Ralph Waldo Emerson - Part 2

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The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson - Part 2

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There is a power in love to divine 
another’s destiny better than that other 
can, and, by heroic encouragements, hold 
him to his task. What has friendship so 
signal as its sublime attraction to what- 
ever virtue is in us ? We will never more 
think cheaply of ourselves, or of life. We 
are piqued to some purpose, and the in- 
dustry of the diggers on the railroad will 
not again shame us. 

Under this head, too, falls that homage, 
very pure, as I think, which all ranks pay 
to the hero of the day, from Coriolanus 
and Gracchus, down to Pitt, Lafayette, 
Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear 
the shouts in the street! The people 
cannot see him enough. They delight in 
a man. Here is a head and a trunk I 
What a front ! what eyes f Atlantean 
shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, 
with equal inward force to guide the great 
machine I This pleasure of full expres- 
sion to that which, in their private ex- 
perience, is usually cramped and ob- 
structed, runs, also, much higher, and is 
the secret of the reader’s joy in literary 
genii^. Nothing is kept back. There is 
firq Ccioough tQ fuse the mountain of ore. 


Shakespeare’s principal merit may ba 
conveyed, in saying that he, of all men. 
best understands tlie English language, 
and can say what he will. Yet these un- 
choked channels and floodgates of ex- 
pression are only health or fortunate con- 
stitution. Shakespeare’s name suggests 
other and purely intellectual benefits. 

Senates and sovereigns have no com- 
pliment, with their medals, swords, and 
armorial coats, like the addressing to a 
human being thoughts out of a certain 
height, and presupposing his intelligence, 
This honour, which is possible in per- 
sonal intercourse scarcely twice in a life- 
time, genius perpetually pays; contented, 
if now and then, in a century, the proffer 
is accepted. The indicators of the values 
of matter are degraded to a sort of cooks 
and confectioners, on the appearance of 
the indicators of ideas. Genius is the 
naturalist or geographer of the super- 
sensible regions, and draws their map ; 
and, by acquainting us with new fields of 
activity, cools our affection for the old. 
These are at once accepted as the reality, 
of which the world we have conversed 
with is the show. 

We go to the gymnasium and the 
swimming-school to see the power and 
beauty of the body ; there is the like 
pleasure, and a higher benefit from wit- 
nessing intellectual feats of all kinds ; as, 
feats of memory, of mathematical combi- 
nation, great power of abstraction, the 
transmutings of the imagination, even 
versatility, and concentration, as these 
acts expose the invisible organs and 
members of the mind, which respond, 
member for member, to the parts of the 
body. For, wc thus enter a new gymna- 
sium, and learn to choose men by their 
truest marks, taught, with Plato, ” to 
choose those w'ho can, without aid from 
the eyes, or any other sense, proceed to 
truth and to being.” Foremost among 
these activities, are the summersaults, 
spells, and resurrections wrought by the 
imagination. When this wakes, a man 
seems to multiply ten times or a thousand 
times his force. It opens the delicious 
sense of indeterminate size, and inspires 
an audacious mental habit. We are aa 
elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a 
sentence in a book, or a word dropped ia 
conversation, sets free our fancy, and in- 
stantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, 
and our feet tread the floor of the Pit. 
And this benefit is real, because we am 
entitled to these enlargements, and, onca 
having passed the bounds, shall oever 



USES OP GREAT MEN. 


165 


4gAin be quite the miserable pedants we I 
were. 

The high functions of the intellect are 
SO allied, that some imaginative power 
usually appears in all eminent minds, 
even in arithmeticians of the first class, 
but especially in meditative men of an 
intuitive habit of thought. This class 
serve us, so that they have the perception 
of identity and the perception of reaction. 
The eyes of Plato, Shakespeare, Sweden- 
borg, Goethe, never shut on either of 
these laws. The perception of these laws 
is a kind of metre of the mind. Little; 
minds are little, through failure to see; 
them. 

Even these feasts have their surfeit. 
Our delight in reason degenerates into 
idolatry of the herald. Especially" when 
a mind of powerful method has instructed 
men, we find the examples of oppression. 
The dominion of Aristotle, the Ptolemaic 
astronomy, the credit of Luther, of Bacon, 
of Locke — in religion, the history of hier- 
archies, of saints, and the sects which 
have taken the name of each founder, are 
in point. Alas ! every man is such a 
victim. The imbecility of men is always 
inviting the imprudence of power. It is 
the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle and 
to blind the beholder. But true genius 
seeks to defend us from itself. True 
genius will not impoverish, but will 
liberate, and add now senses. If a wise 
man should appear in our village, he 
would create, in those who conversed 
with him, a new consciousness of wealth, 
by opening their eyes to unobserved ad- 
vantages ; he would establish a sense of 
immovable equality, calm us with assur- 
ances that we could not be cheated ; as 
everyone would discern the checks and 
guaranties of condition. The rich would 
see their mistakes and poverty, the poor 
their escapes and their resources. 

But nature brings all this about in due 
time. Potation is her remedy. The soul 
is impatient of masters, and eager for 
change. Housekeepers say of a domestic 
who has been valuable, She had lived 
with mo long enough. We are tenden- 
cies, or rather, symptoms, and none of 
us complete. We touch and go, and sip 
the foam of many lives. Rotation is the 
law of nature. When nature removes a 
great man., people explore the horizon for 
a successor ; but none comes, and none 
will. His class is extinguished with him. 
In some other and quite different field, 
the next man will appear; not Jefferson, 
p>t Franklin, but npw a great salesmaQ ; 


then a road-contractor ; then a scudent of 
fishes; then a buffalo-hunting explorer? 
or a semi -savage Western general. Thus 
we make a stand against our rougher 
masters ; but against the best there is a 
finer remedy. The power which they 
communicate is not theirs. When we are 
exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to 
Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato 
was debtor. 

I must not forget that we have a special 
debt to a single class. Life is a scale of 
degrees. Between rank and rank of oiur 
great men are wide intervals. Mankind 
have, in all ages, attached themselves to 
a few persons, who, either by the quality 
of that idea they embodied, or by the 
largeness of their reception, were en- 
titled to the position of leaders and law- 
givers. These teach us the qualities oA 
primary nature — admit us to the con 
stitution of things. We swim day by day 
on a river of delusions, and are effectually 
amused with houses and towns in the air. 
of which the men about us are dupes, 
But life is a sincerity. In lucid intervals 
we say, “ Let there be an entrance opened 
for m© into realities; I have worn the 
fool’s cap too long.” We will know the 
meaning of our economies and politics, 
Give us the cipher, and, if persons and 
things are scores of a celestial music, let 
us read off the strains. We have been 
cheated of our reason ; yet there have 
been sane men, who enjoyed a rich and 
related existence. What they know, they 
know for us. With each new mind, a new 
secret of nature transpires; nor can the 
Bible be closed, until the last great man 
is born. These men correct the delirium 
of the animal spirits, make us con- 
siderate, and engage us to new aims and 
powers. The veneration of mankind 
selects these for the highest place. Wit- 
ness the multitude of statues, pictures, 
and memorials which recall their genius 
in every city, village, house, and ship : — 

“ Ever their phantoms arise before us, 

Our loftier brothers, but one in blood, 

At bed and table they lord it o’er us. 

With looks of beauty, and words of good.* 

How to illustrate the distinctive benefit 
of ideas, the service rendered by those 
who introduce moral truths into the 
general mind ? I am plagued, in all my 
living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. 
If I work in my garden and prune an 
apple-tree, 1 am well enough entertained, 
and could continue indefinitely iji the 
I like occupatioDi But it comes to Iniind 



166 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


that a day is gone, and I have got this 
precious nothing done. I go to Boston 
or New York, and run up and down on 
my affairs; they are sped, but so is the 
day. I am vexed by the recollection of 
this price I have paid for a trifling ad- 
vantage. I remember the pcan d'ane, on 
which whoso sat should have his desire, 
but a piece of the skin was gone for every 
wish. I go to a convention of philan- 
thropists. Do what 1 can, I cannot keep 
my eyes off the clock. But if there should 
appear in the company some gentle soul 
who knows little of persons or parties, of 
Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a 
law that disposes these particulars, and 
80 certifies me of the equity which check- 
mates every false player, bankrupts every 
self-seeker, and apprises me of my inde- 
pendence on any conditions of country, 
or time, or human body, that man liber- 
ates me ; I forget the clock ; I pass out of 
the sore relation to persons ; I am healed 
of my hurts ; I am made immortal by 
apprehending riiy possession of incor- 
ruptible goods. Here is great competi- 
tion of rich and poor. We live in a 
market, where is only so much wheat, or 
wool, or land ; and if I have so much 
more, every other must have so much 
less. I seem to have no good, without 
breach of good manners. Nobody is glad 
in the gladness of another, and our system 
is one of war, of an injurious superiority. 
Every child of the Saxon race is educated 
to wish to be first. It is our system ; and 
a man comes to measure his greatness by 
the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his 
competitors. But in these new fields 
there is room : here are no self-esteems, 
no exclusions. 

I admire great men of all classes, those 
who stand for facts, and for thoughts; I 
like rough and smooth, " Scourgers of 
God,” and ” Darlings of the human race.” 
I like the first Cassar ; and Charles V., of 
Spain ; and Charles XII., of Sweden ; 
Richard Plantagenet ; and Bonaparte, in 
France. I applaud a sufficient man, an 
officer equal to his office ; captains, minis- 
ters, senators. I like a master standing 
firm on legs of iron, well-born, rich, 
handsome, eloquent, loaded with advan- 
tages, drawing all men by fascination into 
tributaries and supporters of his power. 
Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or 
Stafif-like, carry on the work of the world. 
But I find him greater, when he can 
abolish himself, and all heroes, by letting 
in this element of reason, irrespective of 
peri^jiia: this subtilizer, and irresistible 


upward force, into our thought, destroy- 
ing individualism ; the power so great, 
that the potentate is nothing. Then he io 
a monarch, who gives a constitution to 
his people ; a pontiff, who preaches the 
equality of souls, and releases his ser- 
vants from their barbarous homages ; an 
emperor, who can spare his empire, 

But I intended to specify, with a little 
minuteness, two or three points of ser- 
vice. Nature never spares the opium or 
nepenthe ; but, wherever she mars her 
creature with some deformity or defect, 
lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise, 
and the sufferer goes joyfully through 
life, ignorant of the ruin, and incapable 
of seeing it, though all the world point 
their finger at it every day. The worth- 
less and offensive members of society, 
whose existence is a social pest, invari- 
ably think themselves the most ill-used 
people alive, and never get over their 
astonishment at the ingratitude and 
selfishness of their contemporaries. Our 
globe discovers its hidden virtues, not 
only in heroes and archangels, but in 
gossips and nurses. Is it not a rare con- 
trivance that lodged the due inertia in 
every creature, the conserving, resisting 
energy, the anger at being waked or 
changed ? Altogether independent of the 
intellectual force in each, is the pride of 
opinion, the security that we are right. 
Not the feeblest grandame, not a mowing 
idiot, but uses what spark of perception 
and faculty is left, to chuckle and triumph 
in his or her opinion over the absurdities 
of all the rest. Difference from me is the 
measure of absurdity. Not one has a 
misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a 
bright thought that made things cohere 
with this bitumen, fastest of cements ? 
But, in the midst of this chuckle of self- 
gratulation, some figure goes by, which 
Thersites too can love and admire. This 
is he that should marshal us the way we 
were going. There is no end to his aid. 
Without Plato we should almost lose our 
faith in the possibility of a reasonable 
book. V»^e seem to want but one, but we 
want one. We love to associate with 
heroic persons, since our receptivity is 
unlimited ; and, with the great, our 
thoughts and manners easily become 
great. We are all wise in capacity, 
though so few in energy. There needs 
but one wise man in a company, and all 
are wise, so rapid is the contagion. 

Great men are thus a collyrium to clear 

our eyes from egotism, and enable ua to 



USES OF GREAT MEN 


other people and their works. But 
there are vices and follies incident to 
whole populations and ages. Men re- 
Bemble their contemporaries, even more 
than their progenitors. It is observed in 
old couples, or in persons who have been 
housemates for a course of years, that 
tney grow alike ; and, if they should live 
long enough, we should not be able to 
know them apart. Nature abhors these 
complaisances, which threaten to melt 
the world into a lump, and hastens to 
break up such maudlin agglutinations. 
The like assimilation goes on between 
men of one town, of one sect, of one 
political party ; and the ideas of the time 
are in the air, and infect all who breathe 
it. Viewed from any high point, this city 
of New York, yonder city of London, the 
Western civilisation, would seem a bundle 
of insanities. We keep each other in 
countenance, and exasperate by emula- 
tion the frenzy of the time. The shield 
against the stingings of conscience, is the 
universal practice, or our contemporaries. 
Again, it is very easy to be as wise and 
good as your companions. We learn of 
our contemporaries what they know, with- 
out effort, and almost through the pores 
of the skin. We catch it by sympathy, 
or, as a wife arrives at the intellectual 
and moral elevations of her husband. But 
we stop where they stop. Very hardly 
can we take another step. The great, or 
such as hold of nature, and transcend 
fashions, by their fidelity to universal 
ideas, are saviours from these federal 
errors, and defend us from our contem- 
poraries. They are the exceptions which 
we want, where all grows alike. A foreign 
greatness is the antidote for cabalism. 

Thus w^e feed on genius, and refresh 
ourselves from too much conversation 
with our mates, and exult in the depth of 
nature in that direction in which he leads 
us. What indemnification is one great 
man for populations of pygmies ? Every 
mother wishes one son a genius, though 
ail the rest should be mediocre. But a 
new danger appears in the excess of in- 
fluence of the great man. Ilis attractions 
warp us from our place. We have become 
underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah ! 
yonder in the horizon is our help — other 
great men, new qualities, counterweights 
and checks on each otlier. We cloy ofj 
the honey of each peculiar greatness. 
Every hero becomes a bore at last. Per- 
haps Voltaire w'as not bad-hearted, yet he 
said of the good Jesus, even, " I pray you, 
M tpe Qever hear tha^ mejrO’s agaia." 


They cry up the virtues of George Wash- 
ington — “ Damn George Washington I " 
is the poor Jacobin’s whole speech and 
confutation. But it is human nature’? in- 
dispensable defence. The centripetcnce 
augments the centrifugence. We balance 
one man with his opposite, and the health 
of the state depends on the see-saw. 

There is, however, a speedy limit to the 
use of heroes. Every genius is defended 
from approach by quantities of unavail- 
ableness. They are very attractive, and 
seem at a dist? nee our own ; but we are 
hindered on all sides from approach. The 
more we are drawn, the more we are 
repelled. There is something not solid 
in the good that is done for us. The best 
discovery the discoverer makes for him- 
self. It has something unreal for his 
companion, until he too has substantiated 
it. It seems as if the Deity dressed each 
soul which ho sends into nature in certain 
virtues and powers not communicable to 
other men, and, sending it to perform one 
more turn through the circle of beings, 
wrote ** Not trans/erablet" and “ Good /or 
this trip only," on these garments of the 
soul. There is somewhat deceptive about 
the intercourse of minds. The boundaries 
are invisible, but tliey are never crossed. 
There is such good-will to impart, and 
such good-will to receive, that each 
threatens to become the other ; but the 
law of individuality collects its secret 
strength ; you are you, and I am I, and so 
we remain. 

For nature wishes everything to remain 
itself ; and, whilst every individual strives 
to grow and exclude, and to exclude and 
grow, to the extremities of the universe, 
and to imj)ose the law of its being on 
every otlier creature, Nature steadily aims 
to protect each against every other. Each 
is self-defended. Nothing is mere marked 
than the power by which individuals are 
guarded from individuals, in a world where 
every benefactor becomes :30 easily a 
malefactor, only by continuation of his 
activity into places where it is not due 
where children seem so much at the mercy 
of their foolish parents, and where almost 
all men are too social and interfering. 
We rightly speak of the guardian angels 
of cliildren. How superior in their security 
from infusions of evil persons, from vul- 
garity and second thought 1 They shed 
their own abundant beauty on the objects 
they behold. Therefore, they are not at 
the mercy of such poor educators as wq 
adults. If we huff and chide them, t^y 
1 890Q epme not to mind it, and get 91 



teg REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


reliance ; and if we indulge them to folly, 
they learn the limitation elsewhere. 

We need not fear excessive influence. 
A more generous trust is permitted. Serve 
the great. Stick at no humiliation. 
Grudge no office thou canst render. Be, 
the limb of their body, the breath of their 
mouth. Compromise thy egotism. Who 
cares for that, so thou gain aught wider 
and nobler ? Never mind the taunt of 
Boswell ism : the devotion may easily be 
greater than the wretched pride which is 
guarding its own skirts. Be another : not 
thyself but a Platonist ; not a soul, but a 
Christian ; not a naturalist, but a Carte- 
isian; not a poet, but a Shakespearian. 
In vain, the wheels of tendency will not 
stop, nor will all the forces of inertia, fear, 
or of love itself, hold thee there. On, and 
for ever onward ! The microscope observes 
a monad or wheel-insect among the in- 
fusories circulating in water. Presently, 
a dot appears on the animal, which 
enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two 
perfect animals. The ever-proceeding 
detachment appears not less in all thought 
and in society. Children think they can- 
not live without their parents. But, long 
before they are aware of it, the black dot 
has appeared, and the detachment taken 
place. Any accident will now reveal to 
them their independence. 

But great men ; the word is injurious. 
Is there caste ? is there fate ? What 
becomes of the promise to virtue ? The 
thoughtful youth laments the superfeeta- 
tion of nature. “ Generous and hand- 
some,” he says, ” is your hero ; but look at 
yonder poor Paddy, whose country is his 
wheelbarrow ; look at his whole nation of , 
Paddies.” Why are the masses, from the | 
dawn of history down, food for knives and 
powder ? The idea dignifies a few leaders, 
who have sentiment, opinion, love, self- 
devotion ; and they make war and death 
sacred ; but what for the wretches whom 
they hire and kill ? The cheapness of 
man is every day’s tragedy. It is as real 
a loss that others should be low, as that 
we should be low ; for we must have 
^.'/ciety. 

Is it a reply to these suggestions, to say, 
society is a Pestalozzian school : all are 
teachers and pupils in turn ? We are 
equally served by receiving and by im- 
parting. Men who know the same things 
are not long the best company for each 
other. But bring to each an intelligent 
perion of another experience, and it is as 
II you let off water from a lake, by cutting 


a lower basin. It seems a mechanical ad« 
vantage, and great benefit it is to each 
speaker, as he can now paint out hij 
thought to himself. We pass very fast, in 
our personal moods, from dignity to de- 
pendence. And if any appear never to 
assume the chair, but always to stand and 
servo, it is because we do not see the 
company in a sufficiently long period for 
the whole rotation of parts to come about. 
As to what we call the masses, and com* 
mon men; there are no common men. 
All men are at laet of a size ; and true art 
is only possible, on thp conviction that 
every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. 
Fair play, and an open field, and freshest 
laurels to all who have won them I But 
Heaven reserves an equal scope for every 
creature. Each is uneasy until he has 
produced his private ray unto the concave 
sphere, and beheld his talent also in its 
last nobility and exaltation. 

The heroes of the hour are relatively 
great : of a faster growth ; or they are 
such, in whom, at the moment of success, 
a quality is ripe which is then in request. 
Other days will demand other qualities. 
Some rays escape the common observer, 
and want a finely adapted eye. Ask the 
great man if there be none greater. His 
companions are ; and not the less great, 
but the more, that society cannot sea 
them. Nature never sends a great man 
into the planet, without confiding the 
secret to another soul. 

One gracious fact emerges from these 
studies— that there is true ascension in 
our love. The reputatioxas of the nine- 
teenth century will one day be quoted, to 
prove its barbarism. The genius of hu- 
manity is the real subject whose biography 
is written in our annals. We must infer 
much, and supply many chasms in the 
record. The history of the universe is 
symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No 
man, in all the procession of famous men, 
is reason or illumination, or that essence 
we were looking for; but is an exhibition, 
in some quarter, of new possibilities. 
Could we one day complete the immense 
figure which these flagrant points com- 
pose! The study of many individuals 
leads us to an elemental region wherein 
the individual is lost, or wherein all touch 
by their summits. Thought and feeling, 
that break out there, cannot be impounded 
by any fence of personality. This is the 
key to the power of the greatest men— - 
I their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality 
I of mind travels by nignt and by day, in 
I concentric circles from its origin, twd 



PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 


publishes llflelt by unknown methods : 
the union of all minds appear intimate : 
what gets admission to one, cannot be 
kept out of any other : the smallest acqui- 
sition of truth or of energy, in any quar- 
ter, is so much good to the commonwealth 
of souls. If the disparities of talent and 
position vanish, when the individuals are 
seen in the duration which is necessary to 
complete the career of each ; even more 
swiftly the seeming injustice disappears, 
when we ascend to the central identity of 
all the individuals, and know that they are 
made of the substance which ordaineth 
and doeth. j 

The genius of humanity is the right! 
point of view of history. The qualities! 
abide; the men who exhibit them have* 
now more, now less, and pass away; the 
qualities remain on another brow. No 
experience is mKe familiar. Once you 
saw phoenixes: they are gone ; the world 
is not therefore disenchanted. The ves- 
sels on which you read sacred emblems 
turn out to be common pottery ; but the 
sense of the pictures is sacred, and you 
may still read them transferred to the 
walls of the world. For a time, our 
teachers serve us personally, as metres or 
milestones of progress. Once they were 
angels of knowledge, and their figures 
touched the sky, Then we drew near, saw 


169 

their means, culture, an^ limits; and 
they yielded their place to other geniuses. 
Happy, if a few names remain so high, 
that we have not been able to read them 
nearer, and age and comparison have not 
robbed them of a ray. But, at last, wa 
shall cease to look in men for complete- 
ness, and shall content ourselves with their 
social and delegated quality. All that re- 
spects the individual is temporary and 
prospective, like the individual himself, 
who is ascending out of his limits, into a 
catholic existence. We have never come 
at the true and best benefit of any genius, 
so long as we believe him an original 
force. In the moment when he ceases to 
help us as a cause, he begins to help us 
more as an effect. Then he appears as 
an exponent of a vaster mind and will. 
The opaque self becomes transparent with 
the light of the First Cause. 

Yet, within the limits of human educa- 
tion and agency, we may say, great men 
exist that there may be greater men. The 
destiny of organised nature is ameliora- 
tion, and who can tell its limits ? It is 
for man to tame the chaos ; on every side, 
wdiilst he lives, to scatter the seeds ot 
science and of song, that climate, corn, 
animals, men, may be milder, and the 
germs of love and benefit may be multi- 
plied. 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 


Among books, Plato only is entitled to 
Omar’s fanatical compliment to the Koran, 
when he said, “Burn the libraries; for, 
their value is in this book." These sen- 
tences contain the culture of nations ; 
these are the corner-stone of schools ; 
these are the fountain-head of literatures. 
A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, 
taste, symmetry, poetry, language, rhe- 
toric, ontology, morals, or practical wis- 
dom. There was never such range of 
speculation. Out of Plato come all things 
that are still written and debated among 
men of thought. Great havoc makes he 
among our originalities. We have reached 
the mountain from which all these drift 
boulders were detached. The Bible of 
the learned for twenty-two hundred years, , 
every brisk young man, who says in sue-' 
cession fine things to each reluctant gene- 
ration — Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, 
Bruno, I,ocke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Cole- 
ridge -ls some reader of Plato, translating 


[into the vernacular, wittily, his good 
things. Even the men of grander propor- 
tion sufTer some deduction from the mis- 
fortune (shall I say ?) of coming after this 
exhausting generaliser. St. Augustine, 
Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Sweden- 
borg, Goethe, are likewise his debtors, 
and must say after him. For it is fair to 
credit the broadest generaliser with all 
the particulars deducible from his thesis. 

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, 
Plato — at once the glory and the shame o( 
mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman 
have availed to add any idea to his cate« 
gories. No wife, no children had he, and 
the thinkers of all civilized nations are 
his posterity, and are tinged with his 
mind. How many great men Nature is 
incessantly sending up out of night, to be 
his men — Platonists I the Alexandrians, e 
constellation of genius ; the Elizabethans, 
not less ; Sir Thomas More, Henry Mqrs, 
John Hales, John Smith, Lord 0acub« 



170 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cud worth, Syden- 
ham, Thomas Taylor ; Marcilius Ficinus, 
and Picus Mirandola. Calvinism is in 
his Phaedo ; Christianity is in it. Maho- 
metanism draws all its philosophy, in its 
handbook of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly, 
from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all 
its texts. This citizen of a town in Greece 
is no villager nor patriot. An Englishman 
reads and says, “how English !“ a Ger- 
man— “how Teutonic !*’ an Italian — “ how 
Roman and how Greek ! ’’ As they say 
that Helen of Argos had that universal 
beauty that everybody felt related to her, 
so Plato seems, to a reader in New Eng- 
land, an American genius. His broad 
humanity transcends all seclional lines. 

This range of Pkito instructs us what 
to think of the vexed question concerning 
his reputed works — what are genuine, 
what spurious. It is singular that wher- 
ever wo find a man higher, by a whole 
head, than any of his contemporaries, it 
is sure to come into doubt, what are his 
real works. Thus, Homer, Plato, Raffaelle, 
Shakespeare. For these men magnetise 
their contemporaries, so that their com- 
panions can do for them what they can 
never do for themselves ; and the great 
man does thus live in several bodies, and 
write, or paint, or act, by many hands : 
and, after some time, it is not easy to say 
what is the authentic work of the master, 
and what is only of his school. 

Plato, too, like every great man, con- 
sumed his own limes. What is a great 
man, but one of great affinities, who takes 
up into himself all arts, sciences, all 
knowables, as his food ? He can spare 
nothing ; he can dispose of everything. 
What is not good for virtue, is good for 
knowledge. Hence his contemporaries 
tax him with plagiarism. But the in- 
ventor only knows how to borrow; and 
society is glad to forget the innumerable 
labourers who ministered to this architect, 
and reserves all its gratitude for him. 
When v/e are praising Plato, it seems we 
are praising quotations from Solon, and 
Sophron, and Philolaus. Be it so. Every 
book is a quotation ; and every house is a 
quotation out of all forests, and mines, 
and stone quarries ; and every man is a 
quotation from all his ancestors. And 
this grasping inventor puts all nations 
under contribution. 

Plato absorbed the learning of his times 
•—Philolaus, Timaeus, Heraclitus, Parme- 
nides, and what else ; then his master, 
Socrates ; and, finding himself still capa- 
W of a larger syuthesis— beyond all ex- 


ample then or since — he travelled inta 

Italy, to gain what Pythagoras had for 
him ; then into Egypt, and perhaps still 
farther east, to import the other element, 
which Europe wanted, into the European 
mind. This breadth entitles him to stand 
as the representative of philosophy. Ha 
says, in the Republic, “ Such a genius as 
philosophers must of necessity have, is 
v^ont but seldom, in all its parts, to meet 
in one man ; but its different parts gene- 
rally spring up in different persons.** 
Every man, who would do anything well, 
must come to it from a Ihigher ground. A 
philosopher must be more than a philo- 
sopher. Plato is clothed with the powers 
of a poet, stands upon the highest placo 
of the poet, and (though I doubt ha 
wanted the decisive gift of lyric expres- 
sion) mainly is not a poet, because he 
chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior 
purpose. 

Great geniuses have the shortest bio- 
graphies. Their cousins can tell you 
nothing about them. They lived in their 
writings, and so their house and street lifa 
was trivial and commonplace. If yoi4 
would know their tastes and complexions 
the most admiring of their readers most 
resembles them. Plato, especially, has no 
external biography. If he had lover, wife, 
or children, we hear nothing of them. He 
ground them all into paint. As a good 
chimney burns its smoke, so a philo- 
sopher converts the value of all his for- 
tunes into his intellectual performances. 

I He was born 430 a.c., about the time of 
the death of Pericles ; was of patrician 
connection in his times and city; and is 
said to have had an early inclination for 
war; but, in his twentieth year, meeting 
with Socrates, was easily dissuaded from 
this pursuit, and remained for ten years 
his scholar, until the death of Socrates. 
He then went to Megara ; accepted tha 
invitations of Dion and of Dionysius to 
the court of Sicily ; and went there three 
times, though very capriciously treated. 
He travelled into Italy; then into Egypt, 
where he stayed a long time ; some say 
throe — some say thirteen years. It ifl 
said ho went farther, into Babylonia : 
this is uncertain. Returning to Athens* 
he gave lessons, in the Academy, to those 
whom his fame drew thither ; and died, af 
we have received it, in the act of writing, 
at eighty-one years. 

But the biography of Plato is interior. 
We are to account for the supreme eleva- 
tion of this man in the intellectual his- 
tpry of our race— -how it happens tha^ 



PLATO: OR. THH PHILOSOPHER, 


te jMrojidftion to the culture of men. they 1 
become his scholars ; that, as our Jewish j 
Bible has implanted itself in the table- 
talk and household life of every man and 
woman in the European and American 
nations, so the writings of Plato have 
preoccupied every school of learning, 
every lover of thought, every church, every 
poet — making it impossible to think, on 
certain levels, except through him. lie 
stands between the truth and every man’s 
mind, and has almost impressed language, 
and the primary forms of thought, with 
his name and seal. I am struck, in read- 
ing him, with the extreme modernness of 
his style and spirit. Here is the germ of 
that Europe we know so well, in its long 
history of arts and arms : here are all its 
traits, already discernible in the mind of 
Plato — and in none before him. It has 
spread itself since into a hundred histo- 
ries, but has added no new element. This 
perpetual modernness is the measure of 
merit in every work of art, since the 
author of it was not misled by anything 
short-lived or local, but abode by real and 
abiding traits. How Plato came thus to 
be Europe, and philosophy, and almost 
literature, is the problem for us to 
solve, ! 

This could not have happened without 
R sound, sincere, and catholic man, able 
to honour, at the same time, the ideal, or 
laws of the mind, and fate, or the order of 
nature. The first period of a nation, as 
of an individual, is the period of nneon- 
Bcioiis strength. Children cry, .scream, 
and stamp with fury, unable to express 
their desires. As soon as they can speak 
and tell their want, and the reason of it, 
they become gentle. In adult life, whilst 
the perceptions are obtuse, men and 
women talk vcliemently and superlatively, 
blunder and quarrel ; their manners are 
full of desperation ; their speech is full 
of oaths. As soon as, with culture, things 
have cleared up a little, and they see 
them no longer in lumps and masses, but 
accurately distributed, they desist from 
that weak vehemence, and ex{)lain their 
meaning in detail. If the tongue had not 
been framed for articulation, man would 
still be a beast in the forest. The same 
weakness and want, on a higher plane, 
occurs daily in the education of ardent 
young men and women. “ Ah ! you don’t 
understand me ; I have never met with 
anyone who comprehends me and they 
jsigh, and weep, write verses, and walk 
alone — fault of power to express their 
precise meaning. In a month or two, 


through the favour of theif gdod genius, 
they meet someone so related as to as- 
sist their volcanic estate ; and, good com- 
munication being once established, they 
are thenceforward good citizens. It is 
ever thus. The progress is to accuracy, 
to skill, to truth, from blind force. 

There is a moment, in tlie history of 
every nation, when, proceeding out of this 
brute youth, the perceptive powers reach 
their ripeness, and have not yet become 
microscopic ; so that man, at that instant, 
extends across the entire scale ; and, with 
his feet still planted on the immense forces 
of night, conversed, by his eyes and brain, 
with solar and stellar creation. That is 
the moment of adult health, the culmina- 
tion of power. 

Such is the history of Europe, in all 
points ; and such in philosophy. Its early 
records, almost perished, are of the immi- 
grations from Asia, bringing with them 
the dreams of barbarians ; a confusion of 
crude notions of morals and of natural 
philosophy, gradually subsiding, through 
the partial insight of single teachers. 

Before Pericles came the Seven Wise 
Masters ; and we have the beginnings of 
geometry, metaphysics, and ethics : then 
the partialists — deducing the origin of 
things from flux or water, or from air, or 
from fire, or from mind. All mix with 
these causes mythologic pictures. At 
last comes Plato, the distributor, who 
needs no barbaric paint, or tattoo, or 
whooping; for he can define. He leaves 
with Asia the vast and superlative ; he is 
the arrival of accuracy and intelligence. 
“ He shall be as a god to me, who can 
rightly divide and define.” 

This defining is philosophy. Philo- 
sophy is the account which the human 
mind gives to itself of the constitution of 
the world. Two cardinal facts lie for ever 
at the base ; the one, and the two. 
I, Unity, or identity ; and, 2, Variety. 
We unite all things, by perceiving the 
law which pervades them ; b}’^ perceiving 
the superficial differences, and the pro- 
found resemblances. But every mental 
act — this very perception of identity or 
oneness, recognises the difference of 
things. Oneness and otherness. It is 
impossible to speak or to think without 
embracing both. 

The mind is urged to ask for one causa 
of many effects ; then for the cause of 
that ; and again the cause, diving still 
into the profound: self-assured that it 
shall arrive at an absolute and sufficient 
one— -a one that shall bo all. “ Initho 



172 


EEPRESENTATIVB MEN. 


midst of tho sun is the light, in the midst 
of the light is truth, and in the midst of 
truth is the imperishable being,” say the 
Vedas, All philosophy, of east and west, 
has the same centripetence. Urged by 
an opposite necessity, the mind returns 
from the one to that which is not one, but 
other or many ; from cause to effect ; and 
affirms the necessary existence of variety, 
the self-existence of both, as each is in- 
volved in the other. These strictly blended 
.dements it is the problem of thought to 
separate and to reconcile. Their exist- 
ence is mutually contradictory and exclu- 
sive ; and each so fast slides into the 
other, that we can never say what is one, 
and what it is not. The Proteus is as 
nimble in the highest as in the lowest 
grounds, when we contemplate the one, 
the true, the good— as in the surfaces and 
extremities of matter. 

In all nations, there are minds which 
incline to dwell in the conception of the 
fundamental Unity. The raptures of 
prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all 
being in one Being. ‘ This tendency finds 
its highest expression in the religious 
writings of the East, and chiefly in the 
Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bha- 
gavat Geeta, and the Vishnu Parana. 
Those writings contain little else than 
this idea, and they rise to pure and sub- 
lime strains in celebrating it. 

The Same, the Same : friend and foe 
are of one stuff; the ploughman, the 
plough, and the furrow, are of one stuff; 
and the stuff is such, and so much, that 
the variations of form are unimportant. 
" You are fit ” (says the supreme Krishna 
to a sage) "to apprehend that you are 
not distinct from me. That which I am, 
thou art, and that also is this world, with 
its gods, and heroes, and mankind. Men 
contemplate distinctions because they are 
stupefied with ignorance.” ‘‘The words 
I and mine constitute ignorance. What is 
the great end of all you shall now learn 
from me. It is soul — one in all bodies, 
pervading, uniform, perfect, pre-eminent 
over nature, exempt from birth, growth, 
and decay, omnipresent, made up of true 
knowledge, independent, unconnected 
with unrealities, with name, species, and 
the rest, in time past, present, and to 
come, The knowledge that this spirit, 
which is essentially one, is in one’s own, 
and in all other bodies, is the wisdom of 
one who knows the unity of things. As 
one diJQfusive air, passing through the per- 
forations of a flute, is distinguished as the 
of a scale, so the nature of the 


Great Spirit is single, though its forms be 
manifold, arising from the consequences 
of acts. When the difference of the in- 
vesting form, as that of god, or the rest, is 
destroyed, there is no distinction.” " The 
whole world is but a manifestation of 
Vishnu, who is identical with all things, 
and is to be regarded by the wise as not 
differing from, but as the same as them- 
selves. I neither am going nor coming ; 
nor is my dwelling in any one place ; nor 
art thou, thou ; nor are others, others ; 
nor am I, I.” As if he had said, " All is 
for the soul, and the soul is Vishnu ; and 
animals and stars are transient paintings ; 
and light is whitewash ; and durations are 
deceptive ; and form is imprisonment ; 
and heaven itself a decoy.” That which 
the soul seeks is resolution into being, 
above form, out of Tartarus, and out of 
heaven — liberation from nature. 

If speculation tends thus to a terrific 
unity, in which all things are absorbed, 
action tends directly backwards to diver- 
sity. The first is the course of gravitation 
of mind ; the second is the power of 
nature. Nature is the manifold. The 
unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. 
Naturj; opens and creates. These two 
principles reappear and interpenetrate all 
things, all thought; the one, the many, 
One is being ; the other, intellect : one is 
necessity ; the other, freedom : one, rest ; 
the other, motion : one, power ; the other, 
distribution : one, strength ; the other, 
pleasure: one, consciousness ; the other, 
definition : one, genius : the other, talent ; 
one, earnestness ; the other, knowledge : 
one, possession; the otlier, trade; one, 
caste ; the other, culture : one, king ; the 
other, democracy: and, if vve dare carry 
these generalisations a step higher, and 
'najme the last tendency of both, we might 
say, that the end of the one is escape 
from organisation — pure science ; and the 
end of the other is the highest instrumen- 
tality, or use of means, or executive 
deity. 

Each student adheres, by temperament 
and by habit, to the first or to the second 
|of these gods of the mind. By religion, 
he tends to unity; by intellect, or by the 
senses, to the many. A too rapid uni- 
fication, and an excessive appliance to 
parts and particulars, are the twin dangeri 
of speculation. 

To this partiality the history of nations 
corresponded. The country of unity, of 
immovable institutions, the seat of a 
philosophy delighting in abstractions, of 
men faithful in doctrine and io practice 



PLATO: OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 


to thd idea of a deaf, unimplorable, im- 
mense fate, is Asia ; and it realises this 
faith in the social institution of caste. 
On the other side, the genius of Europe 
is active and creative : it resists caste by 
culture ; its philosophy was a discipline ; 
t is a land of arts, inventions, trade, free- 
dom. If the East loved inxinity, the West 
delighted in boundaries. 

European civility is the triumph of 
talent, the extension of system, the 
sharpened understanding, adaptive skill, 
delight in forms, delight in manifestation, 
in comprehensible results. Pericles, 
Athens, Greece, had been working in this 
element with the joy [of genius not yet 
chilled by any foresight of the detriment 
of an excess. They saw before them no 
sinister political economy ; no ominous 
Malthus ; no Paris or London ; no pitiless 
subdivision of classes — the doom of the I 
pin-makers, the doom of the weavers, 
of dressers, of stockingers, of carders, of’ 
fpinners, of colliers ; no Ireland ; no 
Indian caste, superinduced by the efforts 
of Europe to throw it off. The under- 
standing was in its health and prime. Art 
was in its splendid novelty. They cut the 
Pciitelican marble as if it were snow, and 
their perfect works in architecture and 
sculpture seemed things of course, not 
more difficult than the completion of a 
new ship at the Medford yards, or new 
mills at Lowell. These things are in 
course, and may be taken for granted. 
The Roman legion, Byzantine legislation, 
English trade, the saloons of Versailles, 
the cafes of Paris, the steam-mill, steam- 
boat, steam-coach, may all be seen in per- 
spective : the town-meeting, the ballot- 
box, the newspaper and cheap press. 

Meantime, Plato, in Egypt and in 
Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the idea of 
one Deity, in which all things are ab- 
sorbed. The unity of Asia, and the detail 
of Europe ; the infinitude of the Asiatic 
soul, and the defining, result-loving, 
machine-making, surface-seeking, opera- 
going Europe — Plato came to join, and by 
contact, to enhance the energy of each. 
The excellence of Europe and Asia are 
in his brain. Metaphysics and natural 
philosophy expressed the genius of 
Europe; he substructs the religion of 
Asia, as the base. 

In short, a balanced soul was born, 
perceptive of the two elements. It is as 
easy to be great as to be small. The rea- 
son why we do not at once believe in 
admirable souls, is because they are not 
in our experience. In actual life, they 


173 

are so rare, as to be incredible [ but* 
primarily, there is not only no presump* 
tion against them, but the strongest pre- 
sumption in favour of their appe arance. 
But whether voices were heard in the sky, 
or not ; whether his mother or his father 
dreamed that the infant man-child was 
the son of Apollo; whether a sviarm of 
bees settled on his lips, or not; a man 
who could see two sides of a thing was 
born. The wonderful synthesis so familiar 
in nature; the upper and the under sido 
of the medal of Jove ; the union of impos- 
sibilities, which reappears in every object * 
its real and its ideal power — was now, 
also, transferred entire to the conscious- 
ness of a man. 

