundred, nay, a thousand men without
character; and that the right men will give a permanent direction to
the fortunes of a state. As for the bullying drunkards, of which armies
are usually made up, he thought cholera, small-pox, and consumption as
valuable recruits.” He held the belief that courage and chastity are
silent concerning themselves. He said, “As soon as I hear one of my men
say, ‘Ah, let me only get my eye on such a man, I’ll bring him down,’
I don’t expect much aid in the fight from that talker. ’Tis the quiet,
peaceable men, the men of principle, that make the best soldiers.”
“’Tis still observed those men most valiant are
Who are most modest ere they came to war.”
True courage is not ostentatious; men who wish to inspire terror seem
thereby to confess themselves cowards. Why do they rely on it, but
because they know how potent it is with themselves?
The true temper has genial influences. It makes a bond of union
between enemies. Governor Wise of Virginia, in the record of his
first interviews with his prisoner, appeared to great advantage. If
Governor Wise is a superior man, or inasmuch as he is a superior man,
he distinguishes John Brown. As they confer, they understand each other
swiftly; each respects the other. If opportunity allowed, they would
prefer each other’s society and desert their former companions. Enemies
would become affectionate. Hector and Achilles, Richard and Saladin,
Wellington and Soult, General Daumas and Abdel Kader, become aware that
they are nearer and more alike than any other two, and, if their nation
and circumstance did not keep them apart, would run into each other’s
arms.
See too what good contagion belongs to it. Everywhere it finds its
own with magnetic affinity. Courage of the soldier awakes the courage
of woman. Florence Nightingale brings lint and the blessing of her
shadow. Heroic women offer themselves as nurses of the brave veteran.
The troop of Virginian infantry that had marched to guard the prison
of John Brown ask leave to pay their respects to the prisoner. Poetry
and eloquence catch the hint, and soar to a pitch unknown before.
Everything feels the new breath, except the old doting, nigh-dead
politicians, whose heart the trumpet of resurrection could not wake.
The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions,
inspirations, flashes of genius. The hero could not have done the
feat at another hour, in a lower mood. The best act of the marvellous
genius of Greece was its first act; not in the statue or the Parthenon,
but in the instinct which, at Thermopylæ, held Asia at bay, kept Asia
out of Europe,--Asia with its antiquities and organic slavery,--from
corrupting the hope and new morning of the West. The statue, the
architecture, were the later and inferior creation of the same
genius. In view of this moment of history, we recognize a certain
prophetic instinct better than wisdom. Napoleon said well, “My hand
is immediately connected with my head”; but the _sacred_ courage is
connected with the heart. The head is a half, a fraction, until it is
enlarged and inspired by the moral sentiment. For it is not the means
on which we draw, as health or wealth, practical skill or dexterous
talent, or multitudes of followers, that count, but the aims only. The
aim reacts back on the means. A great aim aggrandizes the means. The
meal and water that are the commissariat of the _forlorn hope_ that
stake their lives to defend the pass are sacred as the Holy Grail, or
as if one had eyes to see in chemistry the fuel that is rushing to feed
the sun.
There is a persuasion in the soul of man that he is here for cause,
that he was put down in this place by the Creator to do the work for
which he inspires him, that thus he is an overmatch for all antagonists
that could combine against him. The pious Mrs. Hutchinson says of some
passages in the defence of Nottingham against the Cavaliers, “It was a
great instruction that the best and highest courages are beams of the
Almighty.” And whenever the religious sentiment is adequately affirmed,
it must be with dazzling courage. As long as it is cowardly insinuated,
as with the wish to succor some partial and temporary interest, or to
make it affirm some pragmatical tenet which our parish church receives
to-day, it is not imparted, and cannot inspire or create. For it is
always new, leads and surprises, and practice never comes up with it.
There are ever appearing in the world men who, almost as soon as they
are born, take a bee-line to the rack of the inquisitor, the axe of the
tyrant, like Jordano Bruno, Vanini, Huss, Paul, Jesus, and Socrates.
