but of a counterfeit. Everybody hates imbecility and shortcoming, not
new methods. The astronomer is not ridiculous inasmuch as he is an
astronomer, but inasmuch as he is not an astronomer. Be that you are:
be that cheerly and sovereignly. Plotinus makes no apologies, he says
roundly, “the knowledge of the senses is truly ludicrous.” “Body and
its properties belong to the region of nonentity, as if more of body
was necessarily produced where a defect of being happens in a greater
degree.” “Matter,” says Plutarch, “is privation.” Let the man of ideas
at this hour be as direct, and as fully committed. Have you a thought
in your heart? There was never such need of it as now. As we read
the newspapers, as we see the effrontery with which money and power
carry their ends and ride over honesty and good-meaning, patriotism
and religion seem to shriek like ghosts. We will not speak for them,
because to speak for them seems so weak and hopeless. We will hold
fast our opinion and die in silence. But a true orator will make us
feel that the states and kingdoms, the senators, lawyers and rich men
are caterpillars’ webs and caterpillars, when seen in the light of this
despised and imbecile truth. Then we feel what cowards we have been.
Truth alone is great. The orator too becomes a fool and a shadow before
this light which lightens through him. It shines backward and forward,
diminishes and annihilates everybody, and the prophet so gladly feels
his personality lost in this victorious life. The spiritual nature
exhibits itself so in its counteraction to any accumulation of material
force. There is no mass that can be a counterweight for it. This makes
one man good against mankind. This is the secret of eloquence, for
it is the end of eloquence in a half-hour’s discourse,--perhaps by a
few sentences,--to persuade a multitude of persons to renounce their
opinions, and change the course of life. They go forth not the men they
came in, but shriven, convicted, and converted.
We have many revivals of religion. We have had once what was called
the Revival of Letters. I wish to see a revival of the human mind:
to see men’s sense of duty extend to the cherishing and use of their
intellectual powers: their religion should go with their thought and
hallow it. Whosoever looks with heed into his thoughts will find
that our science of the mind has not got far. He will find there is
somebody within him that knows more than he does, a certain dumb life
in life; a simple wisdom behind all acquired wisdom; somewhat not
educated or educable; not altered or alterable; a mother-wit which does
not learn by experience or by books, but knew it all already; makes
no progress, but was wise in youth as in age. More or less clouded it
yet resides the same in all, saying _Ay, ay_, or _No, no_
to every proposition. Yet its grand _Ay_ and its grand _No_
are more musical than all eloquence. Nobody has found the limit of its
knowledge. Whatever object is brought before it is already well known
to it. Its justice is perfect; its look is catholic and universal, its
light ubiquitous like the sun. It does not put forth organs, it rests
in presence: yet trusted and obeyed in happy natures it becomes active
and salient, and makes new means for its great ends.
The scholar then is unfurnished who has only literary weapons. He
ought to have as many talents as he can; memory, arithmetic, practical
power, manners, temper, lion-heart, are all good things, and if he has
none of them he can still manage, if he have the main-mast,--if he is
anything. But he must have the resource of resources, and be planted on
necessity. For the sure months are bringing him to an examination-day
in which nothing is remitted or excused, and for which no tutor, no
book, no lectures, and almost no preparation can be of the least avail.
He will have to answer certain questions, which, I must plainly tell
you, cannot be staved off. For all men, all women, Time, your country,
your condition, the invisible world, are the interrogators: _Who are
you? What do you? Can you obtain what you wish? Is there method in your
consciousness? Can you see tendency in your life? Can you help any
soul?_
Can he answer these questions? can he dispose of them? Happy if you can
answer them mutely in the order and disposition of your life! Happy
for more than yourself, a benefactor of men, if you can answer them in
works of wisdom, art, or poetry; bestowing on the general mind of men
organic creations, to be the guidance and delight of all who know them.
These questions speak to Genius, to that power which is underneath and
greater than all talent, and which proceeds out of the constitution
of every man: to Genius, which is an emanation of that it tells of;
whose private counsels are not tinged with selfishness, but are laws.
Men of talent fill the eye with their pretension. They go out into
some camp of their own, and noisily persuade society that this thing
which they do is the needful cause of all men. They have talents for
contention, and they nourish a small difference into a loud quarrel.