The balanced soul came. If he lovec^l 
abstract truth, he saved himself by pro- 
I pounding the most popular of all prin- 
ciples, the absolute good, which rules 
rulers, and judges the judge. If he made 
transcendental distinctions, be fortified 
himself by drawing all his illustration* 
from sources disdained by orators and 
polite conversers ; from mares and pup- 
pies ; from pitchers and soup-ladles ; from 
cooks and criers ; the shops of potters, 
horse-doctors, butchers, and fishmongers, 
lie cannot forgive in himself a partiality, 
but is resolved that the two poles of 
thought shall appear in his statement. 
His argument and his sentence are self- 
pcised and spherical. The two poles 
appear ; yes, and become two hands, to 
grasp and appropriate their own. 

Every great artist has been such by 
by synthesis. Our strength is transitional, 
alternating ; or, shall I say, a thread 
of two strands. The sea-shore, sea 
seen from shore, shore seen from sea ; 
the taste of two metals in contact ; and 
our enlarged powers at the approach and 
at the departure of a friend ; the experi- 
ence of poetic creativeness, which is not 
found in staying at home, nor yet in 
I travelling, but in transitions from one to 
I the other, which must therefore be adrahly 
t managed to present as much transitiorsi 
surface as possible ; this command of two 
elements must explain the power and the 
charm of Plato. Art expresses the one, 
or the same by the different. Thought 
seeks to know unity in unity ; poetry to 
show it by variety; that is, always by an 
object or symbol. Plato keeps the two 
vases, one of jether and one of pigment, 
at his side, and invariably uses both. 
Things added to things, as statistics, civil 
history, are inventories. Things used ai 
language are inexhaustibly attrac^ve* 



1/4 tiEPRESENTAflVS MEif. 


Plato turns Incessantly the obverse and 
the reverse to the medal of Jove. 

To take an example — The physical 
philosophers had sketched each his theory 
of the world; the theory of atoms, of fire, 
of flux, of spirit ; theories mechanical and 
chemical in their genius. Plato, a master 
of mathematics, studious of all natural 
laws and causes, feels these, as second 
causes, to be no theories of the world, but 
bare inventories and lists. To the study 
of nature he therefore prefixes the dogma 
— ** Let us declare the cause which led 
the Supreme Ordainer to produce and 
compose the universe. lie was good; and 
he who is good has no kind of envy. 
Exempt from envy, he wished that all 
things should be as much as possible like 
himself. Whosoever, taught by wise men, 
shall admit this as the prime cause of the 
origin and foundation of the v/oiid, will* 
be in the truth.*’ “ All things are for the 
sake of the good, and it is tlie cause of 
everything beautiful.” This dogma ani- 
mates and impersonates his philosophy. 

The synthesis which makes the charac- 
ter of his mind appears in all his talents. 
Where there is great compass of wit, w'e 
usually find excellences that combine 
easily in the living man, but in descrip- 
tion appear incompatible. The mind of I 
Plato is not to be exhibited by a Chinese 1 
catalogue, but is to be apprehended by an 1 
original mind in the exercise of its original 
power. In him the freest abandonment 
is united with the precision of a geometer. 
His daring imagination gives him the 
more solid grasp of facts ; as the birds of 
highest flight have the strongest alar 
bones. His patrician polish, his intrinsic 
elegance, edged by an irony so subtle that 
it stings and paralyses, adorn the soundest 
health and strength of frame. According 
to the old sentence, “ If Jove should des- 
cend to the earth, he would speak in the 
Style of Plato.” 

With this palatial air, there is, for the 
direct aim of several of his works, and 
running through the tenor of tiicmi all, a 
certain earnestness, which mounts, in the 
Republic, and in the Phxdo, to piety. 
He has been charged with feigning sick- 
ness at the time of the death of Socrates. 
But the anecdotes that have come down 
from the times attest his manly inter- 
ference before the people in his master’s 
behalf, since even the savage cry of the 
assembly to Plato is preserved; and the 
indignation towards popular government, 
in many of his pieces, expresses a per- 
son^! exasperation. He has a probity, a 


native reverence for justice and lidtGUt, 
and a humanil.y which makes him tende? 
for the superstitions of the people. Add 
to this, he believes that poetry, prophecy, 
and the high insight, are from a wisdom 
of which man is not master ; that the gods 
never philosophise; but by a celestial 
mania, these miracles are accomplished 
Horsed on these winged steeds, he sweeps 
the dim regions, visits worlds which flesh 
cannot enter : he saw the souls in pain ; 
he hears the doom of the judge; he be- 
holds the penal metempsychosis ; the 
Fates, with the rock and shears ; and 
hears the intoxicating hum of their 
spindle. 

But this circumspection never forsook 
him. One would say he had read the 
inscription on the gates of Busyrane-^ 

' i^e bold ; ” and on the second gate, 
* Be bold, be bold, and evermore b« 
bold:” and then again had paused veil 
at the third gate, ” Be not too bold.” 
His strength is like the momentum of a 
falling planet ; and his discretion, the 
return of its due and perfect curve — so 
excellent is his Greek love of boundary, 
and his skill in definition. In reading 
logarithms, one is not more secure, than 
in following Plato in his flights. Nothing 
can be colder than his head, v/hen rhe 
lightnings of his imagination are playing 
in the sky. He has finished his thinking, 
before he brings it to the reader ; and 
he abounds in the surprises of a literary 
master. He has that opulence which 
furnishes, at every turn, the precise 
weapon he needs. As the rich man wears 
no more garments, drives no more horses, 
sits in no more chambers, than the poor — 
but has that one dress, or equipage, or 
instrument, which is fit for tlie hour and 
the need ; so Plato, in his plenty, is never 
restricted, but has the fit word, Thera 
is, indeed, no weapon in all the armoury 
of wit which he did not possess and use- 
epic, analysis, mania, intuition, music, 
satire, and irony, down to the customary 
and polite. His illustrations are poetry, 
and his jests illustrations. Socrates’ pro- 
fession of obstetric art is good philosophy ; 
and his finding that word ” cookery,” and 
” adulatory art,” for rhetoric, in the 
Gorgias, does us a substantial service 
still. No orator can measure in effect 
with him who can give good nicknames. 

What moderation, and understatement, 
and checking his thunder in mid volley j 
He has good-naturedly furnished the cour- 
tier and citizen with all that can be said 
against the schools, ” For philosophy 19 



PLATO: Oi?, TUB PHILOSOPHER. 


ftH olegant thing, If anyone modestly med- 
dles with it ; but, if he is conversant with 
it more than is becoming, it corrupts the 
man." He could well afford to be gene- 
rous — he, who from the sunlike centrality 
and reach of his vision, had a faith with- 
out cloud. Such as his perception, was 
his speech : he plays with the doubt, and 
makes the most of it ; he paints and 
quibbles ; and by and by comes a sentence 
that moves the sea and land. The admir- 
able earnest comes not only at intervals, 
in the perfect yes and no of the dialogue, 
but in bursts of light. "I, therefore, Calli- 
cles, am persuaded by these accounts, and 
consider how I may exhibit my soul be- 
fore the judge in a healthy condition. 
Wherefore disregarding the honours tliat 
most men value, and looking to the truth, 

I shall endeavour in reality to live as vir- 
tuously as I can ; and, when I die, to die 
so. And I invite all other men, to the 
utmost of my power ; and you, too, I in 
turn invite to this contest, which, I affirm, 
surpasses all contests here." 

He is a groat average man ; one who, to 
the best thinking, adds a proportion and 
equality in his faculties, so that men see 
in him their own dreams and glimpses 
made available, and made to pass for what 
Uiey are. A great common sense is his 
warrant and qualification to be the world’s 
Interpreter. He has reason, as all the 
philoso\'hic and poetic class have : but he 
bas, also, what they have not, — this strong 
solving sense to reconcile his poetry with 
the appearances of the world, and build a 
bridge from the streets of cities to the At- 
lantis. He omits never this graduation, 
but slopes his thought, however pictur- 
esque the precipice on one side, to an access 
from the plain. He never writes in 
ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic rap- 
tures, 

Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. 
He could prostrate himself on the earth, 
and cover his eyes, whilst he adored that 
which cannot be numbered, or guaged, or 
known, or named : that of which e-very- | 
thing can be affirmed and denied : that 
“ which is entity and nonentity." He called 
it super-essential. He even stood ready, 
as in the Parmenides, to demonstrate that ' 
it was so— that this Being exceeded the 
limits of intellect. No man ever more j 
fully acknowledged the Ineffable. Having 
paid his homage, as for the human race, I 
to the Illimitable, he then stood erect, and 
for the human race affirmed, “And yet 
things lire knowable ! "—that tSi the Asia 


175 

in his mind was first heartily hdftoured — 
the ocean of love and power, before ferm, 
before will, before knowledge, the Same, 
the Good, the One; and now. refres^iJrfcd 
and empowered by this worship, the in- 
stinct of Europe, namely, culture, returns ; 
and he cries, Yet things are knowable ! 
They are knowable, because, being from 
one, things correspond. There is a scale : 
and the correspondence of heaven to earth, 
of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, 
is our guide. As there is a science o'i 
stars, called astronomy ; a science of 
quantities, called mathematics ; a science 
of qualities, called chemistry ; so there ia 
a science of sciences — I call it Dialectic — 
which is the Intellect disf;riminating the 
false and the true. It rests on the obser- 
vation of identity and diversity ; for, to 
judge, is to unite to an object the notion 
which belongs to it. The sciences, even 
the best — mathematic.s and astronomy — 
are like sportsmen, who seize whatever 
prey offers, even without being able to 
make any use of it. Dialectic must teach 
the use of them. “ This is of that rank 
that no intellectual man wall enter on any 
study for its own sake, but only with a 
view to advance himself in that one sole 
science wliich embraces all." 

** The essence or peculiarity of man is 
to comprehend a whole ; or that which, in 
the diversity of sensations, can be com- 
prised under a rational unity." “Tito 
soul which has never perceived the truth, 
cannot pass into the human form." I 
announced to men the Intellect. I an- 
nounce the good of beginning interpene- 
trated by the mind that made nature ’ 
this benefit, namely, that it can under- 
stand nature, which it made and maketh. 
Nature is good, but intellect is better; as 
the law-giver is before the law-roceiver. I 
give you joy, O sons of men ! that truth 
is altogether wholesome; that we have 
hope to search out what might be the very 
self of everything. The misery of man is 
to be baulked* of the sight of essence, and 
to be stuffed with conjectures : but the 
supreme good is reality ; the supreme 
beauty is reality ; and all virtue and all 
felicity depend on this science of the real ; 
for courage is nothing else than know- 
ledge ; the fairest fortune that can befall 
man, is to be guided by his demon to that 
which is truly his own. This also is the 
essence of justice — to attend everyone 
his own *. nay, the notion of virtue is not 
to ba arrived at, except through direct 
contemplation of the divine essence. 
Courage, tlienl for, “ th« persuasion 



176 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


we must search that which we do not 
know, will render us, beyond comparison, 
better, braver, and more industrious, than 
if we thought it impossible to discover 
what we do not know, and useless to 
search for it.” He secures a position not 
to be commanded, by his passion for 
reality; valuing philosophy only as it is 
the pleasure of conversing with real being. 

Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he 
said, Culture. lie saw the institutions of 
Sparta, and recognised more genially, one 
would say, than any since, the hope of 
education. He delighted in every accom- 
plishment, in every graceful and useful 
and truthful performance ; above all, in 
the splendours of genius and intellectual 
achievement. “The whole of life, O 
Socrates, ^aid Glaiico, is, with the wise, the 
measure of hearing such discourses as 
these.” What a price he sets on the feats 
of talent, on the powers of Pericles, of 
Isocrates, of Parmenides I What price, 
above price, on the talents themselves ! 
He called the several faculties, gods, in 
his beautiful personation. What value he 
gives to the art of gymnastic in education ; 
what to geometry ; what to music ; what 
to astronomy, whose appeasing and medi- 
cinal power he celebrates ! In the 
Timaeus, he indicates the highest employ- 
ment of the eyes. “ By us it is asserted, 
that God invented and bestowed sight on 
us for this purpose— that, on surveying 
the circles of intelligence in the heavens, 
we might properly employ those of our 
own minds, which, though disturbed v/hen 
compared with the others that are uniform, 
are still allied to their circulations ; and 
that, having thus learned, and being natu- 
rally possessed of a correct reasoning 
faculty, we might, by imitating the uni- 
form revolutions of divinity, set right our 
own wanderings and blunders.” And in 
the Republic — *' By each of these disci- 
plines, a certain organ of the soul is both 
purified and reanimated, which is blinded 
and buried by studies of another kind ; an 
organ better worth saving than ten thou- 
sand eyes, since truth is perceived by this 
alone.” 

He said, Culture ; but he first admitted 
its basis, and gave immeasurably the first 
place to advantages of nature. His patri- 
cian tastes laid stress on the distinctions 
of birth. In the doctrine of the organic j 
character and disposition is the origin of | 
caste. “ Such as were fit to govern, into! 
their composition the informing Deity] 
mingled gold ; into the military, silver ; 
irof and brass for husbandmen and artifi- 


cers.” The East confirms itself, In ali 
ages, in this faith. The Koran is explicit 
on this point of caste. ” Men have their 
metal, as of gold and silver. Those of you 
who were the worthy ones in the state of 
ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the 
state of faith, as soon as you embrace it.” 
Plato was not less firm. “ Of the five 
orders of things, only four can be taught 
to the generality of men.” In the Repub- 
lic, he insists on the temperaments of the 
youth, as first of the first. 

A happier example of the stress laid on 
nature, is in the dialogue with the young 
Theages, who wishes to receive lessons 
from Socrates. Socrates declares that, if 
some have grown wise by associating with 
him, no thanks are due to him ; but» 
simply, whilst they were with him, 
they grew wise, not because of him ; 
he pretends not to know the way of it. 
“ It is adverse to many, nor can those bo 
benefited by associating with me, whom 
the Demon opposes; so that is not pos- 
sible for me to live with these. With 
many, however, he does not prevent me 
from conversing, who yet are not at all 
benefited by associating with me. Siicl\ 
O Theages, is the association with me ; 
for, if it pleases the God, you will make 
great and rapid proficiency ; you will not, 
if he does not please. Judge wliether it is 
not safer to be instructed by some one of 
those who have power over the benefit 
which they impart to men, than by rno, 
who benefit or not, just as it may happen.” 
As if he had said, “ I have no system. I 
cannot be answerable for you. You will 
be what you must. If there is love be- 
tween us, inconceivably delicious and 
profitable will our intercourse be; if not, 
your time is lost, and you will only annoy 
me. I shall seem to you stupid, and the 
reputation I have, false. Quite above us, 
beyond the will of you or me, is this secret 
affinity or repulsion laid. All my good is 
magnetic, ^nd I educate, not by lessons, 
but by going about my business.” 

He said, Culture ; he said. Nature : and 
he failed not to add “ There is also the 
divine.” There is no thought in any mind, 
but it quickly tends to convert itself into 
a power, and organises a huge instrumen- 
tality of means. Plato, lover of limits, 
loved the illimitable, saw the enlargement 
and nobility which come from truth itself 
and good itself, and attempted, as if on 
the part of the human intellect, once for 
all, to do it adequate homage— homage 
fit for the immense soul to receive, and 
yet homage becoming the intellect to reck 



^LATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. T77 


der; He said, then, Our faculties run out 
into infinity, and return to us thence. We 
can define but a little way ; but here is a 
fact which will not be skipped, and which 
to shut our eyes upon is suicide. All 
things are in a scale ; and, begin where 
we will, ascend and ascend. All things 
are symbolical ; and what we call result^ 
are beginnings. 

A key to the method and completeness 
of Piato is his twice bisected line. After 
he has illustrated the relation between the 
absolute good and true, and the forms of 
the intelligible world, he says : “ Let there 
be a line cut in two unequal parts. Cut 
again each of these two parts — one repre- 
senting the visible, the other the intelligi- 
ble world — and these two new sections, 
representing the bright part and the dark 
part of these worlds, you will have, for one 
of the sections of the visible world — 
images, that is, both shadows and reflec- 
tions ; for the other section, the objects of 
these images — that is, plants, animals, 
and the works of art and nature. Then 
divide the intelligible world in like man- 
ner ; tlie one section will be of opinions 
and hypotheses, and the other section, of 
truths.” To these four sections, the four 
operations of the soul correspond — con- 
jecture, faith, understanding, reason. As 
every pool reflects the image of the sun 
so every thought and thing restores us an 
image and creature of the supreme Good. 
The universe is perforated by a million j 
channels for his activity. All tilings mount 
and mount. 

All his thought has this ascension ; in 
Phaedrus, teaching that beauty is the most 
lovely of all things, exciting hilarity, and 
shedding desireand confidence through the 
universe, wherever it enters; and it enters, 
in some degree, into all things : but that 
there is another, which is as much more 
beautiful than beauty, as beauty is than 
chaos ; namely, wisdom, which our won- 
derful organ of sight cannot reach unto, 
but which, could it be seen, would ravish 
us with its perfect reality. He has the 
same regard to it as the source of excel- 
lence in worksof art. ” When an artificer, 

the fabrication of any work, looks to 
that which always subsists according fo 
the same ; and, employing a model of this 
kind expresses its idea and power in his 
work ; it must follow, that his production 
should be beautiful. But when he beholds 
that which is born and dies, it will be far 
from beautiful.” 

Thus ever : the Banquet is a teaching 
In the same spirit, familiar now to all the 


[Poetry, and to all the sermons of the 
world, that the love of the sexes is initial ; 

I and symbolises, at a distance, the passion 
of the soul for that immense lake of beauty 
it exists to seek. This faith in the 
Divinity is never out of mind, and consti- 
tutes the ground of all his dogmas. Body 
cannot teach wisdom — God only. In the 
same mind, he constantly affirms that 
virtue cannot be taught ; that it is not a 
science, but an inspiration; that the 
greatest goods are produced to us through 
mania, and are assigned to us by a divine 
gift. 

This leads me to that central figure, 
which he has established in his Academy, 
as the organ 'iirough which every con- 
sidered opinion shall be announced, and 
wfiiose biography he has likewise so 
laboured, that the historic facts are lost 
in the light of Plato’s mind. Socrates and 
Plato are the double star, which the most 
powerful instruments will not entirely 
separate. Socrates, again, in his traits 
and genius, is the best example of that 
synthesis which constitutes Plato’s extra- 
ordinary power. Socrates, a man of 
humble stem, but honest enough ; of the 
commonest history ; of a personal homeli- 
ness so remarkable, as to be a cause of 
wit in others— the rather that his broad 
good-nature and exquisite taste for a joke 
invited the sally, which was sure to be 
paid. The players personated him on the 
stage ; the potters copied his ugly face on 
their stone jugs. He was a cool fellow, 
adding to his humour a perfect temper, 
and a knowledge of his man, be he who 
he might whom he talked with, which laid 
the companion open to certain defeat in 
any debate — and in debate he immode- 
rately delighted. The young men are 
prodigiously fond of him, and invite him 
to their feasts, whither he goes for conver- 
sation. He can drink, too : has th^ 
strongest head in Athens; and, after leav- 
ing the whole party under the table, goes 
away, as if nothing had happened, to bOgin 
new dialogues with somebody that is sober, 
In short, he was what our country-people 
call an old one. 

He affected a good many citizen-like 
tastes, was monstrously fond of Athens, 
hated trees, never willingly went beyond 
the walls, knew the old characters, valued 
the bores and philistines, thought every- 
thing in Athens a little better than any- 
thing in any other place. He was plain 
as a Quaker in habit and speech, affected 
low phrases, and illustrations from cocks 
and quails, soup-pans and eycamq^- 



‘78 ttBPRBSBNTAttVB MB^. 


Bpoons, gf^oiWa and farriers, and nn- 
nameable offices — especially if he talked 
with any superfine person. He had a 
Franklin-like wisdom. Thus, he showed 
one who was afraid to go on foot to 
Olympia, that it was no more than his 
daily walk within doors, if continuously 
extended, would easily reach. 

Plain old uncle as he was,\^ith his great 
ears — an immense talker — the rumour 
ran, that, on one or two occasions, in the 
war with Bocotia, he had shown a determi- 
nation which had covered the retreat of a 
troop ; and there was some story that, 
under cover of folly, he had, in the city 
government, when one day he chanced to 
hold a seat there, evinced a courage in 
opposing singly the popular voice, w'hich 
had well-nigh ruined him. He is very 
poor ; but then he is hardy as a soldier, 
and can live on a few olives ; usually, in 
the strictest sense, on bread and water, 
except when entertained by his friends. 
His necessary expenses were exceedingly 
email, and no one else could live as he 
did. He wore no under garment ; his 
upper garment was the same for summer 
and winter ; and he w^ent barefooted ; and 
it is said that, to procure the pleasure, 
which he loves, of talking at his ease all 
day with the most elegant and cultivated 
young men, ha will now and then return 
to his shop, and carve statues, good or bad, 
for sale. However that be, it is certain 
that he had grown to delight in nothing 
else than this conversation ; and that, 
under his hypocritical pretence of knowing 
nothing, he attacks and brings down all 
the fine speakers, all the fine philosophers 
of Athens, whether natives, or strangers 
from Asia Minor and the islands. Nobody 
can refuse to talk with him, he is so 
honest, and really curious to know ; a man 
who was willingly confuted, if he did not 
.speak the truth, and who willingly con- 
futed others asserting what was false ; and 
not less pleased when confuted than wdien 
confuting ; for he thought not any evil 
happened to men, of such magnitude as 
false opinion respecting the just and un- 
just. A pitiless disputant, who knows 
nothing, but the bounds of whose con- 
quering intelligence no man had ever 
reached ; whose temper was imperturba- 
ble ; whose dreadful logic w^as always 
leisurely and sportive ; so careless and 
ignorant, as to disarm the weariest, and 
draw them, in the pleasantest manner, 
into horrible doubts and confusion. But he 
always knew the way out ; knew it, yet 
wof.ld not tell it. No escape ; be drives 


them to terrible choices by (\lS dilemmaSy 
and tosses the Hippiascs i^nd Gorgiases, 
with their grand reputations, as a boy tosses 
his balls. The tyrannous realist ! — Meno 
has discoursed a thousand limes, atlength, 
on virtue, before many companies, and 
very w’ell, as it appeared to him ; but, at 
this moment, he cannot even tell what it 
is — this cramp-fish of a Socrates has so 
bewitched him. 

This hard-headed humourist whose 
strange conceits, drollery, and bonhomie, 
diverted the young patricians whilst the 
rumour of his sayings and quibbles gets 
abroad every day, turns out, in the sequel, 
to have a probity as invincible as his logic, 
and to be either insane, or, at least, under 
cover of this play, enthusiastic in his 
religion. When accused before the judges 
of subverting the popular creed, he affirms 
the immortality of the soul, the future 
reward and punishment ; and, refusing 
to recant, in a caprice of the popular 
government, was condemned to die, and 
sent to the prison. Socrates entered the 
prison, and took away all ignominy from 
the place, which could not be a prison, 
wliilst he was there. Crito bribed the 
jailer ; but Socrates would not go out by 
treachery. “Whatever inconvenience 
I ensue, nothing is to be preferred before 
justice. These things I hear like pipea 
and drums, whose sound makes me deaf 
to everything you say.” The fame of this 
prison, the fame of the discourses there, 
and the drinking of the hemlock, i i one 
of the most precious passages in the his- 
tory of the world. 

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, 
of tlie droll and the martyr, llie keen street 
and market debater with the sweetest 
saint known to any liistory at that time, 
had forcibly struck the mind of Plato, so 
capacious of these contrasts ; and tlie 
figure of Socrates, by a necessity, placed 
itself in the foreground of the scene, as 
the fittest dispenser of the intelleciual 
treasures he had to communicate. It was 
a rare fortune, that this AOsop of the mob, 
and this robed scholar should meet, to 
make each other immortal in tlieir mutual 
faculty. The strange synthesis, in the 
character of Socrates, capped the synthe- 
sis in tlij mind of Plato. Moreover, by 
this means, he was able, in the direct way, 
ami without envy, to avail himself of the 
wit and weight of Socrates, to which un- 
questionably his own debt was great ; and 
these derived again their principal advan- 
tage from the perfect art of Plato. 

It remains to say, that the defect of Plato 



PLATO: IJIEW READINGS. 


179 


In power is only that which results inevi- 
tably from his quality. He is intellectual 
in his aim ; and, therefore, in expression, 
literary. Mounting into heaven, diving 
into the pit, expounding the laws of the 
state,, the passion of love, the remorse of 
crime, the hope of the parting soul — he is 
literary, and never otherwise. It is almost 
the sole deduction from the merit of Plato, 
that his writings have not — what is, no 
doubt, incident to this regnancy of intel- 
lect in his work — the vital authority which 
the screams of prophets and the sermons 
of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess. 
There is an interval ; and to cohesion, 
contact is necessary. 

I know not what can be said in reply to 
this criticism, but that we have come to a 
fact in the nature of things ; an oak is not 
an orange. The qualities of sugar remain 
with sugar, and those of salt, with salt. 

In the second place, he has not a system. 
The dearest defenders and disciples are at 
fault. He attempted a theory of the uni- 
verse, and his theory is not complete or 
self-evident. One man thinks he means 
this ; and another, that : he has said one 
thing in one place, and the reverse of it 
in another place. lie is charged with 
having failed to make the transition from 
ideas to matter. Here is the world, sound 
as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of 
chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not 
a mark of haste, or botching, or second 
thought; but the theory of the world is 
a thing of shreds and patches. 

The longest wave is quickly lost in the 
sea. Plato would willingly have a Plato- 
nism, a known and accurate expression for 
the world, and it should be accurate. It 
shall be the world passed through the 
mind of Plato— -nothing less. Every atom 
shall have the Platonic tinge ; every atom, 
every relation or quality you knew before, 
you sliall know again, and find here, but 
now ordered ; not nature, but art. And 
you shall feel that Alexander indeed over- 
ran, with men and horses, some countries 
of the planet ; but countries, and things 
of which countries are made, elements, 
planet itself, laws of planet and of men, 
have passed through this man as bread 
into his body, and become no longer bread, 
but body ; so all this mammoth morsel 
has become Plato. He has clapped copy- 
right on the world. This is the ambition 
of individualism. But the mouthful proves 
too large. Boa constrictor has good will 
to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad 
in the attempt ; and biting, get strangled : 
biUeq wqtW hQlds thp ^iter fa§f byJiig 


own teeth. There he perishes : uncon* 
quered nature lives on, and forgets him. 
So it fares with all ; so must it fare with 
Plato. In view of eternal nature, Plato 
turns out to be philosophical exercitations. 
tie argues on this side, and on that. The 
aciitest German, the lovingest disciple, 
could never tell what Platonism was ; in- 
deed, admirable texts can be quoted on 
both sides of every great question from 
him. 

These things we are forced to say, if wo 
must consider the effort of Plato, or of any 
philosopher, to dispose of Nature — which 
will not be disposed of. No power of 
genius has ever yet had the smallest suc- 
cess in explaining existence. The per- 
fect enigma remains. But there is an in- 
justice in assuming this amViition for 
Plato. Let us not seem to treat with 
flippancy his venerable name. Men, in 
proportion to their intellect, have ad- 
mitted his transcendent claims. The 
way to know him, is to compare him, not 
with nature, but with other men. How 
many ages have gone by, and he remains, 
unapproached ! A chief structure of hu- 
man wit, like Karnac, or the mediaeval 
cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains, it 
requires all the breadth of human faculty 
to know it. I think it is trulicst seen, 
when seen w’ith the most respect. His 
sense deepens, his merits multiply, with 
study. When we say here is a fine collec- 
tion of fables ; or, when we praise the 
style; or the common sense; or arith- 
metic ; we speak as boys, and much ol 
our impatient criticism of the dialectic, I 
suspect is no better. The criticism is like 
our impatience of miles, when we are in 
a hurry ; but it is still best that a mile 
should have seventeen hundred and sixty 
yards. The great eyed Plato proportioned 
the lights and shades after the genius of 
our life. 


PLATO: NEW READINGS. 

The publication, in Mr. Bohn’s “ Serial 
Library,” of the excellent translations of 
Plato, which we esteem one of the chief 
benefits the clieap press has yielded, gives 
us an occasion to take hastily a few more 
notes of the elevation and bearings of 
this fixed star ; or, to add a bulletin, lilea 
the journals, of Plato at the latest dates. 

Modern science, by the extent of its 
generalisation, learme^ to index;|nify 



REhRESEinATlVE MEN. 


iSo 

the stndent of man for the defects of indi- j 
viduals, by tracing growth and ascent in 
races; and by the simple expedient of 
lighting up the vast background, generates 
a feeling of complacency and hope. The 
human being has the saurian and the plant 
in his rear. His arts and sciences, the 
easy issue of his brain, look glorious when 
prospectively beheld from the distant brain 
of ox, crocodile, and fish. It seems as 
if nature, in regarding the geologic night 
behind her, when in five or six millen- 
niums, she had turned out five o» six men, 
as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, 
was nowise discontented with the result. 
These samples attested the virtue of the 
tree. These were a clear amelioration of 
trilobite and saurus, and a good basis for 
further proceeding. With this artist, 
time and space are cheap, and she is in- 
sensible to what you say of tedious pre- 
paration, She waited tranquilly the flow- 
ing periods of paleontology, for the hour 
to be struck when man should arrive. 
Then periods must pass before the motion 
of the earth can be suspected ; then before 
the map of the instincts and the cultivable 
powers can be drawn. But as of races, 
80 the succession of individual men isj 
fatal and beautiful, and Plato has the for- 
tune, in the history of mankind, to mark ’ 
an epoch. 

Plato’s fame does not stand on a syllo- 
gism, or on any masterpieces of the 
Socratic reasoning, or on any thesis, as, 
for example, the immortality of the soul, j 
He is more than an expert, or a schoolman, 
or a geometer, or the prophet of a peculiar 
message. He represents the privilege of 
the intellect, the power, namely, of carrj’^- 
ing up every fact to successive platforms, 
and so disclosing in every fact, a germ of 
expansion. These expansions are in the 
essence of thought. The naturalist 
would never help us to them by any dis- 
coveries of the extent of the universe, 
but is as poor, when cataloguing the 
resolved nebula of Orion, as when mea- 
suring the angles of an acre. But the 
Republic of Plato, by these expansions, 
may be said to require, and so to antici- 
pate, the astronomy of Laplace. The 
expansions are organic. The mind does 
not create what it perceives, any more 
than the eye creates the rose. In ascrib- 
ing to Plato the merit of announcing them 
we only say, here was a more complete 
man, who could apply to nature the whole 
Bcale of the senses, the understanding 
and the reason. These expansions, or 
axtetisioQSi consist in continuing the 


spiritual sight where the horixoQ falls on 
our natural vision, and, by this second 
sight, discovering the long lines rf law 
which shoot in every direction. Every- 
where he stands on a path which has no 
end, but runs continuously round the uni- 
verse. Therefore, every word becomes 
an exponent of nature. Wlatever ha 
looks upon discloses a second sense, and 
ulterior senses. His perception of the 
generation of contraries, of death out of 
life, and life out of death — that law by 
which, in nature, decomposition is recom- 
position, and putrefaction and cholera are 
only signals of a new creation; his dis- 
cernment of the little in the large, and 
the large in the small ; studying the state 
in the citizen, and the citizen in the state ; 
and leaving it doubtful whether he exhib- 
ited the Republic as an allegory on the 
education of the private soul ; his beauti- 
ful definitions of ideas, of time, of form, 
of figure, of the line, sometimes hypo- 
thetically given, as his defining of virtue, 
courage, justice, temperance; his love of 
the apologue, and his apologues them- 
selves; the cave of Trophonius ; the ring 
of Gyges ; the charioteer and two horses ; 
the golden, silver, brass, and iron tempera- 
ments; Theuth and Thamus; and the 
visions of Hades and the Fates — fables 
which have imprinted themselves in the 
human memory like the signs of the 
zodiac ; his soliform eye and his boniform 
soul ; his doctrine of assimilation ; his 
doctrine of reminiscence ; his clear vision 
of the laws of return, or reaction, which 
secure instant justice throughout the uni- 
verse, instanced everywhere, but especially 
in the doctrine, “ what comes from God 
to us, returns from us to God,” and in 
Socrates’ belief that the laws below are 
sisters of the laws above. 

More striking examples are his moral 
conclusions. Plato affirms the coinci- 
dence of science and virtue ; for vice can 
never know itself and virtue; but virtue 
knows both itself and vice. The eye at- 
tested that justice was best, as long as it 
was profitable *, Plato affirms that it is 
profitable throughout ; that the profit is 
intrinsic, though the just conceal his jus- 
tice from gods and men ; that it is better 
I to suffer injustice, than to do it; that the 
I sinner ought to covet punishment; that 
the lie was more hurtful than homicide ; 
and that ignorance, or the involuntary lie, 
was more calamitous than involuntary 
homicide ; that the soul is unwillingly 
deprived of true opinions ; and that no 
man sins willingly ; that the order of pro* 



PLATO: NEW READINGS, 


Ceeding of natHro was from the mind to 
the body ; and, though a sound body can- 
not restore an unsound mind, yet a good 
soul can, by its virtue, render the body 
the best possible. The intelligent have a 
right over the ignoiant, namely, the right 
of instructing them. The right punish- 
ment of one out of tune, is to make him 
play in tune ; the fine which the good, re- 
fusing to govern, ought to pay, is, to be 
governed by a worse man ; that his guards 
shall not handle gold and silver, but shall 
be instructed that there is gold and silver 
in their souls, which will make men will- 
ing to give them everything which they 
need. 

This second sight explains the stress 
laid on geometry. He saw that the globe 
of earth was not more lawful and precise 
than was the supersensible ; that a celes- 
tial geometry was in place there, as a 
logic of lines and angles here below ; that 
the world was throughout mathematical ; 
the proportions are constant of oxygen, 
Azote, and lime; there is just so much 
water, and slate, and magnesia ; not less 
are the proportions constant of the moral 
elements. 

The eldest Goethe, hating varnish and 
falsehood, delighted in revealing the real 
at the base of the accidental ; in discover- 
ing connection, continuity, and representa- 
tion everywhere ; hating insulation ; and 
appears like the god of wealth among the 
cabins of vagabonds, opening power and 
capability in everything he touches. Ethi- 
cal science was new and vacant, when 
Plato could write thus : “ Of ail whose 
arguments ar^ left to the men of the pre- 
sent time, no one has ever yet condemned 
injustice, or praised justice, otherwise 
than as respects the repute, honours, 
and emoluments arising therefrom ; while, 
as respects either of them in itself, and 
subsisting by its own power in the soul of 
the possessor, and concealed both from 
gods and men, no one has yet sufficiently 
investigated, either in poetry or prose 
writings — how, namely, that the one is 
the greatest of all the evils that the soul 
has within it, and justice the greatest 
good.” 

His definition of ideas, as what is simple, 
permanent, uniform, and self-existent, for 
ever discriminating them from the notions 
of the understanding, marks an era in the 
world. He was born to behold the self- 
cvolving power of spirit, endless, generator 
of new ends ; a power which is the key at 
once to the centrality and the evanescence 
of tbiogs, Plato is so centred, that he can 


well spare all his dogmas. Thus the fad 
of knowledge and ideas reveals to him the 
fact of eternity ; and the doctrine of re- 
miniscence he offers as the most probable 
particular explication. Call that fanciful — 
it matters not ; the connection between 
our knowledge and the abyss of being is 
still real, and the explication must be not 
less magnificent. 

He has indicated every eminent point 
in speculation. He wrote on the scale of 
the mind itself, so that all things have 
symmetry in his tablet. He put in all the 
past, without weariness, and descended 
into detail with a courage like that he wit- 
nessed in nature. One would say, that his 
forerunners had mapped out each a farm, 
or a district, or an island, in intellectiiai 
geography, but that Plato first drew the 
sphere. He domesticates the soul in 
nature; man is the microcosm. All the 
circles of the visible heaven represent aa 
many circles in the rational soul. There 
is no lawless particle, and there is nothing 
casual in the action of the human mind, 
The names of things, too, are fatal, follow- 
ing the nature of things. All the gods of 
the Pantheon are, by their names, signi- 
ficant of a profound sense. The gods are 
the ideas. Pan is speech, or manifesta* 
tion; Saturn, the contemplative; Jove, 
the regal soul ; and Mars, passion. Venus 
is proportion; Calliope, the soul of the 
world ; Aglaia, intellectual illustration. . 

These thoughts, in sparkles cf light, had 
appeared often to pious and to prj?tic 
souls; but this well-bred, all-know 
Greek geometer comes with command, 
gathers them all up into rank and gra- 
dation, the Euclid of holiness, and marries 
the two parts of nature. Before all men, 
he saw the intellectual values of the moral 
sentiment. He describes his own ideal, 
when he paints in Timaeus a god leading 
things from disorder into order. Ha 
kindled a fire so truly in the centre, 
that we see the sphere illuminated, and 
can distinguish poles, equator, and lines 
of latitude, every arc and node ; a theory 
so averaged, so modulated that you would 
say, the winds of ages had swept through 
this rhythmic structure, and not that it 
was the brief extempore blotting of one 
short-lived scribe. Hence it has happened 
that a very well-marked class of souls, 
namely, those who delight in giving a 
spiritual, that is, an ethico-intellectual 
expression to every truth, by exhibiting 
an ulterior end which is yet legitimate to 
it, are said to Platonise. Thus, Midtusl 



representative MEN'. 


Angelo is a Platon! st, in his sonnets. 
Shakespeare is a Platonist, when he 
writes, “ Nature is made better by no 
mean, but nature makes that mean," or, 

“ He that can endure 
To follow with alle}^iance a fallen lord, 

Does conquer him that did his master con- 
quer. 

And earns a place in the story." 

Hamlet is a pure Platonist. and 'tis the 
magnitude only of Shakespeare’s proper 
genius that hinders him from beingclassed 
as the most eminent of this school. Swe- 
denborg, throughout his prose poem of 
** Conjugal Love," is a Platonist. 

His subtlety commended him to men of 
thought. The secret of his popular suc- 
cess is the moral aim, which endeared 
him to mankind. " Intellect," he said, 
" is king of heaven and of earth;" but.' 
in Plato, intellect is always moral. His 
writings have also the sempiternal youth 
of poetry. For their arguments, most of 
them, might have been couched in son- 
nets : and poetry has never soared higher 
than in the Timaeus and the Phaedrus. As 
th« poeti too, he is only contemplative. 


He did not, like Pythagoras, break nlmseH 
with an institution. All his painting in 
the Republic must be esteemed mythical, 
with intent to bring out, sometimes in 
violent colours, his thought. You cannot 
institute, without peril of charlatanism. 

It was a high scheme, his absolute 
privilege for the best (which, to make em- 
phatic, he expressed by community of 
women), as the premium which he would 
set on grandeur. There shall be exempts 
of two kinds : first, those who by demerit 
have put themselves below protection- 
outlaws; and, secondly, those who by 
eminence of nature and desert are out of 
the reach of your rewards : let such bo 
free of the city, and above the law. We 
confide them to themselves ; let them do 
with us as they will. Let none presume 
to measure the irregularities of Michel 
Angelo and Socrates by village scales. 

In his eighth book of the Republic, ha 
throws a little mathematical dust in onr 
eyes. I am sorry to see him, after such 
noble superiorities, permitting the lie to 
governors. Plato plays Providence a 
little with the baser sort, as people allow 
themselves with their dogs and cats, 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 


Among eminent persons, those who are 
most dear to men are not of the class 
which the economist calls producers ; 
they have nothing in their hands ; they 
have not cultivated corn, nor made bread; 
they have not led out a colony, nor in- 
vented a loom. A higher class, in the es- 
timation and love of this city-building, 
market-going race of mankind, are the 
poets who, from the intellectual kingdom, 
feed the thought and imagination with 
ideas and pictures which raise men out of 
the world of corn and money, and console 
them for the short-comings of the day, 
and the meanness of labour and traffic. 
Then, also, the philosopher has his value, 
who flatters the intellect of this labourer, 
by engaging him with subtleties which 
instruct him in new faculties. Others 
may build cities ; he is to understand 
them, and keep them in awe. But there 
is a class who lead us into another region, 
the world of morals, or of will. What is 
singular about this region of thought is 
its claim. Wherever the sentiment of 
right comes in, it takes precedence of 
iyerything for Qther things, I 


make poetry of them ; but the moral sen- 
timent makes poetry of me. 

