nation of minds, as a drop of water balances the sea; and under this
view the problem of culture assumes wonderful interest. Culture implies
all which gives the mind possession of its own powers; as languages to
the critic, telescope to the astronomer. Culture alters the political
status of an individual. It raises a rival royalty in a monarchy. 'Tis
king against king. It is ever the romance of history in all
dynasties,--the co-presence of the revolutionary force in intellect. It
creates a personal independence which the monarch cannot look down, and
to which he must often succumb. If a man know the laws of nature better
than other men, his nation cannot spare him; nor if he know the power of
numbers, the secret of geometry, of algebra, on which the computations
of astronomy, of navigation, of machinery, rest. If he can converse
better than any other, he rules the minds of men wherever he goes; if he
has imagination, he intoxicates men. If he has wit, he tempers despotism
by epigrams: a song, a satire, a sentence, has played its part in great
events. Eloquence a hundred times has turned the scale of war and peace
at will. The history of Greece is at one time reduced to two
persons,--Philip, or the successor of Philip, on one side, and
Demosthenes, a private citizen, on the other. If he has a military
genius, like Belisarius, or administrative faculty, like Chatham or
Bismarck, he is the king's king. If a theologian of deep convictions and
strong understanding carries his country with him, like Luther, the
state becomes Lutheran, in spite of the Emperor, as Thomas à Becket
overpowered the English Henry. Wit has a great charter. Popes and kings
and Councils of Ten are very sharp with their censorships and
inquisitions, but it is on dull people. Some Dante or Angelo, Rabelais,
Hafiz, Cervantes, Erasmus, Béranger, Bettine von Arnim, or whatever
genuine wit of the old inimitable class, is always allowed. Kings feel
that this is that which they themselves represent; this is no
red-kerchiefed, red-shirted rebel, but loyalty, kingship. This is real
kingship, and their own only titular. Even manners are a distinction,
which, we sometimes see, are not to be overborne by rank or official
power, or even by other eminent talents, since they too proceed from a
certain deep innate perception of fit and fair.
It is too plain that a cultivated laborer is worth many untaught
laborers; that a scientific engineer, with instruments and steam, is
worth many hundred men, many thousands; that Archimedes or Napoleon is
worth for labor a thousand thousands; and that in every wise and genial
soul we have England, Greece, Italy, walking, and can dispense with
populations of _navvies_.
Literary history and all history is a record of the power of minorities,
and of minorities of one. Every book is written with a constant secret
reference to the few intelligent persons whom the writer believes to
exist in the million. The artist has always the masters in his eye,
though he affect to flout them. Michel Angelo is thinking of Da Vinci,
and Raffaele is thinking of Michel Angelo. Tennyson would give his fame
for a verdict in his favor from Wordsworth. Agassiz and Owen and Huxley
affect to address the American and English people, but are really
writing to each other. Everett dreamed of Webster. McKay, the
shipbuilder, thinks of George Steers; and Steers, of Pook, the naval
constructor. The names of the masters at the head of each department of
science, art, or function are often little known to the world, but are
always known to the adepts; as Robert Brown in botany, and Gauss in
mathematics. Often the master is a hidden man, but not to the true
student; invisible to all the rest, resplendent to him. All his own work
and culture form the eye to see the master. In politics, mark the
importance of minorities of one, as of Phocion, Cato, Lafayette, Arago.
The importance of the one person who has the truth over nations who have
it not, is because power obeys reality, and not appearance; according to
quality, and not quantity. How much more are men than nations! the wise
and good souls, the stoics in Greece and Rome, Socrates in Athens, the
saints in Judæa, Alfred the king, Shakspeare the poet, Newton the
philosopher, the perceiver, and obeyer of truth,--than the foolish and
sensual millions around them! so that, wherever a true man appears,
everything usually reckoned great dwarfs itself; he is the only great
event, and it is easy to lift him into a mythological personage.