But the world is wide, nobody will go there after to-morrow. The gun
they have pointed can defend nothing but itself, nor itself any longer
than the man is by. What is the use of artificial positions? But Genius
has no taste for weaving sand, or for any trifling, but flings itself
on real elemental things, which are powers, self-defensive; which first
subsist, and then resist unweariably forevermore all that opposes.
Genius has truth and clings to it, so that what it says and does is
not in a by-road, visited only by curiosity, but on the great highways
of nature, which were before the Appian Way, and which all souls must
travel. Genius delights only in statements which are themselves true,
which attack and wound any who opposes them, whether he who brought
them here remains here or not;--which are live men, and do daily
declare fresh war against all falsehood and custom, and will not let an
offender go; which society cannot dispose of or forget, but which abide
there and will not down at anybody’s bidding, but stand frowning and
formidable, and will and must be finally obeyed and done.
The scholar must be ready for bad weather, poverty, insult, weariness,
repute of failure, and many vexations. He must have a great patience,
and ride at anchor and vanquish every enemy whom his small arms cannot
reach, by the grand resistance of submission, of ceasing to do. He
is to know that in the last resort he is not here to work, but to be
worked upon. He is to eat insult, drink insult, be clothed and shod in
insult until he has learned that this bitter bread and shameful dress
is also wholesome and warm, is in short indifferent; is of the same
chemistry as praise and fat living; that they also are disgrace and
soreness to him who has them. I think much may be said to discourage
and dissuade the young scholar from his career. Freely be that said.
Dissuade all you can from the lists. Sift the wheat, frighten away the
lighter souls. Let us keep only the heavy-armed. Let those come who
cannot but come, and who see that there is no choice here, no advantage
and no disadvantage compared with other careers. For the great
Necessity is our patron, who distributes sun and shade after immutable
laws.
Yes, he has his dark days, he has weakness, he has waitings, he
has bad company, he is pelted by storms of cares, untuning cares,
untuning company. Well, let him meet them. He has not consented to the
frivolity, nor to the dispersion. The practical aim is forever higher
than the literary aim. He shall not submit to degradation, but shall
bear these crosses with what grace he can. He is still to decline how
many glittering opportunities, and to retreat, and wait. So shall you
find in this penury and absence of thought a purer splendor than ever
clothed the exhibitions of wit. I invite you not to cheap joys, to
the flutter of gratified vanity, to a sleek and rosy comfort; no, but
to bareness, to power, to enthusiasm, to the mountain of vision, to
true and natural supremacy, to the society of the great, and to love.
Give me bareness and poverty so that I know them as the sure heralds
of the Muse. Not in plenty, not in a thriving, well-to-do condition,
she delighteth. He that would sacrifice at her altar must not leave a
few flowers, an apple, or some symbolic gift. No; he must relinquish
orchards and gardens, prosperity and convenience; he may live on a
heath without trees; sometimes hungry, and sometimes rheumatic with
cold. The fire retreats and concentrates within into a pure flame, pure
as the stars to which it mounts.
But, gentlemen, there is plainly no end to these expansions. I have
exhausted your patience, and I have only begun. I had perhaps wiselier
adhered to my first purpose of confining my illustration to a single
topic, but it is so much easier to say many things than to explain one.
Well, you will see the drift of all my thoughts, this namely--that
the scholar must be much more than a scholar, that his ends give
value to every means, but he is to subdue and keep down his methods;
that his use of books is occasional, and infinitely subordinate; that
he should read a little proudly, as one who knows the original, and
cannot therefore very highly value the copy. In like manner he is
to hold lightly every tradition, every opinion, every person, out
of his piety to that Eternal Spirit which dwells unexpressed with
him. He shall think very highly of his destiny. He is here to know
the secret of Genius; to become, not a reader of poetry, but Homer,
Dante, Milton, Shakspeare, Swedenborg, in the fountain, through that.
If one man could impart his faith to another, if I could prevail to
communicate the incommunicable mysteries, you should see the breadth of
your realm;--that ever as you ascend your proper and native path, you
receive the keys of Nature and history, and rise on the same stairs to
science and to joy.
PLUTARCH.