Look at Fox’s Lives of the Martyrs, Sewel’s History of the Quakers,
Southey’s Book of the Church, at the folios of the Brothers Bollandi,
who collected the lives of twenty-five thousand martyrs, confessors,
ascetics, and self-tormentors. There is much of fable, but a broad
basis of fact. The tender skin does not shrink from bayonets, the timid
woman is not scared by fagots; the rack is not frightful, nor the rope
ignominious. The poor Puritan, Antony Parsons, at the stake, tied straw
on his head, when the fire approached him, and said, “This is God’s
hat.” Sacred courage indicates that a man loves an idea better than all
things in the world; that he is aiming neither at pelf or comfort, but
will venture all to put in act the invisible thought in his mind. He
is everywhere a liberator, but of a freedom that is ideal; not seeking
to have land or money or conveniences, but to have no other limitation
than that which his own constitution imposes. He is free to speak
truth; he is not free to lie. He wishes to break every yoke all over
the world which hinders his brother from acting after his thought.
There are degrees of courage, and each step upward makes us acquainted
with a higher virtue. Let us say then frankly that the education of
the will is the object of our existence. Poverty, the prison, the
rack, the fire, the hatred and execrations of our fellow-men, appear
trials beyond the endurance of common humanity; but to the hero whose
intellect is aggrandized by the soul, and so measures these penalties
against the good which his thought surveys, these terrors vanish as
darkness at sunrise.
We have little right in piping times of peace to pronounce on these
rare heights of character; but there is no assurance of security. In
the most private life, difficult duty is never far off. Therefore
we must think with courage. Scholars and thinkers are prone to an
effeminate habit, and shrink if a coarser shout comes up from the
street, or a brutal act is recorded in the journals. The Medical
College piles up in its museum its grim monsters of morbid anatomy,
and there are melancholy sceptics with a taste for carrion who batten
on the hideous facts in history,--persecutions, inquisitions, St.
Bartholomew massacres, devilish lives, Nero, Cæsar, Borgia, Marat,
Lopez,--men in whom every ray of humanity was extinguished, parricides,
matricides, and whatever moral monsters. These are not cheerful facts,
but they do not disturb a healthy mind; they require of us a patience
as robust as the energy that attacks us, and an unresting exploration
of final causes. Wolf, snake, and crocodile are not inharmonious in
nature, but are made useful as checks, scavengers, and pioneers; and
we must have a scope as large as Nature’s to deal with beast-like men,
detect what scullion function is assigned them, and foresee in the
secular melioration of the planet how these will become unnecessary,
and will die out.
He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount
a fear. I do not wish to put myself or any man into a theatrical
position, or urge him to ape the courage of his comrade. Have the
courage not to adopt another’s courage. There is scope and cause and
resistance enough for us in our proper work and circumstance. And
there is no creed of an honest man, be he Christian, Turk, or Gentoo,
which does not equally preach it. If you have no faith in beneficent
power above you, but see only an adamantine fate coiling its folds
about nature and man, then reflect that the best use of fate is to
teach us courage, if only because baseness cannot change the appointed
event. If you accept your thoughts as inspirations from the Supreme
Intelligence, obey them when they prescribe difficult duties, because
they come only so long as they are used; or, if your scepticism reaches
to the last verge, and you have no confidence in any foreign mind, then
be brave, because there is one good opinion which must always be of
consequence to you, namely, your own.
* * * * *
I am permitted to enrich my chapter by adding an anecdote of pure
courage from real life, as narrated in a ballad by a lady to whom all
the particulars of the fact are exactly known.
GEORGE NIDIVER.
Men have done brave deeds,
And bards have sung them well:
I of good George Nidiver
Now the tale will tell.
In Californian mountains
A hunter bold was he:
Keen his eye and sure his aim
As any you should see.
A little Indian boy
Followed him everywhere,
Eager to share the hunter’s joy,
The hunter’s meal to share.
And when the bird or deer
Fell by the hunter’s skill,
The boy was always near
To help with right good-will.
One day as through the cleft
Between two mountains steep,
Shut in both right and left,
Their questing way they keep,
They see two grizzly bears
With hunger fierce and fell
Rush at them unawares
Right down the narrow dell.
The boy turned round with screams,
And ran with terror wild;
One of the pair of savage beasts
Pursued the shrieking child.
The hunter raised his gun,--
He knew _one_ charge was all,--
And through the boy’s pursuing foe
He sent his only ball.
The other on George Nidiver
Came on with dreadful pace:
The hunter stood unarmed,
And met him face to face.