I have sometimes thought that he would 
render the greatest service to modern 
criticism, who shall draw the line of rela- 
tion that subsists between Shakespeare 
and Swedenborg. The human mind 
stands ever in perplexity, demanding in- 
tellect, demanding sanctity, impatient 
equally of each without the other. The 
reconciler has not yet appeared. If we 
tire of the saints, Shakespeare is our city 
of refuge. Yet the instincts presently 
teach, that the problem of essence must 
take precedence of all others — the ques- 
tions of Whence ? What ? and Whither ? 
and the solution of these must be in a life, 
and not in a book. A drama or poem in 
a proximate or oblique reply ; but Moses, 
Menu, Jesus, work directly on this prob- 
lem. The atmosphere of moral senti- 
ment is a region of grandeur which re- 
duces ail material magnificence to toys, 
yet opens to every wretch that has reasoa 
the doors of the universe. Almost with a 
fierce haste it lays its empire on the maq. 
In th^ lapguage gf thg Kgraq^ " Ggd 



SWEDEl^BORG : OR, THE MYSTIC. iS;? 


th« heaTen and tile earth, and all that is 
between them, think yo that we created 
them in jest, and that ye shall not return 
to us ? ” It is the kingdom of the will, and 
by inspiring the will, which is the seat of 
personality, seems to convert the universe 
into a person ; 

The realms of being to n« other bow. 

Not only all are thine, but all are Thou.” 

All men are commanded by the saint. 
The Koran makes a distinct class of those 
who are by nature good, and whose good- 
ness has an influence on others, and pro- 
nounces this class to bo the aim of crea- 
tion : the other classes are admitted to 
the feast of being, only as following in the 
train of this. And the Persian poet ex- 
claims to a soul of this kind : — 

' Go boldly forth, and feast on being’s 
banquet: 

Thou art the called — the rest admitted with 
thee.’’ 

The privilege of this class is an access to 
the secrets and structure of nature, by 
some higher method than by experience. 
In common parlance, what one man is 
said to learn by experience, a man of ex- 
Jraordinary sagacity is said, without ex- 
tjerience, to divine. The Arabians say 
that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali 
Seena, the philosopher conferred together ; 
and, on parting, the philosopher said, 
’’All that he sees, I know;" and the 
mystic said, " All that he knows, I see." 
If one should ask the reason of this in- 
tuition, the solution would lead us into 
that property which Plato denoted as Re- 
miniscence, and which is implied by the 
Hramins in the tenet of Transmigration. 
The soul having been often born, or, as 
the Hindoos say, "travelling the path of 
existence through thousands of births," 
having beheld the things which are here, 
those which are in heaven, and those 
which are beneath, there is nothing of 
which she has not gained the knowledge : 
no wonder that she is able to recollect, in 
regard to any one thing, what formerly 
she knew. " For, all things in nature 
being linked and related, and the soul 
having heretofore known all, nothing hin- 
ders but that any man who has recalled to 
mind, or, according to the common phrase, 
has learned one thing only, should of him- 
self recover all his ancient knowledge, 
and find out again all the rest, if he have 
but courage, and faint not in the midst of 
his researches. For inquiry and learning 
ia reminiscence all.*' How much more, 
If ha that inquires be a holy and godlike 


soul I For, by being assimilated to th« 
original soul, by whom, and after whom, 
all things subsist, the soul of man does 
tiii^n easily flow into all things, and all 
things flow into it : they mix ; and he ia 
present and sympathetic with their struc- 
ture and law. 

This path is difficult, secret, and beset 
with terror. The ancients called it ecstasy 
or absence — a getting out of their bodies 
to think. All religious history contains 
traces of the trance of saints — a beauti- 
tude, but without any sign of joy, earnest, 
solitary, even sad ; "the flight," Plotinus 
called it, " of the alone to the alone ” 
M»;€rir, the closing of the eyes — whence 
our word, Mystic. The trances of Socrates, 
Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, 
Fox, Pascal, Guion, Swedenborg, will 
readily come to mind. But what as read- 
ily comes to mind, is, the accompani- 
ment of disease. This beautitude comes 
in terror, and with shocks to the mind of 
the receiver. "It o’er-informs the tene- 
ment of clay," and drives the man mad ; 
or, gives a certain violent bias, which 
taints his judgment. In the chief exam- 
ples of religious illumination, somewhat 
morbid has mingled, in spite of the un- 
questionable increase of mental power. 
Must the highest good drag after it a 
quality which neutralises and discredits 
it ? — 

** Indeed, it takes 

From our achievements, when performed 
at height, 

The pith and marrow of our attribute.” 

Shall we say, that the economical mother 
disburses so much earth and so much 
fire, by weight and metre, to make a man, 
and will not add a pennyweight, though a 
nation is perishing for a leader ? There- 
fore, the men of God purchased their 
science by folly or pain. If you will have 
pure carbon, carbuncle, or diamond, to 
make the brain transparent, the trunk and 
organs shall be so much the grosser : in- 
stead of porcelain, they are potter’s earth, 
clay, or mud. 

In modern times, no such remarkable 
example of this introverted mind has oc- 
icurred, as in Emanuel Swedenborg, bom 
'in Stockholm, in 1688. This man, who 
[appeared to his contemporaries a vision- 
ary, and elixir of moonbeams, no douh*; 
led the most real life of any man then m 
the world : and now, when the royal and 
ducal Frederics, Cristierns, and Bruns* 
wicks, of that day, have slid into oblivion, 
he begins to spread himself into the minAi 
of thousands. As happens in great men, 
N 



184 


REPRESEli^TATIVE MES 


he seemed, by the variety and amount of 
his powers, to be composition of several 
persons — like the giant fruits which are 
matured in. gardens by the union of four 
or five single blossoms. His frame is on 
a larger scale, and possesses the advan- 
tages of size. As it is easier to see the 
reflection of the great sphere in large 
globes, though defaced by some crack or 
bitmish, than in drops of water, so men 
of large calibre, though with some eccen- 
tricity or madness, like Pascal or Newton, 
help us more than balanced mediocre 
minds. 

His youth and training could not fail to 
be extraordinary. Such a boy could not 
wihistle or dance, but goes grubbing into 
mines and mountains, prying into chem- 
istry, optics, physiology, mathematics, 
and astronomy, to find images fit for the 
measure of his versatile and capacious 
brain. He was a scholar from a child, 
and was educated at Upsala. At the age 
of twenty-eight, he was made Assessor of 
the Board of Mines, by Charles XII. In 
1716, he left home for four years, and 
visited the universities of England, Hol- 
land, France, and Germany. He per- 
formed a notable feat of engineering in 
1718, at the siege of Fredericshall, by 
hauling two galleys, five boats, and a sloop, 
•some fourteen English miles overland, 
for the royal service. In 1721, he jour- 
neyed over Europe, to examine mines and 
smelting-works. He published, in 1716, 
his Daedalus Hyperboreus, and, from^ this 
time, for the next thirty years, was’ em- 
ployed in the composition and publication 
of his scientific works. With the like 
force, he threw himself into theology. 
In 1743, when he was fifty-four years old, 
what is called his illumination began. All 
his metallurgy, and transportation of 
ships overland, was absorbed into this 
ecstasy. He ceased to publish any more 
scientific books, withdrew from his prac- 
tical labours, and devoted himself to the 
writing and publication of his voluminous 
theological works, which were printed at 
his own expense, or at that of the Duke 
of Brunswick, or other prince, tat Dresden, 
Leipsic, London, or Amsterdam. Later, 
he resigned his office of Assessor: the 
salary attached to this office continued to 
bo paid to him during his life. His duties 
had brought him into intimate acquaint- 
ance with King Charles XII., by whom 
he was much consulted and honoured. 
The like favour was continued to him by 
his successor. At the Diet of 1751, Count 
Hppken says, the most solid memorials on 


finance were from his pen. In Sweden, 
he appears to have attracted a marked 
regard. His rare science and practical 
skill, and the added fame of second sight 
and extraordinary religious knowledge 
and gifts, drew to him queens, nobles, 
clergy, shipmasters, and people about the 
ports through which he was wont to pass 
in his many voyages. The clergy inter- 
fered a little with the i^^iportation and 
publication of his religions works; but 
he seems to have kept the friendship of 
men in power. He was never married. 
He had great modesty and gentleness of 
bearing. His habits were simple ; he 
lived on bread, milk, and vegetables ; he 
lived in a house situated in a large garden : 
he went several times to England, where 
he does not seem to have attracted any 
attention whatever from the learned or 
the eminent ; and died at London, March 
29, 1772, of apoplexy, in his eighty-fifth 
year. He is described, when in London; 
as a man of a quiet, clerical habit, not 
averse to tea and coffee, and kind to chil- 
dren. He wore a sword when in full 
velvet dress, and whenever he walked 
out, carried a gold-headed cane. There 
is a common portrait of him in antique 
coat and wig, but the face has a wander 
ing or vacant air. 

The genius which was to penetrate tha 
science of the age with a far more subtle 
science ; to pass the bounds of space and 
time; venture into the dim spirit-realm, 
and attempt to establish a new religion in 
the world — began its lessons in quarries 
and forges, in the smelting-pot and cruci- 
ble, in ship-yards and dissecting-rooms. 
No one man is perhaps able to judge of 
the merits of his works on so many sub- 
jects. One is glad to learn that his books 
on mines and metals are held in the high- 
est esteem by those who understand these 
matters. It seems that ho anticipated 
much science of the nineteenth century ; 
anticipated, in astronomy, the discovery 
of the seventh planet — but, unhappily, not 
also of the eighth ; anticipated the views 
of modern astronomy in regard to the 
generation of earths by the sun ; in mag- 
netism, some important experiments and 
conclusions of later students ; in chemis- 
try, the atomic theory; in anatomy, the 
discoveries of Schlichting, Munro, and 
Wilson ; and first demonstrated the office 
of the lungs. His excellent English editor 
magnanimously lays no stress on his dis- 
coveries, since he was too great to care to 
be original ; and wo are to judge, by vrbai 
bo can spare, of what remains, 



SWEDENBORG: OR, THE MYSTIC. 185 


A colossal souli he lies vast abroad on 
his times, uncomprehended by them, and 
requires a long focal distance to be seen ; 
suggests, as Aristotle, Bacon, Seldon, 
Humboldt, that a certain vastness of 
learning, or qtiasi (omnipresence of the 
human soul in nature, is possible. His 
superb speculation, as from a tower, over 
nature and arts, without ever losing sight 
of the texture and sequence of things, 
almost realises his own picture, in his 
'* Principia,” of the original integrity of 
man. Over and above the merit of his 
particular discoveries, is the capital merit 
of his self-equality. A drop of water has 
the properties of the sea, but cannot ex- 
hibit a storm. There is beauty of a con- 
cert, as well as of a flute ; strength of a 
host, as well as of a hero ; and, in Sweden- 
borg, those who are best acquainted with 
modern books will most admire the merit 
of mass, One of the missouriums and 
mastodons of literature, he is not to be 
measured by whole colleges of ordinary 
scholars. His stalwart presence would 
flutter the gowns of a university. Our 
books are false by being fragmentary: 
their sentences are bonmots, and not parts 
of natural discourse ; childish expressions 
of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, 
worse, owing a brief notoriety to their 
petulance, or aversion from the order of 
nature — being some curiosity or oddity, 
designedly not in harmony with nature, 
and purposely framed to excite surprise, 
as jugglers do by concealing their means. 
But Swedenborg is. systematic, and respec- 
tive of the world in every sentence : all the 
means are orderly given ; his faculties 
work with astronomic punctuality, and 
this admirable writing is pure from all 
pertness or egotism. 

Swedenborg was born into an atmos- 
phere of great ideas. 'Tis hard to say 
what was his own: yet his life was digni- 
fied by noblest pictures of the universe. 
The robust Aristotelian method, with its 
breadth and adequateness, shaming our 
Sterile and linear logic by its genial radia- 
tion, conversant with series and degree, 
with effects and ends, skilful to discrimi- 
nate power from form, essence from acci- 
dent, and opening, by its terminology and 
definition, high roads into nature, had 
trained a race of athletic philosophers. 
Harvey had shown the circulation of the 
blood ; Gilbert had shown that the earth 
was a magnet ; Descartes, taught by Gil- 
bert’s magnet, with its vortex, spiral, and 
polarity, had filled Europe with the lead- 
u&i; thought of vortical motion, ^ the secret 


of nature. Newton, in the year in which 
Swedenborg was bom, published the 
** Principia,” and established the universal 
gravity. Malpighi, following the high 
doctrines of Hippocrates, Leucippus, and 
Lucretius, had given emphasis to the 
dogma that nature works in leasts — “ tota 
in minimis existit natura.” Unrivalled 
dissectors, Swammerdam, Leeuwenhoek, 
Winslow, Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius, 
Boerhaave, had left nothing for scapel or 
microscope to reveal in human or com 
parative anatomy ; Linnaeus, his contem* 
porary, was affirming, in his beautiful 
science, that “ Nature is always like her- 
self and, lastly, the nobility of method, 
the largest application of principles, had 
been exhibited by Leibnitz and Christian 
Wolff, in cosmology ; whilst Locke and 
Grotius had drawn the moral argument. 
What was left for a genius of the largest 
calibre, but to go over their ground, and 
verify and unite ? It is easy to see, in 
these minds, the origin of SwedenborgVi 
studies, and the suggestion of his problems. 
He had a capacity to entertain and vivify 
these volumes of thought. Yet the proxi- 
mity of these geniuses, one or other of 
whom had introduced all his leading ideas, 
makes Swedenborg another example of 
the difficulty, even in a highly fertile 
genius, of proving originality, the first 
birth and annunciation of one of the laws 
of nature. 

He named his favourite views, the doc- 
trine of Forms, the doctrine of Series and 
Degrees, the doctrine of Influx, the doc- 
trine of Correspondence. His statement 
of these doctrines deserves to be studied 
in his books. Not every man can read 
them, but they will reward him who can. 
His theologic works are valuable to illus- 
trate tliese. His writings would be a 
sufficient library to a lonely and athletic 
student; and the " Economy of the Ani- 
mal Kingdom" is one of those books 
which, by the sustained dignity of think- 
ing, is an honour to the human race. He 
had studied spars and metals to some pur- 
pose, His varied and solid knowledge 
makes his style lustrous with points and 
shooting spicula of thought, and resem- 
bling one of those winter mornings when 
the air sparkles with crystals. The gran- 
deur of the topics makes the grandeur of 
the style. He was apt for cosmology, be- 
cause of that native perception of identity 
which made mere size of no account to 
him. In the atom of magnetic iron, ha 
saw the quality which would generate the 
spiral motion of sun and planet. ^ 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


1 86 

The thoughts in which he lived were, 
the universality of each law in nature; 
She Platonic doctrine of the scale or de- 
grees ; the version or conversion of each 
-into other, and so the correspondence of 
all the parts ; the fine secret that little 
explains large, and large, little ; the cen- 
trality of man in nature, and the connec- 
tion that subsists throughout all things : 
he saw that the human body was strictly 
universal, or an instrument through which 
the soul feeds and is fed by the whole of 
matter! so that he held, in exact antagon- 
ism to the sceptics, that “ the wiser a man 
is, the more will he be a worshipper of the 
Deity." In short, he was a believer in the 
Identity-philosophy, which he held not 
idly, as the dreamers of Berlin or Boston, 
but which he experimented with and 
established through years of labour, with 
the heart and strength of the rudest 
Viking that his rough Sweden ever sent to 
battle. 

This theory dates from the oldest philo- 
sophers, and derives perhaps its best 
illustration from the newest. It is this ; 
that nature iterates her means perpetually 
on successive planes. In the old apnorism, 
'Stature is always self -similar. In the plant, 
the eye or germinative point opens to a 
leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of 
transforming the leaf into radicle, stamen, 
pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed. The 
whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf 
on leaf without end, the more or less of 
heat, light, moisture, and food determin- 
ing the form it shall assume. In the ani- 
mal, nature makes a vertebra, or a spine 
of vertebrae, and helps herself still by a 
new spine, with a limited power of modi- 
fying its form — spine on spine, to the end 
of the world. A poetic anatomist, in our 
t^wn day, teaches that a snake, being a 
jiorizontal line, and man, being an erect 
line, constitute a right angle ; and be- 
tween the lines of this mystical quadrant, 
all animated beings find their place ; and 
he assumes the hair-worm, the span-worm, 
or the snake, as the type or prediction of 
the spine. Manifestly, at the end of the 
spine, nature puts out smaller spines, as 
arms ; at the end of the arms, new spines, 
as hands; at the other end, she repeats 
the process, as legs and feet. At the top 
of the column, she puts out another spine, 
which doubles or loops itself over, as a 
span-worm, int^ a ball, and forms the 
skull, with extremities again; the hands 
being now the upper jaw, the feet the 
lower jaw, the fingers and toes being re- 
presented this time by upper and lower 


teeth. This new spine is destined to high 
uses. It is a new man on the shoulders 
of the last. It can almost shed its trunk, 
and manage to live alone, according to 
the Platonic idea in the Timii^us. Within 
it, on a higher plane, all that was done in 
che trunk repeats itself. Nature recites 
her lesson once more in a higher mood. 
The mind is a finer body, and resumes its 
functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, 
excluding, and generating, in a new and 
ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is 
all the process of alimentation repeated, in 
tne acquiring, comparing, digesting, and 
assimilating of experience. Here again is 
the mystery of generation repeated. In 
the brain are male and female faculties : 
here is marriage, here is fruit. And there 
is no limit to this ascending scale, but 
series on series. B'verything, at the end 
of one use, is taken up into the next, each 
series punctually repeating every organ 
and process of the last. W e are adapted 
to infinity. We are hard to please, and 
love nothing which ends : and in nature is 
no end ; but everything, at the end of one 
use, is lifted into a superior, and the 
ascent of these things climbs into demonics 
and celestial natures. Creative force, like 
a musical composer, goes on unweariedly 
repeating a simple air or theme, now high, 
now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand 
times reverberated, till it fills earth and 
heaven with the chant. 

Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is 
good ; but grander, when we find chemis- 
try only an extension of the law of masses 
into particles, and that the atomict heory 
shows the action of chemistry to be me- 
chanical also. Metaphysics shows us a 
sort of gravitation, operative also in the 
mental phenomena ; and the terrible tabu- 
lation of the French statists brings every 
piece of whim and humour to be reducible 
also to exact numerical ratios. If one man 
in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, 
eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, 
then in every twenty thousand, or thirty 
thousand, is found one man who eats 
shoes, or marries his grandmother. What 
we call gravitation, and fancy ultimate, is 
one fork of a mightier stream, for which 
we hav'j yet no name. Astronomy is ex- 
cellent ; blit it must come up into life to 
have its full value, and not remain there 
in globes and spaces. The globule of 
blood gyrates around its own axis in the 
human veins, as the planet in the sky ; and 
the circles of intellect relate to those of 
the heavens. Each law of nature has the 
like universality ; eating, sleep or bibemg'* 



StVEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 


tion, rotation, generation, metamorphosis, 
vortical motion, which is seen in eggs as 
In planets. These grand rhymes or 
returns in nature — the dear, best-known 
face startling us at every turn, under a 
mask so unexpected that we think it the 
face of a stranger, and carrying up the 
semblance into divine forms — delighted 
the prophetic eye of Swedenborg ; and he 
must be reckoned a leader in that revolu- 
tion, which, by giving to science an idea, 
has given to an aimless accumulation of 
experiments, guidance and form, and a 
beating heart. 

I own, with some regret, that his printed 
works amount to about fifty stout octavos, 
his scientific works being about half of the 
whole number; and it appears that a mass 
of manuscripts still unedited remains in 
the royal library at Stockholm. The 
scientific works have just now been trans- 
lated into English, in an excellent edition. 

Swedenborg printed these scientific 
books in the ten years from 1734 to 1744, 
and they remained from that time neg- 
lected : and now, after their century is 
complete, he has at last found a pupil in 
Mr. Wilkinson, in London, a philosophic 
critic, with a coequal vigour of understand- 
ing and imagination comparable only to 
Lord Bacon’s, who has produced his mas- 
ter’s buried books to the day, and trans- 
ferred them, with every advantage, from 
their forgotten Latin into English, to go 
round the world in our commercial and 
conquering tongue. This startling reap- 
pearance of Swedenborg, after a hundred 
years, in his pupil, is not the least remark- 
able fact in his history. Aided, it is said, 
by the munificence of Mr. Clissold, and 
also by his literary skill, this piece of 
poetic justice is done. The admirable 
preliminary discourses with which Mr. 
Wilkinson has enriched these volumes, 
throw all the contemporary philosophy of 
England into shade, and leave me nothing 
to say on their proper grounds. 

The “Animal Kingdom” is a book of 
wonderful merits. It was written with the 
highest end — to put science and the soul, 
long estranged from each other, at one 
again. It was an anatomist’s account of the 
human body, in the highest style of poetry. 
Nothing can exceed the bold and brilliant 
treatment of a subject usually so dry and 
repulsive. He saw nature “wreathing 
through an everlasting spiral, with wheels 
that never dry, on axles that never creak," 
and sometimes sought “ to uncover those 
aecret recesses where Nature is sitting at 
the firea in the depths of her laboratory ; " 


187 

whilst the picture comes recommended by 
the hard fidelity with which it is based on 
practical anatomy. It is remarkable that 
this sublime genius decides, peremptorily 
for the analytic, against the synthetic 
method ; and, in a book whose genius is 
a daring poetic synthesis, claims to cod 
fine himself to a rigid experience. 

He knows, if he only, the flowing of 
nature, and how wise was that old answer 
of Amasis to him who bade him drink up 
the sea — “Yes, willingly, if you will stop 
the rivers that flow in." Few knew as 
much about nature and her subtle man- 
ners, or expressed more subtly her goings. 
He thought as large a demand is made on 
our faith by nature, as by miracles. " He 
noted that in her proceeding from first 
principles through her several subordina- 
tions, there was no state through which 
she did not pass, as if her path lay through 
all things.” “ For as often as she betakes 
herself upward from visible phenomena, 
or, in other words, withdraws herself in- 
ward, she instantly, as it were, disappears, 
while no one knows what has become of 
her, or whither she is gone : so that it is 
necessary to take science as a guide in 
pursuing her steps.” 

The pursuing the inquiry under the 
light of an end or final cause, gives won- 
derful animation, a sort of personality to 
the whole writing. This book announces 
his favourite dogmas. The ancient doc- 
trine of Hippocrates, that the brain is a 
gland ; and of Leucippus, that the atom 
may be known by the mass ; or, in Plato, 
the macrocosm by the microcosm; and* 
in the verses of Lucretius — 

Ossa videlicet e pauxillis atque minutis 
Ossibus sic et de pauxillis atque minutis 
Visceribus viscus gigui, sanguenque creari 
Sanguinis inter se multis coeimtibus guttis ; 

Ex aiirique putat micis consistere posse 
Aurum, ct do terris terram concrescere pavis; 
Ignibusex igneis, humorem humoribus esse. 

Lib. I. 835, 

“The principle of all things, entrails made 
Of smallest entrails ; bone, of smallest bone ; 
Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to 
one ; 

Gold, of small grains ; earth, of small sand 
compacted ; 

Small drops to water, sparks to fire con- 
tracted : ’* 

and which Malpighi bad summed in hit 
maxim, that "nature exists entire in 
beasts " — is a favourite thought of Swe- 
denborg. "It Is a constant law of th« 
organic body, that large, compound, oe 
visible forms exist and subsist flbm 



REPRUSBNtATtVB MEN. 


1^8 


•m^er, simpler, and ultimately from in- 
visible forms, which act similarly to the 
larger ones, but more perfectly and more 
universally ; and the feast forms so per- 
fectly and universally, as to involve an 
idea representative of their entire uni- 
verse." The unities of each organ are so 
many little organs, homogeneous with 
their compound : the unities of the tongue 
are little tongues ; those of the stomach, 
little stomachs ; those of the heart are 
little hearts. This fruitful idea furnishes 
a key to every secret. What was too 
small for the eye to detect was read by the 
aggregates ; what was too large, by the 
units. There is no end to his application 
of the thought. " Hunger is an aggregate 
of very many little hungers, or losses of 
blood by the little veins all over the body." 
It is a key to this theology also. Man 
is a kind of very minute heaven, corres- 
ponding to the world of spirits and to 
heaven. Every particular idea of man, 
and every affection, yea, every smallest 
part of his affection, is an image and efBgy 
of him. A spirit may be known from 
only a single thought. God is the grand 
man." 

The hardihood and thoroughness of his 
study of nature required a theory of forms 
also. " Forms ascend in order from the 
lowest to the highest. The lowest form is 
angular, or the terrestrial and corporeal. 
The second and next higher form is the 
circular, which is also called the perpetual- 
angular, because the circumference of a 
circle is a perpetual angle. The form 
above this is the spiral, parent and 
measure of circular forms ; its diameters 
are not rectilinear, but variously circular, 
and have a spherical surface for centre ; 
therefore it is called the perpetual-circu- 
lar. The form above this is the vortical, 
or perpetual- spiral ; next, the perpetual- 
vortical, or celestial: last, the perpetual- 
celestial, or spiritual." 

Was it strange that a genius so bold 
should take the last step, also — conceive 
that he might attain the science of all 
sciences, to unlock the meaning of the 
world ? In the first volume of the 
" Animal Kingdom," he broaches the 
subject, in a remarkable note : 

" In our doctrine of Representations and 
Correspondences, we shall treat of both 
these symbolical and typical resemblances, 
and of the astonishing things which occur, 
I will not say, in the living body only, but 
throughout nature, and which correspond 
BO entirely to supreme and spiritual things, 
Uiftt.oa« would swear that the physical 


world was purely symbolical of the spirltUAl 
world ; insomuch, that if we choose to ex- 
press any natural truth in physical and 
definite vocal terms, and to convert these 
terms only into the corresponding and 
spiritual terms, we shall by these means 
elicit a spiritual truth, or theological 
dogma, in place of the physical truth or 
precept : although no mortal would have 
predicted that anything of the kind could 
possibly arise by bare literal transposi- 
tion ; inasmuch as the one precept, con- 
sidered separately from the other, appears 
to have absolutely no relation to it, I in- 
tend, hereafter, to communicate a number 
of examples of such correspondences, to- 
gether with a vocabulary containing the 
terms of spiritual things, as well as of the 
physical things for which they are substi- 
tuted. This symbolism pervades the 
living body." 

The fact, thus explicitly stated, is im- 
plied in all poetry, in allegory, in fable, in 
the use of emblems, and in the structure 
of language. Plato knew of it, as is 
evident from his twice bisected line, in 
the sixth book of the Republic. Lord 
Bacon had found that truth and nature 
differed only as seal and print; and he 
instanced some physical propositions, 
with their translation into a moral or 
political sense. Behmen, and all mystics, 
imply this law, in their dark riddle-writ- 
ing. The poets, in as far as they are 
poets, use it ; but it is known to them 
only, as the magnet was known for ages, 
as a toy. Sv/edanborg first put the fact 
into a detached and scientific statement, 
because it was habitually present to him, 
and never not seen. It was involved, as 
we explained already, in the doctrine of 
identity and iteration, because the mental 
series exactly tallies with the material 
series. It required an insight that could 
mnk things in order and series ; or, rather, 
it required such rightness of position, that 
the poles of the eye should coincide with 
the axis of the world. The earth had fed 
its mankind through five or six millen- 
niums, and they had sciences, religions, 
philosophies ; and yet had failed to see 
the correspondence of meaning between 
every part and every other part. And, 
down to this hour, literature has no book 
in which the symbolism of things is scien- 
tifically opened. One would say, that, as 
soon as men had the first hint that every 
sensible object — animal, rock, river, air — 
nay, space and time, subsists not for itself, 
nor finally to a material end, but as a 
picture-language to tell another story ol 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 


ppeings and duties, other science would be 
put by, and a science of such grand pre- 
sage would absorb all faculties : that each 
man would ask of all objects, what they 
mean ; Why does the horizon hold me 
fast, with my joy and grief, in this centre ? 
Why hear I the same sense from countless 
differing voices, and read one never quite 
expressed fact in endless picture-lan- 
guage ? Yet, whether it be, that these 
things will not be intellectually learned, 
or, that many centuries must elaborate 
and compose so rare and opulent a soul — I 
there is no comet, rock-stratum, fossil, 
fish, quadruped, spider, or fungus, that, ! 
for itself, does not interest more scholars 
and classifiers, than the meaning and 
upshot of the frame of things. 

But Swedenborg was not content with 
the culinary use of the world. In his 
fifty-fourth year, these thoughts held him 
fast, and his profound mind admitted the 
perilous opinion, too frequent in religious 
history, that he was an abnormal person, 
;o whom was granted the privilege of con- 
versing with angels and spirits ; and this 
ecstasy connected itself with just this 
S»ftice of explaining the moral import of 
the sensible world. To a right perception, 
at once broad and minute, of the order of 
nature, he added the comprehension of 
the moral laws in their widest social as- 
pects : but whatever he saw, through some 
excessive determination to form, in his 
constitution, he saw not abstractedly, but 
in pictures, heard it in dialogues, con- 
structed it in events. When he attempted 
to announce the law most sanely, he was j 
forced to couch it in parable. 

Modern psychology offers no similar 
example of a deranged balance. The 
principal powers continued to maintain a ! 
healthy action ; and, to a reader who can 
make due allowance in the report for the 
reporter's peculiarities, the results are 
Still instructive, and a more striking testi- 
mony to the sublime laws he announced, 
than any that balanced dullness could 
afford. He attempts to give some account 
of the modus of the new state, affirming 
that “ his presence in the spiritual world 
is attended with a certain separation, but 
only as to the intellectual part of his 
mind, not as to the will part;” and he 
affirms that " he sees, with the internal 
sight, the things that are in another life, 
more clearly than he sees the things which 
are here in the world.” 

Having adopted the belief that certain 
books of the Old and New Testaments 
were exact allegories, or written in the 


189 

angelic or ecstatic mode, he employed his 
remaining years in extricating from the 
literal, the universal sense. lie had bor- 
rowed from Plato the fine fable of "a 
most ancient people, men better than we. 
and dwelling nigher to the gods ; ” and 
Swedenborg added, that they used the 
earth symbolically ; that these, when they 
saw terrestrial objects, did not think at all 
about them, but only about those which 
they signified. The correspondence be- 
tween thoughts and things henceforward 
occupied him. “The ve^ organic form 
resembles the end inscribed on it.” A 
man is in general, and in particular, an 
organised justice or injustice, selfishnesa 
or gratitude. And the cause of this har- 
mony he assigned in the Arcana: “ The 
reason why all and single things, in the 
heavens and on earth, are representative, 
is because they exist from an influx of the 
Lord, through heaven.” This design of 
exhibiting such correspondences, which, 
if adequately executed, would be the 
poem of the world, in which all history 
and science would play an er^ential part, 
was narrowed and defeated by the exclu- 
sively theologic direction which his in- 
quiries took. His perception of nature is 
not human and universal, but is mystical 
and Hebraic. He fastens each natural 
object to a theologic notion — a horse sig- 
nifies carnal understanding; a tree, per- 
ception : the moon, faith ; a cat means 
this ; an ostrich, that ; an artichoke, this 
other; and poorly tethers every symbol 
to a several ecclesiastic sense. The slip- 
pery Proteus is not so easily caught. In 
nature, each individual symbol plays 
innumerable parts, as each particle of 
matter circulates in turn through every 
system. The central identity enables any 
one symbol to express successively all the 
qualities and shades of real being. In 
the transmission of the heavenly waters, 
every hose fits every hydrant. Nature 
J avenges herself speedily on the hard pe- 
dantry that would chain her waves. She 
is no literalist. Everything must be taken 
genially, and we must be at the top of our 
condition, to understand anything rightly. 

His theological bias thus fatally nar- 
rowed his interpretation of nature, and 
the dictionary of symbols is yet to be 
written. But the interpreter, whom man- 
kind must still expect, will find no prede- 
cessor who has approached so near to the 
true problem. 

Swedenborg styles himself, in the title- 
page of his books, ** Servant of the Lord 
Jesus Christ ; ” and by force of inteyeot 



190 


BEPRBSBmATlVE MEN. 


and in effect, he is the last Father in the i 
Church, and is not likely to have a suc- 
cessor. No wonder that his depth of 
ethical wisdom should give him influence 
as a teacher. To the withered traditional 
church yielding dry catechisms, he let in j 
nature again, and the worshipper, escaping 
from the vestry of verbs and texts, is sur- i 
prised to find himself a party to the whole ' 
of his religion: his religion thinks for 
him, and is of universal application : he 
turns it on every side ; it fits every part of 
life, interprets and dignifies every circum- 
stance. Instead of a religion which visited 
him diplomatically three or four times — 
when he was born, when he married, when 
he fell sick, and when he died, and for the 
rest never interfered with him — here was 
a teaching which accompanied him all 
day, accompanied him even into sleep and 
dreams; into his thinking, and showed 
him through what a long ancestry his 
thoughts descend ; into society, and showed 
by what affinities he was girt to his equals 
and his counterparts ; into natural ob- 
jects, and showed their origin and mean- 
ing, what are friendly and what are hurtful ; 
and opened the future world by indicating 
the continuity of the same laws. His dis- 
ciples allege that their intellect is invigo- 
rated by the study of his books. 

There is no such problem for criticism 
as his theological writings, their merits 
are so commanding ; yet such grave de- 
ductions must be made. Their immense 
and sandy diffuseness is like the prairie, or 
the desert, and their incongruities are like 
the last deliration. He is superfluously 
explanatory, and his feeling of the ignor- 
ance of men, strangely exaggerated. Men 
take truths of this nature very fast. Yet 
he abounds in assertions : he is a rich 
discoverer, and of things which most im- 
port us to know. His thought dwells in 
essential resemblances, Tike the resem- 
blance of a house to the man who built it. 
Ho saw things in their law, in likeness of 
function, not of structure. There is an 
invariable method and order in his delivery 
of his truth, the habitual proceeding of 
the mind from inmost to outmost. What 
earnestness and weightiness — his eye 
never roving, without one swell of vanity, 
or one look to self, in any common form 
of literary pride ! a theoretic or specula- 
tive man, but whom no practical man in 
the universe could affect to scorn. Plato 
is a gownsman: his garment, though of 
purple, and almost sky-woven, is an aca- j 
demic robe, atjd hinders action with its 
voluminoue folds. But this mystic is! 


awful to Caesar, Lycurgus himself would 

bow. 

The moral insight of Swedenborg, the 
correction of popular errors, the announce- 
ment of ethical laws, take him out of 
comparison with any other modern writer, 
and entitle him to a place, vacant for some 
ages, among the lawgivers of mankind. 
That slow but commanding influence 
which he has acquired, like that of other 
religious geniuses, must be excessive also, 
and have its tides, before it subsides into 
a permanent amount. Of course, what is 
real and universal cannot be confined to 
the circle of those who sympathise strictly 
with his genius, but will pass forth into 
the common stock of wise and just think- 
ing. The world has a sure chemistry, by 
which it extracts what is excellent in its 
children, and lets fall the infirmities and 
limitations of the grandest mind. 

That metempsychosis which is familiar 
in the old mythology of the Greeks, col- 
lected in Ovid, and in the Indian Trans- 
migration, and is there objective, or really 
takes place in bodies by alien will — ia 
Swedenborg’s mind, has a more philoso^ 
phic character. It is subjective, or depends 
entirely upon the thought of the person. 
All things in the universe arrange them- 
selves to each person anew, according to 
his ruling lovo. Man is such as his affection 
and thought are. Man is man by virtue of 
willing, not by virtue of knowing and un- 
derstanding. As he is, so he sees. The 
marriages of the world are broken up. 
Interiors associate all in the spiritual 
world. Whatever the angels looked upon 
was to them celestial. Each Satan ap- 
pears to himself a man ; to those as bad 
as he, a comely man; to the purified, a 
heap of carrion. Nothing can resist 
states : everything gravitates : like will to 
like : what we call poetic justice talces 
effect on the spot. We have come into a 
world which is a living poem. Everything 
is as I am. Bird and beast is not bird 
and beast, but emanation and effluvia of 
the minds and wills of men there pre- 
sent. Everyone makes his own house 
and state. The ghosts are tormented 
with the fear of death, and cannot remem- 
ber that they have died. They who are ia 
evil and falsehood are afraid of all others. 
Such as have deprived themselves of 
charity, wander and flee: the societies 
which they approach discover their qua- 
lity, and drive them away. The covetous 
seem to themselves to be abiding in cells 
where their money is deposited, and these 
to be invested with mice. They who plaoa 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 


merit in good works seem to themselves to 
Out wood. “ I asked such, if they were not 
wearied ? They replied, that they have not 
yet done work enough to merit heaven.” 

He delivers golden sayings, which ex- 
press with singular beauty the ethical 
laws ; as when he uttered that famed sen- 
tence, that, •' in heaven the angels are 
advancing continually to the springtime 
of their youth, so that the oldest angel 
appears the youngest:” “The more 
angels, the more room : ” “ The perfec- 
tion of man is the love of use : ” “ Man, 
in his perfect form, is heaven : ” “ What 
is from Him, is Him : ” ” Ends always 
ascend as nature descends.” And the 
truly poetic account of the writing in the 
inmost heaven, which, as it consists of in- 
flexions according to the form of heaven, 
can be read without instruction. He al- 
most justifies his claim to preternatural 
vision, by strange insights of the structure 
of the human body and mind. “ It is 
never permitted to anyone, in heaven, to 
stand behind another and look at the back 
of his head : for then the influx which is 
from the Lord is disturbed.” The angels, 
from the sound of the voice, know a man’s 
Jove ; from the articulation of the sound, 
his wisdom ; and from the sense of the 
words, his science. 

In the “Conjugal Love,” he has un- 
folded the science of marriage. Of this 
book, one would say, that, with the highest 
elements, it has failed of success. It came 
near to be the Hymn of Love, which Plato 
attempted in the “Banquet”; the love, 
which, Dante saysi Casella sang among 
the angels in Paradise; and which, as 
lightly celebrated, in its genesis, fruition, 
and effect, might well entrance the souls, 
as it would lay open the genesis of all 
institutions, customs, and manners. The 
book had been grand, if the Hebraism had 
been omitted, and the law stated without 
Gothicism, as ethics, and with that scope 
for ascension of state which the nature of 
things requires. 

It is a fine platonic development of the 
science of marriage ; teaching that sex is 
universal, and not local ; virility in the 
male qualifying every organ, act, and 
thought; and the feminine in woman. 
Therefore, in the real or spiritual world, 
the nuptial union is not momentary, but 
incessant and total; and chastity not a 
local, but a universal virtue ; unchastity 
being discovered as much in the trading, 
or planting, or speaking, or philoso- 
phising, as in generation ; and that, though 
the virgins he saw in heaven were beauti- 


I9i 

ful, the wives were incomparably more 
beautiful, and went on increasing in beauty 
evermore. 

Yet Swedenborg, after his mode, pinned 
his theory to a temporary form. He 
exaggerates the circumstance of marriage; 
and, though he finds false marriages on 
earth, fancies a wiser choice in heaven. 
But of progressive souls, all loves and 
friendships are momentary. Do you love 
me? means. Do you see the same truth ? 
If you do, we are happy with the same 
happiness : but presently one of us passes 
into the perception of new truth ; we are 
divorced, and no tension in jature can 
hold us to each other. I know how de- 
licious is this cup of love — I existing for 
you, you existing for me; but it is a 
child’s clinging to his toy ; an attempt to 
eternise the fireside and nuptial chamber ; 
to keep the picture-alphabet through 
which our first lessons are prettily con- 
veyed. The Eden of God is bare and 
grand: like the out-door landscape, re- 
membered from the evening fireside, it 
seems cold and desolate, whilst you cower 
over the coals ; but, once abroad again, 
we pity those who can forego the magnifi- 
cence of nature, for candle-light and cards. 
Perhaps the true subject of the “Con- 
jugal Love ” is Conversation, whose law*? 
are profoundly eliminated. It is false, if 
literally applied to marriage. For God is 
the bride or bridegroom of the soul, 
Heaven is not the pairing of two, but the 
communion of all souls. We meet, and 
dwell an instant under the temple of one 
thought, and part as though we parted not, 
to join another thought in other fellow- 
ships of joy. So far from there being any- 
thing divine in the low and proprietary 
sens© of Do you love me ? it is only when 
you leave and lose me, by casting your- 
self cn a sentiment which is higher than 
both of us, that I draw near, and find my- 
self at your side ; and I am repelled, if 
you fix your eye on me, and demand love. 
In fact, in the spiritual world, we change 
sexes every moment. You love the worth 
in me ; then I am your husband : but it is 
not me, but the worth, that fixes the love ; 
and that worth is a drop of the ocean of 
worth that is beyond me. Meantime, I 
adore the greater worth in another, and 
so become his wife. He aspires to a 
higher worth in another spirit, and is wife 
or receiver of that influence. 