The soul
Shall have society of its own rank:
Be great, be true, and all the Scipios,
The Catos, the wise patriots of Rome,
Shall flock to you and tarry by your side
And comfort you with their high company.
PLUTARCH.[10]
IT is remarkable that of an author so familiar as Plutarch, not only
to scholars, but to all reading men, and whose history is so easily
gathered from his works, no accurate memoir of his life, not even the
dates of his birth and death, should have come down to us. Strange
that the writer of so many illustrious biographies should wait so long
for his own. It is agreed that he was born about the year 50 of the
Christian era. He has been represented as having been the tutor of the
Emperor Trajan, as dedicating one of his books to him, as living long
in Rome in great esteem, as having received from Trajan the consular
dignity, and as having been appointed by him the governor of Greece.
He was a man whose real superiority had no need of these flatteries.
Meantime, the simple truth is, that he was not the tutor of Trajan,
that he dedicated no book to him, was not consul in Rome, nor governor
of Greece; appears never to have been in Rome but on two occasions,
and then on business of the people of his native city, Chæronea; and
though he found or made friends at Rome, and read lectures to some
friends or scholars, he did not know or learn the Latin language there;
with one or two doubtful exceptions, never quotes a Latin book; and
though the contemporary, in his youth or in his old age, of Persius,
Juvenal, Lucan and Seneca, of Quintilian, Martial, Tacitus, Suetonius,
Pliny the Elder and the Younger, he does not cite them, and, in return,
his name is never mentioned by any Roman writer. It would seem that
the community of letters and of personal news was even more rare at
that day than the want of printing, of railroads and telegraphs, would
suggest to us.
But this neglect by his contemporaries has been compensated by an
immense popularity in modern nations. Whilst his books were never known
to the world in their own Greek tongue, it is curious that the “Lives”
were translated and printed in Latin, thence into Italian, French,
and English, more than a century before the original “Works” were yet
printed. For whilst the “Lives” were translated in Rome in 1470, and
the “Morals,” part by part, soon after, the first printed edition of
the Greek “Works” did not appear until 1572. Hardly current in his own
Greek, these found learned interpreters in the scholars of Germany,
Spain and Italy. In France, in the middle of the most turbulent civil
wars, Amyot’s translation awakened general attention. His genial
version of the “Lives” in 1559, of the “Morals” in 1572, had signal
success. King Henry IV. wrote to his wife, Marie de Medicis: “_Vive
Dieu._ As God liveth, you could not have sent me anything which
could be more agreeable than the news of the pleasure you have taken
in this reading. Plutarch always delights me with a fresh novelty. To
love him is to love me; for he has been long time the instructor of
my youth. My good mother, to whom I owe all, and who would not wish,
she said, to see her son an illustrious dunce, put this book into my
hands almost when I was a child at the breast. It has been like my
conscience, and has whispered in my ear many good suggestions and
maxims for my conduct and the government of my affairs.” Still earlier,
Rabelais cites him with due respect. Montaigne, in 1589, says: “We
dunces had been lost, had not this book raised us out of the dirt. By
this favor of his we dare now speak and write. The ladies are able
to read to schoolmasters. ’Tis our breviary.” Montesquieu drew from
him his definition of law, and, in his _Pensées_, declares, “I
am always charmed with Plutarch; in his writings are circumstances
attached to persons, which give great pleasure;” and adds examples.
Saint Evremond read Plutarch to the great Condé under a tent. Rollin,
so long the historian of antiquity for France, drew unhesitatingly his
history from him. Voltaire honored him, and Rousseau acknowledged him
as his master. In England, Sir Thomas North translated the “Lives”
in 1579, and Holland the “Morals” in 1603, in time to be used by
Shakspeare in his plays, and read by Bacon, Dryden, and Cudworth.
Then, recently, there has been a remarkable revival, in France, in
the taste for Plutarch and his contemporaries; led, we may say, by
the eminent critic Sainte-Beuve. M. Octave Gréard, in a critical work
on the “Morals,” has carefully corrected the popular legends and
constructed from the works of Plutarch himself his true biography.
M. Levéque has given an exposition of his moral philosophy, under
the title of “A Physician of the Soul,” in the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_; and M. C. Martha, chapters on the genius of Marcus
Aurelius, of Persius, and Lucretius, in the same journal; whilst M.
