proportions and strength. The hero must have the force of ten men. The
chief is taller by a head than any of his tribe. Douglas can throw the
bar a greater cast. Richard can sever the iron bolt with his sword.
The horn of Roland, in the romance, is heard sixty miles. The Cid has
a prevailing health that will let him nurse the leper, and share his
bed without harm. And since the body is the pipe through which we
tap all the succors and virtues of the material world, it is certain
that a sound body must be at the root of any excellence in manners and
actions; a strong and supple frame which yields a stock of strength
and spirits for all the needs of the day, and generates the habit of
relying on a supply of power for all extraordinary exertions. When
Nature goes to create a national man, she puts a symmetry between the
physical and intellectual powers. She moulds a large brain, and joins
to it a great trunk to supply it; as if a fine alembic were fed with
liquor for its distillations from broad full vats in the vaults of the
laboratory.
Certainly, the origin of most of the perversities and absurdities that
disgust us is, primarily, the want of health. Genius is health and
Beauty is health and virtue is health. The petty arts which we blame in
the half-great seem as odious to them also;--the resources of weakness
and despair. And the manners betray the like puny constitution.
Temperament is fortune, and we must say it so often. In a thousand
cups of life, only one is the right mixture,--a fine adjustment to the
existing elements. When that befalls, when the well-mixed man is born,
with eyes not too dull nor too good, with fire enough and earth enough,
capable of impressions from all things, and not too susceptible,--then
no gift need be bestowed on him, he brings with him fortune, followers,
love, power.
“I think he’ll be to Rome
As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it
By sovereignty of nature.”
Not the phrenologist but the philosopher may well say, Let me see
his brain, and I will tell you if he shall be poet, king, founder of
cities, rich, magnetic, of a secure hand, of a scientific memory, a
right classifier; or whether he shall be a bungler, driveller, unlucky,
heavy, and tedious.
It were to dispute against the sun, to deny this difference of brain.
I see well enough that when I bring one man into an estate, he sees
vague capabilities, what others might, could, would, or should do with
it. If I bring another man, he sees what _he_ should do with it.
He appreciates the water-privilege, land fit for orchard, tillage,
pasturage, wood-lot, cranberry-meadow; but just as easily he foresees
all the means, all the steps of the process, and could lay his hand
as readily on one as on another point in that series which opens the
capability to the last point. The poet sees wishfully enough the
result; the well-built head supplies all the steps, one as perfect as
the other, in the series. Seeing this working head in him, it becomes
to me as certain that he will have the direction of estates, as that
there are estates. If we see tools in a magazine, as a file, an
anchor, a plough, a pump, a paint-brush, a cider-press, a diving-bell,
we can predict well enough their destination; and the man’s
associations, fortunes, love, hatred, residence, rank, the books he
will buy, the roads he will traverse are predetermined in his organism.
Men will need him, and he is rich and eminent by nature. That man
cannot be too late or too early. Let him not hurry or hesitate. Though
millions are already arrived, his seat is reserved. Though millions
attend, they only multiply his friends and agents. It never troubles
the Senator what multitudes crack the benches and bend the galleries to
hear. He who understands the art of war, reckons the hostile battalions
and cities, opportunities and spoils.
An aristocracy could not exist unless it were organic. Men are born to
command, and--it is even so--“come into the world booted and spurred to
ride.” The blood royal never pays, we say. It obtains service, gifts,
supplies, furtherance of all kinds from the love and joy of those who
feel themselves honored by the service they render.
Dull people think it Fortune that makes one rich and another poor. Is
it? Yes, but the fortune was earlier than they think, namely, in the
balance or adjustment between devotion to what is agreeable to-day and
the forecast of what will be valuable to-morrow.
Certainly I am not going to argue the merits of gradation in the
universe; the existing order of more or less. Neither do I wish to go
into a vindication of the justice that disposes the variety of lot.
I know how steep the contrast of condition looks; such excess here
and such destitution there; like entire chance, like the freaks of
the wind, heaping the snow-drift in gorges, stripping the plain; such
despotism of wealth and comfort in banquet-halls, whilst death is in
the pots of the wretched,--that it behooves a good man to walk with
tenderness and heed amidst so much suffering. I only point in passing
to the order of the universe, which makes a rotation,--not like the
coarse policy of the Greeks, ten generals, each commanding one day and
then giving place to the next, or like our democratic politics, my turn
now, your turn next,--but the constitution of things has distributed
a new quality or talent to each mind, and the revolution of things is
always bringing the need, now of this, now of that, and is sure to
bring home the opportunity to every one.
The only relief that I know against the invidiousness of superior
position is, that you exert your faculty; for whilst each does that,
he excludes hard thoughts from the spectator. All right activity is
amiable. I never feel that any man occupies my place, but that the
reason why I do not have what I wish, is, that I want the faculty
which entitles. All spiritual or real power makes its own place.