I say _unarmed_ he stood.
Against those frightful paws
The rifle but, or club of wood,
Could stand no more than straws.
George Nidiver stood still
And looked him in the face;
The wild beast stopped amazed,
Then came with slackening pace.
Still firm the hunter stood,
Although his heart beat high;
Again the creature stopped,
And gazed with wondering eye.
The hunter met his gaze,
Nor yet an inch gave way;
The bear turned slowly round,
And slowly moved away.
What thoughts were in his mind
It would be hard to spell:
What thoughts were in George Nidiver
I rather guess than tell.
But sure that rifle’s aim,
Swift choice of generous part,
Showed in its passing gleam
The depths of a brave heart.
SUCCESS.
SUCCESS.
Our American people cannot be taxed with slowness in performance or
in praising their performance. The earth is shaken by our engineries.
We are feeling our youth and nerve and bone. We have the power of
territory and of sea-coast, and know the use of these. We count our
census, we read our growing valuations, we survey our map, which
becomes old in a year or two. Our eyes run approvingly along the
lengthened lines of railroad and telegraph. We have gone nearest to
the Pole. We have discovered the Antarctic continent. We interfere in
Central and South America, at Canton, and in Japan; we are adding to an
already enormous territory. Our political constitution is the hope of
the world, and we value ourselves on all these feats.
’Tis the way of the world; ’tis the law of youth, and of unfolding
strength. Men are made each with some triumphant superiority, which,
through some adaptation of fingers, or ear, or eye, or ciphering, or
pugilistic or musical or literary craft, enriches the community with a
new art; and not only we, but all men of European stock value these
certificates. Giotto could draw a perfect circle; Erwin of Steinbach
could build a minster; Olaf, king of Norway, could run round his
galley on the blades of the oars of the rowers, when the ship was in
motion; Ojeda could run out swiftly on a plank projected from the top
of a tower, turn round swiftly, and come back; Evelyn writes from
Rome: “Bernini, the Florentine sculptor, architect, painter, and poet,
a little before my coming to Rome, gave a public opera, wherein he
painted the scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines, composed the
music, writ the comedy, and built the theatre.”
“There is nothing in war,” said Napoleon, “which I cannot do by my
own hands. If there is nobody to make gunpowder, I can manufacture
it. The gun-carriages I know how to construct. If it is necessary to
make cannons at the forge, I can make them. The details of working
them in battle, if it is necessary to teach, I shall teach them. In
administration, it is I alone who have arranged the finances, as you
know.”
It is recorded of Linnæus, among many proofs of his beneficent skill,
that when the timber in the shipyards of Sweden was ruined by rot,
Linnæus was desired by the government to find a remedy. He studied the
insects that infested the timber, and found that they laid their eggs
in the logs within certain days in April, and he directed that during
ten days at that season the logs should be immersed under water in the
docks; which being done the timber was found to be uninjured.
Columbus at Veragua found plenty of gold; but leaving the coast, the
ship full of one hundred and fifty skilful seamen,--some of them old
pilots, and with too much experience of their craft and treachery to
him,--the wise admiral kept his private record of his homeward path.
And when he reached Spain, he told the King and Queen, “that they may
ask all the pilots who came with him, where is Veragua. Let them answer
and say, if they know where Veragua lies. I assert that they can give
no other account than that they went to lands where there was abundance
of gold, but they do not know the way to return thither, but would be
obliged to go on a voyage of discovery as much as if they had never
been there before. There is a mode of reckoning,” he proudly adds,
“derived from astronomy, which is sure and safe to any who understands
it.”
Hippocrates in Greece knew how to stay the devouring plague which
ravaged Athens in his time, and his skill died with him. Dr. Benjamin
Rush, in Philadelphia, carried that city heroically through the yellow
fever of the year 1793. Leverrier carries the Copernican system in
his head, and knew where to look for the new planet. We have seen an
American woman write a novel of which a million copies were sold in
all languages, and which had one merit, of speaking to the universal
heart, and was read with equal interest to three audiences, namely,
in the parlor, in the kitchen, and in the nursery of every house. We
have seen women who could institute hospitals and schools in armies.
We have seen a woman who by pure song could melt the souls of whole
populations. And there is no limit to these varieties of talent.