Fustel de Coulanges has explored from its roots in the Aryan race, then
in their Greek and Roman descendants, the primeval religion of the
household.
Plutarch occupies a unique place in literature as an encyclopædia of
Greek and Roman antiquity. Whatever is eminent in fact or in fiction,
in opinion, in character, in institutions, in science--natural, moral,
or metaphysical, or in memorable sayings, drew his attention and
came to his pen with more or less fulness of record. He is, among
prose-writers, what Chaucer is among English poets, a repertory for
those who want the story without searching for it at first hand,--a
compend of all accepted traditions. And all this without any supreme
intellectual gifts. He is not a profound mind; not a master in any
science; not a lawgiver, like Lycurgus or Solon; not a metaphysician,
like Parmenides, Plato, or Aristotle; not the founder of any sect
or community, like Pythagoras or Zeno; not a naturalist, like Pliny
or Linnæus; not a leader of the mind of a generation, like Plato or
Goethe. But if he had not the highest powers, he was yet a man of rare
gifts. He had that universal sympathy with genius which makes all its
victories his own; though he never used verse, he had many qualities
of the poet in the power of his imagination, the speed of his mental
associations, and his sharp, objective eyes. But what specially marks
him, he is a chief example of the illumination of the intellect by
the force of morals. Though the most amiable of boon-companions, this
generous religion gives him _aperçus_ like Goethe’s.
Plutarch was well-born, well-taught, well-conditioned; a
self-respecting, amiable man, who knew how to better a good education
by travels, by devotion to affairs private and public; a master of
ancient culture, he read books with a just criticism; eminently
social, he was a king in his own house, surrounded himself with select
friends, and knew the high value of good conversation; and declares in
a letter written to his wife that “he finds scarcely an erasure, as in
a book well-written, in the happiness of his life.”
The range of mind makes the glad writer. The reason of Plutarch’s vast
popularity is his humanity. A man of society, of affairs; upright,
practical; a good son, husband, father, and friend,--he has a taste for
common life, and knows the court, the camp and the judgment-hall, but
also the forge, farm, kitchen and cellar, and every utensil and use,
and with a wise man’s or a poet’s eye. Thought defends him from any
degradation. He does not lose his way, for the attractions are from
within, not from without. A poet in verse or prose must have a sensuous
eye, but an intellectual co-perception. Plutarch’s memory is full, and
his horizon wide. Nothing touches man but he feels to be his; he is
tolerant even of vice, if he finds it genial; enough a man of the world
to give even the Devil his due, and would have hugged Robert Burns,
when he cried:--
“O wad ye tak’ a thought and mend!”
He is a philosopher with philosophers, a naturalist with naturalists,
and sufficiently a mathematician to leave some of his readers, now and
then, at a long distance behind him, or respectfully skipping to the
next chapter. But this scholastic omniscience of our author engages a
new respect, since they hope he understands his own diagram.
He perpetually suggests Montaigne, who was the best reader he has ever
found, though Montaigne excelled his master in the point and surprise
of his sentences. Plutarch had a religion which Montaigne wanted,
and which defends him from wantonness; and though Plutarch is as
plain-spoken, his moral sentiment is always pure. What better praise
has any writer received than he whom Montaigne finds “frank in giving
things, not words,” dryly adding, “it vexes me that he is so exposed
to the spoil of those that are conversant with him.” It is one of the
felicities of literary history, the tie which inseparably couples
these two names across fourteen centuries. Montaigne, whilst he grasps
Étienne de la Boèce with one hand, reaches back the other to Plutarch.
These distant friendships charm us, and honor all the parties, and make
the best example of the universal citizenship and fraternity of the
human mind.
I do not know where to find a book--to borrow a phrase of Ben
Jonson’s--“so rammed with life,” and this in chapters chiefly ethical,
which are so prone to be heavy and sentimental. No poet could
illustrate his thought with more novel or striking similes or happier
anecdotes. His style is realistic, picturesque and varied; his sharp
objective eyes seeing everything that moves, shines, or threatens in
nature or art, or thought or dreams. Indeed, twilights, shadows, omens
and spectres have a charm for him. He believes in witchcraft and the
evil eye, in demons and ghosts,--but prefers, if you please, to talk
of these in the morning. His vivacity and abundance never leave him to
loiter or pound on an incident. I admire his rapid and crowded style,
as if he had such store of anecdotes of his heroes that he is forced to
suppress more than he recounts, in order to keep up with the hasting
history.
