for which you were inwardly formed, the second rule is concentration,
which doubles its force. Thus if you are a scholar, be that. The same
laws hold for you as for the laborer. The shoemaker makes a good shoe
because he makes nothing else. Let the student mind his own charge;
sedulously wait every morning for the news concerning the structure of
the world which the spirit will give him.
No way has been found for making heroism easy, even for the scholar.
Labor, iron labor, is for him. The world was created as an audience for
him; the atoms of which it is made are opportunities. Read the
performance of Bentley, of Gibbon, of Cuvier, Geoffroy St. Hilaire,
Laplace. "He can toil terribly," said Cecil of Sir Walter Raleigh. These
few words sting and bite and lash us when we are frivolous. Let us get
out of the way of their blows, by making them true of ourselves. There
is so much to be done that we ought to begin quickly to bestir
ourselves. This day-labor of ours, we confess, has hitherto a certain
emblematic air, like the annual ploughing and sowing of the Emperor of
China. Let us make it an honest sweat. Let the scholar measure his valor
by his power to cope with intellectual giants. Leave others to count
votes and calculate stocks. His courage is to weigh Plato, judge
Laplace, know Newton, Faraday, judge of Darwin, criticise Kant and
Swedenborg, and on all these arouse the central courage of insight. The
scholar's courage should be as terrible as the Cid's, though it grow out
of spiritual nature, not out of brawn. Nature, when she adds difficulty,
adds brain.
With this respect to the bias of the individual mind, add, what is
consistent with it, the most catholic receptivity for the genius of
others. The day will come when no badge, uniform, or medal will be worn;
when the eye, which carries in it planetary influences from all the
stars, will indicate rank fast enough by exerting power. For it is true
that the stratification of crusts in geology is not more precise than
the degrees of rank in minds. A man will say: 'I am born to this
position; I must take it, and neither you nor I can help or hinder me.
Surely, then, I need not fret myself to guard my own dignity.' The great
man loves the conversation or the book that convicts him, not that which
soothes or flatters him. He makes himself of no reputation; he conceals
his learning, conceals his charity. For the highest wisdom does not
concern itself with particular men, but with man enamored with the law
and the Eternal Source. Say with Antoninus, "If the picture is good, who
cares who made it? What matters it by whom the good is done, by yourself
or another?" If it is the truth, what matters who said it? If it was
right, what signifies who did it? All greatness is in degree, and there
is more above than below. Where were your own intellect, if greater had
not lived? And do you know what the right meaning of Fame is? 'Tis that
sympathy, rather that fine element by which the good become partners of
the greatness of their superiors.
Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the haughtiness of
humility. No aristocrat, no prince born to the purple, can begin to
compare with the self-respect of the saint. Why is he so lowly, but that
he knows that he can well afford it, resting on the largeness of God in
him? I have read in an old book that Barcena, the Jesuit, confessed to
another of his order that when the Devil appeared to him in his cell,
one night, out of his profound humility he rose up to meet him, and
prayed him to sit down in his chair, for he was more worthy to sit there
than himself.
Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I
meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. The
populace will say, with Horne Tooke, "If you would be powerful, pretend
to be powerful." I prefer to say, with the old Hebrew prophet, "Seekest
thou great things?--seek them not"; or, what was said of the Spanish
prince, "The more you took from him, the greater he appeared," _Plus on
lui ôte, plus il est grand_.
Scintillations of greatness appear here and there in men of unequal
character, and are by no means confined to the cultivated and so-called
moral class. 'Tis easy to draw traits from Napoleon, who was not
generous nor just, but was intellectual, and knew the law of things.
Napoleon commands our respect by his enormous self-trust,--the habit of
seeing with his own eyes, never the surface, but to the heart of the
matter, whether it was a road, a cannon, a character, an officer, or a
king,--and by the speed and security of his action in the premises,
always new. He has left a library of manuscripts, a multitude of
sayings, every one of widest application. He was a man who always fell
on his feet. When one of his favorite schemes missed, he had the faculty
of taking up his genius, as he said, and of carrying it somewhere else.
"Whatever they may tell you, believe that one fights with cannon as with
fists; when once the fire is begun, the least want of ammunition renders
what you have done already useless." I find it easy to translate all his
technics into all of mine, and his official advices are to me more
literary and philosophical than the memoirs of the Academy. His advice
to his brother, King Joseph of Spain, was: "I have only one counsel for
you,--_Be Master_." Depth of intellect relieves even the ink of crime
with a fringe of light. We perhaps look on its crimes as experiments of
a universal student; as he may read any book who reads all books, and as
the English judge in old times, when learning was rare, forgave a
culprit who could read and write. 'Tis difficult to find greatness pure.