Then the next step in the series is the equivalence of the soul to
nature. I said that one of the distinctions of our century has been the
devotion of cultivated men to natural science. The benefits thence
derived to the arts and to civilization are signal and immense. They are
felt in navigation, in agriculture, in manufactures, in astronomy, in
mining, and in war. But over all their utilities, I must hold their
chief value to be metaphysical. The chief value is not the useful powers
he obtained, but the test it has been of the scholar. He has accosted
this immeasurable nature, and got clear answers. He understood what he
read. He found agreement with himself. It taught him anew the reach of
the human mind, and that it was citizen of the universe.
The first quality we know in matter is centrality,--we call it
gravity,--which holds the universe together, which remains pure and
indestructible in each mote, as in masses and planets, and from each
atom rays out illimitable influence. To this material essence answers
Truth, in the intellectual world,--Truth, whose centre is everywhere,
and its circumference nowhere, whose existence we cannot
disimagine,--the soundness and health of things, against which no blow
can be struck but it recoils on the striker,--Truth, on whose side we
always heartily are. And the first measure of a mind is its centrality,
its capacity of truth, and its adhesion to it.
When the correlation of the sciences was announced by Oersted and his
colleagues, it was no surprise; we were found already prepared for it.
The fact stated accorded with the auguries or divinations of the human
mind. Thus, if we should analyze Newton's discovery, we should say that
if it had not been anticipated by him, it would not have been found. We
are told that, in posting his books, after the French had measured on
the earth a degree of the meridian, when he saw that his theoretic
results were approximating that empirical one, his hand shook, the
figures danced, and he was so agitated that he was forced to call in an
assistant to finish the computation. Why agitated?--but because, when he
saw, in the fall of an apple to the ground, the fall of the earth to the
sun, of the sun and of all suns to the centre, that perception was
accompanied by the spasm of delight by which the intellect greets a fact
more immense still, a fact really universal,--holding in intellect as in
matter, in morals as in intellect,--that atom draws to atom throughout
nature, and truth to truth throughout spirit? His law was only a
particular of the more universal law of centrality. Every law in nature,
as gravity, centripetence, repulsion, polarity, undulation, has a
counterpart in the intellect. The laws above are sisters of the laws
below. Shall we study the mathematics of the sphere, and not its causal
essence also? Nature is a fable, whose moral blazes through it. There is
no use in Copernicus, if the robust periodicity of the solar system does
not show its equal perfection in the mental sphere,--the periodicity,
the compensatory errors, the grand reactions. I shall never believe that
centrifugence and centripetence balance, unless mind heats and
meliorates, as well as the surface and soil of the globe.
On this power, this all-dissolving unity, the emphasis of heaven and
earth is laid. Nature is brute but as this soul quickens it; Nature
always the effect, mind the flowing cause. Nature, we find, is ever as
is our sensibility; it is hostile to ignorance;--plastic, transparent,
delightful, to knowledge. Mind carries the law; history is the slow and
atomic unfolding. All things admit of this extended sense, and the
universe at last is only prophetic, or, shall we say, symptomatic, of
vaster interpretation and results. Nature an enormous system, but in
mass and in particle curiously available to the humblest need of the
little creature that walks on the earth! The immeasurableness of Nature
is not more astounding than his power to gather all her omnipotence into
a manageable rod or wedge, bringing it to a hair-point for the eye and
hand of the philosopher.
Here stretches out of sight, out of conception even, this vast Nature,
daunting, bewildering, but all penetrable, all self-similar,--an
unbroken unity,--and the mind of man is a key to the whole. He finds
that the universe, as Newton said, "was made at one cast"; the mass is
like the atom,--the same chemistry, gravity, and conditions. The
asteroids are the chips of an old star, and a meteoric stone is a chip
of an asteroid. As language is in the alphabet, so is entire Nature--the
play of all its laws--in one atom. The good wit finds the law from a
single observation,--the law, and its limitations, and its
correspondences,--as the farmer finds his cattle by a footprint. "State
the sun, and you state the planets, and conversely."