We pass for what we are, and we prosper or fail by what we are. There
are men who may dare much and will be justified in their daring. But
it is because they know they are in their place. As long as I am in
my place, I am safe. “The best lightning-rod for your protection is
your own spine.” Let a man’s social aims be proportioned to his means
and power. I do not pity the misery of a man underplaced: that will
right itself presently: but I pity the man overplaced. A certain
quantity of power belongs to a certain quantity of faculty. Whoever
wants more power than is the legitimate attraction of his faculty, is
a politician, and must pay for that excess; must truckle for it. This
is the whole game of society and the politics of the world. Being will
always seem well;--but whether possibly I cannot contrive to seem,
without the trouble of being? Every Frenchman would have a career. We
English are not any better with our love of making a figure. “I told
the Duke of Newcastle,” says Bubb Doddington in his Memoirs, “that it
must end one way or another, it must not remain as it was; for I was
determined to make some sort of a figure in life; I earnestly wished
it might be under his protection, but if that could not be, I must
make some figure; what it would be I could not determine yet; I must
look round me a little and consult my friends, but some figure I was
resolved to make.”
It will be agreed everywhere that society must have the benefit of the
best leaders. How to obtain them? Birth has been tried and failed.
Caste in India has no good result. Ennobling of one family is good
for one generation; not sure beyond. Slavery had mischief enough to
answer for, but it had this good in it,--the pricing of men. In the
South a slave was bluntly but accurately valued at five hundred to a
thousand dollars, if a good field-hand; if a mechanic, as carpenter
or smith, twelve hundred or two thousand. In Rome or Greece what sums
would not be paid for a superior slave, a confidential secretary and
manager, an educated slave; a man of genius, a Moses educated in Egypt?
I don’t know how much Epictetus was sold for, or Æsop, or Toussaint
l’Ouverture, and perhaps it was not a good market-day. Time was, in
England, when the state stipulated beforehand what price should be paid
for each citizen’s life, if he was killed. Now, if it were possible, I
should like to see that appraisal applied to every man, and every man
made acquainted with the true number and weight of every adult citizen,
and that he be placed where he belongs, with so much power confided to
him as he could carry and use.
In the absence of such anthropometer I have a perfect confidence in
the natural laws. I think that the community,--every community, if
obstructing laws and usages are removed,--will be the best measure and
the justest judge of the citizen, or will in the long run give the
fairest verdict and reward; better than any royal patronage; better
than any premium on race; better than any statute elevating families to
hereditary distinction, or any class to sacerdotal education and power.
The verdict of battles will best prove the general; the town-meeting,
the Congress, will not fail to find out legislative talent. The
prerogatives of a right physician are determined, not by his diplomas,
but by the health he restores to body and mind; the powers of a
geometer by solving his problem; of a priest by the act of inspiring
us with a sentiment which disperses the grief from which we suffered.
When the lawyer tries his case in court he himself is also on trial and
his own merits appear as well as his client’s. When old writers are
consulted by young writers who have written their first book, they say,
Publish it by all means; so only can you certainly know its quality.
But we venture to put any man in any place. It is curious how negligent
the public is of the essential qualifications of its representatives.
They ask if a man is a republican, a democrat? Yes. Is he a man of
talent? Yes. Is he honest and not looking for an office or any manner
of bribe? He is honest. Well then choose him by acclamation. And they
go home and tell their wives with great satisfaction what a good thing
they have done. But they forgot to ask the fourth question, not less
important than either of the others, and without which the others do
not avail. Has he a will? Can he carry his points against opposition?
Probably not. It is not sufficient that your work follows your genius,
or is organic, to give you the magnetic power over men. More than taste
and talent must go to the Will. That must also be a gift of nature. It
is in some; it is not in others. But I should say, if it is not in you,
you had better not put yourself in places where not to have it is to be
a public enemy.
The expectation and claims of mankind indicate the duties of this
class. Some service they must pay. We do not expect them to be saints,
and it is very pleasing to see the instinct of mankind on this
matter,--how much they will forgive to such as pay substantial service
and work energetically after their kind; but they do not extend the
same indulgence to those who claim and enjoy the same prerogative but
render no returns. The day is darkened when the golden river runs down
into mud; when genius grows idle and wanton and reckless of its fine
duties of being Saint, Prophet, Inspirer to its humble fellows, baulks
their respect and confounds their understanding by silly extravagances.
To a right aristocracy, to Hercules, to Theseus, Odin, the Cid,
Napoleon; to Sir Robert Walpole, to Fox, Chatham, Mirabeau, Jefferson,
O’Connell;--to the men, that is, who are incomparably superior to the
populace in ways agreeable to the populace, showing them the way they
should go, doing for them what they wish done and cannot do;--of course
everything will be permitted and pardoned,--gaming, drinking, fighting,
luxury. These are the heads of party, who can do no wrong,--everything
short of infamous crime will pass.