His surprising merit is the genial facility with which he deals with
his manifold topics. There is no trace of labor or pain. He gossips
of heroes, philosophers and poets; of virtues and genius; of love and
fate and empires. It is for his pleasure that he recites all that is
best in his reading: he prattles history. But he is no courtier, and
no Boswell: he is ever manly, far from fawning, and would be welcome
to the sages and warriors he reports, as one having a native right
to admire and recount these stirring deeds and speeches. I find him
a better teacher of rhetoric than any modern. His superstitions are
poetic, aspiring, affirmative. A poet might rhyme all day with hints
drawn from Plutarch, page on page. No doubt, this superior suggestion
for the modern reader owes much to the foreign air, the Greek wine,
the religion and history of antique heroes. Thebes, Sparta, Athens
and Rome charm us away from the disgust of the passing hour. But his
own cheerfulness and rude health are also magnetic. In his immense
quotation and allusion we quickly cease to discriminate between what
he quotes and what he invents. We sail on his memory into the ports
of every nation, enter into every private property, and do not stop
to discriminate owners, but give him the praise of all. ’Tis all
Plutarch, by right of eminent domain, and all property vests in this
emperor. This facility and abundance make the joy of his narrative,
and he is read to the neglect of more careful historians. Yet he
inspires a curiosity, sometimes makes a necessity, to read them. He
disowns any attempt to rival Thucydides; but I suppose he has a hundred
readers where Thucydides finds one, and Thucydides must often thank
Plutarch for that one. He has preserved for us a multitude of precious
sentences, in prose or verse, of authors whose books are lost; and
these embalmed fragments, through his loving selection alone, have come
to be proverbs of later mankind. I hope it is only my immense ignorance
that makes me believe that they do not survive out of his pages,--not
only Thespis, Polemos, Euphorion, Ariston, Evenus, etc., but fragments
of Menander and Pindar. At all events, it is in reading the fragments
he has saved from lost authors that I have hailed another example of
the sacred care which has unrolled in our times, and still searches
and unrolls _papyri_ from ruined libraries and buried cities, and
has drawn attention to what an ancient might call the politeness of
Fate,--we will say, more advisedly, the benign Providence which uses
the violence of war, of earthquakes and changed water-courses, to save
underground through barbarous ages the relics of ancient art, and thus
allows us to witness the upturning of the alphabets of old races, and
the deciphering of forgotten languages, so to complete the annals of
the forefathers of Asia, Africa and Europe.
His delight in poetry makes him cite with joy the speech of Gorgias,
“that the tragic poet who deceived was juster than he who deceived not,
and he that was deceived was wiser than he who was not deceived.”
It is a consequence of this poetic trait in his mind, that I confess
that, in reading him, I embrace the particulars, and carry a faint
memory of the argument or general design of the chapter; but he is not
less welcome, and he leaves the reader with a relish and a necessity
for completing his studies. Many examples might be cited of nervous
expression and happy allusion, that indicate a poet and an orator,
though he is not ambitious of these titles, and cleaves to the security
of prose narrative, and only shows his intellectual sympathy with
these; yet I cannot forbear to cite one or two sentences which none who
reads them will forget. In treating of the style of the Pythian Oracle,
he says:--
“Do you not observe, some one will say, what a grace there is in
Sappho’s measures, and how they delight and tickle the ears and fancies
of the hearers? Whereas the Sibyl, with her frantic grimaces, uttering
sentences altogether thoughtful and serious, neither fucused nor
perfumed, continues her voice a thousand years through the favor of the
Divinity that speaks within her.”
Another gives an insight into his mystic tendencies:--
“Early this morning, asking Epaminondas about the manner of Lysis’s
burial, I found that Lysis had taught him as far as the incommunicable
mysteries of our sect, and that the same Dæmon that waited on Lysis,
presided over him, if I can guess at the pilot from the sailing of
the ship. The paths of life are large, but in few are men directed
by the Dæmons. When Theanor had said this, he looked attentively on
Epaminondas, as if he designed a fresh search into his nature and
inclinations.”