Whilst its power is offered to his hand, its laws to his science, not
less its beauty speaks to his taste, imagination, and sentiment. Nature
is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle
of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning
dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions,
yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. Look out
into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which
flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the
meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous
age,--lasting as space and time,--embosomed in time and space. And time
and space,--what are they? Our first problems, which we ponder all our
lives through, and leave where we found them; whose outrunning
immensity, the old Greeks believed, astonished the gods themselves; of
whose dizzy vastitudes all the worlds of God are a mere dot on the
margin; impossible to deny, impossible to believe. Yet the moral element
in man counterpoises this dismaying immensity, and bereaves it of
terror. The highest flight to which the muse of Horace ascended was in
that triplet of lines in which he described the souls which can calmly
confront the sublimity of nature:--
"Hunc solem, et stellas, et decedentia certis
Tempora momentis, sunt qui formidine nulla
Imbuti spectant."
The sublime point of experience is the value of a sufficient man. Cube
this value by the meeting of two such,--of two or more such,--who
understand and support each other, and you have organized victory. At
any time, it only needs the contemporaneous appearance of a few superior
and attractive men to give a new and noble turn to the public mind.
The benefactors we have indicated were exceptional men, and great
because exceptional. The question which the present age urges with
increasing emphasis, day by day, is, whether the high qualities which
distinguished them can be imparted? The poet Wordsworth asked, "What one
is, why may not millions be?" Why not? Knowledge exists to be imparted.
Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret. The inquisitiveness of the
child to hear runs to meet the eagerness of the parent to explain. The
air does not rush to fill a vacuum with such speed as the mind to catch
the expected fact. Every artist was first an amateur. The ear outgrows
the tongue, is sooner ripe and perfect; but the tongue is always
learning to say what the ear has taught it, and the hand obeys the same
lesson.
There is anything but humiliation in the homage men pay to a great man;
it is sympathy, love of the same things, effort to reach them,--the
expression of their hope of what they shall become, when the
obstructions of their mal-formation and mal-education shall be trained
away. Great men shall not impoverish, but enrich us. Great men,--the age
goes on their credit; but all the rest, when their wires are continued,
and not cut, can do as signal things, and in new parts of nature. "No
angel in his heart acknowledges any one superior to himself but the Lord
alone." There is not a person here present to whom omens that should
astonish have not predicted his future, have not uncovered his past. The
dreams of the night supplement by their divination the imperfect
experiments of the day. Every soliciting instinct is only a hint of a
coming fact, as the air and water that hang invisibly around us hasten
to become solid in the oak and the animal. But the recurrence to high
sources is rare. In our daily intercourse, we go with the crowd, lend
ourselves to low fears and hopes, become the victims of our own arts and
implements, and disuse our resort to the Divine oracle. It is only in
the sleep of the soul that we help ourselves by so many ingenious
crutches and machineries. What is the use of telegraphs? What of
newspapers? To know in each social crisis how men feel in Kansas, in
California, the wise man waits for no mails, reads no telegrams. He asks
his own heart. If they are made as he is, if they breathe the like air,
eat of the same wheat, have wives and children, he knows that their joy
or resentment rises to the same point as his own. The inviolate soul is
in perpetual telegraphic communication with the Source of events, has
earlier information, a private despatch, which relieves him of the
terror which presses on the rest of the community.
The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral
sentiment. This is the fountain of power, preserves its eternal newness,
draws its own rent out of every novelty in science. Science corrects the
old creeds; sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile
catechisms; and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander
orbits and universal laws which it discloses. Yet it does not surprise
the moral sentiment. That was older, and awaited expectant these larger
insights.
The affections are the wings by which the intellect launches on the
void, and is borne across it. Great love is the inventor and expander of
the frozen powers, the feathers frozen to our sides. It was the
conviction of Plato, of Van Helmont, of Pascal, of Swedenborg, that
piety is an essential condition of science, that great thoughts come
from the heart. It happens sometimes that poets do not believe their own
poetry; they are so much the less poets. But great men are sincere.
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material
force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the
beginning of its own fulfilment. Every generalization shows the way to a
larger. Men say, Ah! if a man could impart his talent, instead of his
performance, what mountains of guineas would be paid! Yes, but in the
measure of his absolute veracity he does impart it. When he does not
play a part, does not wish to shine, when he talks to men with the
unrestrained frankness which children use with each other, he
communicates himself, and not his vanity. All vigor is contagious, and
when we see creation we also begin to create. Depth of character, height
of genius, can only find nourishment in this soil. The miracles of
genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.
Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the
horse-power of the understanding. Hope never spreads her golden wings
but on unfathomable seas. The same law holds for the intellect as for
the will. When the will is absolutely surrendered to the moral
sentiment, that is virtue; when the wit is surrendered to intellectual
truth, that is genius. Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show.
Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the
possessor to new power as a benefactor. I know well to what assembly of
educated, reflecting, successful, and powerful persons I speak. Yours is
the part of those who have received much. It is an old legend of just
men, _Noblesse oblige_; or, superior advantages bind you to larger
generosity. Now I conceive that, in this economical world, where every
drop and every crumb is husbanded, the transcendent powers of mind were
not meant to be misused. The Divine Nature carries on its administration
by good men. Here you are set down, scholars and idealists, as in a
barbarous age; amidst insanity, to calm and guide it; amidst fools and
blind, to see the right done; among violent proprietors, to check
self-interest, stone-blind and stone-deaf, by considerations of humanity
to the workman and to his child; amongst angry politicians swelling with
self-esteem, pledged to parties, pledged to clients, you are to make
valid the large considerations of equity and good sense; under bad
governments, to force on them, by your persistence, good laws. Around
that immovable persistency of yours, statesmen, legislatures, must
revolve, denying you, but not less forced to obey.
We wish to put the ideal rules into practice, to offer liberty instead
of chains, and see whether liberty will not disclose its proper checks;
believing that a free press will prove safer than the censorship; to
ordain free trade, and believe that it will not bankrupt us; universal
suffrage, believing that it will not carry us to mobs, or back to kings
again. I believe that the checks are as sure as the springs. It is
thereby that men are great, and have great allies. And who are the
allies? Rude opposition, apathy, slander,--even these. Difficulties
exist to be surmounted. The great heart will no more complain of the
obstructions that make success hard, than of the iron walls of the gun
which hinder the shot from scattering. It was walled round with iron
tube with that purpose, to give it irresistible force in one direction.
A strenuous soul hates cheap successes. It is the ardor of the assailant
that makes the vigor of the defender. The great are not tender at being
obscure, despised, insulted. Such only feel themselves in adverse
fortune. Strong men greet war, tempest, hard times, which search till
they find resistance and bottom. They wish, as Pindar said, "to tread
the floors of hell, with necessities as hard as iron." Periodicity,
reaction, are laws of mind as well as of matter. Bad kings and governors
help us, if only they are bad enough. In England, it was the game laws
which exasperated the farmers to carry the Reform Bill. It was what we
call _plantation manners_ which drove peaceable, forgiving New England
to emancipation without phrase. In the Rebellion, who were our best
allies? Always the enemy. The community of scholars do not know their
own power, and dishearten each other by tolerating political baseness in
their members. Now, nobody doubts the power of manners, or that wherever
high society exists, it is very well able to exclude pretenders. The
intruder finds himself uncomfortable, and quickly departs to his own
gang. It has been our misfortune that the politics of America have been
often immoral. It has had the worst effect on character. We are a
complaisant, forgiving people, presuming, perhaps, on a feeling of
strength. But it is not by easy virtue, where the public is concerned,
that heroic results are obtained. We have suffered our young men of
ambition to play the game of politics and take the immoral side without
loss of caste,--to come and go without rebuke. But that kind of loose
association does not leave a man his own master. He cannot go from the
good to the evil at pleasure, and then back again to the good. There is
a text in Swedenborg, which tells in figure the plain truth. He saw in
vision the angels and the devils; but these two companies stood not face
to face and hand in hand, but foot to foot,--these perpendicular up, and
those perpendicular down.