But if those who merely sit in their places and are not, like them,
able; if the dressed and perfumed gentleman, who serves the people in
no wise and adorns them not, is not even _not afraid of them_, if
such an one go about to set ill examples and corrupt them, who shall
blame them if they burn his barns, insult his children, assault his
person, and express their unequivocal indignation and contempt? He
eats their bread, he does not scorn to live by their labor, and after
breakfast he cannot remember that there are human beings. To live
without duties is obscene.
2. Genius, what is so called in strictness,--the power to affect the
Imagination, as possessed by the orator, the poet, the novelist, or
the artist,--has a royal right in all possessions and privileges, being
itself representative and accepted by all men as their delegate. It
has indeed the best right, because it raises men above themselves,
intoxicates them with beauty. They are honored by rendering it honor,
and the reason of this allowance is that Genius unlocks for all men
the chains of use, temperament and drudgery, and gives them a sense of
delicious liberty and power.
The first example that occurs is an extraordinary gift of eloquence.
A man who has that possession of his means and that magnetism that he
can at all times carry the convictions of a public assembly, we must
respect, and he is thereby ennobled. He has the freedom of the city. He
is entitled to neglect trifles. Like a great general, or a great poet,
or a millionaire, he may wear his coat out at elbows, and his hat on
his feet, if he will. He has established relation, representativeness.
The best feat of genius is to bring all the varieties of talent and
culture into its audience; the mediocre and the dull are reached
as well as the intelligent. I have seen it conspicuously shown in
a village. Here are classes which day by day have no intercourse,
nothing beyond perhaps a surly nod in passing. But I have seen a
man of teeming brain come among these men, so full of his facts, so
unable to suppress them, that he has poured out a river of knowledge
to all comers, and drawing all these men round him, all sorts of men,
interested the whole village, good and bad, bright and stupid, in his
facts; the iron boundary lines had all faded away; the stupid had
discovered that they were not stupid; the coldest had found themselves
drawn to their neighbors by interest in the same things. This was a
naturalist.
The more familiar examples of this power certainly are those who
establish a wider dominion over men’s minds than any speech can; who
think, and paint, and laugh, and weep, in their eloquent closets, and
then convert the world into a huge whispering gallery, to report the
tale to all men, and win smiles and tears from many generations. The
eminent examples are Shakspeare, Cervantes, Bunyan, Burns, Scott, and
now we must add Dickens. In the fine arts, I find none in the present
age who have any popular power, who have achieved any nobility by
ennobling the people.
3. Elevation of sentiment, refining and inspiring the manners, must
really take the place of every distinction whether of material power
or of intellectual gifts. The manners of course must have that depth
and firmness of tone to attest their centrality in the nature of the
man. I mean the things themselves shall be judges, and determine. In
the presence of this nobility even genius must stand aside. For the two
poles of nature are Beauty and Meanness, and noble sentiment is the
highest form of Beauty. He is beautiful in face, in port, in manners,
who is absorbed in objects which he truly believes to be superior to
himself. Is there any parchment or any cosmetic or any blood that can
obtain homage like that security of air presupposing so undoubtingly
the sympathy of men in his designs? What is it that makes the true
knight? Loyalty to his thought. That makes the beautiful scorn, the
elegant simplicity, the directness, the commanding port which all men
admire and which men not noble affect. For the thought has no debts,
no hunger, no lusts, no low obligations or relations, no intrigue or
business, no murder, no envy, no crime, but large leisures and an
inviting future.
The service we receive from the great is a mutual deference. If
you deal with the vulgar, life is reduced to beggary indeed. The
astronomers are very eager to know whether the moon has an atmosphere;
I am only concerned that every man have one. I observe however that it
takes two to make an atmosphere. I am acquainted with persons who go
attended with this ambient cloud. It is sufficient that they come. It
is not important what they say. The sun and the evening sky are not
calmer. They seem to have arrived at the fact, to have got rid of the
show, and to be serene. Their manners and behavior in the house and in
the field are those of men at rest: what have they to conceal? what
have they to exhibit? Others I meet, who have no deference, and who
denude and strip one of all attributes but material values. As much
health and muscle as you have, as much land, as much house-room and
dinner, avails. Of course a man is a poor bag of bones. There is no
gracious interval, not an inch allowed. Bone rubs against bone. Life is
thus a Beggar’s Bush. I know nothing which induces so base and forlorn
a feeling as when we are treated for our utilities, as economists do,
starving the imagination and the sentiment. In this impoverishing
animation, I seem to meet a Hunger, a wolf. Rather let us be alone
whilst we live, than encounter these lean kine. Man should emancipate
man. He does so, not by jamming him, but by distancing him. The nearer
my friend, the more spacious is our realm, the more diameter our
spheres have. It is a measure of culture, the number of things taken
for granted. When a man begins to speak, the churl will take him up by
disputing his first words, so he cannot come at his scope. The wise
man takes all for granted until he sees the parallelism of that which
puzzled him with his own view.