These are arts to be thankful for,--each one as it is a new direction
of human power. We cannot choose but respect them. Our civilization
is made up of a million contributions of this kind. For success, to
be sure, we esteem it a test in other people, since we do first in
ourselves. We respect ourselves more if we have succeeded. Neither do
we grudge to each of these benefactors the praise or the profit which
accrues from his industry.
Here are already quite different degrees of moral merit in these
examples. I don’t know but we and our race elsewhere set a higher value
on wealth, victory, and coarse superiority of all kinds, than other
men,--have less tranquillity of mind, are less easily contented. The
Saxon is taught from his infancy to wish to be first. The Norseman
was a restless rider, fighter, freebooter. The ancient Norse ballads
describe him as afflicted with this inextinguishable thirst of victory.
The mother says to her son:--
“Success shall be in thy courser tall,
Success in thyself, which is best of all,
Success in thy hand, success in thy foot,
In struggle with man, in battle with brute:--
The holy God and Saint Drothin dear
Shall never shut eyes on thy career;
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved!”
These feats that we extol do not signify so much as we say. These
boasted arts are of very recent origin. They are local conveniences,
but do not really add to our stature. The greatest men of the world
have managed not to want them. Newton was a great man, without
telegraph, or gas, or steam-coach, or rubber-shoes, or lucifer-matches,
or ether for his pain; so was Shakspeare, and Alfred, and Scipio, and
Socrates. These are local conveniences, but how easy to go now to parts
of the world where not only all these arts are wanting, but where they
are despised. The Arabian sheiks, the most dignified people in the
planet, do not want them; yet have as much self-respect as the English,
and are easily able to impress the Frenchman or the American who visits
them with the respect due to a brave and sufficient man.
These feats have, to be sure, great difference of merit and some of
them involve power of a high kind. But the public values the invention
more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and
better where this came from. The public sees in it a lucrative secret.
Men see the reward which the inventor enjoys, and they think, ‘How
shall we win that?’ Cause and effect are a little tedious; how to
leap to the result by short or by false means? We are not scrupulous.
What we ask is victory, without regard to the cause; after the Rob
Roy rule, after the Napoleon rule, to be the strongest to-day,--the
way of the Talleyrands,--prudent people, whose watches go faster than
their neighbors’, and who detect the first moment of decline, and
throw themselves on the instant on the winning side. I have heard that
Nelson used to say, “Never mind the justice or the impudence, only let
me succeed.” Lord Brougham’s single duty of counsel is, “to get the
prisoner clear.” Fuller says ’tis a maxim of lawyers, “that a crown
once worn cleareth all defects of the wearer thereof.” _Rien ne réussit
mieux que le succès._ And we Americans are tainted with this insanity,
as our bankruptcies and our reckless politics may show. We are great by
exclusion, grasping, and egotism. Our success takes from all what it
gives to one. ’Tis a haggard, malignant, careworn running for luck.
Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives momentary strength and
concentration to men, and seems to be much used in nature for fabrics
in which local and spasmodic energy is required. I could point to men
in this country of indispensable importance to the carrying on of
American life, of this humor, whom we could ill spare; any one of them
would be a national loss. But it spoils conversation. They will not
try conclusions with you. They are ever thrusting this pampered self
between you and them. It is plain they have a long education to undergo
to reach simplicity and plain-dealing, which are what a wise man mainly
cares for in his companion. Nature knows how to convert evil to good;
Nature utilizes misers, fanatics, show-men, egotists, to accomplish her
ends; but we must not think better of the foible for that. The passion
for sudden success is rude and puerile, just as war, cannons, and
executions are used to clear the ground of bad, lumpish, irreclaimable
savages, but always to the damage of the conquerors.
I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit,
to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of
the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without
apprenticeship, or the sale of goods through pretending that they sell,
or power through making believe you are powerful, or through a packed
jury or caucus, bribery and “repeating” votes, or wealth by fraud.
They think they have got it, but they have got something else,--a
crime which calls for another crime, and another devil behind that;
these are steps to suicide, infamy, and the harming of mankind. We
countenance each other in this life of show, puffing, advertisement,
and manufacture of public opinion; and excellence is lost sight of in
the hunger for sudden performance and praise.