Well, I please myself with its diffusion,--to find a spark of true fire
amid much corruption. It is some guaranty, I hope, for the health of the
soul which has this generous blood. How many men, detested in
contemporary hostile history, of whom, now that the mists have rolled
away, we have learned to correct our old estimates, and to see them as,
on the whole, instruments of great benefit. Diderot was no model, but
unclean as the society in which he lived; yet was he the best-natured
man in France, and would help any wretch at a pinch. His humanity knew
no bounds. A poor scribbler who had written a lampoon against him, and
wished to dedicate it to a pious Duc d'Orleans, came with it in his
poverty to Diderot, and Diderot, pitying the creature, wrote the
dedication for him, and so raised five-and-twenty louis to save his
famishing lampooner alive.
Meantime we hate snivelling. I do not wish you to surpass others in any
narrow or professional or monkish way. We like the natural greatness of
health and wild power. I confess that I am as much taken by it in boys,
and sometimes in people not normal, nor educated, nor presentable, nor
church-members,--even in persons open to the suspicion of irregular and
immoral living,--in Bohemians,--as in more orderly examples. For we must
remember that in the lives of soldiers, sailors, and men of large
adventure, many of the stays and guards of our household life are
wanting, and yet the opportunities and incentives to sublime daring and
performance are often close at hand. We must have some charity for the
sense of the people which admires natural power, and will elect it over
virtuous men who have less. It has this excuse, that natural is really
allied to moral power, and may always be expected to approach it by its
own instincts. Intellect at least is not stupid, and will see the force
of morals over men, if it does not itself obey. Henry VII. of England
was a wise king. When Gerald, Earl of Kildare, who was in rebellion
against him, was brought to London, and examined before the Privy
Council, one said, "All Ireland cannot govern this Earl." "Then let this
Earl govern all Ireland," replied the King.
'Tis noted of some scholars, like Swift, and Gibbon and Donne, that they
pretended to vices which they had not, so much did they hate hypocrisy.
William Blake, the artist, frankly says, "I never knew a bad man in whom
there was not something very good." Bret Harte has pleased himself with
noting and recording the sudden virtue blazing in the wild reprobates of
the ranches and mines of California.
Men are ennobled by morals and by intellect; but those two elements know
each other and always beckon to each other, until at last they meet in
the man, if he is to be truly great. The man who sells you a lamp shows
you that the flame of oil, which contented you before, casts a strong
shade in the path of the petroleum which he lights behind it; and this
again casts a shadow in the path of the electric light. So does
intellect when brought into the presence of character; character puts
out that light. Goethe, in his correspondence with his Grand Duke of
Weimar, does not shine. We can see that the Prince had the advantage of
the Olympian genius. It is more plainly seen in the correspondence
between Voltaire and Frederick of Prussia. Voltaire is brilliant,
nimble, and various, but Frederick has the superior tone. But it is
curious that Byron _writes down_ to Scott; Scott writes up to him. The
Greeks surpass all men till they face the Romans, when Roman character
prevails over Greek genius. Whilst degrees of intellect interest only
classes of men who pursue the same studies, as chemists or astronomers,
mathematicians or linguists, and have no attraction for the crowd, there
are always men who have a more catholic genius, are really great as men,
and inspire universal enthusiasm. A great style of hero draws equally
all classes, all the extremes of society, till we say the very dogs
believe in him. We have had such examples in this country, in Daniel
Webster, Henry Clay, and the seamen's preacher, Father Taylor; in
England, Charles James Fox; in Scotland, Robert Burns; and in France,
though it is less intelligible to us, Voltaire. Abraham Lincoln is
perhaps the most remarkable example of this class that we have seen,--a
man who was at home and welcome with the humblest, and with a spirit and
a practical vein in the times of terror that commanded the admiration of
the wisest. His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room
in it to hold the memory of a wrong.
These may serve as local examples to indicate a magnetism which is
probably known better and finer to each scholar in the little Olympus of
his own favorites, and which makes him require geniality and humanity in
his heroes. What are these but the promise and the preparation of a day
when the air of the world shall be purified by nobler society; when the
measure of greatness shall be usefulness in the highest
sense,--greatness consisting in truth, reverence, and good-will?