I will not protract this discourse by describing the duties of the
brave and generous. And yet I will venture to name one, and the same
is almost the sole condition on which knighthood is to be won; this,
namely, loyalty to your own order. The true aristocrat is he who is
at the head of his own order, and disloyalty is to mistake other
chivalries for his own. Let him not divide his homage, but stand for
that which he was born and set to maintain. It was objected to Gustavus
that he did not better distinguish between the duties of a carabine and
a general, but exposed himself to all dangers and was too prodigal of a
blood so precious. For a soul on which elevated duties are laid will so
realize its special and lofty duties as not to be in danger of assuming
through a low generosity those which do not belong to it.
There are all degrees of nobility, but amid the levity and giddiness
of people one looks round, as for a tower of strength, on some
self-dependent mind, who does not go abroad for an estimate, and has
long ago made up its conclusion that it is impossible to fail. The
great Indian sages had a lesson for the Brahmin, which every day
returns to mind, “All that depends on another gives pain; all that
depends on himself gives pleasure; in these few words is the definition
of pleasure and pain.” The noble mind is here to teach us that failure
is a part of success. Prosperity and pound-cake are for very young
gentlemen, whom such things content; but a hero’s, a man’s success
is made up of failures, because he experiments and ventures every
day, and “the more falls he gets, moves faster on;” defeated all the
time and yet to victory born. I have heard that in horsemanship he is
not the good rider who never was thrown, but rather that a man never
will be a good rider until he is thrown; then he will not be haunted
any longer by the terror that he shall tumble, and will ride;--that
is his business,--to _ride_, whether with falls or whether with
none, to ride unto the place whither he is bound. And I know no such
unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind, as that tenacity
of purpose which, through all change of companions, of parties, of
fortunes,--changes never, bates no jot of heart or hope, but wearies
out opposition, and arrives at its port. In his consciousness of
deserving success, the caliph Ali constantly neglected the ordinary
means of attaining it; and to the grand interests, a superficial
success is of no account. It prospers as well in mistake as in luck,
in obstruction and nonsense, as well as among the angels; it reckons
fortunes mere paint; difficulty is its delight: perplexity is its
noonday: minds that make their way without winds and against tides. But
these are rare and difficult examples, we can only indicate them to
show how high is the range of the realm of Honor.
I know the feeling of the most ingenious and excellent youth in
America; I hear the complaint of the aspirant that we have no prizes
offered to the ambition of virtuous young men; that there is no Theban
Band; no stern exclusive Legion of Honor, to be entered only by long
and real service and patient climbing up all the steps. We have a
rich men’s aristocracy, plenty of bribes for those who like them; but
a grand style of culture, which, without injury, an ardent youth can
propose to himself as a Pharos through long dark years, does not exist,
and there is no substitute. The youth, having got through the first
thickets that oppose his entrance into life, having got into decent
society, is left to himself, and falls abroad with too much freedom.
But in the hours of insight we rally against this skepticism. We then
see that if the ignorant are around us, the great are much more near;
that there is an order of men, never quite absent, who enroll no
names in their archives but of such as are capable of truth. They are
gathered in no one chamber; no chamber would hold them; but, out of the
vast duration of man’s race, they tower like mountains, and are present
to every mind in proportion to its likeness to theirs. The solitariest
man who shares their spirit walks environed by them; they talk to
him, they comfort him, and happy is he who prefers these associates to
profane companions. They also take shape in men, in women. There is no
heroic trait, no sentiment or thought that will not sometime embody
itself in the form of a friend. That highest good of rational existence
is always coming to such as reject mean alliances.
One trait more we must celebrate, the self-reliance which is the
patent of royal natures. It is so prized a jewel that it is sure to
be tested. The rules and discipline are ordered for that. The Golden
Table never lacks members; all its seats are kept full; but with this
strange provision, that the members are carefully withdrawn into deep
niches, so that no one of them can see any other of them, and each
believes himself alone. In the presence of the Chapter it is easy for
each member to carry himself royally and well; but in the absence of
his colleagues and in the presence of mean people he is tempted to
accept the low customs of towns. The honor of a member consists in
an indifferency to the persons and practices about him, and in the
pursuing undisturbed the career of a Brother, as if always in their
presence, and as if no other existed. Give up, once for all, the hope
of approbation from the people in the street, if you are pursuing great
ends. How can they guess your designs?