In the elder English dramatists, and mainly in the plays Of Beaumont
and Fletcher, there is a constant recognition of gentility, as if a
noble behavior were as easily marked in the society of their age as
color is in our American population. When any Rodrigo, Pedro or Valerio
enters, though he be a stranger, the duke or governor exclaims, ‘This
is a gentleman,—and proffers civilities without end; but all the rest
are slag and refuse. In harmony with this delight in personal
advantages there is in their plays a certain heroic cast of character
and dialogue,—as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the Double
Marriage,—wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial and on such
deep grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the slightest
additional incident in the plot, rises naturally into poetry. Among
many texts take the following. The Roman Martius has conquered
Athens,—all but the invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of
Athens, and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the latter inflames
Martius, and he seeks to save her husband; but Sophocles will not ask
his life, although assured that a word will save him, and the execution
of both proceeds:—
_Valerius_. Bid thy wife farewell.
_Sophocles_. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen,
Yonder, above, ’bout Ariadne’s crown,
My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.
_Dorigen_. Stay, Sophocles,—with this tie up my sight;
Let not soft nature so transformed be,
And lose her gentler sexed humanity,
To make me see my lord bleed. So, ’tis well;
Never one object underneath the sun
Will I behold before my Sophocles:
Farewell; now teach the Romans how to die.
_Martius_. Dost know what ’t is to die?
_Sophocles_. Thou dost not, Martius,
And, therefore, not what ’tis to live; to die
Is to begin to live. It is to end
An old, stale, weary work, and to commence
A newer and a better. ’Tis to leave
Deceitful knaves for the society
Of gods and goodness. Thou thyself must part
At last from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs,
And prove thy fortitude what then ’t will do.
_Valerius_. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus?
_Sophocles_. Why should I grieve or vex for being sent
To them I ever loved best? Now I’ll kneel,
But with my back toward thee; ’tis the last duty
This trunk can do the gods.
_Martius_. Strike, strike, Valerius,
Or Martius’ heart will leap out at his mouth.
This is a man, a woman. Kiss thy lord,
And live with all the freedom you were wont.
O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me
With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn,
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.
_Valerius_. What ails my brother?
_Sophocles_. Martius, O Martius,
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.
_Dorigen_. O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak
Fit words to follow such a deed as this?
_Martius_. This admirable duke, Valerius,
With his disdain of fortune and of death,
Captived himself, has captivated me,
And though my arm hath ta’en his body here,
His soul hath subjugated Martius’ soul.
By Romulus, he is all soul, I think;
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved;
Then we have vanquished nothing; he is free,
And Martius walks now in captivity.
I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel, or oration
that our press vents in the last few years, which goes to the same
tune. We have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not often the
sound of any fife. Yet, Wordsworth’s “Laodamia,” and the ode of “Dion,”
and some sonnets, have a certain noble music; and Scott will sometimes
draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord Evandale given by Balfour of
Burley. Thomas Carlyle, with his natural taste for what is manly and
daring in character, has suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to
drop from his biographical and historical pictures. Earlier, Robert
Burns has given us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies there is
an account of the battle of Lutzen which deserves to be read. And Simon
Ockley’s History of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of individual
valor, with admiration all the more evident on the part of the narrator
that he seems to think that his place in Christian Oxford requires of
him some proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we explore the
literature of Heroism we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its
Doctor and historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the
Epaminondas, the Scipio of old, and I must think we are more deeply
indebted to him than to all the ancient writers. Each of his “Lives” is
a refutation to the despondency and cowardice of our religious and
political theorists. A wild courage, a Stoicism not of the schools but
of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and has given that book its
immense fame.
We need books of this tart cathartic virtue more than books of
political science or of private economy. Life is a festival only to the
wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a
ragged and dangerous front. The violations of the laws of nature by our
predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us also. The
disease and deformity around us certify the infraction of natural,
intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed
such compound misery. A lock-jaw that bends a man’s head back to his
heels; hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes; insanity
that makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera, famine, indicate a
certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime,
must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily no man exists who
has not in his own person become to some amount a stockholder in the
sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.