Whether a self-inquisitorial habit, that 
he grew into, from jealousy of the sins to 
I which men of thought are liable, he 



192 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


acquired, In disentangling and demon- 
strating that particular form of moral dis- 
ease, an acumen which no conscience can 
resist. I refer to his feeling of the pro- 
fanation of thinking to what is good 
“from scientifics,” “To reason about 
faith, is to doubt and deny.” He was 
ainfully alive to the difference between 
nowing and doing, and this sensibility is 
incessantly expressed. Philosophers are, 
therefore, vipers, cockatrices, asps, 
hemorrhoids, presters, and flying ser- 
pents ; literary men are conjurers and 
charlatans. j 

But this topic suggests a sad after- ^ 
thought, that here we find the seat of his 
own pain. Possibly Swedenborg paid the 
penalty of introverted faculties. Success, 
or a fortunate genius, seems to depend on 
a happy adjustment of heart and brain ; ! 
on a due proportion, hard to hit, of moral 
and mental power, which, perhaps, obeys 
the law of those chemical ratios which 
make a proportion in volumes necescary 
to combination, as when gases will com- 
bine in certain fixed rates, but not at any 
rate. It is hard to carry a full cup : and 
this man, profusely endowed in heart and 
mind, early fell into dangerous discord 
with himself. In his Animal Kingdom, 
he surprised us, by declaring that he 
loved analysis, and not synthesis; and 
now, after his fiftieth year, he falls into 
jealousy of his intellect; and, though 
aware that truth is not solitary, nor is 
goodness solitary, but both must ever mix 
and marry, he makes war on his mind, 
takes the part of the conscience against 
it, and, on all occasions, traduces and 
blasphemes it. The violence is instantly 
avenged. Beauty is disgraced, love is 
unlovely, when truth, the half part of 
heaven, is denied, as much as when a 
bitterness in men of talent leads to satire, 
and destroys the judgment. He is wise, 
but wise in his own despite. There is an 
air of infinite grief, and the sound of 
wailing, all over and through this lurid 
universe. A vampire sits in the seat of 
the prophet, and turns with gloomy 
appetite to the images of pain. Indeed, 
a bird does not more readily weave its 
nest, or a mole bore into the ground, than 
this seer of souls substructs a new hell 
and pit, each more abominable than the 
last, round every new crew of offenders. 
He was let down through a column that 
seemed of brass, but it was formed of 
angelic spirits, that he might descend 
safely amongst the unhappy, and witness 
thf vastation of souls : and heard there, 


for a long continuance, their lamentations ; 
he saw their tormentors, who increase and 
strain pangs to infinity ; he saw the hell 
of jugglers, the hell of assassins, the hell 
of the lascivious ; the hell of robbers, who 
kill and boil men ; the infernal tun of the 
deceitful; the excrementitious hells; the 
hell of the revengeful, whose faces re- 
sembled a round, broad cake, and their 
arms rotate like a wheel. Except Rabelais 
and Dean Swift, nobody ever had such 
science of filth and corruption. 

These books should be used with 
caution. It is dangerous to sculpture 
these evanescing images of thought. True 
in transition, they become false if fixed. 
It requires, for his just apprehension, 
almost a genius equal to his own. But 
when his visions become the stereotyped 
language of multitudes of persons, of all 
degrees of age and capacity, they are 
perverted. The wise people of the Greek 
race were accustomed to lead the most 
intelligent and virtuous young men, as 
part of their education, through the 
Eleiisinian mysteries, wherein, with much 
pomp and graduation, the highest truths 
known to ancient wisdom were taught. 
An ardent and contemplative young man, 
at eighteen or twenty years, might read 
once these books of Swedenborg, these 
mysteries of love and conscience, and then 
throw them aside for ever. Genius is ever 
haunted by similar dreams, when the 
hells and the heavens are opened to it. 
But these pictures are to be held as 
mystical, that is, as a quite arbitrary and 
accidental picture of the truth — not as the 
truth. Any other symbol would be at 
good : then this is safely seen. 

Swedenborg’s system of the world wants 
central spontaneity ; it is dynamic, not 
vital, and lacks power to generate life. 
There is no individual in it. The universe 
is a gigantic crystal, all whose atoms and 
laminae lie in uninterrupted order, and 
with unbroken unity, but cold and still. 
What seems an individual and a will, is 
none. There is an immense chain of 
intermediation, extending from centre to 
extremes, which bereaves every agency of 
all freedom and character. The universe, 
in his poem, suffers under a magnetic 
sleep, and only reflects the mind of the 
magnetiser. Every thought comes into 
each mind by influence from a society 
of spirits that surround it, and into these 
from a higher society, and so on. All his 
types mean the same few things. All his 
figures speak one speech. All bis in^er« 



SWEDENBORG: OR, THE MYSTIC. 


£ocutOf3 Swedenborgise. Bo they who 
they may, to this complexion must they 
come at last. This Charon ferries them 
ail over in his boat; kings, counsellors, 
cavaliers, doctors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir 
Hans Sloane, King George II., Mahomet, 
or whosoever, and all gather one grim- 
ness of hue and style. Only when Cicero 
comes by, our gentle seer sticks a little 
at saying he talked with Cicero, and, 
with a touch of human relenting, remarks, 
“ one whom it was given me to believe 
was Cicero ; " and when the sot disant 
Roman opens his mouth, Rome and elo- 
quence have ebbed away — it is plain theo- 
logic Swedenborg, like the rest. His 
heavens and hells are dull ; fault of want 
of individualism. The thousand-fold re- 
lation of men is not there. The interest 
that attaches in nature to each man, be- 
cause he is right by his wrong, and wrong 
by his right, bees use he defies all dogma- 
tising and classification, so many allow- 
ances, and contingencies, and futurities, 
are to be taken into account, strong by 
his vices, often paralysed by his virtues — 
sinks into entire sympathy with his 
society. This want reacts to the centre 
of the system. Though the agency of 
“the Lord” is in every line referred to 
by name, it never becomes alive. There 
is no lustre in that eye which gazes from 
the centre, and which should vivify the 
immense dependency of beings. 

The vice of Swedenborg’s mind is its 
theologic determination. Nothing with 
him has the liberality of universal wis- 
dom, but we are always in a church. 
That Hebrew muse, which taught the 
lore of right and wrong to men, had the 
same excess of influence for him, it has 
had for the nations. The mode, as well 
as the essence, was sacred. Palestine is 
ever the more valuable as a chapter in 
universal history, and ever the less an 
available element in education. The 
genius of Swedenborg, largest of all 
modern souls in this department of 
thought, wasted itself in the endeavour 
to reanimate and conserve what had 
already arrived at its natural term, and, 
in the great secular Providence, was re- 
tiring from its prominence, before western 
modes of thought and expression, Swe- 
denborg and Behmen both failed by 
attaching themselves to the Christian 
symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, 
which carries innumerable Christianities, 
humanities, divinities, in its bosom. 

The excess of influence shows itself in 
the incongruous importation of a foreign 


193 

rhetoric. “ What have I to do,“ asks the 
impatient reader, “with jasper and sar- 
donyx, beryl and chalcedony ; what with 
arks and passovers, ephahs and ephods; 
what with lepers and emerods : what with 
heave-offerings and unleavened bread ; 
chariots of fire, dragons crowned and 
horned, behemoth and unicorn? Good 
for Orientals, these are nothing to me. 
The more learning you bring to explain 
them, the more glaring the impertinence. 
The more coherent and elaborate the 
system, the less I like it. I say, with the 
Spartan, ‘ Why do you speak so much to 
the purpose, of that which is nothing tcl 
the purpose ? * My learning is such a£ 
God gave me in my birth and habit, in 
the delight and study of my eyes, and not 
of another man’s. Of all absurdities, this 
of some foreigner, proposing to take away 
my rhetoric, and substitute his own, and 
amuse me with pelican and stork, instead 
of thrush and robin ; palm-trees and 
shittim-wood, instead of sassafras and 
hickory— seems the most needless.” 

Locke said, ” God, when he makes tha 
'prophet, does not unmake tha man.” 
Swedenborg’s history points the remark. 
The parish disputes, in the Swedish 
church, between the friends and foes of 
Luther and Melancthon, concerning 
“ faith alone,” and “ works alone,” intrude 
themselves into his speculations upon 
the economy of the universe, and of the 
celestial societies. The Lutheran bishop's 
son, for whom the heavens are opened, 
so that he sees with eyes, and in the 
richest symbolic forms, the awful truth of 
things, and utters again, in his books, as 
under a heavenly mandate, the indis- 
putable secrets of moral nature — with all- 
these grandeurs resting upon him, re- 
mains the Lutheran bishop’s son ; his 
judgments are those of a Swedish polemic 
and his vast enlargements are purchased 
by adamantine limitations. He carries 
his controversial memory with him in his 
visits to the souls. He is like Michel 
Angelo, who, in his frescoes, put the car- 
dinal who had offended him to roast under 
a mountain of devils ; or, like Dante, who 
avenged, in vindictive melodies, all his 
private wrongs ; or, perhaps still more 
like Montaigne’s parish priest, who, if a 
hail-storm passes over the village, thinks 
the day of doom is come, and the canni- 
bals already have got the pip. Sweden- 
borg confounds us not less with the pains 
of Melancthon, and Luther, and Wolfius, 
and his own books, which he advertises 
among the angels. § 



^04 REPRESENTATIVE MEH, 


Under the same theologic cramp many 
of his dogmas are bound. His cardinal 
position in morals is, that evils should be 
shunned as sins. But be does not know 
what evil is, or what good is, who thinks 
any ground remains to be occupied, after 
saying that evil is to be shunned as evil. 
I doubt not he was led by the desire to 
insert the element of personality of Deity. 
But nothing is added. One man, you say, 
dreads erysipelas — show him that this 
dread is evil : or, one dreads hell — show 
him that dread is evil. He who loves 
goodness, harbours angels, reveres rever- 
ence, and lives with God. The less we 
have to do with our sins, the better. No 
•man can afford to waste his moments in 
compunctions. “ That is active duty,” 
say the Hindoos, “which is not for our 
bondage ; that is knowledge, which is for 
our liberation : all other duty is good only 
unto weariness.” 

Another dogma, growing out of this 
pernicious theologic limitation, is this 
Inferno. Swedenborg has devils. Evil, 
according to old philosophers, is good in 
the making. That pure malignity can 
exist, is the extreme proposition of unbe- 
lief. It is not to be entertained by a 
rational agent ; it is atheism ; it is the 
last profanation. Euripides rightly said — 

Goodness and being in the gods are one ; 

He who imputes ill to them makes them 
none.” 

To what a painful perversion had 
Gothic theology arrived, that Sweden- 
borg admitted no conversion for evil 
spirits ! But the divine effort is never re- 
laxed ; the carrion in the sun will convert 
itself to grass and flowers ; and man, 
though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, 
is on his way to all that is good and true. 
Burns, with the wild humour of his apos- 
trophe to “ poor old Nickie Ben,” 

“ O wad ye tak a thought, and mend I ” 

has the advantage of the vindictive theo- 
logian. Everything is superficial, and 
perishes, but love and truth only. The 
largest is always the truest sentiment, 
and we feel the more generous spirit of 
the Indian Vishnu — “ I am the same to 
aU mankind. There is not one who is 
worthy of my love or hatred. They who 
serve mo with adoration — I am in them, 
and they in me. If one whose ways are 
altogether evil, serve mo alone, he is as 
respectable as the just man; he is alto- 
gether well employed ; he soon becometh 
of a virtuous spirit, and obtaineth eternal 
happiness,'' 


I For the anomalous preteflislon of Rev9« 
ilations of the other world— only his prO' 
bity and genius can entitle it to any 
serious regard. His revelations destroy 
their credit by running into deflail. If a 
man say, that the Holy Ghost has in- 
formed him that the Last Judgment (or 
the last of the judgments) took place in 
1757; OT, that the Dutch, in the other 
world, live in a heaven by themselves, 
and the English, in a heaven by them- 
selves; I reply, that the Spirit which is 
holy, is reserved, taciturn, and deals in 
laws. The rumours of ghosts and hob- 
goblins gossip and tell fortunes. The 
teachings of the High Spirit are abstemi- 
ous, and, in regard to particulars, nega- 
tive. Socrates’ Genius did not advise 
him to act or to find, but if he purposed 
to do somewhat not advantageous, it dis- 
suaded him. “ What God is,” he said, 
“ I know not ; what he is not, I know.” 
The Hindoos have denominated the Su- 
preme Being, the “ Internal Check.” 
The illuminated Quakers explained their 
Light, not as somewhat which leads to 
any action, but it appears as an obstruct 
tion to anything unfit. But the right ex- 
amples are private experiences, which 
are absolutely at one on this point. 
Strictly speaking, Swedenborg’s revela- 
tion is a confounding of planes — a capital 
offence in so learned a categorist. This 
is to carry the law of surface into the 
j plane of substance, to carry individualism 
and its fopperies into the realm of 
essences and generals, which is disloca- 
tion and chaos. 

The secret of heaven is kept from ago 
to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel, 
ever dropped an early syllable to answer 
the longings of saints, the fears of mortals. 
We should have listened on our knees to 
any favourite, who, by stricter obedi- 
ence, had brought his thoughts into 
parallelism with the celestial currents, 
and could hint to human ears the scenery 
and circumstance of the newly parted 
soul. But it is certain that it must tally 
with what is best in nature. It must not 
be inferior in tone to the already known 
works of the artist who sculptures the 
globes of the firmament, and writes the 
moral law. It must be fresher than rain- 
bows, stabler than mountains, agreeing 
with flowers, with tides, and the rising 
and setting of autumnal stars. Melodious 
poets shall be hoarse as street ballads, 
when once the penetrating key-note ot 
I nature and spirit is sounded — the earth- 
[beat, sea-beat, heartbeat, which makef 



SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC 


the tune to which the sun rolls, and the 
globule of blood, and the sap of trees. 

In this mood, we hear the rumour that 
the neer has arrived, and his tale is told. 
But there is no beauty, no heaven ; for 
angels, goblins. The sad muse loves night 
and death, and the pit. His Inferno is 
mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the 
same relation to the generosities and joys 
of truth, of which human souls have al- 
ready made us cognisant, as a man’s bad 
dreams bear to his ideal life. It is indeed 
very like, in its endless power of lurid pic- 
tures, to the phenomena of dreaming, 
which nightly turns many an honest gen- 
tleman, benevolent, but dyspeptic, into a 
wretch, skulking like a dog about the 
outer yards and kennels of creation. 
When he mounts into the heaven, I do 
not hear its language. A man should not 
tell me that he has walked among the 
angels; his proof is, that his eloquence 
makes me one. Shall the archangels be 
less majestic and sweet than the figures 
that have actually walked the earth ? 
These angels that Swedenborg paints 
give us no very high idea of their disci- 
pline and culture: they are all country 
parsons: their heaven is a fete champetre, 
an evangelical picnic, or French distribu- 
tion of prizes to virtuous peasants. 
Strange, scholastic, didactic, passionless, 
bloodless man, who denotes classes of 
souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, 
and visits doleful hells as a stratum of 
chalk or hornblende ! He has no sym- 
pathy. He goes up and down the world 
of men, a modern Rhadamanthus in gold- 
headed cane and peruke, and with non- 
chalance, and the air of a referee, distri- 
butes souls. The warm, many-weathered, 
passionate-peopled world is to him a 
grammar of hieroglyphs, or an emblema- 
tic freemason’s procession. How dif- 
ferent is Jacob Behmen! he is tremulous 
with emotion, and listens awe-struck, 
with the gentlest humanity, to the Teacher 
whose lessons he conveys ; and when he 
asserts that, “ in some sort, love is greater 
than God,” his heart beats so high that 
the thumping against his leathern coat is 
audible across the centuries. ’Tis a great 
difference. Behmen is healthily and 
beautifully wise, notwithstanding the 
mystical narrowness and incommunicable- 
ness. Swedenborg .is disagreeably wise, 
and, with all his accumulated gifts, para- 
lyses and repels. 

It is the best sign of a great nature, that 
ft opens a foreground, and, like the breath 
of morning landscapes, invites us onward. 


195 

Swedenborg is retrospective nor can we 
divest him of his mattock tnd shroud. 
Some minds are for ever restrained froiv) 
descending into nature ; others are for 
ever prevented from ascending out of 
it. With a force of many men, he could 
never break the umbilical cord which 
held him to nature, and he did not rise 
to the platform of pure genius. 

It is remarkable that this man, who, by 
his perception of symbols, saw the poetic 
construction of things, and the primary 
relation of mind to matter, remained en- 
tirely devoid of the whole apparatus ol 
poetic expression, which that perception 
creates. He knew the grammar and rudi- 
ments of the Mother-Tongue — how could 
he not read off one strain into music ? 
Was he like Saadi, who, in his vision, 
designed to fill his lap with the celestial 
flowers, as presents for his friends ; but 
the fragrance of the roses so intoxicated 
him, that the skirt dropped from his 
hands? or, is reporting a breach of the 
manners of that heavenly society ? or, wat 
it that he saw the vision intellectually, 
and hence that chiding of the intellectual 
that pervades his books ? Be it as it may, 
his books have no melody, no emotion, 
no humour, no relief to the dead prosaic 
level. In his profuse and accurate im- 
agery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. 
We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre land- 
scape. No bird ever sang in all these 
gardens of the dead. The entire want of 
poetry in so transcendent a mind be- 
tokens the disease, and, like a hoarse 
voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of 
warning. I think, sometimes, he will not 
be read longer. His great name will turn 
a sentence. His books have become a 
monument. His laurel so largely mixed 
with cypress, a charnel-breath so mingles 
with the temple incense, that boys and 
maids will shun the spot. 

Yet, in this immolation of genius and 
fame at the shrine of conscience, is a 
merit sublime beyond praise. He lived 
to purpose : he gave a verdict. He elected 
goodness as the clew to which the 
soul must cling in all this labyrinth of 
nature. Many opinions conflict as to the 
true centre. In the shipwreck, some cling 
to running rigging, some to cask and 
barrel, some to spars, some to mast ; the 
pilot chooses with science — I plant myself 
here ; all will sink before this *, “he comes 
to land who sails with me.” Do not rely 
on heavenly favour, or on compassion to 
folly, or on prudence, on common sense, 
the old usage and main chance of mJb : 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


*96 

nothing can keep you — not fate, nor 
health, nor admirable intellect; none can 
keep you but rectitude only, rectitude for 
ever and ever ! — and, with a tenacity that 
never swerved in all his studies, inven- 
tions, dreams, he adheres to this brave 
choice. I think of him as of some trans- 
migrating votary of Indian legend, who 
•ays, “ Though I be dog, or jackal, or 
pismire, in the last rudiments of nature, 
under what integument or ferocity, I 
cleave to right, as the sura ladder that 
leads up to man and to God.” 

Swedenborg has rendered a double 
service to mankind, which is now only 
beginning to be known. By the science 
of experiment and use, he made his first 
steps: he observed and published the 


laws of nature ; and, ascending by just 
degrees,' from events to their summits knd 
causes, he was fired with piety at the 
harmonies he felt, and abandoned himself 
to his joy and worship. This was his first 
service. If the glory was too bright for 
his eyes to bear, if ho staggered under 
the trance of delight, the more excellen*^ 
is the spectacle he saw, the realities cf 
being which beam and blaze through him 
and which no infirmities of the prophet 
are suffered to obscure; and ho renders 
a second passive service to men, not less 
than the first — perhaps, in the great circle 
of being, and in the retributions of 
spiritual nature, not less glorious or less 
beautiful to himself, 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SCEPTIC. 


Every fact is related on one side to sen- 
sation, and, on the other, to morals. The 
game of thought is, on the appearance of 
one of these two sides, to find the other ; 
given the upper, to find the under side. 
Nothing so thin, but has these two faces ; 
and, when the observer has seen the ob- 
verse, he turns it over to see the reverse. 
Life is a pitching of this penny — heads or 
tails. We never tire of this game, because 
there is still a slight shudder of astonish- 
ment at the exhibition of the other face, 
at the contrast of the two faces. A man 
is flushed with success, and bethinks him- 
self what this good luck signifies. He 
drives his bargain in the the street ; but it 
occurs, that he also is bought and sold. 
He .sees the beauty of a human face, and 
searches the cause of that beauty, which 
must be more beautiful, fie builds his 
fortunes, maintains the laws, cherishes 
his children ; but he asks himself, why ? 
and whereto? This head and this tail 
are called, in the language of philosophy. 
Infinite and Finite ; Relative and Absolute; 
Apparent and Real ; and many fine names 
beside. 

Each man is born with a predisposition 
to one or the other of these sides of 
nature ; and it will easily happen that men 
will be found devoted to one or the other. 
One class has the perception of difference, 
and is conversant with facts and surfaces ; 
cities and persons ; and the bringing cer- 
tain things to pass; — the men of talent 
and action. Another class have the per- 
ception of identity, and are men of faith 
and philosophy, men of genius, 


Each of these riders drives too fast, 
Plotinus believes only in philosophers; 
Fenelon, in saints ; Pindar and Byron, in 
poets. Read the haughty language in 
which Plato and the Piatonists speak of 
all rnen who are not devoted to their own 
shining abstractions : other men are rats 
and mice. The literary class is usually 
proud and exclusive. The correspondence 
of Pope and Swift describes mankind 
around them as monsters ; and that of 
Goethe and Schiller, in our own time, is 
scarcely more kind. 

It is easy to see how this arrogance 
comes. The genius is a genius by the 
first look he casts on any object. Is his 
eye creative ? Does he not rest in angles 
and colours, but beholds the design — he 
will presently undervalue the actual ob- 
ject.* In powerful moments, his thought 
has dissolved the works of art and nature 
into their causes, so that the works appear 
heavy and faulty. He has a conception of 
beauty which the sculptor cannot embody* 
Picture, statue, temple, railroad, steam«» 
engine, existed first in an artist’s mind, 
without flaw, mistake, or friction, which 
impair the executed models. So did the 
church, the state, college, court, social 
circle, and all the institutions. It is not 
strange that these men, remembering what 
they have seen and hoped of ideas, should 
affirm disdainfully the superiority of ideas 
Having at some time seen that the happy 
soul will carry all the arts in power, they 
say: Why cumber ourselves with super- 
fluous realisations? and, like dreaming 
beggars, they assume to speak and ac m 



MONVAiGNB: OR, THE SCEPTIC. 


li these values were already substantia- 

tedi 

On the other part, the men of toil and 
trade and luxury— the animal world, in- 
cluding the animal in the philosopher and 
poet also— and the practical world, in- 
cluding the painful drudgeries which are 
never excused to philosopher or poet any 
more than to the rest— weigh heavily on 
the other side. The trade in our streets 
believes in no metaphysical causes, thinks 
nothing of the force which necessitated 
traders and a trading planet to exist ; no, 
but sticks to cotton, sugar, wool, and salt. 
The ward meetings, on election days, are 
not softened by any misgiving of the value 
of these ballotings. Hot life is streaming 
in a single direction. To the men of this 
world, to the animal strength and spirits, 
to the men of practical power, while 
immersed in it, the man of ideas appears 
out of his reason. They alone have rea- 
son. 

Things always bring their own philoso- 
phy with them, that is, prudence. No 
man acquires property without acquiring 
with it a little arithmetic, also. In 
England, the richest country that ever 
existed, property stands for more, com- 
pared with personal ability, than in any 
other. After dinner, a man believes less, 
denies more : verities have lost some 
charm. After dinner, arithmetic is the 
only science ; ideas are disturbing, incen- 
diary, follies of young men, repudiated by 
the solid portion of society: and a man 
comes to bo valued by his athletic and 
animal qualities. Spence relates, that 
Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey Kneller, 
one day, when his nephew, a Guinea 
trader, came in. “ Nephew," said Sir 
Godfrey, " you have the honour of seeing 
the two greatest men in the world.” " I 
don’t know how great men you may be," 
said the Guinea man, "but I don’t like 
your looks. I have often bought a much 
better than both of you, all muscles and 
bones, for ten guineas.” Thus, the men 
of the senses revenge themselves on the 
professors, and repay scorn for scorn. 
The first had leaped to conclusions not 
yet ripe, and say more than is true ; the 
others make themselves merry with the 
philosopher, and weigh man by the pound. 
They believe that mustard bites the ton- 
gue, and pepper is hot, friction-matches 
are incendiary, revolvers to be avoided, 
and suspenders hold up pantaloons ; that 
there is much sentiment in a chest of tea ; 
and a man will be eloquent, if you give 
him good wine. Are you tender and 


197 

scrupulous — you must eat aoore mince« 
pie. They hold that Lather had milk io 
him when he said, 

** Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Goiang, 
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben iang j > 

and when he advised a young scholar, per* 
plexed with fore-ordination and free-will, 
to get well drunk. ‘‘The nerves,” says 
Cabanis, " they are the man." My neigh- 
bour, a jolly farmer, in the tavern bar- 
room, thinks that the use of money is sura 
and speedy spending : " for his part," he 
says, " he puts his down his neck, and 
gets the good of it." 

The inconvenience of this way of think- 
ing is, that it runs mto indifferentism, and 
then into disgust. Life is eating us up. 
We shall be fables presently. Keep cool ; 
it will be all one a hundred years hence. 
Life’s well enough ; but we shall be glad 
to get out of it, and they will all be glad 
to have us. Why should we fret and 
drudge ? Our meat will taste to-morrow 
as it did yesterday, and we may at last 
have had enough of it. " Ah," said my 
languid gentleman at Oxford, " there’s no- 
thing new or true — and no matter." 

With a little more bitterness, the cynic 
moans ; our life is like an ass led to 
market by a bundle of hay being carried 
before him : he sees nothing but the 
bundle of hay. " There is so much trouble 
in coming into the world," said Lord 
Bolingbroke, " and so much more, as well 
as meanness, in going out of it, that ’tis 
hardly worth while to bo hero at all." I 
know a philosopher of this kidney, who 
was accustomed briefly to sum up his ex- 
perience of human nature in saying 
“ Mankind is a damned rascal : " and the 
natural corollary is pretty sure to follow 
— " The world lives by humbug, and so 
will I." 

The abstractionist and the materialist 
thus mutually exasperating each other, 
and the scoffer expressing the worst of 
materialism, there arises a third party to 
occupy the middle ground between these 
two, the sceptic, namely. He finds both 
wrong by being in extremes. He labours 
to plant his feet, to be the beam of the 
balance. He will not go beyond his card. 
He sees the one-sidedness of these men 
of the street; he will not be a Gibeonite ; 
he stands for the intellectual faculties, a 
cool head, and whatever serves to keep it 
cool ; no unadvised industry, no unre- 
warded self-devotion, no loss of the brains 
in toil. Am I an ox or a dray ? — You ara 
both in extremes, he says. You that will 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


198 


have all solid, and a world of pig-lead, 
deceive yourselves grossly; you believe 
yourselves rooted and grounded on ada- 
mant; and yet, if we uncover the last 
facts of our knowledge, you are spinning 
like bubbles in a river, you know not 
whither or whence, and you are bottomed 
and capped and wrapped in delusions. 

Neither will he be betrayed to a book, 
and wrapped in a gown. The studious 
class are their own victims : they are thin 
and pale, their feet are cold, their heads 
are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a 
fear of interruption — pallor, squalor, hun- 
ger, and egotism. If you come near them, , 
and see what conceits they entertain — 
they are abstractionists, and spend their 
days and nights in dreaming some dream ; 
in expecting the homage of society to 
some precious scheme built on a truth, 
but destitute of proportion in its present- 
ment, of justness in its application, and 
of all energy of will in the schemer to 
embody and vitalise it. 

But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot 
see. I know that human strength is not 
in extremes, but in avoiding extremes, 
I, at least, will shun the weakness of 
philosophising beyond my depth. What 
is the use of pretending to powers we 
have not ? What is the use of pretending 
to assurances we have not, respecting the 
other life ? Why exaggerate the power of 
virtue ? Why be an angel before your 
time ? These strings, wound up too high, 
will snap. If there is a wish for immor- 
tality, and no evidence, why not say just 
that ? If there are conflicting evidences, 
why not state them ? If there is not 
ground for a candid thinker to make up 
his mind, yea or nay — why not suspend 
the judgment ? I weary of these dogma- 
tisers, I tire of these hacks of routine, 
who deny the dogmas. I neither affirm 
nor deny. I stand here to try the case. 
I am here to consider, to con- 

sider how it is. I will try to keep the ba- 
lance true. Of what use to take the chair, 
and glibly rattle off theories of society, re- 
ligion. and nature, when I know that 
practical objections lie in the way, insur- 
mountable by me and by my mates ? 
Why so talkative in public, when each of 
my neighbours can pin me to my seat by 
arguments I cannot refute ? Why pretend 
that life is so simple a gam(^ v/hen we 
know how subtle and illusive tig© Proteus 
is ? Why think to shut up ali things in 
your narrow coop, when we know there 
are not one or two only, but ten, twenty, 
a tj:^ousand things, and unlike? Why 


fancy that you have III the truth in your 
keeping ? There is much to say on all 
sides. 

Who shall forbid a wise scepticism^ 
seeing that there is no practical question 
on which anything more than an approxi- 
mate solution can be had ? Is not mar- 
riage an open question, when it is alleged, 
from the beginning of the world, that such 
as are in the institutior wish to get out 
and such as are out wish to get in ? And 
the reply of Socrates, to him who asked 
whether he should choose a wife, still 
remains reasonable, “ that, whether he 
should choose one or not, he would repent 
it.” Is not the state a question? All 
society is divided in opinion on the sub- 
ject of the state. Nobody loves it; great 
numbers dislike it, and suffer conscientious 
scruples to allegiance ; and the only de- 
fence set up, is the fear of doing worse in 
disorganising. Is it otherwise with the 
church ? Or, to put any of the questions 
which touch mankind nearest — shall the 
young man aim at a leading part in law, 
in politics, in trade ? It will not be pre- 
tended that a success in either of these 
kinds is quite coincident with what is best 
and inmost in his mind. Shall he, then, 
cutting the stays that hold him fast to the 
social state, put out to sea with no guidanc(ft 
but his genius ? There is much to say on 
both sides. Remember the open question 
between the present order of ” competi- 
tion,” and the friends of “attractive and 
associated labour,” The generous minds 
embrace the proposition of labour shared 
by all ; it is the only honesty ; nothing 
else is safe. It is from the poor man’s 
hut alone, that strength and virtue come : 
and yet, on the other side, it is alleged 
that labour irnpuirs the form, and breaks 
the spirit of man, and the labourers cry 
unanimously, “ We have no thoughts.” 
Culture, how indispensable 1 I cannot 
forgive you the want of accomplishments; 
and yet, culture will instantly impair that 
chiefest beauty of spontaneousness. Ex- 
cellent is culture for a savage ; but once 
let him read in the book, and he is no 
longer able not to think of Plutarch’s 
heroes. In short, since true fortitude of 
understanding consists ” in not letting 
what we know be embarrassed by what 
we do not know,” we ought to secure 
those advantages which we can command, 
and not risk them by clutching after the 
airy and unattainable. Come, no chi- 
meras I Let us go abroad ; let us mix in 
affairs ; let us learn, and get, and have, 
and climb. ** Meo are a sort of moving 



MONTAIGNE : VR, THE SCEPTIC. 


plants, and, like trees, receive a great 
part of their nourishment from the air. 
If they keep too much at home, they pine.” 
Let us have a robust, manly life ; let us 
know what we know, for certain ; what we 
have, let it be solid, and seasonable, and 
our own. A world in the hand is worth 
two in the bush. Let us have to do with 
real men and women, and not with skip- 
ping ghosts. 

This, then, is the right ground of the 
sceptic — this of consideration, of self- 
containing ; not at all of unbelief ; not at 
all of universal denying, nor of universal 
doubting — doubting even that he doubts ; 
least of all, of scoffing and profligate jeer- 
ing at all that is stable and good. These 
are no more his moods than are those of 
religion and philosophy. Ho is the con- 
Biderer, the prudent, taking in sail, 
counting stock, husbanding his means, 
believing that a man has too many 
enemies, than that he can afford to be 
his own ; tliat we cannot give ourselves 
too many advantages, in this unequal 
conflict, with powers so vast and un- 
weariablo ranged on one side, and this 
little, conceited, vulnerable popinjay that 
a man is, bobbing up and down into every 
danger, on the other. It is a position 
taken up for bettor defence, as of more 
safety, and one that can be maintained ; 
and it is one of more opportunity and 
range : as, when we build a house, the 
rule is to set it not too high nor too low, 
under the wind, but out of the dirt 

The philosophy we want is one oi flux- 
ions and mobility. The Spartan and Stoic 
schemes are too stark and stiff for our 
occasion. A theory of Saint John, and 
of non-resistance, seems, on the other 
hand, too thin and aerial. We want 
some coat woven of elastic steel, stout as 
the first, and limber as the second. We 
want a ship in these billows we inhabit. 
An angular, dogmatic house would be rent 
to chips and splinters, in this storm of 
many elements. No, it must be tight, and 
fit to the form of man, to live at all ; as a 
shell must dictate the architecture of a 
house founded on the sea, The soul of 
man must be the type of our scheme, just 
as the body of man is the type after which 
a dwelling-house is built. Adaptiveness 
is the peculiarity of human nature. We 
are golden averages, 'Volitant stabilities, 
compensated or periodic errors, houses 
founded on the sea. The wise sceptic 
wishes to have a near view of the best 
game, and the chief players ; what is best 
la the planet ; art, and nature, places and 


109 

events, but mainly men. Everything that 
is excellent in mankind— a form of grace, 
an arm of iron, lips of persuasion, a brain 
of resources, every one skilful to play and 
win — he will see and judge. 

The terms of admission to this spectacle, 
are, that we have a certain solid and intel- 
ligible way of living of his own; some 
method of answering the inevitable needc 
of human life ; proof that he has played 
with skill and success ; that he has evinced 
the temper, stoutness, and the range of 
qualities which, among his contempora- 
ries and countrymen, entitle him to fellow- 
ship and trust. For, the secrets of life are 
not shown except to sympathy and like- 
ness. Men do not confide themselves to 
boys, or coxcombs, or pedants, but to 
their peers. Some wise limitation, as the 
modern phrase is ; some condition between 
the extremes, and having itself a positive 
quality ; some stark and sufficient man, 
who is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently 
related to the world to do justice to Paris 
or London, and at the same time, a vigor- 
ous and original thinker, whom cities 
cannot overawe, but who uses them — is 
the fit person to occupy this ground of 
speculation. 

These qualities meet in the character 
of Montaigne. And yet, since the personal 
regard which I entertain for Montaigne 
may be unduly great, I will, under the 
shield of this prince of egotists, offer, as 
an apology for electing him as the repre- 
sentative of scepticism, a word or two to 
explain how my love began and grew for 
this admirable gossip. 

A single odd volume of Cotton’s trans- 
lation of the Essays remained to me from 
my father’s library, when a boy. It lay 
long neglected, until, after many years, 
when I was newly escaped from college, 
I read the book, and procured the remain- 
ing volumes. I remember the delight 
and wonder in which I lived with it. It 
seemed to me as if I had myself written 
the book, in some former life, so sincerely 
it spoke to my thought and experience. 
It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, 
in the cemetery of P^re la Chaise, I came 
to a tomb of Auguste Collignon, who died 
in 1830, aged sixty-eight yiiars, and who, 
said the monument, “ lived to do right, 
and had formed himself to virtue on the 
Essays of Montaigne.” Some years later, 
I became acquainted with an accom- 
plished English poet, John Sterling; and, 
in prosecuting my correspondence, I 
found that, from a love of Montaign^ 
be bad made a pil|}ffiici84;e to his chateau 
o 



200 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


still sUnding near Castellan, in Perigord, 
and, after two hundred and fifty years, had 
copied from the walls of his library the 
inscriptions which Montaigne had written 
there. That Journal of Mr. Sterling’s, 
published m the Westminster Review, Mr. 
Hazlitt has reprinted in the Prolegomena 
to his edition of the Essays. I heard with 
pleasure that one of the newly discovered 
autographs of William Shakespeare was 
in a copy of Florio’s translation of Mon- 
taigne. It is the only book which we 
certainly know to have been in the poet’s 
library. And, oddly enough, the duplicate 
copy of Florio, which the British Museum 
purchased, with a view of protecting the 
Shakespeare autograph (as I was informed 
in the British Museum), turned out to have 
the autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly- 
leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord Byron, 
that Montaigne was the only great writer 
of past times whom he read with avowed 
satisfaction. Other coincidences, not need- 
ful to be mentioned here, concurred to 
make this old Gascon still new and im- 
mortal to me. 

In 1571, on the death of his father, Mon 
taigne, then thirty-eight years old, retired 
from the practice of law, at Bordeaux, 
and settled himself on his estate. Though 
he had been a man of pleasure, and some- 
times a courtier, his studious habits now 
grew on him, and he loved the compass, 
staidness, and independence of the coun- 
try gentleman’s life. He took up his 
economy in good earnest, and made his 
farms yield the most. Downright and 
plain dealing, and abhorring to be de- 
ceived or to deceive, he was esteemed in 
the country for his sense and probity. In 
the civil wars of the League, which con- 
verted every house into a fort, Montaigne 
kept his gates open, and his house without 
defence. All parties freely came and went, 
his courage and honour being universally 
esteemed. The neighbouring lords and 
gentry brought jewels and papers to him 
for safe-keeping. Gibbon reckons, in 
these bigoted times, but two men of liber- 
ality in France — Henry IV. and Montaigne. 

Montaigne is the frankest and honestest 
of all writers. His French freedom runs 
into grossness ; but he has anticipated all 
censure by the bounty of his own confes- 
sions. In his times, books were written 
to one sex only, and almost all were writ- 
ten in Latin ; so that, in a humourist, a 
certain nakedness of statement was per- 
mitted, which our manners, of a litera- 
ture addressed equally to both sexes, do 
oCt allow. But« though a Biblical plain- 


ness, coupled with a most uncanonical 
levity, may shut his pages to many sensi- 
tive readers, yet the offence is superficial, 

I He parades it : he makes the most of it : 
nobody can think or say worse of him 
[than he does. Ho pretends to most of 
the vices ; and, if there be any virtue in 
him, he says, it got in b> stealth. There 
is no man, in his opinion, who has not de- 
served hanging five or six times ; and he 
pretends no exception in his own behalf. 
“Five or six as ridiculous stories, too,” 
he says, “ can be told of me as of any man 
living. ” But, with all this really superflu- 
ous frankness, the opinion of an invincible 
probity grows into every reader’s mind. 

“ When I the most strictly and re- 
ligiously confess myself, I find that the 
best virtue I have has in it some tincture 
of vice ; and I am afraid that Plato, in his 
purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and 
perfect a lover of virtue of that stamp as 
any other whatever), if he had listened, 
and laid his ear close to himself, would 
have heard some jarring sound of human 
mixture ; but faint and remote, and only 
to be perceived by himself.” 

Here is an impatience and fastidious- 
ness at colour or pretence of any kind. 
He has been in courts so long as to have 
conceived a furious disgust at appear- 
ances ; he will indulge himself with a little 
cursing and swearing ; he will talk with 
sailors and gypsies ; use flash and street 
ballads : he has stayed indoors till he is 
deadly sick ; he will to the open air, 
though it rain bullets. He has seen too 
much of gentlemen of the long robe, until 
he washes for cannibals ; and is so nervous^ 
by factitious life, that he thinks the more 
barbarous man is, the better he is. He 
likes his saddle. You may read theology, 
and grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. 
Whatever you get here shall smack of the 
earth and of real life, sweet, or smart, or 
stinging. He makes no hesitation to 
entertain you with the records of his dis- 
ease ; and his journey to Italy is quite full 
of that matter. He took and kept this 
position of equilibrium. Over his name 
he drew an emblematic pair of scales, and 
wrote Que scais je ? under it. As I look 
at his effigy opposite the title-page, I 
seem to hear him say, “ You may play old 
Poz, if you will ; you may rail and exag- 
gerate — I stand here for truth, and will 
not, for all the states, and churches, and 
revenues, and personal reputations of 
Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I see it ; 
I will rather mumble and prose about 
what I certainly know — my house and 



MONTAIGNE: OR, THE SCEPTIC. 


barns ; my father, my wife, and my 
tenants ; my old, lean, bald pate ; my 
knives and forks ; what meats I eat, and 
what drinks I prefer ; and a hundred 
straws just as ridiculous — than I will write, 
with a fine crow-quill, a fine romance. I 
like grey [days, and autumn and winter 
weather. I am grey and autumnal my- 
self, and think an undress, and old shoes 
that do not pinch my feet, and old friends 
who do not constrain me, and plain topics 
where I do not need to strain myself and 
pump my brains, the most suitable. Our 
condition as men is risky and ticklish 
enough. One cannot be sure of himself 
and his fortune an hour, but he may be 
whisked off into some pitiable or ridicu- 
lous plight. Why should I vapour and 
play the philosopher, instead of ballasting, 
the best I can, this dancing balloon ? So, 
at least, I live within compass, keep my- 
Bel f ready for action, and can shoot the gulf, 
at last, with decency. If there be any- 
thing farcical in such a life, the blame is 
not mine ; let it lie at fate’s and nature’s 
door.” 