Life is made of illusions, and a very common one is the opinion you hear
expressed in every village: 'O yes, if I lived in New York or
Philadelphia, Cambridge or New Haven or Boston or Andover there might be
fit society; but it happens that there are no fine young men, no
superior women in my town.' You may hear this every day; but it is a
shallow remark. Ah! have you yet to learn that the eye altering alters
all; "that the world is an echo which returns to each of us what we
say"? 'Tis not examples of greatness, but sensibility to see them, that
is wanting. The good botanist will find flowers between the street
pavements, and any man filled with an idea or a purpose will find
examples and illustrations and coadjutors wherever he goes. Wit is a
magnet to find wit, and character to find character. Do you not know
that people are as those with whom they converse? And if all or any are
heavy to me, that fact accuses me. Why complain, as if a man's debt to
his inferiors were not at least equal to his debt to his superiors? If
men were equals, the waters would not move; but the difference of level
which makes Niagara a cataract, makes eloquence, indignation, poetry, in
him who finds there is much to communicate. With self-respect, then,
there must be in the aspirant the strong fellow-feeling, the humanity,
which makes men of all classes warm to him as their leader and
representative.
We are thus forced to express our instinct of the truth, by exposing the
failures of experience. The man whom we have not seen, in whom no regard
of self degraded the adorer of the laws,--who by governing himself
governed others; sportive in manner, but inexorable in act; who sees
longevity in his cause; whose aim is always distinct to him; who is
suffered to be himself in society; who carries fate in his eye;--he it
is whom we seek, encouraged in every good hour that here or hereafter he
shall be found.
IMMORTALITY.
IMMORTALITY.
IN the year 626 of our era, when Edwin, the Anglo-Saxon king, was
deliberating on receiving the Christian missionaries, one of his nobles
said to him: "The present life of man, O king, compared with that space
of time beyond, of which we have no certainty, reminds me of one of your
winter feasts, where you sit with your generals and ministers. The
hearth blazes in the middle and a grateful heat is spread around, while
storms of rain and snow are raging without. Driven by the chilling
tempest, a little sparrow enters at one door and flies delighted around
us till it departs through the other. Whilst it stays in our mansion it
feels not the winter storm; but when this short moment of happiness has
been enjoyed, it is forced again into the same dreary tempest from which
it had escaped, and we behold it no more. Such is the life of man, and
we are as ignorant of the state which preceded our present existence as
of that which will follow it. Things being so I feel that if this new
faith can give us more certainty, it deserves to be received."
In the first records of a nation in any degree thoughtful and
cultivated, some belief in the life beyond life would of course be
suggested. The Egyptian people furnish us the earliest details of an
established civilization, and I read, in the second book of Herodotus,
this memorable sentence: "The Egyptians are the first of mankind who
have affirmed the immortality of the soul." Nor do I read it with less
interest, that the historian connects it presently with the doctrine of
metempsychosis; for I know well that, where this belief once existed, it
would necessarily take a base form for the savage and a pure form for
the wise;--so that I only look on the counterfeit as a proof that the
genuine faith had been there. The credence of men, more than race or
climate, makes their manners and customs; and the history of religion
may be read in the forms of sepulture. There never was a time when the
doctrine of a future life was not held. Morals must be enjoined, but
among rude men moral judgments were rudely figured under the forms of
dogs and whips, or of an easier and more plentiful life after death. And
as the savage could not detach in his mind the life of the soul from the
body, he took great care for his body. Thus the whole life of man in the
first ages was ponderously determined on death; and, as we know, the
polity of the Egyptians, the by-laws of towns, of streets and houses,
respected burial. It made every man an undertaker, and the priesthood a
senate of sextons. Every palace was a door to a pyramid; a king or rich
man was a _pyramidaire_. The labor of races was spent on the excavation
of catacombs. The chief end of man being to be buried well, the arts
most in request were masonry and embalming, to give imperishability to
the corpse.
The Greek, with his perfect senses and perceptions, had quite another
philosophy. He loved life and delighted in beauty. He set his wit and
taste, like elastic gas, under these mountains of stone, and lifted
them. He drove away the embalmers; he built no more of those doleful
mountainous tombs. He adorned death, brought wreaths of parsley and
laurel; made it bright with games of strength and skill, and
chariot-races. He looked at death only as the distributor of
imperishable glory. Nothing can excel the beauty of his sarcophagus. He
carried his arts to Rome, and built his beautiful tombs at Pompeii. The
poet Shelley says of these delicately carved white marble cells, "they
seem not so much tombs, as voluptuous chambers for immortal spirits." In
the same spirit the modern Greeks, in their songs, ask that they may be
buried where the sun can see them, and that a little window may be cut
in the sepulchre, from which the swallow might be seen when it comes
back in the spring.