Our culture therefore must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear
in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the
commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go
dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected and neither
defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life
in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by
the absolute truth of his speech and the rectitude of his behavior.
Towards all this external evil the man within the breast assumes a
warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to cope single-handed with
the infinite army of enemies. To this military attitude of the soul we
give the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is the contempt for safety
and ease, which makes the attractiveness of war. It is a self-trust
which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its
energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind
of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly
and as it were merrily he advances to his own music, alike in frightful
alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness. There is
somewhat not philosophical in heroism; there is somewhat not holy in
it; it seems not to know that other souls are of one texture with it;
it has pride; it is the extreme of individual nature. Nevertheless we
must profoundly revere it. There is somewhat in great actions which
does not allow us to go behind them. Heroism feels and never reasons,
and therefore is always right; and although a different breeding,
different religion and greater intellectual activity would have
modified or even reversed the particular action, yet for the hero that
thing he does is the highest deed, and is not open to the censure of
philosophers or divines. It is the avowal of the unschooled man that he
finds a quality in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of
life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is
higher and more excellent than all actual and all possible antagonists.
Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in
contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism
is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual’s character. Now
to no other man can its wisdom appear as it does to him, for every man
must be supposed to see a little farther on his own proper path than
any one else. Therefore just and wise men take umbrage at his act,
until after some little time be past: then they see it to be in unison
with their acts. All prudent men see that the action is clean contrary
to a sensual prosperity; for every heroic act measures itself by its
contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last,
and then the prudent also extol.
Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul at
war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and
wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents.
It speaks the truth and it is just, generous, hospitable, temperate,
scornful of petty calculations and scornful of being scorned. It
persists; it is of an undaunted boldness and of a fortitude not to be
wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common life. That false
prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the butt and merriment of
heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its body. What
shall it say then to the sugar-plums and cats’-cradles, to the toilet,
compliments, quarrels, cards and custard, which rack the wit of all
society? What joys has kind nature provided for us dear creatures!
There seems to be no interval between greatness and meanness. When the
spirit is not master of the world, then it is its dupe. Yet the little
man takes the great hoax so innocently, works in it so headlong and
believing, is born red, and dies gray, arranging his toilet, attending
on his own health, laying traps for sweet food and strong wine, setting
his heart on a horse or a rifle, made happy with a little gossip or a
little praise, that the great soul cannot choose but laugh at such
earnest nonsense. “Indeed, these humble considerations make me out of
love with greatness. What a disgrace is it to me to take note how many
pairs of silk stockings thou hast, namely, these and those that were
the peach-colored ones; or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as one
for superfluity, and one other for use!”
Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider the
inconvenience of receiving strangers at their fireside, reckon narrowly
the loss of time and the unusual display; the soul of a better quality
thrusts back the unseasonable economy into the vaults of life, and
says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire he will
provide. Ibn Hankal, the Arabian geographer, describes a heroic extreme
in the hospitality of Sogd, in Bukharia. “When I was in Sogd I saw a
great building, like a palace, the gates of which were open and fixed
back to the wall with large nails. I asked the reason, and was told
that the house had not been shut, night or day, for a hundred years.
Strangers may present themselves at any hour and in whatever number;
the master has amply provided for the reception of the men and their
animals, and is never happier than when they tarry for some time.
Nothing of the kind have I seen in any other country.” The magnanimous
know very well that they who give time, or money, or shelter, to the
stranger,—so it be done for love and not for ostentation,—do, as it
were, put God under obligation to them, so perfect are the
compensations of the universe. In some way the time they seem to lose
is redeemed and the pains they seem to take remunerate themselves.