Brothers, I draw new hope from the atmosphere we breathe to-day, from
the healthy sentiment of the American people, and from the avowed aims
and tendencies of the educated class. The age has new convictions. We
know that in certain historic periods there have been times of
negation,--a decay of thought, and a consequent national decline; that
in France, at one time, there was almost a repudiation of the moral
sentiment, in what is called, by distinction, society,--not a believer
within the Church, and almost not a theist out of it. In England, the
like spiritual disease affected the upper class in the time of Charles
II., and down into the reign of the Georges. But it honorably
distinguishes the educated class here, that they believe in the succor
which the heart yields to the intellect, and draw greatness from its
inspirations. And when I say the educated class, I know what a benignant
breadth that word has,--new in the world,--reaching millions instead of
hundreds. And more, when I look around me, and consider the sound
material of which the cultivated class here is made up,--what high
personal worth, what love of men, what hope, is joined with rich
information and practical power, and that the most distinguished by
genius and culture are in this class of benefactors,--I cannot distrust
this great knighthood of virtue, or doubt that the interests of science,
of letters, of politics and humanity, are safe. I think their hands are
strong enough to hold up the Republic. I read the promise of better
times and of greater men.
PERSIAN POETRY.
PERSIAN POETRY.
TO Baron von Hammer Purgstall, who died in Vienna in 1856, we owe our
best knowledge of the Persians. He has translated into German, besides
the "Divan" of Hafiz, specimens of two hundred poets, who wrote during a
period of five and a half centuries, from A. D. 1050 to 1600. The seven
masters of the Persian Parnassus--Firdousi, Enweri, Nisami,
Dschelaleddin, Saadi, Hafiz, and Dschami--have ceased to be empty names;
and others, like Ferideddin Attar and Omar Chiam, promise to rise in
Western estimation. That for which mainly books exist is communicated in
these rich extracts. Many qualities go to make a good telescope,--as the
largeness of the field, facility of sweeping the meridian, achromatic
purity of lenses, and so forth,--but the one eminent value is the
space-penetrating power; and there are many virtues in books,--but the
essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock, by the record
of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions, which distribute
facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories.
Oriental life and society, especially in the Southern nations, stand in
violent contrast with the multitudinous detail, the secular stability,
and the vast average of comfort of the Western nations. Life in the East
is fierce, short, hazardous, and in extremes. Its elements are few and
simple, not exhibiting the long range and undulation of European
existence, but rapidly reaching the best and the worst. The rich feed on
fruits and game,--the poor, on a watermelon's peel. All or nothing is
the genius of Oriental life. Favor of the Sultan, or his displeasure, is
a question of Fate. A war is undertaken for an epigram or a distich, as
in Europe for a duchy. The prolific sun, and the sudden and rank plenty
which his heat engenders, make subsistence easy. On the other side, the
desert, the simoom, the mirage, the lion, and the plague endanger it,
and life hangs on the contingency of a skin of water more or less. The
very geography of old Persia showed these contrasts. "My father's
empire," said Cyrus to Xenophon, "is so large, that people perish with
cold, at one extremity, whilst they are suffocated with heat, at the
other." The temperament of the people agrees with this life in extremes.
Religion and poetry are all their civilization. The religion teaches an
inexorable Destiny. It distinguishes only two days in each man's
history,--his birthday, called _the Day of the Lot_, and the Day of
Judgment. Courage and absolute submission to what is appointed him are
his virtues.
The favor of the climate, making subsistence easy, and encouraging an
outdoor life, allows to the Eastern nations a highly intellectual
organization,--leaving out of view, at present, the genius of the
Hindoos (more Oriental in every sense), whom no people have surpassed in
the grandeur of their ethical statement. The Persians and the Arabs,
with great leisure and few books, are exquisitely sensible to the
pleasures of poetry. Layard has given some details of the effect which
the _improvvisatori_ produced on the children of the desert. "When the
bard improvised an amatory ditty, the young chief's excitement was
almost beyond control. The other Bedouins were scarcely less moved by
these rude measures, which have the same kind of effect on the wild
tribes of the Persian mountains. Such verses, chanted by their
self-taught poets, or by the girls of their encampment, will drive
warriors to the combat, fearless of death, or prove an ample reward, on
their return from the dangers of the _ghazon_, or the fight. The
excitement they produce exceeds that of the grape. He who would
understand the influence of the Homeric ballads in the heroic ages
should witness the effect which similar compositions have upon the wild
nomads of the East." Elsewhere he adds, "Poetry and flowers are the wine
and spirits of the Arab; a couplet is equal to a bottle, and a rose to a
dram, without the evil effect of either."