Christianity brought a new wisdom. But learning depends on the learner.
No more truth can be conveyed than the popular mind can bear; and the
barbarians who received the cross took the doctrine of the resurrection
as the Egyptians took it. It was an affair of the body, and narrowed
again by the fury of sect; so that grounds were sprinkled with holy
water to receive only orthodox dust; and to keep the body still more
sacredly safe for resurrection, it was put into the walls of the church:
and the churches of Europe are really sepulchres. I read at Melrose
Abbey the inscription on the ruined gate:--
"The Earth goes on the Earth glittering with gold;
The Earth goes to the Earth sooner than it should;
The Earth builds on the Earth castles and towers;
The Earth says to the Earth, All this is ours."
Meantime the true disciples saw through the letter the doctrine of
eternity which dissolved the poor corpse and nature also, and gave
grandeur to the passing hour. The most remarkable step in the religious
history of recent ages is that made by the genius of Swedenborg, who
described the moral faculties and affections of man, with the hard
realism of an astronomer describing the suns and planets of our system,
and explained his opinion of the history and destiny of souls in a
narrative form, as of one who had gone in a trance into the society of
other worlds. Swedenborg described an intelligible heaven, by continuing
the like employments in the like circumstances as those we know,--men in
societies, in houses, towns, trades, entertainments,--continuations of
our earthly experience. We shall pass to the future existence as we
enter into an agreeable dream. All nature will accompany us there.
Milton anticipated the leading thought of Swedenborg, when he wrote, in
"Paradise Lost,"--
"What if Earth
Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein
Each to the other like more than on earth is thought?"
Swedenborg had a vast genius, and announced many things true and
admirable, though always clothed in somewhat sad and Stygian colors.
These truths, passing out of his system into general circulation, are
now met with every day, qualifying the views and creeds of all churches,
and of men of no church. And I think we are all aware of a revolution in
opinion. Sixty years ago, the books read, the sermons and prayers heard,
the habits of thought of religious persons, were all directed on death.
All were under the shadow of Calvinism and of the Roman Catholic
purgatory, and death was dreadful. The emphasis of all the good books
given to young people was on death. We were all taught that we were born
to die; and over that, all the terrors that theology could gather from
savage nations were added to increase the gloom. A great change has
occurred. Death is seen as a natural event, and is met with firmness. A
wise man in our time caused to be written on his tomb, "Think on
living." That inscription describes a progress in opinion. Cease from
this antedating of your experience. Sufficient to to-day are the duties
of to-day. Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the
work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's
duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow
it.
"The name of death was never terrible
To him that knew to live."
A man of thought is willing to die, willing to live; I suppose, because
he has seen the thread on which the beads are strung, and perceived that
it reaches up and down, existing quite independently of the present
illusions. A man of affairs is afraid to die, is pestered with terrors,
because he has not this vision, and is the victim of those who have
moulded the religious doctrines into some neat and plausible system, as
Calvinism, Romanism, or Swedenborgism, for household use. It is the fear
of the young bird to trust its wings. The experiences of the soul will
fast outgrow this alarm. The saying of Marcus Antoninus it were hard to
mend: "It were well to die if there be gods, and sad to live if there be
none." I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction,
namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall continue,
it will continue; if not best, then it will not: and we, if we saw the
whole, should of course see that it was better so. Schiller said, "What
is so universal as death, must be benefit." A friend of Michel Angelo
saying to him that his constant labor for art must make him think of
death with regret, "By no means," he said; "for if life be a pleasure,
yet since death also is sent by the hand of the same Master, neither
should that displease us." Plutarch, in Greece, has a deep faith that
the doctrine of the Divine Providence and that of the immortality of the
soul rest on one and the same basis. Hear the opinion of Montesquieu:
"If the immortality of the soul were an error, I should be sorry not to
believe it. I avow that I am not so humble as the atheist; I know not
how they think, but for me, I do not wish to exchange the idea of
immortality against that of the beatitude of one day. I delight in
believing myself as immortal as God himself. Independently of revealed
ideas, metaphysical ideas give me a vigorous hope of my eternal
well-being, which I would never renounce."[6]
I was lately told of young children who feel a certain terror at the
assurance of life without end. "What! will it never stop?" the child
said; "what! never die? _never_, never? It makes me feel so tired." And
I have in mind the expression of an older believer, who once said to me,
"The thought that this frail being is never to end is so overwhelming
that my only shelter is God's presence." This disquietude only marks the
transition. The healthy state of mind is the love of life. What is so
good, let it endure.