These men fan the flame of human love and raise the standard of civil
virtue among mankind. But hospitality must be for service and not for
show, or it pulls down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high
to value itself by the splendor of its table and draperies. It gives
what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better
grace to bannocks and fair water than belong to city feasts.
The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no
dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy,
not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn and
denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of
tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows
how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision his
living is natural and poetic. John Eliot, the Indian Apostle, drank
water, and said of wine,—“It is a noble, generous liquor and we should
be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was made before
it.” Better still is the temperance of King David, who poured out on
the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his warriors had
brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives.
It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword after the battle
of Philippi, he quoted a line of Euripides,—“O Virtue! I have followed
thee through life, and I find thee at last but a shade.” I doubt not
the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic soul does not sell its
justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep
warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.
Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well
abide its loss.
But that which takes my fancy most in the heroic class, is the
good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common
duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But
these rare souls set opinion, success, and life at so cheap a rate that
they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of sorrow,
but wear their own habitual greatness. Scipio, charged with peculation,
refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait for justification,
though he had the scroll of his accounts in his hands, but tears it to
pieces before the tribunes. Socrates’s condemnation of himself to be
maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum, during his life, and Sir
Thomas More’s playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In
Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Sea Voyage,” Juletta tells the stout captain
and his company,—
_Juletta_. Why, slaves, ’tis in our power to hang ye.
_Master_. Very likely,
’Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.
These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and glow of a
perfect health. The great will not condescend to take any thing
seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were
the building of cities or the eradication of old and foolish churches
and nations which have cumbered the earth long thousands of years.
Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world behind
them, and play their own game in innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws of
the world; and such would appear, could we see the human race assembled
in vision, like little children frolicking together, though to the eyes
of mankind at large they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and
influences.
The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a romance
over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under his bench at school,
our delight in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose. All these
great and transcendent properties are ours. If we dilate in beholding
the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are already
domesticating the same sentiment. Let us find room for this great guest
in our small houses. The first step of worthiness will be to disabuse
us of our superstitious associations with places and times, with number
and size. Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia and England, so
tingle in the ear? Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods
sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut
River and Boston Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves names
of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we will
tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it only
that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends,
angels and the Supreme Being shall not be absent from the chamber where
thou sittest. Epaminondas, brave and affectionate, does not seem to us
to need Olympus to die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies very well
where he is. The Jerseys were handsome ground enough for Washington to
tread, and London streets for the feet of Milton. A great man makes his
climate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the beloved
element of all delicate spirits. That country is the fairest which is
inhabited by the noblest minds. The pictures which fill the imagination
in reading the actions of Pericles, Xenophon, Columbus, Bayard, Sidney,
Hampden, teach us how needlessly mean our life is; that we, by the
depth of our living, should deck it with more than regal or national
splendor, and act on principles that should interest man and nature in
the length of our days.
We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men who never
ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not extraordinary.
When we see their air and mien, when we hear them speak of society, of
books, of religion, we admire their superiority; they seem to throw
contempt on our entire polity and social state; theirs is the tone of a
youthful giant who is sent to work revolutions. But they enter an
active profession and the forming Colossus shrinks to the common size
of man. The magic they used was the ideal tendencies, which always make
the Actual ridiculous; but the tough world had its revenge the moment
they put their horses of the sun to plough in its furrow. They found no
example and no companion, and their heart fainted. What then? The
lesson they gave in their first aspirations is yet true; and a better
valor and a purer truth shall one day organize their belief. Or why
should a woman liken herself to any historical woman, and think,
because Sappho, or Sévigné, or De Staël, or the cloistered souls who
have had genius and cultivation do not satisfy the imagination and the
serene Themis, none can,—certainly not she? Why not? She has a new and
unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of the happiest nature
that ever bloomed. Let the maiden, with erect soul, walk serenely on
her way, accept the hint of each new experience, search in turn all the
objects that solicit her eye, that she may learn the power and the
charm of her new-born being, which is the kindling of a new dawn in the
recesses of space. The fair girl who repels interference by a decided
and proud choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and
lofty, inspires every beholder with somewhat of her own nobleness. The
silent heart encourages her; O friend, never strike sail to a fear!
Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not in vain you
live, for every passing eye is cheered and refined by the vision.
The characteristic of heroism is its persistency. All men have
wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have
chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile
yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the
common the heroic. Yet we have the weakness to expect the sympathy of
people in those actions whose excellence is that they outrun sympathy
and appeal to a tardy justice. If you would serve your brother, because
it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you
find that prudent people do not commend you. Adhere to your own act,
and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and
extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high
counsel that I once heard given to a young person,—“Always do what you
are afraid to do.” A simple manly character need never make an apology,
but should regard its past action with the calmness of Phocion, when he
admitted that the event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his
dissuasion from the battle.
There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot find consolation
in the thought—this is a part of my constitution, part of my relation
and office to my fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted with me that I
should never appear to disadvantage, never make a ridiculous figure?
Let us be generous of our dignity as well as of our money. Greatness
once and for ever has done with opinion. We tell our charities, not
because we wish to be praised for them, not because we think they have
great merit, but for our justification. It is a capital blunder; as you
discover when another man recites his charities.
To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live with some rigor
of temperance, or some extremes of generosity, seems to be an
asceticism which common good-nature would appoint to those who are at
ease and in plenty, in sign that they feel a brotherhood with the great
multitude of suffering men. And not only need we breathe and exercise
the soul by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of debt, of solitude,
of unpopularity,—but it behooves the wise man to look with a bold eye
into those rarer dangers which sometimes invade men, and to familiarize
himself with disgusting forms of disease, with sounds of execration,
and the vision of violent death.
Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never
shines in which this element may not work. The circumstances of man, we
say, are historically somewhat better in this country and at this hour
than perhaps ever before. More freedom exists for culture. It will not
now run against an axe at the first step out of the beaten track of
opinion. But whoso is heroic will always find crises to try his edge.
Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the trial of
persecution always proceeds. It is but the other day that the brave
Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free
speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live.
I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk, but after the
counsel of his own bosom. Let him quit too much association, let him go
home much, and stablish himself in those courses he approves. The
unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure duties
is hardening the character to that temper which will work with honor,
if need be in the tumult, or on the scaffold. Whatever outrages have
happened to men may befall a man again; and very easily in a republic,
if there appear any signs of a decay of religion. Coarse slander, fire,
tar and feathers and the gibbet, the youth may freely bring home to his
mind and with what sweetness of temper he can, and inquire how fast he
can fix his sense of duty, braving such penalties, whenever it may
please the next newspaper and a sufficient number of his neighbors to
pronounce his opinions incendiary.
It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most susceptible heart
to see how quick a bound Nature has set to the utmost infliction of
malice. We rapidly approach a brink over which no enemy can follow us:—
“Let them rave:
Thou art quiet in thy grave.”
In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we are
deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy those who have seen safely
to an end their manful endeavor? Who that sees the meanness of our
politics but inly congratulates Washington that he is long already
wrapped in his shroud, and for ever safe; that he was laid sweet in his
grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him? Who does not
sometimes envy the good and brave who are no more to suffer from the
tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the
speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the
love that will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made
death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal but a native of the
deeps of absolute and inextinguishable being.
IX.
THE OVER-SOUL
“But souls that of his own good life partake,
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye
They are to Him: He’ll never them forsake:
When they shall die, then God himself shall die:
They live, they live in blest eternity.”
_Henry More_.
Space is ample, east and west,
But two cannot go abreast,
Cannot travel in it two:
Yonder masterful cuckoo
Crowds every egg out of the nest,
Quick or dead, except its own;
A spell is laid on sod and stone,
Night and Day ’ve been tampered with,
Every quality and pith
Surcharged and sultry with a power
That works its will on age and hour.