The Essays, therefore, are an entertain- 
ing soliloquy on every random topic that 
comes into his head ; treating everything 
without ceremony, yet with masculine 
sense. There have been men with deeper 
insight ; but, one would say, never a man 
with such abundance of thoughts : he is 
never dull, never insincere, and has the 
genius to make the reader care for all 
that he cares for. 

The sincerity and marrow of the man 
leaches to his sentences. I know not 
anywhere the book that seems less writ- 
ten. It is the language of conversation 
transferred to a book. Cut these words 
and they would bleed ; they are vascular 
and alive. One has the same pleasure in 
it that we have in listening to the neces- 
sary speech of men about their work, 
when any unusual circumstance gives 
momentary importance to the dialogue. 
For blacksmiths and teamsters do not 
trip in their speech ; it is a shower of 
bullets. It is Cambridge men w^ho correct 
themselves, and begin again at every half 
sentence, and, moreover, will pun, and re- 
fine too much, and swerve from the matter 
to the expression. Montaigne talks with 
shrewdness, knows the world, and books, 
and himself, and uses the positive degree : 
never shrieks, or protests, or prays : no 
weakness, no convulsion, no superlative : 
does not wish to jump out of his skin, or 
play any antics, or annihilate space or 
tims ; but is etout and solid: tastes every 


20J^ 

moment of the day ; likes pain, because it 
makes him feel himself, and realise 
things, as we pinch ourselves to know 
that we are awake. He keeps the plain ; 
he rarely mounts or sinks ; likes to feel 
solid ground, and the stones underneath. 
His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspira- 
tion ; contented, self-respecting, and keep- 
ing the middle of the road. There is but 
one exception — in his love for Socrates. 
In speaking of him, for once his cheek 
flushes, and his style rises to passion. 

Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the ag€ 
of sixty, in 1592. When he came to die, 
he caused the mass to be celebrated in 
his chamber. At the age of thirty-three 
he had been married. “ But,” he says, 
” might I have had my own will, I would 
not have married Wisdom herself, if she 
would have had me : but 'tis to much 
purpose to evade it, the common custom 
and use of life will have it so. Most of 
my actions are guided by example, not 
choice.” In the hour of death, ho gave 
the same weight to custom. Que scais 
js? What do I know ? 

This book of Montaigne the world has 
indorsed, by translating it into all tongues, 
and printing seventy-five editions of it in 
FJurope : and that, too, a circulation some- 
what chosen, namely, among courtiers, 

; soldiers, princes, men of the world, and 
men of wit and generosity. 

Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken 
wisely, and given the right and permanent 
expression of the human mind, on the 
conduct of life ? 

We are natural believers. Truth, or 
the connection between cause and effect, 
alone interests us. We are persuaded 
that a thread runs through all things : all 
worlds are strung on it, as beads : and 
men, and events, and life, come to us, 
only because of that thread ; they pass 
and repass, only that we may know the 
direction and continuity of that line. A 
book or statement which goes to show 
that there is no line, but random and 
chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a pros- 
perity and no account of it, a hero born 
from a fool, a fool from a hero— dispiritt 
us. Seen or unseen, we believe the tie 
exists. Talent makes counterfeit ties; 
genius finds the real ones. We hearken 
to the man of science, because we antici- 
pate the sequence in natural phenomena 
which he uncovers. We love whatever 
affirms, connects, preserves ; and disliki 
what scatters or pulls dowa, One 



REPRESENT ATI VE MEN. 


feol 

appears whose nature is to all men's eyes I 
conserving and constructive ; his presence j 
supposes a well-ordered society, agricul-j 
ture, trade, large institutions, and empire, j 
If these did not exist, they would begin to 
exist through his endeavours. Therefore, 
he cheers and comforts men, who feel all 
this in him very readily. The noncon- 
formist and the rebel say all manner of 
unanswerable things against the existing 
republic, but discover to our sense no 
plan of house or state of their own. 
Therefore, though the town, and state, 
and way of living, which our counsellor 
contemplated, might be a very modest or 
musty prosperity, yet men rightly go for 
him, and reject the reformer, so long as he 
comes only with axe and crowbar. 

But though we are natural conservers 
and causationists, and reject a sour, 
dumpish unbelief, the sceptical class, 
which Montaigne represents, have reason, 
and every man, at some time, belongs to 
it. Every superior mind will pass through 
this domain of equilibration — I should 
rather say, will know how to avail himself 
of the checks and balances in nature, as a 
natural weapon against the exaggeration 
and formalism of bigots and blockheads. 

Scepticism is the attitude assumed by 
the student in relation to the particulars 
which society adores, but which he sees 
to be reverend only in their tendency and 
spirit. The ground occupied by the sceptic | 
is the vestibule of the temple. Society 
does not like to have any breath of ques- 
tion blown on the existing order. But the 
interrogation of custom at all points is an 
inevitable stage in the growth of every 
superior mind, and is the evidence of its 
perception of the flowing power which 
remains itself in all changes. 

The superior m ind will find itself equally 
at odds with the evils of society, and with 
the projects that are offered to relieve 
them. The v/ise sceptic is a bad citizen ; 
no conservative ; he sees the selfishness 
of property, and the drowsiness of institu- 
tions. But neither is he fit to work with 
any democratic party that ever was con- 
stituted ; for parties wish everyone com- 
mitted, and he penetrates the popular 
patriotism. His politics are those of the 
“ Soul’s Errand ” of Sir Walter Raleigh ; 
or of Krishna, in the Bhagavat, “ There 
ts none who is worthy of my love or 
hatred whilst he sentences law, physic, 
divinity, commerce, and custom. He is a 
reformer ; yet he is no better member of 
the philanthropic association. It turns 
oul that ho h not tho champion of the 


operative^ the pauper, the prisoner, the 
slave. It stands in his mind, that our 
life in this world is not of quite so easf 
interpretation as churches and school- 
books say. He does not wish to take 
ground against these benevolences, to 
play the part of devil’s attorney, and 
blazon every doubt and sneer rhat darkens 
the sun for him. But he says, There are 
doubts. 

I mean to use the occasion, and cele- 
brate the calendar-day of our Saint Michel 
de Montaigne, by counting and describing 
these doubts or negations. I wish to ferret 
them out of their holes, and sun them a 
little. We must do with them as the 
police do with old rogues, who are shown 
up to the public at the marshal’s office. 
They will never be so formidable, when 
once they have been identified and regis- 
tered. But I mean honestly by them— 
that justice shall be done to their terrors. 
I shall not take Sunday objections, made 
up on purpose to be put down. I shall 
take the worst I can find, whether I can 
dispose of them, or they of me. 

I do not press the scepticism of the 
materialist. I know, the quadruped 
opinion will not prevail. ’Tis of no im- 
portance what bats and oxen think. The 
first dangerous symptom I report, is, the 
[levity of intellect; as if it were fatal to 
earnestness to know much. Knowledge 
is the knowing that we cannot know. The 
dull pray ; the geniuses are light mockers. 
How respectable is earnestness on every 
platform 1 but intellect kills it. Nay, San 
Carlo, my subtle and admirable friend, 
one of the most penetrating of men, finds 
that all direct ascension, even of lofty 
piety, leads to this ghastly insight, and 
'Sends back the votary orphaned. My 
astonishing San Carlo thought the law- 
givers and saints infected. They found 
the ark empty : saw, and would not tell ; 
and tried to choke off their approaching 
followers, by saying, “ Action, action, my 
dear fellows, is for you ! ” Bad as was to 
me this detection by San Carlo, this frost 
in July, this blow from a bride, there was 
'still a worse, namely, the cloy or satiety of 
the saints. In the mount of vision, ere 
they have yet risen from their knees, they 
say, “ \7e discover that this our homage 
and beatitude is partial and deformed ; we 
must fly for relief to the suspected and 
reviled intellect, to the Understanding, the 
Mephistopheles, to the gymnastics of 
talent." 

This is hobgoblin the first ; and, though 
it has been tho subject of much elegy, ia 



MONTAIGNE ; OR, THE SCBP2TC, 


Oittir nineteenth century, from Byron, 
Goethe, and other poets of less fame, not 
to mention many distinguished private 
observers — I confess it is not very affecting 
to my imagination ; for it seems to con- 
cern the shattering of baby-houses and 
crockery-shops. What flutters the church 
of Rome, or of England, or of Geneva, or 
of Boston, may yet be very far from touch- 
ing any principal of faith. I think that 
the intellect and moral sentiment are 
unanimous ; and that, though philosophy 
extirpates bugbears, yet it supplies the 
natural checks of vice, and polarity to the 
soul. I think that the wiser a man is, the 
more stupendous he finds the natural and 
moral economy, and lifts himself to a more 
absolute reliance. 

There is the power of moods, each set- 
ting at naught all but its own tissue of 
facts and beliefs. There is the power of 
complexions, obviously modifying the 
dispositions and sentiments. The beliefs 
and unbeliefs appear to be structural ; and 
as soon as each man attains the poise and 
vivacity which allow the whole machinery 
to play, he will not need extreme exam- 
ples, but will rapidly alternate all opinions 
in his own life. Our life is March weather, 
savage and serene in one hour. We go 
forth austere, dedicated, believing in the 
iron links of Destiny, and will not turn on 
our heel to save our life : but a book or a 
bust, or only the sound of a name, shoots 
a spark through the nerves, and we sud- 
denly believe in will ; my finger-ring shall 
be the seal of Solomon : fate is for imbe- 
ciles : all is possible to the resolved mind. 
Presently, a new experience gives a new 
turn to our thoughts : common sense re- 
sumes its tyranny; w'e say, “ Well, the 
army, after all, ij the gate to fame, man- 
ners, and poetry : and, look you — on the 
whole, selfishness plants best, prunes best, 
makes the best commerce, and the best 
citizen." Are the opinions of a man on 
right and wrong, on fate and causation, at 
the mercy of a broken sleep or an indiges- 
tion ? Is his belief in God and Duty no 
deeper than a stomach evidence ? And 
what guaranty for the permanence of his 
opinions ? I like not the French celerity — 
a new church and state once a week. 
This is the second negation ; and I shall 
let it pass for what it will. As far as it 
asserts rotation of states of mind, I sup- 
pose it suggests its own remedy, namely, ! 
in the record of larger periods. What is 
the mean of many states ; of all the states ? 
Does the general voice of ages affirm any 
principle, or is no community of sentiment 


203 

discoverable in distant times and places ? 
And when it shows the power of self* 
interest, I accept that as part of the divino 
law, and must reconcile it vdth aspiration 
the best I can. 

The word Fate or Destiny, expresses 
the sense of mankind, in all ages — thal 
the laws of the world do not always be- 
friend, but often hurt and crush us. Fate, 
in the shape of Kindt or nature, grows 
over us like grass. We paint Time with 
a scythe ; Love and Fortune, blind ; and 
Destiny, deaf. We have too little power 
of resistance against this ferocity which 
champs us up. What front can we make 
against these unavoidable, victorious, , 
maleficent forces ? What can I do against! 
the influence of race, in my history? 
What can I do against hereditary and 
constitutional habits, against scrofula, 
lymph, impotence ; against climate, 
against barbarism, in my country ? I can 
reason down or deny everything, except 
this perpetual Belly ; feed he must and 
will, and I cannot make him respectable. 

But the main resistance which the 
affirmative impulse finds, and one includ- 
ing all others, is in the doctrine of tlie 
Illusionists. There is a painful rumour 
in circulation, that we have been practised 
upon in all the principal performances of 
life, and free agency is the emptiest name. 
We have been sopped and drugged with 
the air, with food, with woman, with 
children, with sciences, with events, which 
leave us exactly where they found us. 
The mathematics, 'tis complained, leave 
the mind where they find it : so do all 
sciences ; and so do all events and actions. 
I find a man who has passed through all 
the sciences, the churl he was ; and 
through all the offices, learned, civil, and 
social, can detect the child. We are not 
the less necessitated to dedicate life to 

them. In fact, we may come to accept it 
as the fixed rule and theory of our state of 
education, that God is a substance, and 
his method is illusion. The Eastern 
sages owned the goddess Yoganidra, the 
great illusory energy of Vishnu, by whom, 
as utter ignorance, the whole world ifl 
beguiled. 

Or, shall I state it thus ? — The astonish^ 
ment of life, is, the absence of any appear^ 
ance of reconciliation between the theory 
and practice of life. Reason, the prized 
reality, the Law, is apprehended, nowand 

then, for a serene and profound moment, 
amidst the hubbub of cares and worksi 
which have no direct bearing on 



B&PkBSEmATlVE MEl^. 


204 

ftien IdSt, for months or years, and again 
found, for an interval, to be lo4t again. If 
we compute it in time ws may, in fifty 
years, have half-a-dozen reasonable hours. 
But what are these cares and works the 
better ? A method in the world we do not 
see, but this parallelism of great and little, 
which never react on each other, nor dis- 
cover the smallest tendency to converge. 
Experiences, fortunes, governings, read- 
ings, writings, are nothing to the purpose ; 
as when a man comes into the room, it 
does not appear whether he has been fed 
on yams or buffalo — he has contrived to 
get so much bone fibre as he wants, out of 
rice or out of snov/. So vast is the dis- 
proportion between the sky of law and the 
pismire of performance under it, that, 
whether he is a man of worth or a sot, is 
not so great a matter as we say. Shall I 
add, as one juggle of this enchantment, 
the stunning non-intercourse law which 
makes co-operation impossible ? The 
young spirit pants to enter society. But 
all the ways of culture and greatness 
lead to solitary imprisonment. He has 
been often baulked. He did not expect a 
sympathy with his thought from the 
village, but he went v/ith it to the chosen 
and intelligent, and found no entertain- 
ment for it, but mere misapprehension, 
distaste, and scoffing. Men are strangely 
mistimed and misapplied ; and the excel- 
lence of each is an inflamed individualism 
which separates him more. 

There are these, and more than these, 
diseases of thought, which our ordinary 
teachers do not attempt to remove. Now 
shall we, because a good nature inclines 
us to virtue’s side, say, There are no 
doubts — and lie for the right ? Is life to be 
led in a brave or in a cowardly manner ? 
and is not the satisfaction of the doubts 
essential to all manliness ? Is the name 
of virtue to be a barrier to that which is 
virtue ? Can you not believe that a man 
of earnest and burly habit may find small 
good in tea, essays, and catechism, and 
want a rougher instruction, want men, 
labour, trade, farming, war, hunger, plenty, 
love, hatred, doubt, and terror, to make 
things plain to him ; and has he not a 
right to insist on being convinced in his 
own way ? When he is convinced, he will 
b© worth the pains. 

Belief consists in accepting the affirma- 
tions of the soul ; unbelief, in denying 
them. Some minds are incapable of 
scepticism. The doubts they profess to 
cn^^rtain ate rather a civility or accommo- 
dation to the common discourse of their 


company. They may well give themseiv^a 
leave to speculate, for they are secure of 
a return. Once admitted to the heaven 
of thought, they see no relapse into night, 
but infinite invitation cAa the other side. 
Heaven is within heaven, and sky over 
sky, and they are encompassed with 
divinities. Others there are, to whom the 
heaven is brass, and it shuts down to the 
surface of the earth. It is a question of 
temperament, or of more or less immer- 
sion in nature. The last class must needs 
have a reflex or parasite faith ; not a sight 
of realities, but an instinctive reliance on 
the seers and believers of realities. The 
manners and thoughts of believers 
astonish them, and convince them that 
these have seen something which is hid 
from themselves. But their sensual habit 
would fix the believer to his last position, 
whilst ho as inevitably advances ; and 
presently the unbeliever, for love of 
belief, burns the believer. 

Great believers are always reckoned in- 
fidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, 
and really men of no account. The spirit- 
ualist finds himself driven to express his 
faith by a series of scepticisms. Chari- 
table souls comes with their projects, and 
asks his co-operation. How can he hesi- 
tate ? It is the rule of mere comity and 
courtesy to agree where you can, and to 
turn your sentence with something auspi- 
cious, and not freezing and sinister. But 
he is forced to say : *' Oh, these things will 
be as they must be : what can you do ? 
These particular griefs and crimes are the 
foliage and fruit of such trees as wo sea 
growing. It is vain i.o complain of the 
leaf or the berry ; cut it off ; it will bear 
another just as bad. You must begin 
your cure lower down.” The generositiea 
of the day prove an intractable element 
for him. The people’s questions are not 
his ; their methods are not his ; and, 
against all the dictates of good-nature, lie 
is driven to say, ho has no pleasure in 
them. 

Even the doctrines dear to the hope of 
man, of the divine Providence, and of the 
immortality of the soul, his neighbours 
cannot put the statement so that he siiall 
affirm i b But he denies out of more faith, 
and not less. Ho denies out of honesty. 
He had rather stand charged with the 
imbecility of scepticism, than with un- 
truth. I believe, ha says, in the moral 
design of the universe ; it exists hospita- 
bly for the weal of souls ; but your dogmas 
seem to me caricatures: why should I 
make l^lieve them ? Will any say, this 



M0NTAICNE:0R, THE SCEPTIC, 


IS cold and infidel ? The wise and mag- 
nanimous will not say so. They will exult 
in his far-sighted good-will, that can 
abandon to the adversary all the ground 
of tradition and common belief, without 
losing a jot of strength. It sees to the 
end of all transgression. George Fox saw 
“ that there was an ocean of darkness and 
death ; but withal, an infinite ocean of 
light and love which flowed over that of 
darkness.” 

The final solution in which scepticism 
is lost, is in the moral sentiment, which 
never forfeits its supremacy. All moods 
may be safely tried, and their weight 
allowed to all objections : the moral senti- 
ment as easily outweights them all, as any 
one. This is the drop which balances the 
sea. I play with the miscellany of facts, 
and take those superficial views which we 
call scepticism ; but I know that they will 
presently appear to me in that order which 
makes scepticism impossible. A man of 
thought must feel the thought that is 
parent of the universe : that the masses of 
nature do undulate and flow. This faith 
avails to the whole emergency of life and 
objects. The world is saturated with deity 
and with law. He is content with just and 
unjust, with sots and fools with the 
triumph of folly and fraud. He can behold 
with serenity the yawning gulf between the 
ambition of man Jand his power of perfor- 
mance, between the demand and supply of 
power, which makes the tragedy of all souls. 

Charles Fourier announced that “the 
attractions of man are proportioned to his 
destinies;” in other words, that every 
desire predicts its own satisfaction, Yet, 
all experience exhibits the reverse of this ; 
the incompetency of power is the universal 
grief of young and ardent minds. They 
accuse the divine providence of a certain 
parsimony. It has shown the heaven and 
earth to every child, and filled him with a 
desire for the whole ; a desire raging, in- 
finite ; a hunger, as of space to be filled 
with planets ; a cry of famine, as of devils 
for souls. Then for the satisfaction — to 
each man is administered a single drop, a 
bead of dew of vital power, per day—2L 
cup as large as space, and one drop of the 
water of life in it. Each man woke in the 
morning with an appetite that could eat 
the solar system like a cake ; a spirit for 
action and passion without bounds; he 
could lay bis hand on the morning star ; 


he could try conclusions with gravitation 
or chemistry ; but, on the firsi motion to 
prove his strength-hands, feet, senses, 
gave way, and would not serve him. He 
was an emperor deserted by his states 
and left to whistle by himself, or thrust 
into a mob of emperors, all whistling: an! 
still the sirens sang, “The attractions are 
proportioned to the destinies.” in every 
house, in the heart of each maiden, and of 
each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, 
this chasm is found— between the largest 
promise of ideal power, and the shabby 
experience. 

The expansive nature of truth comes to 
our succour, elastic, not to be surrounded. 
Man helps himself by larger generalisa- 
tions. The lesson of life is practically to 
generalise ; to believe what the years and 
the centuries say against the hours ; to 
resist the usurpation of particulars ; to 
penetrate to their catholic sense. Things 
seem to say one thing, and say the reverse. 
The appearance is immoral ; the result is 
moral. Things seem to tend downward, 
to justify despondency, to promote rogues, 
to defeat the just ; and, by knaves, as by 
martyrs, the just cause is carried for- 
ward. Although knaves win in every poli- 
tical struggle, although society seems to 
be delivered over from the hands of one 
set of criminals into the hands of another 
set of criminals, as fast as the government 
is changed, and the march of civilisation 
is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are 
somewhat answered. We see, now, events 
forced on, which seem to retard or retro- 
grade the civility of ages, But the world- 
spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and 
waves cannot drown him. He snaps his 
finger at laws ; and so, throughout history, 
heaven seems to affect low and poor 
means. Through the years and the cen- 
turies, through evil agents, through toys 
and atoms, a great and beneficent ten- 
dency irresistibly streams. 

Let a man learn to look for the perma- 
nent in the mutable and fleeting ; let him 
learn to bear the disappearance of things 
he was wont to reverence, without losing 
his reverence; let him learn that he is 
here, not to work, but to be worked upon ; 
and that, though abyss open under aDyss, 
and opinion displace opinion, all ar« at 
last contained in the Eternal Cause. 


** If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea.’ 



2b6 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN, 


SHAKESPEARE ; 

GRBaI: men are more distinguished by 
range and extent, than by originality. If 
require the originality, which consists 
in weaving; like a spider, their web from 
their own bowels ; in finding clay, and 
making bricks, and building the house; 
no great men are original. Nor does 
valuable originality consist in unlikeness 
to other men. The hero is in the press of 
knights, and the thick of events; and, 
seeing what men want, and sharing their 
desire, he adds the needful length of sight 
and of arm, to come at the desired point. 
The greatest genius is the most indebted 
man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying 
what comes uppermost, and, because he 
•ays everything, saying, at last, something 
good ; but a heart in unison with his time 
and country. There is nothirrg whimsical 
and fantastic in his production, but sweet 
and sad earnest, freighted with the weigh- 
tiest convictions, and pointed with the 
most determined aim which any man or 
class knows of in his times. 

The genius of our life is jealous of in- 
dividuals, and will not have any individual 
great, except through the general. There 
is no choice to genius. A great man does 
not wake up on some fine morning, and 
•ay, “ I am full of life, I will go to sea, 
and find an Antarctic continent : to-day I 
will square the circle : 1 v/ill ransack 
botany, and find a new food for man : I 
have a new architecture in my mind : I 
foresee a new mechanic power : ” no, but 
he finds himself in the river of the 
thoughts and events, forced onward by 
the ideas and necessities of his contem- 
poraries, He stands where all the eyes 
of men look one way, and their hands all 
point in the direction in which he should 
go. The church has reared him amidst 
rites and pomps, and he carries out the 
advice which her music gave him, and 
builds a cathedral needed by her chants 
and processions. He finds a war raging : 
it educates him, by trumpet, in barracks, 
and he betters the instruction. He finds 
two counties groping to bring coal, or 
flour, or fish, from the place of production 
to the place of consumption, and he hits 
on a railroad. Every master has found 
his materials collected, and his power lay 
In his sympathy with his people, and in 
his love of the materials he wrought in. 
Whi^t an economy of power t and what a 


OR, THE POET. 

compensation for the shortness ef life I 
All is done to his hand. The wcrld ha« 
brought him thus far on his way. The 
human race has gone out before him, 
sunk the hills, filled the hollows, and 
bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, 
artisans, women, all have worked for him 
and he enters into their labours. Choose 
any other thing, out of the line of ten- 
dency, out of the national feeling and 
history, and he would have all to do for 
himself : his powers would be expended 
in the first preparations. Great genial 
power, one would almost say, consists in 
not being original at all ; in being ah 
together receptive ; in letting the world 
do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour 
to pass unobstructed through the mind. 

Shakespeare’s youth fell in a time when 
the English people were importunate for 
dramatic entertainments. The court took 
offence easily at political allusions, and 
attempted to suppress them. The Puri- 
tans, a growing and energetic party, and 
the religious among the Anglican church, 
would suppress them. But the people 
wanted them. Inn-yards, houses without 
roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at 
country fairs, were the ready theatres of 
strolling players. The people had tasted 
this new joy; and, as we could not h:)p 0 
to suppress newspapers now— no, nop by 
the strongest party — neither then cruld 
king, prelate, or puritan, alone or united, 
suppress an organ, which was ballad, 
epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture. Punch, 
and library, at the same time. Probably 
king, prelate, and puritan, all found their 
own account in it. It had become, by all 
causes, a national interest — by no means 
conspicuous, so that some great scholar 
would have thought of treating it in an 
English history — but not a whit less con- 
siderable, because it was cheap, and of 
no account, like a baker’s shop. Tho 
best proof of its vitality is the crowd of 
writers which suddenly broke into this 
field ; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson. 
Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, 
Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beau- 
mont and Fletcher. 

The secure possession, by the stage, of 
the public mind, is of the first importance 
to the poet who works for it, He losef 
no time in idle experiments. Here is 
audience and expectation prepared. In 



SHAKESPEARE; 

the Chto of Shakeepearo there is much 
more. At the time when he left Stratford, 
end went up to London, a great body of 
Stage-plays, of all dates and writers, 
existed in manuscript, and were in turn 
produced on the boards. Here is the 
Tale of Troy, which the audience will 
bear hearing some part of, every week; 
the Death of Julius Caesar, and other 
stories out of Plutarch, which they never 
tire of; a shelf full of English history, 
from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, 
down to the royal Henrys, which men 
hear eagerly ; and a string of doleful 
tragedies, merry Italian tales, and Spanish 
voyages, which all the London ’prentices 
know. All the mass has been treated, 
with more or less skill, by every play- 
wright, and the prompter has the soiled 
and tattered manuscripts. It is now no 
longer possible to say who wrote them 
first. They have been the property of 
the Theatre so long, and so many rising 
geniuses have enlarged or altered them, 
inserting a speech, or a whole scene, or 
adding a song, that no man can any longer 
claim coi)yright in this work of numbers. 
Happily, no man wishes to. They are 
not yet desired in that way. We have 
few readers, many spectators and hearers. 
They had best lie where they are. 

Shakespeare, in common with his com- 
rades, esteemed the mass of old plays, 
waste stock, in which any experiment 
could be freely tried. Had the prestige 
which hedges about a modern tragedy 
existed, nothing could have been done. 
The rude warm blood of the living Eng- 
land circulated in the play, as in street- 
ballads, and gave body which he wanted 
to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet 
needs a ground in popular tradition on 
which he may work, and which, again, 
may restrain his art within the due tem- 
perance. It holds him to the people, 
supplies a foundation for his edifice ; and, 
in furnishing so much work done to his 
hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full 
strength for the audacities of his imagina- 
tion, In short, the poet owes to his legend 
what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculp- 
ture in Egypt, and in Greece, grew up in 
subordination to architecture. It was the 
ornament of the temple wall : at first, a 
rude relief carved on pediments, then the 
relief became bolder,and a head or ar m was 
projected from the wall, the groups being 
still arranged wiih reference to the build- 
ing, which serves also as a frame to hold 
the figures; and when, at last, the greatest 
freedom of style and treatment was 


OR, tHk POET, 207 

reached, the prevailing geniut cf architec- 
ture still enforced a certain calmness and 
j continence in the statue. As soon as the 
I statue was begun for itself, and with no 
reference to the temple or palace, the art 
began to decline; freak, extravagance, 
and exhibition took the place of the old 
temperance. This balance-wheel, which 
the sculptor found in architecture, the 
perilous irritability of poetic talent found 
in the accumulated dramatic materials to 
which the people were already wonted, 
and which had a certain excellence which 
no single genius, however extraordinary, 
could hope to create. 

In point of fact, it appears that Shakes- 
peare did owe debts in all directions, and 
was able to use whatever he found ; and 
the amount of indebtedness may be in- 
ferred from Malone’s laborious computa- 
tions in regard to the First, Second, and 
Third Parts of Henry VI., in which “out 
of 6,043 lines, 1,771 were written by some 
author preceding Shakespeare ; 2,373 by 
him, on the foundation laid by his pre- 
decessors ; and 1,899 were entirely his 
own.” And the proceeding investigation 
hardly leaves a single drama of his abso- 
lute invention. Malone’s sentence is an 
important piece of external history. In 
Henry VIII., I think I see plainly the 
cropping out of the original rock on 
which his own finer stratum was laid. 
The first play was written by a superior, 
thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. 
I can mark his lines, and know well their 
cadence. See Wolsey’s soliloquy, and the 
following scene with Cromwell, where — ■ 
instead of the metre of Shakespeare, 
whoso secret is, that the thought con- 
structs the tune, so that reading for tho 
sense will best bring out the rhythm — 
here the lines are constructed on a given 
tune, and the verse has even a trace of 
pulpit eloquence. But the play contains, 
through all its length, unmistakable traits 
of Shakespeare’s hand, and some passages, 
as the account of the coronation, are like 
autographs. What is odd, the compliment 
to Queen Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm. 

Shakespeare knew that tradition sup- 
plies a better fable than any invention 
can. If he lost any credit of design, he 
augmented his resources ; and, at that 
day, our petulant demand for originality, 
was not so much pressed. There was no 
literature for the million. The universal 
reading, the cheap press, were unknown, 
A great poet, who appears in illiterate 
times, absorbs into his sphere all tho 
light which is anywhere radiating. Ergtj 



2o8 


REPRESEmATlVE MEN. 


intellectual ^ewel, every flower of senti- 
ment, it is his fine office to bring to his 
people ; and he comes to value his 
memory equally with his invention. He 
is, therefore, little solicitous whence his 
thoughts have been derived ; whether 
through translation, whether through 
tradition, whether by travel in distant 
countries, whether by inspiration ; from 
whatever source, they are equally wel- 
come to his uncritical audience. Nay, he 
borrows very near home. Other men say 
wise things as well as he ; only they say 
a good many foolish things, and do not 
know when they have spoken wisely. He 
knows the sparkle of the true stone, and 
puts it in high place, wherever he finds it. 
Such is the happy position of Homer, per- 
haps; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt 
that all wit was their wit. And they are 
librarians and historiographers, as well as 
poets. Each romancer was heir and dis- 
penser of all the hundred tales of the 
world — 

** Presenting Thebes’ and Pelops' Una 
And the tale of Troy divine.'* 

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous 
in all our early literature ; and, more 
recently, not only Pope and Dryden have 
been beholden to him, but in the whole 
society of English writers, a large unac- 
knowledged debt is easily traced. One is 
charmed with the opulence which feeds so 
many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge 
borrower. Chaucer, it seems, drew con- 
tinually, through Lydgate and Caxton, 
from Guido di Colonna, whose Latin 
romance of the Trojan war, was in turn 
a compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, 
and Statius, Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, 
and the Provencal poets, are his bene- 
factors : the Romaunt of the Rose is only 
judicious translation from William of 
Lords and John of Meun ; Troilus and 
Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino : the 
Cock and the Fox, from the Lais of Marie : 
The House of Fame, from the French or 
Italian ; and poor Gower he uses as if he 
were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry, 
out of which to build his house. He 
steals by this apology — that what he takes 
has no worth where he finds it, and the 
greatest where he leaves it. It has come 
to be practically a sort of rule in literature, 
that a man, having once shown himself 
capable of original writing, is entitled 
thenceforth to steal from the writings of 
others at discretion. Thought is the 
prcL’erty ^ him who can entertain it; 


and of him who can adequately place ft. 
A certain awkwardness marks the use of 
borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as wo 
have learned what to do with them, they 
become our own. 

Thus, all originality is relative Every 
thinker is retrospective. The learned mem- 
ber of the Legislature, at Westminster, 
Of at Washington, speaks and votes for 
thousands. Show us the constituency, 
and the now invisible channels by which 
the senator is made aware of their wishes, 
the crowd of practical and knowing men, 
who, by correspondence or conversation, 
are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, 
and estimates, and it will bereave his fine 
attitude and resistance of aomething of 
their impressiveness. As Sir Robert 
Peel and Mr. Webster vote, co Locke and 
Rousseau think for thousands ; and so 
there were fountains all round Homer, 
Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they 
drew ; friends, lovers, books, traditions, 
proverbs — all perished — which, if seen, 
would go to reduce the wonder. Did the 
bard speak with authority ? Did he feel 
himself overmatched by any companion ? 
The appeal is to the consciousness of the 
writer. Is there at least in his breast a 
Delphi whereof to ask concerning any 
thought or thing, whether it be verily so, 
yea or nay ? and to have answer, and to 
rely on that ? All the debts which such a 
man could contract to other wit, would 
never disturb his consciousness of origin- 
ality : for the ministrations of books, and 
of other minds, are a whiff of smoke to 
that most private reality with which he 
has conversed. 

It is easy to see that what is best writ- 
ten or done by genius, in the world, was 
no man’s work, but came by wide social 
labour, when a thousand wrought like 
one, sharing the same impulse. Our 
English Bible is a wonderful specimen of 
the strength and music of the English 
I language. But it was not made by one 
I man, or at one time ; but centuries and 
'churches brought it to perfection. There 
never was a time when there was not some 
translation existing. The Liturgy, ad- 
mired for its energy and pathos, is an 
anthology of the piety of ages and 
nations, a translation of the prayers and 
forms of the Catholic Church — these col- 
lected, too, in long periods, from the 
prayers and meditations of every saint 
and sacred writer, all over the world, 
Grotius makes the like remark in respect 
to the Lord’s Prayer, that the single 
clauses of which it is composed were 



SHAKESPEARE: 

already In use, in the time of Christ, in 
the rabbinical forms. He picked out the 
grains of gold. The nervous language of 
the Common Law, the impressive forms 
of our courts, and the precision and sub- 
stantial truth of the legal distinctions, 
are the contribution of all the sharp- 
sighted, strong-minded men v/ho have 
lived in the countries where these laws 
govern. The translation of Plutarch gets 
its excellence by being translation on 
translation. There never was a time 
when there was none. All the truly idio- 
matic and national phrases are kept, and 
all others successfully picked out, and 
thrown away. Something like the same 
process had gone on, long before, with 
the originals of these books. The world 
takes liberties with world books. Vedas, 
/Esop’s Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, j 
Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Min-j 
strelsy, are not the work of single men. 
In the composition of such works, the! 
time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, 
the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, 
the fop, all think for us. Every book sup- 
plies its time with one good word ; every 
municipal law, every trade, every folly of 
the day, and the generic catholic genius 
who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his 
originality to the originality of all, stands 
with the next age as the recorder and 
embodiment of his own. 

We have to thank the researches of 
antiquaries, and the Shakespeare Society, 
for ascertaining the steps of the English 
drama, from the Mysteries celebrated in 
churches and by churchmen, and the final 
detachment from the church, and the 
completion of secular plays, from Ferrex 
and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton’s 
Needle, down to the possession of the 
stage by the very pieces which Shakes- 
peare altered, remodelled, and finally 
made his own. Elated with success, and 
piqued by the growing interest of the 
problem, they have left no bookstall 
imsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, 
no file of old yellow accounts to decom- 
pose in damp and worms, so keen was 
the hope to discover whether the boy 
Shakespeare poached or not, whether he 
held horses at the theatre door, whether 
jae kept school, and why ho loft la his will 
only his second-best bed to Ann Hatha- 
way, his wife. 

There is somewhat touching in the mad- 
ness with which the passing age mis- 
chooses the object on which all candles 
shine, and all eyes are turned ; the care 
with wbicb it registers every trifle touch- 


OR tHE POET. 2 c 9 

ing Queen Elizabeth, and King James* 
and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs* 
and Buckinghams *, and lets pass without 
a single valuable note the founder of 
! another dynasty, which alone will cause 
the Tudor dynasty to be remembered— the 
man who carries the Saxon race in him 
by the inspiration which feeds him, and on 
whose thoughts the foremost people of the 
world are now for some ages to be nour- 
ished, and minds to receive this and not 
another bias. A popular player— nobody 
suspected he was the poet of the human 
race ; and the secret was kept as faithfully 
from poets and intellectual men, as from 
courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon, 
iwho took the inventory of the human 
I understanding for his times, never men- 
tioned his name. Ben Jonson, though wo 
j have strained his few words of regard and 
I panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic 
fame whose first vibrations he was attempt- 
ing, He no doubt thought the praise ha 
has conceded to him generou?, and 
esteemed himself, out of all question, the 
' better poet of the two. 

If it need wit to know wit, according to 
the proverb, Shakespeare’s time should be 
.capable of recognising it. Sir Henry 
Wotton was born four years after Shakes- 
peare, and died twenty-three years after 
him ; and I find, among his correspond- 
ences and acquaintances, the following 
persons : Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, 
Sir Philip Sydney, Earl of Essex, Lord 
Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, 
Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr, Donne, 
Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles 
Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, 
Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, 
Arminius ; with all of whom exists some 
token of his having communicated, with- 
out enumerating many others, whom 
doubtless he saw — Shakespeare, Spenser, 
Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Her- 
berts, Marlow, Chapman and the rest. 
Since the constellation of great men who 
appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, 
there was never any such society; yet 
their genius failed them to find out the 
best head in the universe, Our poet’s 
mark was impenetrable. You cannot see 
the mountain near. It took a century to 
make it suspected ; and not until two 
centuries had passed, after his death, did 
any criticism which we think adequate 
begin to appear. It was not possible to 
write the history of Shakespeare till now ; 
for he is the father of German literature : 
it was on the introduction of Shakespeare 
into German, by Leasing, and the tram^- 



210 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


tion of his works by Wieland and Sclilegel, 
that the rapid burst of German literature 
was most intimately connected. It was 
not until the nineteenth century, whose 
speculative genius is a sort of living 
Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could 
find such wondering readers. Now, 
literature, philosophy, and thought are 
Shakespearised. His mind is the horizon 
beyond which, at present, we do not see 
Our ears are educated to music by hisj 
rhythm. Coleridge and Goethe are the 
only critics who have expressed our con- 
victions with any adequate fidelity; but 
there is in all cultivated minds a silent | 
appreciation of his superlative power and j 
beauty, which, like Christianity, qualifies j 
the period. 

The Shakespeare Society have inquired 
in all directions, advertised the missing 
facts, offered money for any information 
that will lead to proof; and with what re- 
sult ? Beside some important illustration 
of the history of the English stage, to 
which I have adverted, they have gleaned a 
few facts touching the property, and deal- 
ings in regard to property, of the poet. 
It appears that, from year to year, he 
owned a larger share in the Blackfriars 
Theatre : its wardrobe and other appurte- 
nances were his : that he bought an estate 
in his native village, with his earnings, as 
writer and shareholder ; that he lived in 
the best house in Stratford ; was intrusted 
by his neighbours with their commissions 
In London, as of borrowing money, and 
the like ; that he was a veritable farmer. 
About the time when he was writing 
Macbeth, he sues Philip Rogers, in the 
borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five 
shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to 
him at different times ; and, in all re- 
spects, appears as a good husband, with 
no reputation for eccentricity or excess. 
He was a good-natured sort of man, an 
actor and shareholder in the theatre, not 
in any striking manner distinguished from 
other actors and managers. I admit the 
importance of this information. It was 
well worth the pains that have been taken 
to procure it. 

But whatever scraps of information con- 
cerning his condition these researches 
may have rescued, they can shed no light 
upon that infinite invention which is the 
concealed magnet of his attraction for us. 
We are very clumsy writers of history. 
We tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, 
birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earn- 
ing of money, marriage, publication of 
celebrity, death; and wheo we 


have come to an end of this gossip, no my 
of relation appears between it and the 
goddess-born ; and it seems as if, had wo 
dipped at random into the “ Modern 
Plutarch,” and read any other life there, 
it would have fitted the poems as wed. It 
is the essence of poetry to spring, like tha 
rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the in* 
visible, to abolish the past, and refuse all 
history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and 
Collier have wasted their oil. The famed 
theatres, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the 
Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. 
Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and 
Macready dedicate their lives to this 
genius ; him they crown, elucidate, obey, 
and express. The genius knows them 
not. The recitation begins ; one golden 
word leaps out immortal from all this 
painted pedantry, and sweetly torments 
us with invitations to its own inaccessible 
homes. I remember, I went once to sea 
the Hamlet of a famed performer, tho 
pride of the English stage ; and all I then 
heard, and all I now remember, of the 
tragedian, was tliat in which the tragedian 
had no part ; simply, Hamlet’s question 
to the ghost — 

What may this mean, 

That thou, dead corse, ^ain in complete steel 
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon ? ” 

That imagination which dilates the closet 
he writes in to the world’s dimension, 
crowds it with agents in rank and order, 
as quickly reduces the big reality to be 
the glimpses of the moon. These tricks 
of his magic spoil for us the illusions of 
the green-room. Can any biography shed 
light on the localities into which the Mid- 
summer Night’s Dream admits me ? Did 
Shakespeare confide to any notary or 
parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate, 
in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate 
creation ? The forest of Arden, the nim- 
ble air of Scone Castle, the moonlight of 
Portia’s villa, ‘‘the antres vast and de- 
sartsidle,” of Othello’s captivity— where 
I is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, tho 
chancellor’s file of accounts, or private 
letter, that has kept one word of thosa 
transcendent secrets? In fine, in this 
drama, as in all great works of art — in tho 
Cyclopacj-n architecture of Egypt and 
India ; in the Phidian sculpture ; the 
Gothic minsters; the Jt»jian painting; 
the Ballads of Sps-ih and Scotland — tho 
Genius draws up the ladder after him, 
when the creative age goes up to heaven, 
and gives way to a new age, which sect 
the wgrks, and aska in vain fgr a history. 



211 


SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET. 


Shakespeare is the only biographer of 
Shakespeare; and even he can tell no- 
thing, except to the Shakespeare in us ; 
that is, to our most apprehensive and 
sympathetic hour. He cannot step from 
off his tripod, and give us anecdotes of 
his inspirations. Read the antique docu- 
ments extricated, analysed, and compared 
by the assiduous Dyce and Collier ; and 
now read one of those skyey sentences — 
aerolites — which seem to have fallen out of 
heaven, and which, not your experience, 
but the man within the breast, has ac- 
cepted as words of fate; and tell me if| 
they match ; if the former account in any 
manner for the latter ; or which gives the 
most historical insight into the man. 
Hence, though our external history is 
so meagre, yet, with Shakespeare for bio- 
grapher, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we 
have really the information which is 
material, [that which describes character 
and fortune, that which, if we were about 
to meet the man and deal with him, would 
most import us to know. We have his 
recorded convictions on those questions 
which knock for answer at every heart — 
on life and death, on love, on wealth and 
poverty, on the prizes of life, and the ways 
whereby we come at them ; on the charac- 
ters of men, and the influences, occult 
and open, which affect their fortunes; 
and on those mysterious and demoniacal 
powers which defy our science, and which 
yet interweave their malice and their gift 
in our brightest liours. Who ever read 
the volume of the Sonnets, without finding 
that the poet had there revealed, under 
masks that are no masks to the intelligent, 
the law of friendship and of love ; the con- 
fusion of sentiments in the most suscepti- 
ble, and, at the same time, the most intel 
lectiial of men ? What trait of his private 
mind has he hidden in his dramas ? One 
can discern, in his ample pictures of the 
gentleman and the king, what forms and 
humanities pleased him: his delight in 
troops of friends, in large hospitality, in 
cheerful giving, LetTimon, let Warwick, 
let Antonio the merchant, answer for his 
reat heart. So far from Shakespeare’s 
eing the least known, ho is the one per- 
son, in all modern history, known to us. 
What point of morals, of manners, of 
economy, of philosophy, of religion, of 
taste, of the conduct of life, has he not 
settled ? What mystery has he not signi- 
fied his knowledge of? What office, or 
function, or district of man’s work, has he 
not remembered ? What king has he not 
tftijgbt as Talipa taught Napoleon? 


What maiden has not found him finer thtn 
her delicacy ? What lover has he not out- 
loved ? What sage has he not outseen ? 
What gentleman has he not instructed in 
the rudeness of his behaviour ? 

Some able and appreciating critics think 
no criticism on Shakespeare valuable, 
that does not rest purely on the dramatic 
merit ; that he is falsely judged as poet 
and philosopher. I think as highly as 
these critics of his dramatic merit, but 
still think it secondary. He was a full 
man, who liked to talk ,* a brain exhaling 
thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, 
found the drama next at hand. Had he 
been less, we should have had to consider 
how well he filled his place, how good a 
dramatist he was — and he is the best in 
the world. But it turns out, that what he 
has to say is of that weight as to vdthdraw 
some attention from the vehicle ; and ho 
is like some saint whose history is to be 
I rendered into all languages, into verse and 
[ prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up 
into proverbs ; so that the occasion which 
[gave the saint’s meaning the form of a 
conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code 
of laws, is immaterial, compared with the 
universality’of its application. So it fares 
with the wise Shakespeare and his book of 
life. He wrote the airs for all our modern 
music : he wrote the text of modern life ; 
the text of manners ; he drew the man of 
England and Europe ; the father of the 
man in America; he drew the man, and 
described the day, and what is done in it ; 
he read the hearts of men and women, 
their probity, and their second thought, 
and wiles ; the wiles of innocence, and the 
transitions by which virtues and vices slide 
into their contraries : he could divide the 
mother’s part from the father’s part in the 
face of the child, or draw the fine demar- 
cations of freedom and of fate ; he knew 
the laws of repression which make the 
police of nature : and all the sweets and 
all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind 
as truly but as softly as the landscape lies 
on the eye. And the importance of this 
wisdom of life sinks the form, as of Drama 
or Epic, out of notice. 'Tis like making 
a question concerning the paper on which 
a king’s message is written. 

Shakespeare is as much out of the cate- 
gory of eminent authors, as he is out of 
the crowd. He is inconceivably wise ; the 
others, conceivably. A good reader can, 
in a sort, nestle into Plato’s brain, and 
think from thence; but not into Shake- 
speare’s, We are still out-of-doors, Fof 
9 :?ecut$vo feculty, for creation, Shakp2» 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


21Z 

peare is unique. No man can imagine 
it better, He was the furthest reach of 
subtlety compatible with an individual 
self — the subtilest of authors, and only just 
within the possibility of authorship. With 
this wisdom of life, is the equal endowment 
of imaginative and of lyric power. He 
clothed the creatures of his legend with 
form and sentiments, as if they were peo- 
ple who had lived under his roof ; and few 
real men have left such distinct characters 
as these fictions. And they spoke in lan- 
guage as sweet as it was fit. Yet his 
talents never seduced him into an ostenta- 
tion, nor did he harp on one string. An 
omnipresent humanity co-ordinates all 
his faculties. Give a man of talents a 
story to tell, and his partiality will pre- 
sently appear. He has certain observa- 
tions, opinions, topics, which have some 
accidental prominence, and which 'he dis- 
poses all to exhibit. He crams this part, 
and starves that other part, consulting not 
the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and 
itrength. But Shakespeare has no pecu- 
liarity, no importunate topic: but all is 
duly given ; no veins, no curiosities ; no 
cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist 
is he; ho has no discoverable egotism: 
the great he tells greatly ; the small, sub- 
orcliaately. He is wise without emphasis 
or assertion : he is strong, as nature is 
strong, who lifts the land into mountain 
slopes without effort, and by the same 
rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and 
likes as well to do the one as the other 
This makes that equality of power in farce, 
tragedy, narrative, and love-songs ; a 
merit so incessant tliat each reader is 
incredulous of the perception of other 
readers. 

This power of expression, or of trans- 
ferring the inmost truth of things into 
music and verse, makes him the type of 
the poet, and has added a new problem to 
metaphysics. This is that which throws 
him into natural history, as a main pro- 
duction of the globe, and as announcing 
new eras and ameliorations. Things 
ware mirrored in his poetry without loss 
or blur ; he could paint the fine with pre- 
cision, the great with compass ; the tragic 
and the comic indifferently, and without 
any distortion or favour. He carried his 
powerful execution into minute details, to 
a hair point ; finishes an eyelash or a 
dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain ; 
and yet these, like nature's, will bear the 
scrutiny of the solar microscope. 

In short, he is the chief example to 
prove tha^ more or less of producUoi}, 


more or fewer pictures, is a thing 
ferent. He had the power to made one 
picture. Daguerre learned how to let one 
flower etch its image on his plate of 
iodine ; and then proceeds at leisure 
to etch a million. There are always 
objects ; but there was never representa- 
tion. Here is perfect representation, at 
last ; and now let the world of figures sit 
for their portraits. No recipe can be given 
for the making of a Shakespeare ; but the 
possibility of the translation of things into 
song is demonstrated. 

His lyric power lies in the genius of the 
piece. The sonnets, though their excel- 
lence is lost in the splendour of the 
dramas, are as inimitable as they : and it 
is not a merit of lines, but a total merit of 
the piece ; like the tone of voice of some 
incomparable person, so is this a speech 
j of poetic beings, and any clause as un- 
producible now as a whole poem. 

^ Though the speeches in the plays, and 
single lines, have a beauty which tempts 
the ear to pause on them for their euphu- 
ism, yet the sentence is so loaded with 
meaning, and so linked with its foregoers 
and followers, that the logician is satis- 
fied. His means are as admirable as his 
ends ; every subordinate invention, by 
which he helps himself to connect soma 
irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. 
He is not reduced to dismount and walk, 
because his horses are running off with 
him in some distant direction : ho always 
rides. 

The finest poetry was first experience ; 
but the thought has suffered a transforma- 
tion since it was an experience. Culti- 
vated men often attain a good degree of 
skill in writing verses; but it is easy to 
read, through their poems, their personal 
history : anyone acquainted with parties 
can name every figure : this is Andrew, 
and that is Rachel. The sense thus re 
mains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with 
wings, and not yet a butterfly. In the 
poet’s mind, the fact has gone quite over 
into the new element of thought, and has 
lost all that is exuvial. This generosity 
abides with Shakespeare. We say, from 
the truth and closeness of his pictures, 
that he knows the lesson by heart. Yet 
there is not a trace of egotism. 

One more royal trait properly belongs 
to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, 
without which no man can be a poet— 
for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, 
not for its obligation, but for its grace ; 
he delights in the world, in man, in 
woman* for tbe lovoly light that sparkles 



SHAKESPEARE: 

from thorn* Beauty, the spirit of joy and 
hilarity, he sheds over the universe. 
Epicurus relates that poetry hath such 
charms that a lover might forsake his 
mistress to partake of them. And the true 
bards have been noted for their firm and 
cheerful temper. Homer lies in sun- 
shine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and 
Saadi says, “ It was rumoured abroad 
that I was penitent ; but what had I to do 
with repentance ? ” Not less sovereign 
and cheerful — much more sovereign and 
cheerful, is the tone of Shakespeare. His 
name suggests joy and emancipation to 
the heart of m^n. If he should appear 
in any company of -^uman souls, who 
would not march in his troop ? He 
touches nothing that does not borrow 
health and longevity from his festal style. 

And now, how stands the account of 
man with this bard and benefactor, when 
in solitude, shutting our ears to the re- 1 
verberations of his fame, we seek to strike 
the balance ? Solitude has austere les- 
sons ; it can teach us to spare both heroes 
and poets; and it weighs Shakespeare 
also, and finds him to share the halfness 
and imperfection of humanity, 

Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, 
saw the splendour of meaning that plays 
ever the visible world ; knew that a tree 
had another use than for apples, and corn 
another than for meal, and the ball of the 
earth, than for tillage and roads: that 
these things bore a second and finer har- 
vest to the mind, being emblems of its 
thoughts, and conveying in all their natu- 
ral history a certain mute commentary on 
human life. Shakespeare employed them 
as colours to compose his picture. He 
rested in their beauty ; and never took 
the step which seemed inevitable to such 
genius, namely, to explore the virtue 
which resides in these symbols, and im- 
parts this power — what is that which they 
themselves say? He converted the ele- 
ments, which waited on his command, 
into entertainments. He was master of 
the revels to mankind. Is it not as if one 
should have, through majestic powers of 
science, the comets given into his hand 
or the planets and their moons, and 
Bhould draw them from their orbits to 
glare with the municipal fireworks on a 
holiday night, and advertise in all towns, 
•* very superior pyrotechny this evening ! ” 
Are the agents of nature, and the power 
to understand them, worth no more than 


OR, THE POET, ^^3 

a street seicnade, or the breath of a cigar ? 
One remembers again the trumpet-text in 
the Koran — " The heavens and the earth, 
and all that is between them, think ye we 
have created them in jest ? ” As long as 
the question is of talent and mental po^er, 
the world of men has not his equal to 
show. But when the question is to life, 
and its materials, and its auxiliaries, how 
does he profit me ? What does it signify ? 
It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer 
Night’s Dream, or a Winter Evening's 
Tale : what signifies another picture more 
or less? The Egyptian verdict of the 
Shakespeare Societies comes to mind, 
that he was a jovial actor and manager, 
I cannot marry this fact to his verse. 
Other admirable men have led lives in 
some sort of keeping with their thought ; 
but this man, in wide contrast. Had he 
been less, had he reached only the com- 
mon measure of great authors, of Bacon, 
Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave 
the fact in the twilight of human fate; 
but, that this man of men, he who gave to 
the science of mind a new and larger 
subject than had ever existed, and planted 
the standard of humanity some furlongs 
forward into Chaos — that he should not 
be wise for himself — it must even go into 
the world’s history, that the best poet led 
an obscure and profane life, using his 
genius for the public amusement. 

Well, other men, priest and prophet, 

I Israelite, German, and Swede, beheld the 
same objects : they also saw through them 
that which was contained. And to what 
purpose ? The beauty straightway van- 
ished ; they read commandments, all 
excluding mountainous duty; an obliga- 
tion, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell 
on them, and life became ghastly, joyless, 
a pilgrim’s progress, a probation, be- 
leaguered round with doleful histories of 
Adam’s fall and curse, behind us; with 
doomsdays and purgatorial and penal 
fires before us ; and the heart of the seer 
and the heart of the listener sank in them. 

It must be conceded that these are half- 
views of half-men. The world still wants 
its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not 
trifle with Shakespeare the player, nor 
shall grope in graves! with Swedenborg 
the mourner ; but who shall see, speak, 
and act, with equal inspiration. For 
knowledge will brighten the sunshine ; 
right is more beautiful than private affec- 
tion ; and love is compatible with uoiver* 
sal wisdom- 



214 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE 

A.MONG the eminent persons of the nine- 
teenth century, Bonaparte is far the best 
known, and the most powerful ; and owes 
his predominance to the fidelity with 
which he expresses the tone of thought 
and belief, the aims of the masses of I 
active and cultivated men. It is Sweden- 
borg’s theory, that every organ is made 
up of homogeneous particles ; or, as it is j 
sometimes expressed, every whole is made 
of similars ; that is, the lungs are com- 
posed of infinitely small lungs ; the liver, 
of infinitely small livers ; the kidney 
of little kidneys, &c. Following this 
analogy, if any man is found to carry with 
him the power and affections of vast num- 
bers, if Napoleon is France, if Napoleon 
is Europe, it is because the people whom 
he sways are little Napoleons. 

In our society, there is a standing 
antagonism between the conservative and 
the democratic classes ; between those 
who have made their fortunes, and the 
young and the poor who have fortunes to 
make ; between the interests of dead 
labour — that is, the labour of hands long 
ago still in the grave, which labour is now 
entombed in money stocks, or in land and 
buildings owned by idle capitalists — and 
the interests of living labour, which seeks 
to possess itself of land, and buildings, 
and money stocks. The first class is timid, 
selfish, illiberal, hating innovation, and 
continually losing numbers by death. 
The second class is selfish also, encroach- 
ing, bold, self-relying, always outnumber- 
ing the other, and recruiting its numbers 
every hour by births. It desires to keep 
open every avenue to the competition of 
all, and to multiply avenues — the class of 
business men in America, in England, in 
France, and throughout Europe ; the 
class of industry and skill. Napoleon is 
its representative. The instinct of active, 
brave, able men, throughout the middle 
class everywhere, has pointed out Napo- 
leon as the incarnate Democrat. He had 
their virtues and their vices ; above all, he 
had their spirit or aim. That tendency is 
material, pointing at a sensual success, 
and employing the richest and most vari- 
ous means to that end ; conversant with 
mechanical powers, highly intellectual, 
widely and accurately Isarned and skilful, 
but subordinating all intellectual and| 
into me^ns to 9 1 


MAN OF THE WORLD. 

I success. To be the rich man, is the en!U 
I “ God has granted.” says the Koran, ” to 
! eve^ people a prophet in its own tongue.” 
Paris, and London, and New York, tha 
spirit of commerce, cf money, and mate- 
rial power, were also to have their pro- 
phet; and Bonaparte was qualified and 
sent. 

Every one of the million readers of 
anecdotes, or memoirs, or lives of Napo- 
leon, delights in the page, because he 
studies it in his own history. Napoleon 
is thoroughly modern, and, at the highest 
point of his fortunes, has the very spirit of 
the newspapers. He is no saint — to use 
his own word, “ no capuchin,” and he is 
no hero, in the high sense. The man in 
the street finds in him the qualities and 
powers of other men in the street. He 
finds him, like himself, by birth a citizen, 
who, by very intelligible merits, arrived at 
such a commanding position, that he could 
indulge all those tastes which the com- 
mon man possesses, but is obliged to con- 
ceal and deny : good society, good books, 
fast travelling, dress, dinners, servants 
without number, personal weight, the 
execution of his ideas, the standing in tha 
attitude of a benefactor to all persons 
about him, the refined enjoyments of pic- 
tures, statues, music, palaces, and con- 
ventional honours — precisely what is 
agreeable to the heart of every man in the 
nineteenth century — this powerful man 
possessed. 

It is true that a man of Napoleon's truth 
of adaptation to the mind of the masses 
around him, becomes not merely repre- 
sentative, but actually a monopoliser and 
usurper of other minds. Thus Mirabeau 
plagiarised every good thought, every 
good word, that was spoken in France. 
Dumont relates, that he sat in the gallery 
of the Convention, and heard Mirabeau 
make a speech. It struck Dumont that 
he could fit it with a peroration, which he 
wrote in pencil immediately, and showed 
it to Lord Elgin who sat by him. Lord 
Elgin approved it, and Dumont, in the 
evening, showed it to Mirabeau. Mira- 
Ibeau read it, pronounced it admirable, 

! and declared he would incorporate it: into 
his harangue to-morrow, to the Assembly 
“It is impossible,” said Dumont, “ as, 
unfortunately, I have shown it to Lord 
Elgin,” “If you ?bowp it to Lord 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE 

Elgin, and to fifty persons beside, I shall 
•till speak it to-morrow;” and he did 
•peak it, with much effect, at the next 
day’s session. For Mirabeau, with his 
overpowering personality, felt that these 
things, which his presence inspired, were 
as much his own as if he had said them, 
and that his adoption of them gave them 
their weight. Much more absolute and 
centralising was the successor to Mira- 
beau's popularity, and to much more than 
his predominance in France. Indeed, a 
man of Napoleon’s stamp almost ceases 
to have a private speech and opinion. He 
is so largely receptive, and is so placed, 
that he comes to be a bureau for all the 
intelligence, wit, and power, of the age and 
country. He gains the battle ; he makes 
the code ; he makes the system of weights 
and measures ; he levels the Alps ; he 
builds the road. All distinguished engi- 
neers, savants, statists, report to him : so, 
likewise, do all good heads in every kind: 
he adopts the best measures, sets his 
stamp on them, and not these alone, but on 
every happy and memorable expression. 
Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, 
tnd evciry line of his writing, deserves 
reading, as it is the sense of France. 

Bonaparte was the idol of common men, 
because he had in transcendent degree 
the qualities and powers of common men. 
There is a certain satisfaction in coming 
down to the lowest ground of politics, for 
we get rid of cant and hypocrisy. 
Bonaparte wrought, in common with that 
great class he represented, for power and 
wealth — but Bonaparte, specially, with- 
out any scruple as to the means. All the 
sentiments which embarrass men’s pur- 
suit of these objects, he set aside. The 
sentiments were for women and children. 
Fontanes, in 1804, expressed Napoleon’s 
own sense, when, in behalf of the Senate, 
he addressed him — “ Sire, the desire of 
perfection is the worst disease that ever 
afflicted the human mind.” The advo- 
cates of liberty, and of progress, are 
” ideologists ” — a word of contempt often 
in his mouth — ” Necker is an ideologist: ” 
” Lafayette is an ideologist.” 

An Italian proverb, too well known, 
declares that, ” if you would succeed, you 
must not be too good.” It is an advan- 
tage, within certain limits, to have 
renounced the dominion of the sentiments 
«f piety, gratitude, and generosity ; since, 
what was an impassable bar to us, and 
•till is to others, becomes a convenient 
weapon for our purposes; just as the 
which was a Cormidab^^ barrier, 


MAN OF IHE WORLD. 215 

winter transforms into the smoothest of 
roads. 

Napoleon renounced, once for all, senti- 
ments and affections, and would help 
himself with his hands and his head. 
With him is no miracle, and no magic. 
He is a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, 
in earth, in roads, in buildings, in money, 
and in troops, and a very consistent and 
wise master-workman. He is never weak 
and literary, but acts with the solidity and 
the precision of natural agents. He has 
not lost his native sense and sympathy 
with things. Men give way before such 
a man, as before natural events. To be 
sure, there are men enough who are 
immersed in things, as farmers, smiths 
sailors, and mechanics generally ; and we 
know how real and solid such men appear 
in the presence of scholars and gram- 
marians : but these men ordinarily lack 
the power of arrangement, and are like 
hands without a head. But Bonaparte 
superadded to this mineral and animal 
force, insight and generalisation, so that 
men saw in'him combined the natural and 
the intellectual power, as if the sea and 
land had taken flesh and begun to cipher. 
Therefore the land and sea seem to pre- 
suppose him. He came unto his own and 
they received him. This ciphering opera- 
tive knows what ho is working with, and 
what is the product. He knew the pro- 
perties of gold and iron, of wheels and 
ships, of troops and diplomatists, and 
required that each should do after its 
I kind. 

The art of war was the game in which 
he exerted his arithmetic. It consisted, 
according to him, in having always more 
forces than the enemy, on the point where 
the enemy is attacked, or where he 
attacks ; and his whole talent is strained 
by endless manoeuvre and evolution, to 
I march always on the enemy at an angle, 
and destroy his forces in detail. It is 
obvious that a very small force, skilfully 
and rapidly manoeuvring, so as always to 
bring two men against one at the point ot 
engagement, will be an overmatch for a 
much larger body of men. 

The times, his constitution, and hia 
early circumstances, combined to develop 
this pattern democrat. He had the virtues' 
of his class, and the conditions for their 
activity. That common sense, which no 
sooner respects any end, than it finds the 
means to effect it ; the delight in the use 
of means ; in the choice, simplification, 
and combining of means ; the dircctneaa 
and thoroughness of his work ; the 



2I6 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


dence with which all was seen, and the I 
energy with which all was done, make 
Mm the natural organ and head of what 
I may almost call, from its extent, the 
modem party. 

Nature must have far the greatest share 
in every success, and so in his. Such a 
man was wanted, and such a man was 
born ; a man of stone and iron, capable 
of sitting on horse-back sixteen or seven- 
teen hours, of going many days together 
without rest or food, except by snatches, 
and with the speed and spring of a tiger 
in action ; a man not embarrassed by any 
scruples; compact, instant, selfish, pru- 
dent, and of a perception which did not 
suffer itself to be baulked or misled by 
any pretences of others, or any supersti- 
tion, or any heat or haste of his own. 

My hand of iron,” he said, ” was not at 
the extremity of my arm ; it was immedi- 
ately connected with my head.” He re- 
spected the power of nature and fortune, 
and ascribed it to his superiority, instead 
of valuing himself, like inferior men, on 
his opinionativeness, and waging war with 
nature. His favourite rhetoric lay in allu- 
sion to his star ; and he pleased himself, 
as well as the people, when he styled him- j 
self the “Child of Destiny.” “They 
charge me,” ho said, “with the commis-* 
sion of great crimes: men of my stamp 
do not commit crimes. Nothing has been 
more simple than my elevation : ’tis in 
vain to ascribe it to intrigue or crime : it 
was owing to the peculiarity of the times, 
and to my reputation of having fought 
well against the enemies of my country. 
I have always marched with the opinion 
of great masses, and with events. Of 
what use, then, would crimes be to me ? ” 
Again he said, speaking of his son : “ My 
son cannot replace me ; I could not re- 
place myself. 1 am the creature of cir- 
cumstances.” 

He had a directness of action never be- 
fore combined with so much comprehen- 
sion. He is a realist terrific to all talkers, 
and confused truth-obscuring persons. He 
sees where the matter hinges, throws 
himself on the precise point of resistance, 
and slights all other considerations. He 
is strong in the right manner, namely, by 
insight. He never blundered into victory, 
but won his battles in his head, before he 
won them on the field. His principal 
means are in himself. He asks counsel 
of no other. In 1796, he writes to the 
Directoi^; “I have conducted the cam- 
paign without consulting anyone. I should 
baxa done no good, if I had been under 


the necessity of conforming to the notiooi 
of another person. 1 have gained some 
advantages over superior forces, and when 
totally destitute of everything, because, in 
the persuasion that your confidence was 
reposed in me, my actions were as prompt 
as my thoughts.” 

History is full, down to this day, of the 
imbecility of kings and governors. They 
are a class of persons much to be pitied, 
for they know not what they should do. 
The weavers strike for bread ; and the 
king and his ministers, not knowing what 
to do, meet them with bayonets. But 
Napoleon understood his business. Here 
was a man who, in each moment and 
emergency, knew what to do next. It is 
an immense comfort and refreshment to 
the spirits, not only of kings, but of 
citizens. Few men have any next; they 
live from hand to mouth, without plan, 
and are ever at the end of their line, and, 
after each action, wait for an impulse 
from abroad. Napoleon had been the 
first man of the world, if his ends had 
been purely public. As he is, he inspires 
confidence and vigour by the extraordinary 
unity of his action. He is firm, sure, 
self-denying, self-postponing, sacrificing 
everything to his aim — money, troops, 
generals, and his own safety also, to his 
aim ; not misled, like common adven** 
turers, by the splendour of his own means. 
“ Incidents ought not to govern policy,” 
he said, “ but policy, incidents.” “ To be 
hurried away by every event, is to have 
no political system at all,” His victories 
were only so many doors, and he never 
for a moment lost sight of his way onward, 
in the dazzle and uproar of the present 
circumstance. He knew what to do, and 
he flew to his mark. He would shorten a 
straight line to come at his object Hor* 
rible anecdotes may, no doubt, be col- 
lected from his history, of the price at 
which he bought his successes ; but he 
must not therefore be set down as cruel ; 
but only as one who knew no impediment 
to his will ; not bloodthirsty, not cruel — 
but woe to what thing or person stood 
in his way ! Not bloodthirsty, but not 
sparing of blood — and pitiless. He saw 
only the object : the obstacle must give 
way. “ Sire, General Clarke cannot com- 
bine with General Junot, for the dreadf^ 
fire of the Austrian battery.” — Let him 
carry the battery.” — “ Sire, every regiment 
that approaches the heavy artillery is sacri- 
ficed ; Sire, what orders ? ” — “ Forward, 
forward I ” Seruzier, a colonel of artillery, 
gives, in his “ Military Memoirs,” the fob 



SAPOLEON: OR, THE MAN OP THE WORLD. 


lowing sketch of a scene after the battle of 
Austerlitz : " At the moment in which the 
Russian army was making its retreat, 
painfully, but in good order, on the ice of 
the lake, the Emperor Napoleon came rid- 
ing at full speed toward the artillery. ‘ You 
are losing time,’ he cried ; ‘ fire upon 

those masses ; they must be ingulfed : fire 
upon the ice ! ’ The order remained un- 
executed for ten minutes. In vain several 
officers and myself were placed on the 
slope of a hill to produce the effect : 
their balls and mine rolled upon the ice, 
without breaking it up. Seeing that, I 
tried a simple method of elevating light 
howitzers. The almost perpendicular fall 
of the heavy projectiles produced the de- 
sired effect. My method was immediately 
followed by the adjoining batteries, and 
in less than no time we buried ” some* 
“ thousands of Russians and Austrians 
under the waters of the lake.” 

In the plenitude of his resources, every 
obstacle seemed to vanish. ” There shall 
be no Alps,” he said; and he built his 
perfect roads, climbing by graded galleries 
their steepest precipices, until Italy was 
as open to Paris as any town in France. 
He laid his bones to, and wrought for his 
crown. Having decided what was to be 
4one, he did that with might and main. 
He put out all his strength. He risked 
everything, and spared nothing, neither 
ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor 
generals, nor himself. 

We like to see everything do its office 
after its kind, whether it be a milch-cow 
or a rattle-snake ; and, if fighting be the 
best mode of adjusting national differences 
(as large majorities of men seem to agree), 
certainly Bonaparte was right in making it 
thorough. ” The grand principle of war,” 
he said, ” was, that an army ought always 
to be ready, by day and by night, and at 
all hours, to make all the resistance it is 
capable of making.” He never econo- 
mised his ammunition, but, on a hostile 
position^ rained a torrent of iron — shells, 
balls, grape-shot — to annihilate all defence. 
On any point of resistance, he concen- 
trated squadron on squadron in over- 
whelming numbers, until it was swept out 
of existence. To a regiment of horse- 
chasseurs at Lobenstein, two days before 
the battle of Jena, Napoleon said : ” My 
lads, you must not fear death ,* when 
soldiers brave death, they drive him into 
the enemy's ranks.” In the fury of 

* As 1 quote at second-hand, and cannot pro- 
cure Serucier, I dare not adopt the high figure 

I find. I 


assault, he no more spared himself. 
went to the edge of his possibility. It it 
plain that in Italy he did what he could, 
and all that he could. He came, several 
times, within an inch of ruin; and his 
own person was all but lost. He was 
flung into the marsh at Areola. The 
Austrians were between him and his 
troops, in the mMde, and be was brought 
off with desperate efforts. At Lonato, and 
at other places he was on the point of 
being taken prisoner. Ho fought sixty 
battles. He had never enough. Each 
victory was a new weapon. ” My power 
would fall, were I not to support it by new 
achievements. Conquest has made me 
what I am, and conquest must maintain 
me.” He felt, with every wise man, that 
as much life is needed for conservation, 
as for creation. We are always in peril, 
always in a bad plight, just on the edge of 
destruction, and only to be saved by in- 
vention and courage. 

This vigour was guarded and tempered 
by the coldest prudence and punctuality. 
A thunderbolt in the attack, he was found 
invulnerable in his intrenchraents. His 
very attack was never the inspiration of 
courage, but the result of calculation. 
His idea of the best defence consists in 
being still the attacking party. ” My am- 
bition,” he says, ” was great, but was of a 
cold nature.” In one of his conversations 
with Las Casas, he remarked, ” As to 
moral courage, I have rarely met with tha 
two-o’clock-in-the-morning kind : I mean 
unprepared courage, that which is neces- 
sary on an unexpected occasion; and 
which, in spite of the most unforeseen 
events, leaves full freedom of judgment 
and decision : ” and he did not hesitate 
to declare that he was himself eminently 
endowed with this ” two-o’clock-in-the- 
morning courage, and that he had met 
with few persons equal to himself in this 
respect.’ 

Everything depended on the nicety of 
his combinations, and the stars were not 
more punctual than his arithmetic. His 
personal attention descended to the 
smallest particulars. ” At Montebello, I 
ordered Kellermann to attack with eight 
hundred horse, and with th^se he separa- 
ted the six thousand Hungarian grena- 
diers, before the very eyes of the Austrian 
cavalry. This cavalry was half a league 
off, and required a quarter-of-an-hour to 
arrive on the field of action ; and I hava 
observed, that it is always these quarters- 
of-an-hour chat decide the fate of a battle.*' 
Before he fought a battle Bona^rta 



218 REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


thought little about what he should do in 
case of success, but a great deal about 
what he should do in case of a reverse of 
fortune. The same prudence and good 
sense mark all his behaviour. His instruc- 
tions to his secretary at the Tuileries are 
worth remembering. “ During the night, i 
enter my chamber as seldom as possible. 
Do not awake me when you have any 
good news to communicate ; with that 
there is no hurry. But when you bring 
bad news, rouse me instantly, for then 
there is not a moment to be lost.” It was 
a whimsical economy of the same kind 
which dictated his practice, when general 
in Italy, in regard to his burdensome cor- 
respondence. He directed Bourrienne to 
leave all letters unopened for three weeks, 
and then observed with satisfaction how 
large a part of the correspondence had 
thus disposed of itself, and no longer re- 
quired an answer. His achievement of 
business was immense, and enlarges the 
known powers of man. There have been 
many working kings, from Ulysses to 
William of Orange, but none who accom- 
plished a tithe of this man’s performance. 

To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added 
the advantage of having been born to a 
private and humble fortune. In his later 
days, he had the weakness of wishing to 
add to his crowns and badges the prescrip- 
tion of aristocracy ; but he knew his debt 
to his austere education, and made no 
secret of his contempt for the born kings, 
and for “th* hereditary asses,” as he 
coarsely styled the Bourbons. He said 
that, ” in their exile, they have learned 
nothing and forgot nothing.” Bonaparte 
had passed through all the degrees of 
military service, but also was citizen be- 
fore he was emperor, and so has the key 
to citizenship. His remarks and estimates 
discover the information and justness of 
measurement of the middle class. Those 
who had to deal with him, found that he 
was not to be imposed upon, but could 
cipher as well as another man. This ap- 
pears in all parts of his Memoirs, dictated 
at St. Helena, When the expenses of the 
empress, of his household, of his palaces, 
had accumulated great debts, Napoleon 
examined the bills of the creditors him- 
self, detected overcharges and errors, and 
reduced the claims by considerable sums. 

His grand weapon, namely, the millions 
whom he directed, he owed to the repre- 
sentative character which clothed him. 
He interests us as he stands for France 
and for Europe : and he exists as captain 
and king, only as far as the revolution, or 


the interest of the industrious masaei, 
found an organ and a leader in him. In 
the social interests, he knew the meaning 
and value of labour, and threw himself 
naturally on that side, I like an incident 
mentioned by one of his biographers at 
St. Helena. “ When walking with Mrs. 
Balcombe, some servants, carrying heavy 
boxes, passed by on the road, and Mrs. 
Balcombe desired them, in rather an angry 
tone, to keep back. Napoleon interfered, 
saying, ' Respect the burden. Madam.’ ’* 
In the time of the empire, he directed 
attention to the improvement and embel- 
lishment of the markets of the capital, 
“The market-place,” he said, “is the 
Louvre of the common people.” The 
principal works that have survived him 
are his magnificent roads. He filled the 
troops with his spirit, and a sort of free- 
dom and companionship grew up between 
him and them, which the forms of his 
court never permitted between the officers 
and himself. They performed, under his 
eye, that which no others could do. The 
best document of his relation to his troops 
is the order of the day on the morning of 
the battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon 
promises the troops that he will keep his 
person out of reach of fire. This decla- 
ration, which is the reverse of that ordi- 
narily made by generals and sovereigns 
on the eve of a battle, sufficiently explains 
the devotion of the army to their leader. 

But though there is in particulars this 
identity between Napoleon and the mass 
of the people, his real strength lay in 
their conviction that he was their repre- 
sentative in his genius and aims, not only 
when he courted, but when he controlled, 
and even when he decimated them by his 
conscriptions. He knew, as well as any 
Jacobin in France, how to philosophise on 
liberty and equality ; and, when allusion 
was made to the precious blood of centu- 
ries, which was spilled by the killing of 
the Due d’Enghien, he suggested, “ Nei- 
ther is my blood ditch-water.” The people 
felt that no longer the throne was occu- 
pied, and the land sucked of its nourish- 
ment, by a small class of legitimates, 
secluded from all community with the 
children of the soil, and holding the ideas 
and supei i:titions of a long-forgotten state 
of society. Instead of that vampire, a 
man of themselves held, in the Tuileries, 
knowledge and ideas like their own, open* 
ing, of course, to them and their children, 
all places of power and trust. The day 
of sleepy, selfish policy, ever narrowing 
the means and opportunities of young 



NAPOLEOH; OR, THB 

men, was ended, and a day of expansion 
and demand was come. A market for all 
the powers and productions of man was 
opened ; brilliant prizes glittered in the 
eyes of youth and talent. The old, iron- 
bound, feudal France was changed into a 
young Ohio or New York ; and those who 
smarted under the immediate rigours of 
the new monarch, pardoned them, as the 
necessary severities of the military system 
which had driven out the oppressor. And 
even when the majority of the people had 
begun to ask, whether they had really' 
gained anything under the exhausting 
levies of men and money of the new 
master — the whole talent of the county, 
in every rank and kindred, took his part, 
and defended him as its natural patron. I 
In 1814, when advised to rely on the higher 
classes, Napoleon said to those around 
him : “ Gentlemen, in the situation in 
which I stand, my only nobility is the 
rabble of the Faubourgs.” 

Napoleon met this natural expectation. 
The necessity of his position required a 
hospitality to every sort of talent, and its 
appointment to trusts ; and his feeling 
went along with this policy. Like every 
superior person, he undoubtedly felt a de- 
sire for men and compeers, and a wish to 
measure his power with other masters, 
and an impatience of fools and underlings. 
In Italy, he sought for men, and found 
none. ” Good God I” he said, ‘‘ how rare 
men are ! There are eighteen millions in 
Italy, and I have with difficulty found two 
— Dandolo and Melzi.” In later years, 
with larger experience, his respect for 
mankind was not increased. In a moment 
of bitterness, he said, to one of his oldest 
friends: ” Men deserve the contempt with 
which they inspire me. I have only to put 
some gold lace on the coat of my virtuous 
republicans, and they immediately become 
just what I wish them.” This impatience 
at levity was, however, an oblique tribute 
of respect to those able persons who com- 
manded his regard, not only when he 
found them friends and coadjutors, but 
also when they resisted his will. He could 
not confound Fox and Pitt, Carnot, La- 
fayette, and Bernadotte, with the danglers 
of his court ; and, in spite of the detraction 
which his systematic egotism dictated 
toward the great captains who conquered 
with and for him, ample acknowledgments 
are made by him to Lannes, Duroc, Kleber, 
Dessaix, Massena, Murat, Ney, and Auge- 
reau. If he felt himself their patron, and 
the founder of their fortunes, as when he 
■aid, *' I made my generals out of mud,” 


MAli OP TUB WORLD. 219 

he could not hide hii latisfactlon (n re* 
ceiving from them a seconding and sup- 
port commensurate with the grandeur of 
his enterprise. In the Russian campaign, 
he was so much impressed by the courage 
and resources of Marshal Ney, that he 
said, “ I have two hundiCd millions in my 
coffers, and I would give them all for 
Ney.” The characters which he has 
drawn of several of his marshals are dis- 
criminating, and, though they did not 
content the insatiable vanity of French 
officers, are, no doubt, substantially just. 
And, in fact, every species of merit waa 
sought and advanced under his govern- 
ment. ” I know,” he said, ” the depth 
and draught of water of every one of my 
generals.” Natural power was sure to bo 
well received at his court. Seventeen 
men, in his time, were raised from comuDon 
soldiers to the rank of king, marshal, 
duke, or general ; and the crosses of his 
Legion of Honour were given to personal 
valour, and not to family connection. 
” When soldiers have been baptised intha 
fire of a battle-field, they have all ono 
rank in my eyes.” 

When a natural king becomes a titular 
king, everybody is pleased and satisfied. 
The Revolution entitled the strong popu- 
lace of the Faubourg St. Antoine, and 
every horse-boy and powder-monkey in 
the army, to look on Napoleon, as flesh 
of his flesh, and the creature of his party ; 
but there is something in the success of 
grand talent which enlists a universal 
sympathy. For, in the prevalence of 
sense and spirit over stupidity and mal- 
versation, all reasonable men have an 
interest; and, as intellectual beings, we 
feel the air purified by the electric shock, 
when material force is overthrown by in- 
tellectual energies. As soon as we are 
removed out of the reach of local and 
accidental partialities, man feels that Na- 
poleon fights for him ; these are honest 
victories; this strong steam-engine does 
our work. Whatever appeals to the imagi- 
nation, by transcending the ordinary limits 
of human ability, wonderfully encourages 
and liberates us. This capacious head, 
revolving and disposing sovereignly trains 
of affairs, and animating such multitudes 
of agents ; this eye, which looked through 
Europe ; this prompt invention ; this in- 
exhaustible resource — what events I what 
romantic pictures I what strange situa- 
tions I— when spying the Alps, by a sunset 
in the Sicilian sea ; drawing up his army 
for battle, in sight of the Pyramids, and 
saying to his troops, ” From the to^ of 



220 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


chose pyramids, forty centuries look down 
on you ; ” fording the Red Sea ; wading in 
the gulf of the Isthmus of Suez, On the 
shore of Ptolemais, gigantic projects agi- 
tated him. “Had Acre fallen, I should 
have changed the face of the world.” His 
army, on the night of the battle of Auster- 
litz, which was the anniversary of his 
inauguration as Emperor, presented him 
with a bouquet of forty standards taken 
in the fight. Perhaps it is a little puerile, 
the pleasure he took in making these 
contrasts glaring ; as, when he pleased 
himself with making kings wait in his 
ante-chambers, at Tilsit, at Paris, and at 
Erfurt. 

We cannot, in the universal imbecility, 
indecision, and indolence of men, suffi- 
ciently congratulate ourselves on this 
strong and ready actor, who took occasion 
by the beard, and showed us how much may 
be accomplished by the mere force of such 
virtues as all men possess in less degrees ; 
namely, by punctuality, by personal at- 
tention, by courage, and thoroughness. 
** The Austrians,” he said, “ do not know 
the value of time.” I should cite him, in 
his earlier years, as a model of prudence. 
His power does not consist in any wild or 
extravagant force; in any enthusiasm, 
like Mahomet's; or singular power of 
persuasion ; but in the exercise of common 
sense on each emergency, instead of 
abiding by rules and customs. The lesson 
he teaches is that which vigour always 
teaches — that there is always room for it. 
To what heaps of cowardly doubts is not 
that man’s life an answer. When he ap- 
peared, it was the belief of all military 
men that there could be nothing new in 
war ; as it is the belief of men to-day, that 
nothing new can be undertaken in poli- 
tics, or in church, or in letters, or in trade, 
or in farming, or in our social manners 
and customs ; and as it is, at all times, 
the belief of society that the world is used ; 
Up. But Bonaparte knew better than 
society; and, moreover, knew that he 
knew better. I think all men know better 
than they do ; know that the institutions 
we so volubly commend are go-carts and 
baubles; but they dare not trust their 
presentiments. Bonaparte relied on his 
own sense, and did not care a bean for 
Other people’s. The world treated his 
novelties just as it treats everybody’s 
novelties— made infinite objection; mus- 
tered all the impediments ; but he snapped 
his finger at their objections. “ What 
creates great difficulty,” he remarks, “ in 
%e profession of the land -commander, is 


the necessity of feeding so many men and 
animals. If he allov/s himself to be 
guided by the commissaries, he will never 
stir, and all his expeditions will fail.” 
An example of his common sense is what 
he says of the passage of the Alps in 
winter, which all writers, one repeating 
after the other, had described as imprac- 
ticable. “The winter,” says Napoleon, 
“ is not the most unfavourable season for 
the passage of lofty mountains. The snow 
is then firm, the weather settled, and there 
is nothing to fear from avalanches, the 
real and only danger to be apprehended 
in the Alps. On those high mountains, 
there are often very fine days in December, 
of a dry cold, with extreme calmness in 
the air.” Read his account, too, of the 
way in which battles are gained. “ In all 
battles, a moment occurs, when the 
bravest troops, after having made the 
greatest efforts, feel inclined to run. 
That terror proceeds from a want of con- 
fidence in their own courage ; and it only 
requires a slight opportunity, a pretence, 
to restore confidence to them. The art is 
to give rise to the opportunity, and to 
invent the pretence. At Areola, I won th6 
battle with twenty-five horsemen. I 
seized that moment of lassitude, gave 
every man a trumpet, and gained the day 
with this handful. You see that two 
armies are two bodies which meet, and 
endeavour to frighten each other : a mo- 
ment of panic occurs, and that moment 
must be turned to advantage. When a 
man has been present in many actions, he 
distinguishes that moment without diffi- 
culty ; it is as easy as casting up an addi- 
tion.” 

This deputy of the nineteenth century 
added to his gifts a capacity for specula- 
tion on general topics. He delighted in 
running through the range of practical, of 
literary, and of abstract questions. His 
opinion is always original, and to tha 
purpose. On the voyage to Egypt, he 
liked, after dinner, to fix on three or four 
persons to support a proposition, and as 
many to oppose it. He gave a subject, 
and the discussions turned on questions 
of religion, the difterent kinds of govern- 
ment, and the art of war. One day, he 
asked whether the planets were in- 
habited ? On another, what was the age 
of the world ? Then he proposed to con- 
sider the probability of the destruction of 
the globe, either by water or by fire ; at 
another time, the truth or fallacy of pre- 
sentiments, and the interpretation of 
dreams. He was very fond of talking of 



221 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE 

religion. In 1806, he conversed with 
Fournier, Bishop of Montpellier, on 
matters of theology. There were two 
points on which they could not agree, 
viz., that of hell, and that of salvation out 
of the pale of the church. The Emperor 
told Josephine, that he disputed like a 
devil on these two points, on which the 
Bishop was inexorable. To the philoso- 
phers he readily yielded all that was 
proved against religion as the work of 
men and time ; but he would not hear of 
materialism. One fine night, on deok, 
amid a clatter of materialism, Bonaparte 
pointed to the stars, and said, “ You may 
talk as long as you please, gentlemen, 
but who made all that ? ” He delighted 
in the conversation of men of science, 
particularly of Monge and Berthollet ; but 
the men of letters he slighted ; “ they 
were manufacturers of phrases.” Of medi- 
cine, too, he was fond of talking, and with 
those of its practitioners whom he most 
esteemed — with Corvisart at Paris, and 
with Antonomarchi at St. Helena. ” Be- 
lieve me,” he said to the last, “we had 
better leave off all these remedies : life is 
a fortress which neither you nor I know 
anything about. Why throw obstacles in 
the way of its defence ? Its own means 
are superior to all the apparatus of your 
laboratories. Corvisart candidly agreed 
with me, that all your filthy mixtures are 
good for nothing. Medicine is a collection 
of uncertain prescriptions, the results of 
which, taken collectively, are more fatal 
than useful to mankind. Water, air, and 
cleanliness are the chief articles in my 
pharmacopoeia.” 

His memoirs, dictated to Count Mon- 
tholon and General Gourgaud, at St. 
Helena, have great value, after all the de- 
duction that, it seems, is to be made from 
them, on account of his known disingenu- 
ousness. He has the good nature of 
strength and conscious superiority. I 
admire his simple, clear narrative of his 
battles ; good as Csesar's ; his good- 
natured and sufficiently respectful account 
of Marshal Wurmser and his other anta- 
gonists, and his own equality as a writer 
to his varying subject. The most agree- 
■i>le portion is the Campaign in Egypt. 

He had hours of thought and wisdom. 
In intervals of leisure, either in the camp 
or the palace, Napoleon appears as a man 
of genius, directing on abstract questions 
the native appetite for truth, and the im- 
patience of words, he was wont to show 
in war. Ho could enjoy every play of in- 
vention, a romance, a bon mot^ as well as 


MAN OP THE WonLtt. 

a Stratagem in a campaign. He delighted 
to fascinate Josephine and her ladies, in 
a dim-lighted apartment, by the terrors of 
a fiction, to which his voice and dramatic 
power lent every addition. 

I call Napoleon the agent or attorney 
of the middle class of modern society ; of 
the throng who fill the markets, shops, 
counting-houses, manufactories, ships, of 
the modern world, aiming to be rich. 
He was the agitator, the destroyer of pre- 
scription, the internal improver, thn 
liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, 
the opener of doors and markets, the sub- 
verter of monopoly and abuse. Of course, 
the rich and aristocratic did not like him. 
England, the centre of capital, and Rome 
and Austria, centres of tradition and gene- 
alogy, opposed him. The consternation 
of the dull and conservative classes, the 
terror of the foolish old men and old 
women of the Roman conclave — who in 
their despair took hold of anything, and 
would cling to red-hot iron — the vain 
attempts of statists to amuse and deceive 
him, of the Emperor of Austria to bribe 
him ; and the instinct of the young, ardent, 
and active men, everywhere, which pointed 
him out as the giant of the middle class, 
make his history bright and commanding. 
He had tlie virtues of the masses of his 
constituents : he had also their vices. I 
am sorry that the brilliant picture has its 
reverse. But that is the fatal quality 
which we discover in our pursuit of wealth, 
that it is treacherous, and is bought by the 
breaking or weakening of the sentiments ; 
and it is inevitable that we should find 
the same fact in the history of this cham- 
pion, who proposed to himself simply a 
brilliant career, without any stipulation 
or scruple concerning the means. 

Bonaparte was singularly destitute of 
generous sentiments. The highest-placed 
individual in the most cultivated age and 
population of the world— he has not the 
merit of common truth and honesty. He 
is unjust to his generals ; egotistic, and 
monopolising ; meanly stealing the credit 
of their great actions from Kellermann, 
from Bernadette ; intriguing to involve 
his faithful Junot in hopeless bankruptcy, 
in order to drive him to a distance from 
Paris, because the familiarity of his man- 
ners offends the new pride of his throne. 
He is a boundless liar. The official paper, 
his Moniteurs, and all his bulletins, are 
proverbs for saying what he wished to be 
believed ; and worse — he sat, in his pre- 
mature old age, in his lonely island, coldly 
falsifying facts, and dates, and cbaractem, 



222 


SEPSESJBNTATIVE MEN, 


and giving to history a theatrical iclat. 
Like all Frenchmen, he has a passion for 
stage effect. Every action that breathes 
of generosity is poisoned by this calcula- 
tion. His star, his love of glory, his doc- 
trine of the immortality of the soul, are 
all French. “ I must dazzle and astonish. 
If I were to give the liberty of the press, 
my power could not last three days.” To 
make a great noise is his favourite design. 
** A great reputation is a great noise : 
the more there is made, the farther off it 
is heard. Laws, institutions, monuments, 
nations, all fall ; but the noise continues, 
and resounds in after ages.” His doc- 
trine of immortality is simply fame. His 
theory of influence is not flattering. 
” There are two levers for moving men — 
interest and fear. Love is a silly infatua- 
tion, depend upon it. Friendship is but 
a name. I love nobody. I do not even 
love my brothers ; perhaps Joseph, a little, 
from habit, and because he is my elder ; | 
and Duroc, I love him too; but why? — | 
because his character pleases me : he is 
stern and resolute, and, I believe, the 
fellow never shed a tear. For my part, 

I know very well that I have no true 
friends. As long as I continue to be 
what I am, I may have as many pre- 
tended friends as I please. Leave sensi- 
bility to women: but men should be 
firm in heart and purpose, or they should 
have nothing to do with war and govern- 
ment.” He was thoroughly unscrupulous. 
He would steal, slander, assassinate, 
drown, and poison, as his interest dictated. 
He had no generosity; but mere vulgar 
hatred ; he was intensely selfish ; he was | 
perfidious : he cheated at cards : he was 
a prodigious gossip ; and opened letters ; 
and delighted in his infamous police ; and 
rubbed his hands with joy when he had 
intercepted some morsel of intelligence j 
concerning the men and women about 
him, boasting that ” he knew everything ; ” | 
and interfered with the cutting the dresses 
of the women; and listened after the 
hurrahs and the compliments of the street, 
incognito. His manners were coarse. He 
treated women with low familiarity. He 
had the habit of pulling their ears, and 
pinching their cheeks, when he was in 
good-humour, and of pulling the ears and 
whiskers of men, and of striking and 
horse-play with them, to his last days. It 
does not appear that he listened at key- 
holes, or, at least, that he was caught at 
It. In short, when you have penetrated 
through all the circles of power and 
j|pl|Ddour, you were not dealing with a 


gentleman, at last ; but ^Ith kn ihipOtfZdr 
and a rogue : and he fully deserves the 
epithet of Jupiter Soapin, or a sort of 
Scamp Jupiter, 

In describing the two parties into which 
modern society divides itself — the demo- 
crat and the conservative— I said, Bona- 
parte represents the Democrat, or the 
party of men of business, against the sta- 
tionary or conservative parly. I omitted 
then to say, what is material to the state- 
ment, namely, that these two parties differ 
only as young and old. The democrat is 
a young conservative ; the conservative 
is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the 
democrat ripe, and gone to seed — because 
both parties stand on the one ground of 
the supreme value of property, which one 
endeavours to get, and the other to keep. 
Bonaparte may be said to represent the 
whole history of this party, its youth and 
its age; yes, and with poetic justice, its 
I fate, in his own. The counter-revolution, 

' the counter-party, still waits for its organ 
and representative, in a lover and a man 
of truly public and universal aims. 

Here was an experiment, under the 
most favourable conditions, of the powers 
of intellect without conscience. Never 
was such a leader so endowed, and so 
weaponed ; never leader found such aids 
and followers. And what was the result 
of this vast talent and power, of these 
immense armies, burned cities, squan- 
dered treasures, immolated millions of 
men, of this demoralised Europe ? It 
came to no result. All passed away, like 
the smoke of his artillery, and left no 
trace. He left France smaller, poorer, 
feebler, than he found it ; and the whole 
contest for freedom was to be begun 
again. The attempt was, in princi^e, 

I suicidal. France served him with life and 
limb, and estate, as long as it could iden- 
tify its interests with him ; but when men 
saw that after victory was another war ; 
after the destruction of armies, new con- 
scriptions ; and they who had toiled so 
desperately were never nearer to the re- 
ward — they could not spend what they 
had earned, nor repose on their down- 
beds, nor strut in their chateaux — they 
deserted him. Men found that his absorb- 
ing egotism was deadly to all other men. 
It resembled the torpedo, which inflicts a 
succession of shocks on anyone who 
takes hold of it, producing spasms which 
contract the muscles of the hand, so that 
the man cannot open his fingers ; and the 
animal inflicts new and more violent 



GOETHB; OR, 

shocks, Ofttil he paralyses and kills his 
▼ictim. So, this exorbitant egotist nar- 
rowed, impoverished, and absorbed the 
power and existence of those who served 
him; and the universal cry of France, 
and of Europe, in 1814, was, " enough of 
him : ” “ assez de Bonaparte,” 

It was not Bonaparte’s fault. He did 
all that in him lay, to live and thrive with- 
out moral principle. It was the nature of 
things, the eternal law of the man and 
the world, which baulked and ruined him ; 
and the result, in a million experiments 


TUB WBITBk. 223 

would be the same. • lEvery experimenti 
by multitudes or by individuals, that has 
a sensual and selfish aim, will fail, Th« 
pacific Fourier will be as inefficient as the 
pernicious Napoleon. As long as out 
civilization is essentially one of property, 
of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be 
mocked by delusions. Our riches will 
leave us sick ; there will be bitterness in 
our laughter; and our wine will burn our 
mouth. Only that good profits which we 
can taste with all doors open and which 
serves all men. 


GOETHE; OR, 

I FIND a provision, in the constitution *of 
the world, for the writer or secretary, who 
is to report the doings of the miraculous 
spirit of life that everywhere throbs and 
works. His office is a reception of the 
facts into the mind, aud then a selection 
of the eminent and characteristic ex- 
periences. 

Nature will be reported. All things are 
engaged in writing their history. The 
planet, the pebble, goes attended by its 
shadow. The rolling rock leaves its 
scratches on the mountain ; the river, its 
channel in the soil ; the animal, its bones 
in the stratum ; the fern and leaf, their 
modest epitaph in the coal. The falling 
drop makes its sculpture in the sand or 
the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow, 
or along the ground, but prints, in charac- 
ters more or less lasting, a map of its 
march. Every act of the man inscribes 
itself in the memories of his fellows, and 
in his own manners and face. The air is 
full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the 
ground is all memoranda and signatures ; 
and every object covered over with hints, 
which speak to the intelligent. 

In nature, this self-registration is in- 
cessant, and the narrative is the print of 
the seal. It neither exceeds nor comes 
short of the fact. But nature strives up- 
ward ; and, in man, the report is some- 
thing more than print of the seal. It is a 
new and finer form of the original. The 
record is alive, as that which it recorded 
is alive. In man, the memory is a kind 
of looking-glass, which, having received 
the images of surrounding objects, is 
touched with life, and disposes them in a 
new order. The facts which transpired 
do not lie in it inert ; but some subside, 
and others shine ; so that soon we have a 


THE WRITER. 

new picture, composed of the eminent 
experiences. The man co-operates. He 
loves to communicate ; and that which is 
for him to say lies as a load on his heart 
until it is delivered. But, besides the 
universal joy of conversation, some men 
are born with exalted powers for this 
second creation. Men are born to write. 
The gardener saves every slip, and seed, 
and peach-stone: his vocation is to be a 
planter of plants. Not less does the writer 
attend his affair. Whatever he beholds 
or experiences, comes to him as a model, 
and sits for its picture. He counts it all 
nonsense that they say, that some things 
are undescribable. He believes that all 
that can be thought can be written, first 
or last ; and he would report the Holy 
Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing so broad, 
so subtle, or so dear, but comes therefore 
commended to his pen — and he will write^ 
In his eyes, a man is the faculty of re- 
porting, and the universe is the possibility 
of being reported. In conversation, in 
calamity, he finds new materials ; as our 
German poet said, ” Some God gave me 
the power to paint what I suffer.” He 
dii*ws his rents from rage and pain. By 
acjni; rashly, he buys the power of talk- 
ing wisely. Vexations, and a tempest of 
passion, only fill his sail; as the good 
Luther writes, ” When I am angry, I can 
pray well, and preach well ; ” and if we 
knew the genesis of fine strokes of 
eloquence, they might recall the com- 
plaisance of Sultan Amurath, who struck 
off some Persian heads, that his physician, 
Vesalius, might see the spasms in the 
muscles of the neck. His failures are the 
preparation of his victories, A new 
thought, or a crisis of passion, apprises 
him that all that he has yet learned 



224 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


written is exoteric — is not the fact, but 
some rumour of the fact. What then? 
Does he throw away the pen ? No ; he 
begins again to describe in the new light 
which has shined on him — if, by some 
means, he may yet save some true word. 
Nature conspires. Whatever can be 
thought can be spoken, and still rises 
for utterance, though to rude and stam- 
mering organs. If they cannot compass 
it, it waits and works, until, at last, it 
moulds them to its perfect will, and is 
articulated. 

This striving after imitative expression, 
which one meets everywhere, is significant 
of the aim of nature, but is mere steno- 
graphy. There are higher degrees, and 
nature has more splendid endowments 
for those whom she elects to a superior I 
office ; for the class of scholars or writers, I 
who see connection where the multitude 
see fragments, and who are impelled to 
exhibit the facts in ideal order, and so to 
supply the axis on which the frame of 
things turns. Nature has dearly at heart 
the formation of the speculative man, or 
scholar. It is an end never lost sight of, 
and is prepared in the original casting of 
things. He is no permissive or accidental 
appearance, but an organic agent, one of 
the estates of the realm, provided and 
prepared, from of old and from everlasting, 
in the knitting and contexture of things. 
Presentiments, impulses, cheer him. 
There is a certain heat in the breast, 
which attends the perception of a primary 
truth, which is the shining of the spiritual 
sun down into the shaft of the mine. 
Every thought which dawns on the mind, 
in the moment of its emergence announces 
its own rank, whether it is some whimsy, 
or whether it is a power. 

If we have his incitements, there is, on 
the other side, invitation and need enough 
of his gift. Society has, at all times, the 
came want, namely, of one sane man with 
adequate powers of expression to hold up 
each object of monomania in its right re- 
lations. The ambitious and mercenary 
bring their last new mumbo-jumbo, 
whether tariff, Texas railroad, Romanism, 
mesmerism, or California; and, by de- 
taching the object from its relations, easily 
succeed in making it seen in a glare ; and 
a multitude go mad about it, and they are 
n ot to be reproved or cured by the oppo- 
site multitude, who are kept from this 
particular insanity by an equal frenzy on 
another crotchet. But let one man have 
the comprehensive eye that can replace 
this isolated prodigy in its right neigh- 


bourhood and bearings — the illtisiofl 
vanishes, and the returning reason of the 
community thanks the reason of the 
monitor. 

The scholar is the man of the ages, but 
he must also wish with other men to stand 
well with his contemporaries, But there 
is a certain ridicule, among superficial 
people, thrown on the scliolars or clerisy, 
which is of no import, unless the scholar 
heed it. In this country, the emphasis of 
conversation, and of public opinion, com- 
mends the practical man ; and the solid 
portion of the community is named with 
significant respect in every circle. Our 
people are of Bonaparte’s opinion con- 
cerning ideologists. Ideas are subversive 
of social order and comfort, and at last 
make a fool of the possessor. It is be- 
lieved, the ordering a cargo of goods from 
New York to Smyrna ; or, the running up 
and down to procure a company of sub- 
scribers to set agoing five or ten thousand 
spindles ; or, the negociations of a caucus, 
and the practising on the prejudices and 
facility of country-people, to secure their 
votes in November — is practical and com- 
mendable. 

If I were to compare action of a much 
higher strain with a life of contemplation, 
I should not venture to pronounce with 
much confidence in favour of the former. 
Mankind have such a deep stake in in- 
ward illumination, that there is much to 
be said by the hermit or monk in defence 
of his life of thought and prayer. A cer- 
tain partiality, a headiness, and loss of 
balance, is the tax which all action must 
pay. Act, if you like — but you do it at 
your peril. Men’s actions are too strong 
for them. Show me a man w’ho has acted, 
and who has not been the victim and 
slave of his action. What they have done 
commits and enforces them to do the 
same again. The first act, which was to 
be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. 
The fiery reformer embodies his aspira- 
tion in some rite or covenant, and he and 
his friends cleave to the form, and lose the 
aspiration. The Quaker has established 
Quakerism, the Shaker has established 
his monastery and his dance ; and, al- 
though each prates of spirit, there is no 
spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spirit- 
ual. But where are his new things of to- 
day ? In actions of enthusiasm, this draw- 
back appears : but in those lower activities, 
which have no higher aim than to make 
us more comfortable and more cowardly, 
in actions of cunning, actions that steal 
and lie, actions that divorce the specula* 



GOETHE: OR, 

from the practical faculty, and put a 
ban on reason and sentiment, there is 
nothing else but drawback and negation. 
The Hindoos write in their sacred books, 
" Children only, and not the learned, speak 
of the speculative and the practical facul- 
ties as two. They are but one, for both 
obtain the self-same end, and the place 
which is gained by the followers of the 
one is gained by the followers of the 
other. That man seeth, who seeth that 
the speculative and the practical doctrines 
are one.’* For great action must draw on 
the spiritual nature. The measure of 
action is the sentiment from which it pro- 
ceeds. The greatest action may easily 
be one of the most private circumstance. 

This disparagement will not come from 
the leaders, but from inferior persons. 
The robust gentlemen who stand at the 
head of the practical class, share the ideas 
of the time, and have too much sympathy 
with the speculative class. It is not from 
men excellent in any kind, that disparage- 
ment of any other is to be looked for. 
With such, Talleyrand’s question is ever 
the main one ; not, is he rich ? is he com- 
mitted ? is he well-meaning ? has he this 
or that faculty ? is he of the movement ? 
is he of the establishment ? — but, is he 
anybody ? does he stand for something ? 
He must be good of his kind. That is all 
that Talleyrand, all that State Street, all 
that the common sense of mankind asks. I 
Be real and admirable, not as we know, 
but as you know. Able men do not care 
in what kind a man is able, so only that 
he is able. A master likes a master, and 
does not stipulate whether it be orator, 
artist, craftsman, or king. 

Society has really no graver interest 
than the well-being of the literary class. 
And it is not to be denied that men are 
cordial in their recognition and welcome 
of intellectual accomplishments. Still the 
writer does not stand with us on any com- 
manding ground. I think this to be his 
own fault. A pound passes for a pound. 
There have been times when he was a 
sacred person ; he wrote Bibles ; the first 
hymns ; the codes ; the epics ; tragic 
songs ; Sibylline verses ; Chaldean ora- 
cles ; Laconian sentences, inscribed on 
temple walls. Every word was true, and 
woke the nations to new life; He wrote 
without levity, and without choice. Every 
word was carved before his eyes, into the 
earth and the sky ; and the sun and stars 
were only letters of the same purport, and 
of no more necessity. But how can he 
be honoured, when he does not honour 


THE WRITER. 225 

himself ; when he loses himself In the 
crowd ; when he is no longer the law* 
giver, but the sycophant, ducking to the 
giddy opinion of a reckless public ; when 
he must sustain with shameless advocacy 
some bad government, or must bark all 
the year round, in opposition ; or write 
conventional criticism, or profligate 
novels ; or, at any rate, write without 
thought, and without recurrence, by day 
and by night, to the sources of inspira*' 
tion ? 

Some reply to these questions may be 
furnished by looking over the list of men 
of literary genius in our age. Among 
these, no more instructive name occurs 
than that of Goethe, to represent the 
powers and duties of the scholar or 
writer. 

I described Bonaparte as a representa- 
tive of the popular external life and aims 
of the nineteenth century. Its other half, 
its poet, is Goethe, a man quite domesti- 
cated in the century, breathing its air, 
enjoying its fruits impossible at any earlier 
time, and taking away, by his colossal 
parts, the reproach of weakness, which, 
but for him, would lie on the intellectual 
works of the period. Pie appears at a 
time when a general culture has spread 
itself, and has smoothed down all sharp 
individual traits; when, in the absence of 
heroic characters, a social comfort and 
co-operation have come in. There is no 
poet, but scores of poetic writers; no 
Columbus, but hundreds of post-captains, 
with transit-telescope, barometer, and 
concentrated soup and pemmican ; no 
Demosthenes, no Chatham, but any num- 
ber of clever parliamentary and forensic 
debaters ; no prophet or saint, but colleges 
of divinity ; no learned man, but learned 
societies, a cheap press, reading-rooms, 
and book-clubs, without number. Thera 
was never such a miscellany of facts. 
The world extends itself like American 
trade. We conceive Greek or Roman 
life — life in the middle ages — to be a 
simple and comprehensible affair; but 
modem life to respect a multitude of 
things, which is distracting. 

Goethe was the philosopher of this mul- 
tiplicity ; hundred-handed, Argus-eyed, 
able and happy to cope with this rolling 
miscellany of facts and sciences, and by 
his own versatility, to dispose of them 
with ease ; a manly mind, unembarrassed 
by the variety of coats of convention, with 
which life had got inemsted, easily able 
by his subtlety to pierce these, and to 
draw bis strength from nature, with which 



336 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


ho lived in full communion. What is 
Btrange, too, he lived in a small town, in 
a petty state, in a defeated state, and in a 
time when Germany played no such lead- 
ing part in the world’s affairs as to swell 
the bosoms of her sons with any metro- 
politan pride, such as might have cheered 
a French, or English, or once, a Roman 
or Attic genius. Yet there is no trace of 
provincial limitation in his muse. He is 
not a debtor to his position, but was bom 
with a free and controlling genius. 

The Helena, or the second part of 
“Faust,” is a philosophy of literature set in 
poetry , the work of one who found him- 
self the master of histories, mythologies, 
philosophies, sciences, and national lite- 
ratures, in the encyclopaedical manner 
in which modern erudition, with its inter- 
national intercourse of the whole earth’s 
population, researches into Indian, Etrus- 
can, and all Cyclopaean arts, geology, 
chemistry, astronomy ; and every one of 
these kingdoms assuming a certain aerial 
and poetic character, by reason of the 
multitude. One looks at a king with 
reverence ; but if one should chance to 
be at a congress of kings, the eye would 
take liberties with the peculiarities of 
each. These are not wild miraculous 
songs, but elaborate forms, to which the 
poet has confided the results of eighty 
years of observation. This reflective and 
critical wisdom makes the poem more 
truly the flower of this time. It dates 
itself. Still he is a poet — poet of a 
prouder laurel than any contemporary, 
and, under this plague of microscopes, 
(for he seems to see out of every pore of 
his skin,) strikes the harp with a hero’s 
strength and grace. 

The wonder of the book is its superior 
intelligence. In the menstruum of this 
man’s wit, the past and the present ages, 
and their religions, politics, and modes of 
thinking, are dissolved into archetypes 
and ideas. What new mythologies sail 
through his head ! The Greeks said, that 
Alexander went as far nfl Chaos ; Goethe 
went, only the other day, as far ; and one 
step fartlier he hazarded, and brought 
himself safe back. 

There is a heart-cheering freedom in 
his speculation. The immense horizon 
which journeys with us lends it majesty to 
trifles, and to matters of convenience and 
necessity, as to solemn and festal per- 
formances. He was the soul of his cen- 
tury, If that was learned, and had 
become, by population, compact organi- 
•Ation, and drill of parts, one great £z- 1 


ploring Expedition, accsmulating A gldt 
of facts and fruits too fast for any hither- 
to-existing savans to classify, this man’s 
mind had ample chambers for the distri- 
bution of all. He had a power to unite 
the detached atoms again by their own 
law. He has clothed our modeta existence 
with poetry. Amid littleness and detail, 
he detected the Genius of life, the old 
cunning Proteus, nestling close beside us, 
and showed that the dulness and prose we 
ascribe to the ag^e was only another of his 
masks : — 

“ His very fligM Is presence in disguise ** 

that he had put off a gay uniform for a 
fatigue dress, and was not a whit less 
vivacious or rich in Liverpool, or the 
Hague, than once in Rome or Antioch. 
He sought him in public squares and 
main streets, in boulevardr and hotels ; 
and, in the solidest kingdom of routine 
and the senses, he showed the lurking 
demonic power ; that, in actions of routine, 
a thread of mythology and fable spins it- 
self : and this, by tracing the pedigree of 
every usage and practice, every institu- 
tion, utensil, and means, home to its 
origin in the structure of man. He had 
an extreme impatience of conjecture and 
of rhetoric. “I have guesses enough of 
my own ; if a man write a book, let him 
set down only what he knows.” He writes 
in the plainest and lowest tone, omitting 
a great deal more than he writes, and 
putting ever a thing for a word. He has 
explained the distinction between the 
antique and the modern spirit and art. 
He has defined art, its scope and laws. 
He has said the best things about nature 
that ever were said. He treats nature as 
the old philosophers, as the seven wise 
'masters did — and, with whatever loss of 
French tabulation and dissection, poetry 
jand humanity remain to us; and they 
have some doctoral skill. Eyes are better, 
on the whole, than telescopes or micro- 
scopes. He has contributed a key to 
many parts of nature, through the rare 
turn for unity and simplicity in his mind. 
Thus Goethe suggested the leading idea 
of modern botany, that a leaf, or the eye 
of a leaf, is the unit of botany, and that 
every part of the plant is only a trans- 
formed leaf to meet a new condition ; and, 
by varying the conditions, a leaf may be 
converted into any other organ ; and any 
other organ into a leaf. In like manner, 
in osteology, he assumed that one verte- 
bra of the spine might be considered th# 
unit of the skeleton; the head was only 



GOETHE: OR, THE WRITER, 


tho uppermost vertebra transformed. 

The plant goes from knot to knot, closing 
at last, with the flower and the seed. So 
the tape-worm, the caterpillar, goes from 
knot to knot, and closes with the head. 
Man and the higher animals are built up 
through the vertebrae, the powers being 
concentrated in the head.” In optics, 
again, he rejected the artificial theory of 
seven colours, and considered that every 
colour was the mixture of light and dark- 
ness in new proportions. It is really of 
very little consequence what topic he 
writes upon. He sees at every pore, and 
has a certain gravitation towards truth. 
He will realise what you say. He hates 
to be trifled with, and to be made to say 
over again some old wife’s fabh% that has 
had possession of men’s faith these thou- 
sand years. He may as well see if it is 
true as another. He sifts it, I am here, 
he would say, to be the measure and judge 
of these things. Why should I take them 
entrust? And, therefore, what he says 
of religion, of passion, of marriage, of 
manners, of property, of paper money, of 
periods of belief, of omens, of luck, or 
whatever else, refuses to be forgotten. 

Take the most remarkable example that 
could occur of this tendency to verify 
every terra in popular use. The Devil had 
played an important part in mythology in 
all times, Goethe would have no word 
that does not cover a thing. The same 
measure will still serve : ‘‘ I have never 
heard of any crime which I might not have 
committed.” So he flies at the throat of 
this imp. He shall be real; he shall be 
modern ; he shall be European ; he shall 
dress like a gentleman, and accept the 
manners, and walk in the streets, and be 
well initiated in the life of Vienna, and of 
Heidelberg, in 1820— or he shall not exist. 
Accordingly, he stripped him of mytho- 
logic gear, of horns, cloven foot, harpoon 
tail brimstone, and blue-fire, and, instead 
of looking in books and pictures, looked 
for him in his own mind, in every shade 
of coldness, selfishness, and unbelief that, 
in crowds, or in solitude, darkens over the 
human thought— and found that the por- 
trait gained reality and terror by every- 
thing he added, and by everything he took 
away. He found that the essence of this 
hobgoblin, which had hovered in shadow 
about the habitations of men, ever since 
there were men, was pure intellect, applied 

as always there is a tendency — to the 
service of the senses : and he flung into 
literature, in his Mephistopheles, the first 
organic figure that bao been added for 


227 

some ages, and which will remain as long 
as the Prometheus, 

I have no design to enter into any 
analysis of his numerous works. They 
consist of translations, criticisms, dramas 
lyric and every other description of poems, 
literary journals, and portraits of distin- 
guished men. Yet I cannot omit to 
specify ” Wilhelm Meister.” 

” Wilhelm Meister ” is a novel in every 
sense, the first of its kind, called by its 
admirers the only delineation of modern 
society — as if other novels, those of Scott, 
for example, dealt with costume and con- 
dition, this with the spirit of life. It is a 
book over which some veil is still drawn. 
It is read by very intelligent persons with 
wonder and delight. It is preferred by 
some such to Hamlet, as a work of genius. 
I suppose, no book of this century can 
compare with it in its delicious sweetness, 
so new, so provoking to the mind, gratify- 
ing it with so many and so solid thoughts, 
just insights into life, and manners, and 
characters ; so many good hints for the 
conduct of life, so many unexpected 
glimpses into a higher sphere, and never 
a trace of rhetoric or dulness. A very 
provoking book to the curiosity of young 
men of genius, but a very unsatisfactory 
one. ^ Lovers of light reading, those who 
look in it for the entertainment they find 
in a romance, are disappointed. On the 
other hand, those who begin it with the 
higher hope to read in it a worthy history 
of genius, and the just award of the laurel 
to its toils and denials, have also reason 
to complain. We had an English romance 
here, not long ago, professing to embody 
the hope of a new age, and to unfold the 
political hope of the party called ” Young 
England,” in which the only reward of 
virtue is a seat in parliament, and a 
peerage, Goethe’s romance has a con- 
clusion as lame and immoral, George 
Sand, in ” Consuelo” and its continuation, 

; has sketched a truer and more dignified 
picture. In the progress of the story, the 
characters of the hero and heroine expand 
at a rate that shivers the porcelain chess- 
table of aristocratic convention : they quit 
the society and habits of their rank ; they 
lose their wealth ; they become the ser- 
vants of great ideas, and of the most 
generous social ends; until, at last, th« 
hero, who is the centre and fountain of an 
association for the rendering of the noblest 
benefits to the human race, no longer 
answers to his own titled name ; it sounds 
foreign and remote in his ear. ‘‘I am 
only man,” be says ; ” I breathe and work 



228 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


for man/' and this in poverty and extreme 
sacrifices. Goethe’s hero, on the con- 
trary, has so many weaknesses and im- 
purities, and keeps such bad company, 
that the sober English public, when the 
book was translated, were disgusted. And 
et it is so crammed with wisdom, with 
nowledge of the world, and with know- 
ledge of laws ; the persons so truly and 
subtly drawn, and with such few strokes, 
and not a word too much, the book remains 
ever so new and unexhausted, that we 
must even let it go its way, and be willing 
to get what good from it we can, assured 
that it has only begun its office, and has 
millions of readers yet to serve. j 

The argument is the passage of a demo- i 
crat .tothe aristocracy, using both words 
in their best sense. And this passage is 
not made in any mean or creeping way, 
but through the hall door. Nature and 
character assist, and the rank is made real 
by sense and probity in the nobles. No 
generous youth can escape this charm of 
reality in the book, so that it is highly 
stimulating to intellect and courage. 

The ardent and holy Novalis character- 
ised the book as “thoroughly modern and 
prosaic ; the romantic is completely 
levelled in it ; so is the poetry of nature ; 
the wonderful. The book treats only of 
the ordinary affairs of men : it is a poeti- 
cised civic and domestic story. The 
wonderful in it is expressly treated as 
fiction and enthusiastic dreaming: ’’ — and 
yet, what is also characteristic, Novalis 
soon returned to this book, and it remained 
his favourite reading to the end of his life. 

What distinguishes Goethe for French 
and English readers, is, a property which 
he shares with his nation — an habitual 
reference to interior truth. In England 
and in America, there is a respect for 
talent ; Jind, if it is exerted in support of 
any ascertained or intelligible interest or 
party, oi In regular opposition to any, the 
public i»» satisfied. In France, there is 
even a g> eater delight in intellectual bril- 
liancy, fo r its own sake. And, in all these 
countries, men of talent write from talent. 
It is enough if the understanding is occu- 
pied, the taste propitiated— so many 
columns, so many hours, filled in a lively 
and credi*able way. The German intel- 
lect wants the French sprightliness, the 
fine practcal understanding of the Eng- 
lish, and t he American adventure ; but it 
has a certain probity, which never rests in 
a superfl tial performance, but asks 
steadily, 7 p what end ? A German public 
asks for s coatroliing sincerity, Here is 


activity of thought ; but what is it tor f 
What does the man mean ? Whence, 
whence all these thoughts ? 

Talent alone cannot make a writer. 
There must be a man behind the book ; a 
personality which, by birth and quality, is 
pledged to the doctrines there set forth, 
and which exists to see and state things 
so, and not otherwise ; holding things be 
cause they are things. If ho cannot 
rightly express himself to-day, the same 
things subsist, and will open themselves 
to-morrow. There lies the burden on his 
mind — the burden of truth to be declared 
— more or less understood ; and it con- 
stitutes his business and calling in the 
world, to see those facts through, and to 
make them known. What signifies that 
he trips and stammers ; that his voice is 
harsh or hissing ; that his method or his 
tropes are inadequate ? That message 
will find method and imagery, articulation 
and melody. Though he were dumb, it 
would speak. If not — if there be no such 
God’s word in the man — what care we how 
adroit, how fluent, how brilliant he is ? 

It makes a great difference to the force 
I of any sentence, whether there be a man 
behind it, or no. In the learned journal, 
in the influential newspaper, I discern no 
form : only some irresponsible shadow ; 
oftener some moneyed corporation, or 
some dangler, who hopes, in the mask 
and robes of his paragraph, to pass for 
somebody. But, through every clausa 
and part of speech of a right book, I meet 
the eyes of the most determined of men ; 
his force and terror inundate every word : 
the commas and dashes are alive ; so that 
the writing is athletic and nimble — can go 
far and live long. 

In England and America, one may be 
an adept in the writings of a Greek or 
Latin poet, without any poetic taste or fire. 
That a man has spent years on Plato and 
Proclus, does not afford a presumption 
that he holds heroic opinions, or under- 
values the fashions of his town. But the 
German nation have the most ridiculous 
good faith on these subjects ; the student 
out of the lecture-room, still broods on 
the lessons; and the professor cannot 
divest himself of the fancy, that the truths 
of philosophy have some application to 
Berlin and Munich. This earnestness 
enables them to outsee men of much more 
talent. Hence, almost all the valuable 
distinctions which are current in higher 
conversation, have been derived to us 
from Germany. But, whilst men dis- 
tinguished for wit and learning, in England 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 


ftod France, adopt their study and their 
tide with a certain levity, and are not 
understood to be very deeply engaged, 
from grounds of character to the topic or 
the part they espouse — Goethe, the head 
and body of the German nation, does not i 
speak from talent, but the truth shines 
through : bs is very wise, though his talent 
often veils his wisdom. However excel- 
lent his sentence is, he has somewhat 
better in view. It awakens my curiosity. 
He ha:? the formidable independence 
which converse with truth gives ; hear you, 
or forbear, his fact abides; and your 
interest in the writer is not confined to his 
story, and he dismissed from memory, 
when he has performed his task creditably, 
as a baker when he has left his loaf ; but 
his work is the least part of him. The 
old Eternal Genius who built the world 
has confided himself more to this man 
than to any other. I dare not say that 
Goethe ascended to the highest grounds 
from which genius has spoken. He has 
not worshipped the highest unity ; he is 
incapable of a self-surrender to the moral 
sentiment. There are nobler strains in 
poetry than any he has sounded. There 
are writers poorer in talent, whose tone 
is purer, and more touches the heart. 
Goethe can never be dear to men. His is 
not even the devotion to pure truth ; but 
to truth for the sake of culture. He has 
no aims less large than the conquest of 
Universal nature, of universal truth to be 
his portion : a man not to be bribed, nor 
deceived, nor overawed ; of a stoical self- 
command and self-denial, and having one 
test for all men — What canyon teach me]? 
All possessions are valued by him for 
that only ; rank, privileges, health, time, 
being itself. 

He is the type of culture, the amateur of 
all arts, and sciences, and events ; artistic, 
but not artist; spiritual, but not spiritual- 
ist. There is nothing he had not right 
to know : there is no weapon in the 
armoury of universal genius he did not 
take into his hand, but with peremptory 
heed that he should not be for a moment 
prejudiced by his instruments. He lays a 
ray of light under every fact, and between 
himself and his dearest property. From 
him nothing was hid, nothing withholden. 
The lurking demons sat to him, and the 
saint who saw the demons ; and the 
metaphysical elements took form. “ Piety 
itself is no aim, but only a means, where- 
by, through purest inward peace, we may 
attain to highest culture.” And his 
^netrationof every aei^ret of the fine Mts 


will make Goethe still more statuesque^ 
His affections help him, like women em- 
ployed by Cicero to worm out the secret 
of conspirators. Enmities he has none. 
Enemy of him you may be~if so, you 
shall teach him aught which your good-will 
cannot — were it only what experience will 
accrue from your ruin. Enemy and wel- 
come, but enemy on high terms. He 
cannot hate anybody; his time is worth 
too much. Temperamental antagonisms 
may be suffered, but like feuds of 
emperors, who fight dignifiedly across 
kingdoms. 

His autobiography, under the title of 
” Poetry and Truth out of my Life,” is the 
expression of the idea — now familiar to 
the world through the German mind, but 
a novelty to England, Old and New, when 
that book appeared — that a man exists 
for culture ; not for what he can accom- 
plish, but for what can bo accomplished 
in him. The reaction of things on the 
man is the only noteworthy result. An 
intellectual man can see himself as a 
third person ; therefore his faults and de- 
lusions interest him equally with his suc- 
cesses, Though he wishes to prosper in 
affairs, he wishes more to know the 
history and destiny of man ; whilst the 
clouds of egotists drifting about him are 
only interested in a low success. 

This idea reigns in the ” Dichtung imd 
Wahrheit,” and directs the selectioai of the 
incidents ; and nowise the external impor- 
tance of events, the rank of the personages, 
or the bulk of incomes, Ot course the 
book affords slender materials for what 
would be reckoned with us a ‘‘ Life of 
Goethe ” — few dates ; no correspon- 
dence ; no details of offices or employ- 
ments ; no light on his marriage ; and, a 
period of ten years, that should be the 
most active in his life, after his settlement 
at Weimar, is sunk in silence. Meantime, 
certain love-affairs, that came to nothing, 
as people say, have the strangest impor- 
tance : he crowds us with details — certain 
whimsical opinions, cosmogonies, and 
religions of his own invention, and, espe- 
cially h iS relations to remarkable minds, 
and to critical epochs of thought — these 
he magnifies. His ” Daily and Yearly 
Journal,” his '* Italian Travels,” his 
“ Campaign in France,” and the historical 
part of his ‘‘ Theory of Colours,” have the 
same interest. In the last, he rapidly 
notices Kepler, Roger Bacon, Galileo, 
Newton, Voltaire, &c. ; and the charm of 
this portion of the book consists in the 
simplest statement o€ the relation betwixt 



230 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


these grandees of European scientific 
history and himself ; the mere drawing of 
the lines from Goethe to Kepler, from 
Goethe to Bacon, from Goethe to Newton. 
The drawing of the line is for the time and 
person, a solution of the formidable 
problem, and gives pleasure when Iphi- 
genia and Faust do not, without any cost 
of invention comparable to that of 
Iphigenia and Faust. 

The lawgiver of art is not an artist. Was 
it that he knew too much, that his sight 
was microscopic, and interfered with the 
just perspective, the seeing of the whole ? 
He is fragmentary ; a writer of occasional 
poems, and of an encyclopaedia of sen- 
tences. When he sits down to write a 
drama or la tale, he collects and sorts his 
observations from a hundred sides, and 
combines them into the body as fitly as he 
can. A great deal refuses to incorporate : 
this he adds loosely, as letters of the 
parties, leaves from their journals, or the j 
like. A great deal still is left that will not | 
find any place. This the bookbinder alone 
can give any cohesion to : and hence, not- 
withstanding the looseness of many of his 
works, we have volumes of detached 
paragraphs, aphorisms, xenien, &c. 

I suppose the worldly tone of his tales 
grew out of the calculations of self-culture. 

It was the infirmity of an admirable 
scholar, who loved the world out of grati- 
tude ; who knew where libraries, galleries, 
architecture, laboratories, savans, and 
leisure were to be had, and who did not 
quite trust the compensations of poverty 
and nakedness. Socrates loved Athens ; 
Montaigne, Paris ; and Madame de 
Stael said she was only vulnerable on that 
side (namely, of Paris). It has its favour- 
able aspect. All the geniuses are usually 
so ill-assorted and sickly, that one is ever 
wvishing them somewhere else. We 
seldom see anybody who is not uneasy or I 
afraid to live. There is a slight blush of 
shame on the cheek of good men and 
aspiring men, and a spice ©f caricature. 
But this man was entirely at home and 
happy in his century and the world. None 
was so fit to live, or more heartily enjoyed 
the game. In this aim of culture, which 
is the genius of his works, is their power. 
The idea of absolute, eternal truth, with 


it, is higher. The surrender to th€ tor- 
rent of poetic inspiration is higher ; .hit, 
compared with any motives on which 
books are written in England and America, 
this is very truth, and has the power to 
inspire which belongs to truth. Thus has 
he brought back to a book some of its 
ancient might and dignity. 

Goethe, coming into an over-civilised 
time and country, when original talent 
was oppressed under the load of books 
and mechanical auxiliaries, and the dis- 
tracting variety of claims, taught men how 
to dispose of this mountainous miscellany, 
and make it subservient. I join Napoleon 
with him, as being both representatives of 
the impatience and reaction of nature 
against the morgue of conventions — two 
stern realists, who, with their scholars, 
have severally set the axe at the root of 
the tree of cant and seeming, for this time, 
and for all time. This cheerful labourer, 
with no external popularity or provoca- 
tion, drawing his motive and his plan 
from his own breast, tasked himself with 
stints for a giant, and, without relaxation 
or rest, except by alternating his pursuits, 
worked on for eighty years with the steadi* 
ness of his first zeal, 

It is the last lesson of modern science, 
^^at the highest simplicity of structure is 
produced, not by few elements, but by the 
highest complexity. Man is the most 
composite of all creatures; the wheel- 
insect, volvox glohator, is at the other 
extreme. We shall learn to draw rents 
and revenues from the immense patri- 
mony of the old and the recent ages. 
Goethe teaches courage, and the equiva- 
lence of all »\mes ; that the disadvantages 
of any epoch exist only to the faint- 
hearted. Genius hovers with his sunshine 
and music close by the darkest and deafest 
eras. No mortgage, no attainder, will 
hold on men or hours. The world is 
young; the former great men call to 
us affectionately. We too must write 
Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the 
earthly world. The secret of genius is to 
suffer no fiction to exist for us ; to realise 
all that we know ; in the high refinement 
of modern life, in arts, in sciences, in 
books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, 
and a purpose ; and first, last, midst, and 


MU NtwMtM to n»y own enlarsement by 1 without end, to honour every truth by usg. 



ENGLISH TRAITS, 


FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 

I HAVE been twice in England. In 1833, 
on my return from a short lour in Sicily, 
Italy, and France, I crossed from 
r 3 oulogne, and landed in London at the 
Tower stairs. It was a dark Sunday 
morning ; there were few people in the 
streets ; and I remember the pleasure of 
that first walk on English ground, with my 
companion, an American artist, from the 
Tower up through Cheapside and the 
Strand, to a house in Russell Square, 
whither we had been recommended to good 
chambers. For the first time for many 
months we were forced to check the 
saucy habit of travellers’ criticism, as we 
could no longer speak aloud in the streets 
without being understood. The shop- 
signs spoke our language ; our country 
names were on the door plates ; and the j 
public and private buildings wore a more j 
native and wonted front. 

Like most young men at that time, I 
vras much indebted to the men of Edin- 
burgh, and of the Edinburgh Review — to 
Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Hallam, and to Scott, 
Playfair, and De Quincey ; and my narrow 
and desultory reading had inspired the 
wish to see the faces of three or four 
writers — Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, 
De Quincey, and the latest and strongest 
contributor to the critical journals, 
Carlyle ; and I suppose if I had sifted the 
reasons that led me to Europe, when I 
was ill and was advised to travel, it was 
mainly the attraction of these persons. If 
Goethe had been still living, I might have 
wandered into Germany also. Besides 
those I have named (for Scott was dead), 
there was not in Britain the man living 
whom I cared to behold, unless it were the 
Duke of Wellington, whom I afterwards 
saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral 
of Wilberforce. The young scholar fancies 
it happiness enough to live with people 
wno can give an inside to the world ; 

Wting that they are prigpuer^, 


too, of their own thought, and cannot 
apply themselves to yours. The condi* 
tions of literary success are almost 
destructive of the best social power, as 
they do not leave that frolic liberty which 
only can encounter a companion on the 
best terms. Is it probable you left some 
obscure comrade at a tavern, or in 
the farms, with right mother-wit, and 
equality to life, when you crossed sea and 
land to play bo-peep with celebrated 
scribes. I have, however, found writers 
superior to their books, and I cling to my 
first belief, that a strong head will dispose 
fast enough of these impediments, and 
give one the satisfaction of reality, the 
sense of having been met, and a larger 
horizon. 

On looking over the diary of my journey 
in 1833, I find nothing to publish in my 
memoranda of visits to places. But I 
have copied the few notes I made of visits 
to persons, as they respect parties quite 
too good and too transparent to the whole 
world to make it needful to affect any 
prudery of suppression about a few hints 
of those bright personalities. 

At Florence, chief among artists, I 
found Horatio Greenough, the American 
sculptor. His face was so handsome, 
and his person so well formed, that ho 
might be pardoned, if, as was alleged, the 
face of his Medora, and the figure of a 
colossal Achilles in clay, were idealisa- 
tions of his own. Greenough was a supe- 
rior man, ardent and eloquent, and all his 
opinions had elevation and magnanimity. 
He believed that the Greeks had wrought in 
schools or fraternities — the genius of the 
master imparting his design to his friends, 
and inflaming them with it, and when his 
strength was spent, a new hand, with 
equal heat, continued the work ; and so 
by relays, until it was finished in every 
part with equal fire. This was necessary 
in so refractory a material as stone ; and 
ho thought art would never prosper until 
we left our shy jealous ways, and worked 
society its tltey. All his thougjitS 



23 - 


ENGLISH TRAITS, 


breathed th« same generosity, He was 
an accurate and deep man. He was a 
votary of the Greeks, and impatient of 
Gothic art. His paper on Architecture, 
published in 1843, announced in advance 
the leading thoughts of Mr. Ruskin on the 
morality in architecture, notwithstanding 
the antagonism in their views of the his- 
tory of art. I have a private letter from 
him — later, but respecting the same 
period — in which he roughly sketches his 
own theory. “ Here is my theory of, 
structure: A scientific arrangement ofj 
spaces and forms to functions and to site ; 
an emphasis of features proportioned to 
their gradated importance in function; 
colour and ornament to be decided and 
arranged and varied by strictly organic 
laws, having a distinct reason for each deci- 
sion ; the entire and immediate banishment 
of all make-shift and make-believe.” 

Greenhough brought me, through a com- 
mon friend, an invitation from Mr. Landor, 
who lived at San Domenica de Fiesole. 
On the 15th May I dined with Mr. Lan- 
dor. I found him noble and courteous, 
living in a cloud of pictures at his Villa 
Gherardesca, a fine house commanding a 
beautiful landscape. I had inferred from 
his books, or magnified from some anec- 
dotes, an impression of Achillean wrath — 
an untamable petulance. I do not know 
whether the imputation was just or not, 
but certainly on this May day his courtesy 
veiled that haughty mind, and he was the 
most patient and gentle of hosts. He 
praised the beautiful cyclamen which 
grows all about Florence; he admired 
Washington; talked of Wordsworth, By- 
ron, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. 
To be sure, he is decided in his opinions, 
likes to surprise, and is well content to 
impress, if possible, his English whim 
Upon the immutable past. No great man 
ever had a great son, if Philip and Alex- 
ander be not an exception ; and Philip he 
calls the greater man. In art, he loves 
the Greeks, and in sculpture, them only. 
He prefers the Venus to everything else, 
and, after that, the head of Alexander, in 
the gallery here. He prefers John of Bo- 
logna to Michel Angelo ; in painting, 
Raffaelle ; and shares the growing taste 
for Perugino and the early masters. The 
Greek histories he thought the only good ; 
and after them, Voltaire’s. I could not 
make him praise Mackintosh, nor my more 
recent friends ; Montaigne very cordially — 
and Charron also, which seemed undis- 
criminating. He thought Degerando in- 
debted to ” Lucas on Happiness ” and 


“ Lucas on Holiness f *' He pestered m« 

with Southey ; but who is Southey ? 

He invited me to breakfast on Friday. On 
Friday I did not fail to go, and this time 
with Greenough. He entertained us at 
once with reciting half-a-dozen hexameter 
lines of Julius Caesar’s ! — from Donatus, 
he said. He glorified Lord Chesterfield 
more than was necessary, and undervalued 
Burke, and undervalued Socrates ; desig- 
nated as three of the greatest of men, 
Washington, Phocion, and Tirpoleon ; 
much as our pomologists, in their lists, 
select the three or the six best pears “ for 
a small orchard ; ” and did not even omit 
to remark the similar termination of their 
names. ” A great man,” he said, “ should 
make great sacrifices, and kill his hundred 
oxen, without knowing whether they would 
be consumed by gods and heroes, or whe- 
ther the flies would eat them.” I had visi- 
ted Professor Amici, who had shown me 
his miscroscopes, magnifying (it was said) 
two thousand diameters ; and I spoke of 
the uses to which they were applied. 
Landor despised entomology, yet, in the 
same breath, said, "the sublime was in 
a grain of dust.” I suppose I teased him 
about recent writers, but he professed 
never to have heard of Herschell, not even 
by name. One room was full of pictures, 
which he likes to show, especially one 
piece, standing before which, he said ” he 
would give fifty guineas to the man that 
would swear it was a Domenichino.” I 
I was more curious to see his library, but 

Mr. H , one of the guests, told me that 

Mr. Landor gives away his books, and hag 
never more than a dozen at a time in hig 
house. 

Mr. Landor carries to its height the love 
of freak which the English delight to in- 
dulge, as if to signalise their commanding 
freedom. He has a wonderful brain, de- 
spotic, violent, and inexhaustible, meant 
for a soldier, by what chance converted to 
letters, in which there is not a style nor 
a tint not known to him, yet with an Eng- 
lish appetite for action and heroes. The 
thing done avails, and not what is said 
about it. An original sentence, a step 
forward, is worth more than all the cen- 
sures. Landor is strangely undervalued 
in England ; usually ignored ; and some- 
times savagely attacked in the Reviews. 
The criticism may be right or wrong, and 
is quickly forgotten ; but year after year 
the scholar must still go back to Landor 
for a multitude of elegant sentences — for 
wisdom, wit, and indignation that are un- 
forgetable, 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND, 




From London, on the 5 th August, I 
went to Highgate, and wrote a note to Mr. 
Coleridge, requesting leave to pay my 
respects to him. It was near noon. Mr. 
Coleridge sent a verbal message, that he 
was in bed, but if I would call after one 
o’clock, he would see me. I returned at 
one, and he appeared, a short, thick old 
man, with bright blue eyes and fine clear 
complexion, leaning on his cane. He took 
snuff freely, which presently soiled his 
cravat and neat black suit. He asked 
w’hether I knew Ailston, and spoke warmly 
of his merits and doings when he knew 
him in Rome ; what a master of the Ti- 
tianesqiie he was, &c., &c. He spoke of 
Dr. Channing. It was an unspeakable 
misfortune that he should have turned 
out a Unitarian after all. On this, he burst 
into a declamation on the folly and igno- 
rance of Unitarianism — its high unreason- 
ableness; and taking up Bishop Water- 
land's book, which lay on the table, he 
read with vehemence two or three pages 
written by himself in the fly-leaves— 
passages, too, which, I believe, are printed 
in the “ Aids to Reflection." When he 
stopped to take breath, I interposed, that, 
“whilst I highly valued all his explana- 
tions, I was bound to tell him that 1 was 
born and bred a Unitarian." “ Yes," he 
said, “ I supposed so ; " and continued as 
before. “ It was a wonder, that after so 
many ages of unquestioning acquiescence 
in the doctrine of St. Paul — the doctrine 
of the Trinity, which was also, according 
to Philo Judaeus, the doctrine of the Jews 
before Christ — this handful of Priestleians 
should take on themselves to deny it, &c., 
&c. He was very sorry that Dr. Chan- 
ning — a man to whom he looked up — no, 
to say that he looked up to him would be 
to speak falsely; but a man whom he 
looked at with so much interest — should 
embrace such views. When he saw Dr. 
Channing, he had hinted to him that he 
was afraid he loved Christianity for what 
was lovely and excellent — he loved the 
good in it, and not the true ; and I tell you, 
sir, that I have known ten persons who 
loved the good, for one person who loved 
the true ; but it is a far greater virtue to 
love the true for itself alone, than to love 
the good for itself alone. He (Coleridge) 
knew all about Unitarianism perfectly 
well, because he had once been a Uni- 
tarian, and knew what quackery it was. He 
had been called ‘ the rising star of Uni- 
tarianism.”' He went on defining, or 
rather refining: “The Trinitarian doc- 
trine was realism: the idea of God was 


not essential, but super-essential ; * talked 
of trinism and tetrakism, and much more, 
of which I only caught this : “ that the will 
was that by which a person is a person ; 
because, if one should push me in the 
street, and so I should force the man next 
me into the kennel, I should at once ex- 
claim, * I did not do it, sir,’ meaning it 
was not my will." And this also : “ that if 
you should insist on your faith here in 
England, and I on mine, mine would be 
the hotter side of the fagot.” 

I took advantage of a pause to say, that 
he had many readers of all religious 
opinions in America, and I proceeded to 
inquire if the “ extract ” from the Inde- 
pendent’s pamphlet, in the third volume of 
the “ Friend," were a veritable quotation. 
He replied that it was really taken from a 
pamphlet in his possession, entitled “ A 
Protest of one of the Independents," or 
something to that effect. I told him how ex- 
cellent 1 thought it, and how much I wished 
to see the entire work. “ Yes." he said, 
“ the man was a chaos of truths, but lacked 
the knowledge that God was a god of order. 
Yet the passage would no doubt strike you 
more in the quotation than in the original» 
for I have filtered it." 

When I rose to go, he said, “ I do not 
know whether you care about poetry, but 
I will repeat some verses I lately made on 
my baptismal anniversary ; " and ha re- 
cited with strong emphasis, standing, ten 
or twelve lines, beginning — 

** Born unto God in Christ — " 

He inquired where I had been travel- 
ling; and on learning that I had been in 
Malta and Sicily, he compared one island 
with the other, “ repeating what he had 
said to the Bishop of London when he re- 
turned from that country, that Sicily was 
an excellent school of political economy ; 
for, in any town there, it only needed to 
ask what the government enacted, and 
reverse that to know what ought to be 
done; it was the most felicitously oppo- 
site legislation to anything good and wise. 
There were only three things which the 
government had brought into that garden 
of delights, namely, itcli, pox, and famine; 
whereas, in Malta, the force of law and 
mind was seen, in making that barren rock 
of semi-Saracen inhabitants the seat of 
population and plenty." Going out, he 
showed mo in the next apartment a pic- 
ture of Allston’s. and told me “ that Mon- 
tague, a picture-dealer, once came to see 
him, and, glancing towards this, said, 

* Well, you have got a picture I ’ thinking 



234 


ENGLISH TRAITS. 


it the work of an old master ; afterwards, 
Montague, still talking with his back to 
the canvas, put up his hand and touched 
it, and exclaimed, ‘ By Heaven ! this pic- 
ture is not ten years old : ' so delicate and 
skilful was that man’s touch.” 

I was in his company for about an hour, 
but find it impossible to recall the largest 
part of his discourse, which was often like 
so many printed paragraphs in his book — 
perhaps the same — so readily did he fall 
into certain commonplaces. As I might 
have foreseen, the visit was rather a spec- 
tacle than a conversation, of no use beyond 
the satisfaction of my curiosity. He was 
old and preoccupied, and could not bend 
to a new companion and think with him. 

From Edinburgh I went to the High- 
lands. On my return, I came from Glas- 
gow to Dumfries, and being intent on 
delivering a letter which I had brought 
from Home, inquired for Craigenputtock. 
It was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish 
of Dunscore, sixteen miles distant. No 
public coach passed near it, so I took a 
private carriage from the inn. I found 
the house amid desolate heathery hills, 
where the lonely scholar nourished his 
mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from 
his youth, an author who did not need to 
hide from his readers, and as absolute a 
man of the world, unknown and exiled on 
that hill-farm, as if holding on his own 
terms what is best in London. He was 
tall and ga\mt, with a cliff-like brow, self- 
possessed, and holding his extraordinary 
powers of conversation in ea.sy command ; 
clinging to his northern accent with evi- 
dent relish ; full of lively anecdote, and 
with a streaming humour, which floated 
i^verything he looked upon. His talk 
[playfully exalting the familiar objects, put 
the companion at once into an acquaint- 
ance with his Lars and Lemurs, and it 
was very pleasant to learn what was pre- 
destined to be a pretty mythology. F'ew 
were the objects and lonely the man, 
” not a person to speak to within sixteen 
miles except the minister of Dunscore; ” 
BO that books inevitably made his topics. 

He had names of his own for all the 
matters familiar to his discourse. Black- 
wood’s” was the “sand magazine,” 
” Fraser’s ” nearer approach to possibility 
of life was the ” mud magazine ; ” a piece 
of road near by that marked some failed 
enterprise was the ” grave of the last six- 
pence.” When too much praise of any 
genius annoyed him, he professed hugely 
to admire the talent shown by his pig. 

had 9peot much tiipp ai^d cQntriyance 


in confining the poor beast to one enclo- 
sure in his pen, but pig, by great strokes 
of judgment, had found out how to let a 
board down, and had foiled him. For all 
that, he still thought man the most plastic 
little fellow in the planet, and he liked 
Nero’s death, ^'Qualis artifex pereo 1*^ 
better than most history. He worships 
a man that will manifest any truth to him. 
At one time he had enquired and read a 
good deal about America. Landor’a 
principal was mere rebellion, and that he 
feared was the American principle. The 
best thing he knew of that country was, 
that in it a man can have meat for his 
labour. He had read in Stewart’s book, 
that when he enquired in a New York 
hotel for the Boots, he had been shown 
across the street and had found miingo in 
his own house dining on roast turkey. 

We talked of books. Plato he does 
not read, and he disparaged Socrates* 
and, when pressed, persisted in making 
Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he called the 
splendid bridge from the old world to the 
new. His own reading had been multi- 
farious. Tristram Shandy was one of hia 
first books after Robinson Crusoe, and 
Robertson’s America an early favourite. 

I Rousseau’s Confessions had discovered to 
him that he was not a dunce ; and it was 
now ten years since he had learned Ger- 
man, by the advice of a man who told him 
he would find in that language what he 
wanted. 

He took despairing or satirical views of 
literature at this moment ; recounted the 
incredible sums paid in one year by the 
great booksellers for puffing. Hence it 
comes that no newspaper is trusted now, 
no books are bought, and the bookselleri 
are on the eve of bankruptcy. 

He still returned to Fhiglish pauperism, 
the crowded country, the selfish abdication 
by public men of all that public persons 
should perform. ” Government should 
direct poor men what to do. Poor Irish 
folk come wandering over these moors. 
My dame makes it a rule to give to every 
son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies 
his wants to the next house. But here are 
thousands of acres which might give them 
all meal , and nobody to bid these poor 
Irish go to the moor and till it. They 
burned the stacks, and so found a way to 
force the rich people to attend to them.’* 

We went out to walk over long hills, 
and looked at Criffel, then without his 
cap, and down into Wordsworth’s country. 
There we sat down, and talked of the im- 
mortality of the soul. It was oot Carlyle t 



FIRST VISIT TO El^GLAND 


fault that we talked on that topic, for he 
had the natural disinclination of every 
nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls, 
and did not like to place himself where no 
step can be taken. But he was honest 
and true, and cognisant of the subtile 
links that bind ages together, and saw how 
every event affects all the future. “ Christ 
died on the tree : that built Dunscore kirk 
yonder : that brought you and me together. 
Time has only a relative existence.” 

He was already turning his eyes towards 
London with a scholar’s appreciation. 
London is the heart of the world, he said, 
wonderful only from the mass of human 
being*. He liked the huge machine. 
Each keeps its own round. The baker’s 
boy brings muffins to the window at a 
fixed hour every day, and that is all the 
Londoner knows or wishes to know on the 
subject. But it turned out good men. 
He named certain individuals, especially 
one man of letters, his friend, the best 
mind he knew, whom London had well 
served. 

On the 28th August, I went to Rydal 
Mount, to pay my respects to Mr. Words- 
worth. Ilis daughters called in their 
father, a plain, elderly, white-haired man, 
»ot prepossessing, and disfigured by green 
goggles. He sat down, and talked with 
great simplicity. Ho had just returned 
from a journey. His health was good, 
but he had broken a tooth by a fall, when 
walking with two lawyers, and had said, 
that he was glad it did not happen forty 
years ago; whereupon tliey had praised 
his philosophy. 

He had much to say of America, the 
more that it gaveoccasion for his favourite 
topic — that society is being enlightened by 
a superficial tuition, out of all proportion 
to its being restrained by moral culture. 
Schools do no good. Tuition is not edu- 
cation. He thinks more of the education 
of circumstances than of tuition. ’Tis 
not a question whether there are offences 
of which the law takes cognizance, but 
whether there are offences of which 
the law does not take cognizance. Sin 
is what he fears, and how society is to 
escape without gravest mischiefs from 
this source ? Ho has even said, what 
seemed a paradox^ that they needed a 
civil war in America, to teach the necessity 
of knitting the social ties stronger. 
"There may be,” he said, " in America 
some vulgarity in manner, but that’s not 
toportant. That comes of the pioneer 
tftate of things. But I fear they are too much 


235 

given to the making of money ; and m- 
condly, to politics ; that they make political 
distinction the end, and not the mea’is. 
And I fear they lack a class of men of 
leisure — in short, of gentlemen — to give a 
tone of honour to the community. I am 
told that things are boasted of in the se- 
cond class of society there, which in Eng- 
land — God knows, are done in England 
every day — but would never be spoken of. 
In America I wish to know not how many 
churches or schools, but what newspapers ? 
My friend. Colonel Hamilton, at the foot 
of the hill, who was a year in America, 
assures me that the newspapers are atro- 
cious, and accuse members of Congress of 
stealing spoons ! ” He was against taking 
off the tax on newspapers in England, 
which the reformers represent as a tax 
upon knowledge, for this reason, that they 
would be inundated with base prints. He 
said, he talked on political aspects, for he 
wished to impress on me and all good 
Americans to cultivate the moral, the con- 
servative, &c., &c., and never to call into 
action the physical strength of the people, 
as had just now been done hi England in 
the Reform Bill — a thing prophesied by 
Delolme. He alluded once or twice to 
his conversation with Dr. Channing, who 
had recently visited him (laying hig hand 
on a particular chair in which the Doctor 
had sat). 

The conversation turned on books. 
Lucretius he esteems a far higher poet 
than Virgil : not in his system, which is 
nothing, but in his power of illustration. 
Faith is necessary to explain anything, 
and to reconcile the foreknowledge of God 
with human evil. Of Cousin (whose 
lectures we had all been reading in Boston) 
he knew only the name. 

I inquired if he had read Carlyle’s criti» 
cal articles and translations. He said, he 
thought him sometimes insane. He pro- 
ceeded to abuse Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister 
heartily.* It was full of all manner of 
fornication. It was like the crossing of 
flies in the air. He had never gone fur- 
ther than the first part ; so digusted was 
ho that he threw the book across the room. 
I deprecated tliis wrath, and said what I 
could for the better parts of the book ; 
and he courteously promised to look at 
it again. Carlyle, he said, wrote most 
obscurely. He was clever and deep, but 
he defied the sympathies of everybody. 
Even Mr. Coleridge wrote more clearly, 
though he had always wished Coleridge 
would write more to be understood. He 
led me out into his garden, and showed 



ENGLISH TRAITS, 


2^0 

me the gravel walk in which thousands of | 
his lines were composed. His eyes are 
much inflamed. This is no loss, except 
for reading because he never writes prose, 
and of poetry he carries even hundreds of 
lines in his head before writing them. He 
had just returned from a visit to Staffa, 
and within three days had made three 
sonnets on Fingal’s Cave, and was com- 
posing a fourth, when he was called in to see 
me. He said, “ If you are interested in 
my verses, perhaps you will like to hear 
these lines.” I gladly assented ; and he 
recollected himself for a few moments, 
and then stood forth and repeated, one 
after the other, the three entire sonnets 
with greet animation. I fancied the se- 
cond and third more beautiful than his 
poems are wont to be. The third is 
addressed to the flowers, which, ho said, 
especially the ox-eye daisy, are very abun- 
dant on the top of the rock. The second 
olludes to the name of the cave, which is 
Cave of Music ; ” the first to the circum- 
stance of its being visited by the promis- 
cuous company of the steamboat. 

This recitation was so unlooked for and 
Burprising — he, the old Wordsworth, stand- 
ing apart, and reciting to me in a garden- 
w^k, like a school-boy declaiming — that 
1 at first was near to laugh ; but recollecting 
myself, that I had come thus far to see a 
poet, and he was chanting poems to me, I 
saw that he was right and I was wrong, 
and gladly gave myself up to hear. I told 
him how much the few printed extracts 
bad quickened the desire to possess his 
unpublished poems. He replied, he never 
was in haste to publish ; partly, because 
be corrected a good deal, and every altera- 
tion is ungraciously received after printing; 
but what he had written would be printed, 
whetlier he lived or died. I said, ” Tintern 
Abbey ” appeared to be the favourite poem 
with the public, but more contemplative 
readers preferred the first books of the 
Excursion,” and the Sonnets. He said, 
•* Yes, they are better.” He preferred 
f uch of his poems as touched the affec- 
tions, to any others ; for whatever is 
didactic — what theories of society, and so 
on — might perish quickly; but whatever 
combined a truth with an affection was 
•« «4*, good to-day and good for 
«ver. Ho cited the sonnet ” On the feel- 
ings of a high-minded Spaniard,” which 
fcie preferred to any other (I so understood 
him), and the ‘‘ Two Voices ; ** and quoted, 
fphh evident pleasure, the verses addressed 
To the Skylark.” In this connection, he 
of the Newtonian theory, that it might 


yet be superseded and forgotten ', and 
Dalton’s atomic theory. 

When I prepared to depart, ha said he 
wished to show me what a common per- 
son in England could do, and he led me 
into the enclosure of his clerk, a young 
man, to whom he had given this slip of 
ground, which was laid out, or its natural 
capabilities shown, with much taste. Ho 
then said he would show me a better way 
towards the inn ; and he walked a good 
part of a mile, talking, and ever and anon 
stopping short to impress the word or tlia 
verse, and finally parted from me with great 
kindness, and returned across the fields. 

Wordsworth honoured himself by his 
simple adherence to truth, and was very 
willing not to shine ; but he surprised by 
the hard limits of his thought. To judge 
from a single conversation, he made the 
impression of a narrow and very English 
mind ; of one who paid for his rare eleva- 
tion by general tameness and conformity. 

[ Off his own beat, his opinions were of no 
value. It is not very rare to find persons 
loving sympathy and ease, who expiate 
their departure from the common in one 
direction, by their conformity in every 
other, 


VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 

The occasion of my second visit to Eng- 
land was an invitation from some Me- 
chanics’ Institutes in Lancashire and 
Yorkshire, which separately are organised 
much in the same way as our New England 
Lyceums, but, in 1847, had been linked 
into a ” Union,” which embraced twenty 
or thirty towns and cities, and presently 
extended into the middle counties, and 
northward into Scotland. I was invited, 
on liberal terms, to read a series of lec- 
tures in them all. The request was urged 
with every kind suggestion, and every 
assurance of aid and comfort, by friend- 
liest parties in Manchester, who, in the 
sequel, amply redeemed their word. Th« 
remuneration was equivalent to the fees at 
that time paid in this country for the like 
services. At all events, it was sufficient 
to cover a^iy travelling expenses, and the 
proposal offered an excellent opportunity 
of seeing the interior of England and Scot- 
land, by means of a home, and a com- 
mittee of intelligent friends, awaiting me 
in every town. 

I did not go very willingly. I am not a 
good traveller, nor have I found that long 



VOYAGE TO BMGLANa 


putheya yield a fair share of reasonable 
hours. But the invitation was repeated 
and pressed at a moment of more leisure, 
and when I was a little spent by some un- 
usual studies. I wanted a change and a 
tonic, and England was proposed to me. 
Besides, there were, at least, the dread 
attraction and salutary influences of the 
sea. So I took my berth in the packet- 
ship ly ashingfon Irvifig, and sailed from 
Boston on Tuesday, sth October, 1847. 

On Friday, at noon, we had only made 
one hundred and thirty-four miles. A 
nimble Indian would have swum as far ; but 
the captain affirmed that the ship would 
show us in time all her paces, and vve crept 
along through the floating drift of boards, 
logs, and chips, which the rivers of Maine 
and New Brunswick pour into the sea after 
a freshet. 

At last, on Sunday night, after doing one 
day’s work in four, the storm came, the 
winds blew, and we flew before a north- 
Vvcster, which strained every rope and sail. 1 
The good ship darts through the w’ater all 
day, all night, like a flsh, quivering with 
speed, gliding through liquid leagues, slid- 
ing from horizon to horizon. She has 
passed Cape Sable ; she has reached the 
Banks ; the land-birds are left ; gulls, hag- 
lets, ducks, petrels, swim, dive, and hover 
around ; no fishermen ; she has passed the 
Banks ; left five sail behind her, far on the 
edge of the west at sundown, which were 
far east of us at morn — though they say at 
Bca a stern chase is a long race — and still 
we fly for our lives. The shortest sea-line 
from Boston to Liverpool is 2,850 miles. 
This a steamer keeps, and saves 150 miles. 
A sailing ship can never go in a shorter 
line than 3,000, and usually it is much 
longer. Our good master keeps his kites 
up to the last moment, studding-sails alow 
and aloft, and, by incessant straight steer- 
ing, never loses a rod of way. Watchful- 
ness is the law of the ship — watch on 
watch, for advantage and for life. Since 
the ship was built, it seems, the master 
never slept but in his day-clothes whilst 
on board. “ There are many advantages,” 
says Saadi, “ in sea-voyaging, but security 
is not one of them.” Yet in hurrying over 
these abysses, whatever dangers we are 
running into, we are certainly running out 
ol the risks of hundreds of miles every 
day, which have their own chances of 
squall, collision, sea-stroke, piracy, cold, 
and thunder. Hour for hour, the risk on 
a steamboat is greater ; but the speed is 
safety, or twelve days of danger, instead 
of twenty four. 


^A1 

Our ship was registered 750 tons, and 
weighed, perhaps, with all her freight, 
1,500 tons. Themamma.st, from deck to 
the top-button, measured 115 feet; the 
length of the deck, from stem to stern, 155. 
It is impossible not to personify a ship; 
everybody does, in everything they say — - 
she behaves well ; she minds her rudder; 
she swims like a duck ; she runs her nose 
into the water ; she looks into a port. 
Then that wonderful esprit du corps, by 
wdiich we adopt into our self-love every- 
thing we touch, makes us all champions 
of her sailing qualities. 

The conscious ship hears all the praise. 
In one week she has made 1,467 miles, and 
now, at night, seems to hear the steamer 
behind her, which left Boston to-day at 
tw'o, has mended her speed, and is flying 
before the grey south wind eleven and a 
half knots the hour. The sea-fire shines 
in her wake, and far around wherever a 
wave breaks. I read the hour, ph. 45' , on 
my watch by this light. Near the equator, 
you can read small piint by it; and the 
mate describes the phosphoric insects, 
when taken up in a pail, as shaped like a 
Carolina potato. 

I find the sea-life an acquired taste, like 
that for tomatoes and olives. The con- 
finement, cold, motion, noise, and odour 
are not to be dispensed with. The floor 
of your room is sloped at an angle of 
twenty or thirty degrees, and I waked every 
morning with the belief that someone was 
tipping up my berth. Nobody likes to 
be treated ignomipiously, upset, shoved 
against the side of the house, rolled’ over, 
suffocated with bilge, mephitis, and stew- 
ing oil. We get used to these annoyances 
at last, but the dread of the sea remains 
longer. The sea is masculine, the type of 
active strength. Look, what egg-shells are 
drifting all over it, each one, like ours, 
filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alter- 
nating, with cockney conceit, as the sea is 
rough or smooth. Is this sad-coloured 
circle an eternal cemetery ? In our grave- 
yards we scoop a pit, but this aggressive 
water opens mile-wide pits and chasms, 
and makes a mouthful of a fleet. To the 
geologist, the sea is the only firmament ; 
the land is in perpetual flux and change, 
now blown up like a tumour, now sunk in a 
chasm, and the registered observations of 
a few hundred years find it in a perpetual 
tilt, rising and falling. The sea keeps ita 
old level; and 'tis no wonder that the 
history of our race is so recent, if the roaf 
of the ocean is silencing our traditions. 
A rising of the sea, such as has been ob» 



23 S ENGLISH TRAtTS. 

served, say an inch in a century, from cast Bulwes, Balrac, and Sand were oui sea 
to west on the land, will bury all the towns, gods. Among the passengers, there was 
monuments, bones, and knowledge of some variety of talent and profession ; we 
mankind, steadily and insensibly. If it is exchanged our experiences, and all learned 
capable of these great and secular mis- something. The busiest talk with leisure 
chiefs, it is quite as ready at private and and convenience at sea, and sometimes a 
local damage ; and of this no landsman memorable fact turns up, which you have 
seems so fearful as the seaman. Such long had a vacant niche for, and seize with 
discomfort and such danger as the narra- the joy of a collector. But, under the best 
tives of the captain and mate disclose are conditions, a voyage is one of the severest 
bad enough as the costly fee we pay for tests to try a man. A college examination 
entrance to Europe ; but the wonder is is nothing to it. Sea-days are long— 
always new that any sane man can be a these lack-lustre, joyless days which 
sailor. And here, on the second day of whistled over us ; but they were few, — 
our voyage, stepped out a little boy in his only fifteen, as the captain counted, six- 
shirt-sleeves, who had hid himself, whilst teen according to me. Reckoned from the 
the ship was in port, in the bread-closet, timewhen we left soundings, our speed was 
having no money, and wishing to go to such that the captain drew the line of his 
England. The sailors have dressed him course in red ink on his chart, for the 
in Guernsey frock, with a knife in his belt, encouragement or envy of future navi- 
and he is climbing nimbly about after gators. 

them, “ likes the work^ first-rate, and, if It has been said that the King of Eng- 
the captain will take him, means now to land would consult his dignity by giving 
come back again in the ship.” The mate audience to [foreign ambassadors in the 
avers that this is the history of all sailors ; cabin of a man-of-war. And I think the 
nine out of ten are run-away boys ; and white path of an Atlantic ship the right 
adds, that all of them are sick of the sea, avenue to the palace front of this sea^ 
but stay in it out of pride. Jack has a life faring people, who [for hundreds of years 
of risks, incessant abuse, and the worst claimed the strict sovereignty of the sea, 
pay. It if a little better with the mate, and exacted toll and the striking sail from 
and not very much better with the captain, the ships of all other peoples. When 
A hundred dollars a month is reckoned their privilege was disputed by the Dutch 
high pay, If sailors were contented, if and other junior marines, on the plea that 
they had not resolved again and again not you could never anchor on the same wave 
to go to sea any more, I should respect or hold property in what was always 
them. ^ flowing, the English did not stick to claim 

Of course, the inconveniences and the channel, or bottom of all the main, 
terrors of the sea are not of any account “ As if,” said they, ” we contended for the 
to those whose minds are preoccupied, drops of the sea, and not for its situation. 
The water-laws, arctic frost, the mountain, or the bed of those waters. The sea is 
the mine, only shatter xockneyism ; every bounded by his Majesty’s empire.” 
noble activity makes room for itself. A As we neared the land, its genius was 
great mind is a good sailor, as a great felt. This was Inevitably the British side, 
heart is. And the sea is not slow in dis- in every man’s thought arises now a new 
closing inestimable secrets to a good system, English sentiments, English loves 
naturalist. and fears. English history and social 

’Tis a good rule in every journey to modes. Yesterday, every passenger had 
provide some piece of liberal study to res- measured the speed of the ship by watch- 
cue the hours which bad weather, bad ing the bubbles over the ship’s bulwarks, 
company, and taverns steal from the best To-day, instead of bubbles, we measure 
economist. Classics which at home are by Kinsale, Cork, Waterford, and Ard- 
drowsily read have a strange charm in a more. There lay the green shore of 
country inn, or in the transom of a mer- Ireland, like some coast of plenty. Wo 
chant brig. I remember that some of the could sen towns, towers, churches, har- 
happiest and most valuable hours I have vests ; but the curse of eight hundred 
owed to books, passed, many years ago, on years we cotUd not discenit 
shipboard. The worst impediment I have 
found at sea is the want of light in the 
aibin. 

.We found on board the usual cabin 
libraiy : Basil Hall, Dumas, Dickens, 



LANn 


LAND. 

Att^KRi thought Italy and England the 
only countries worth living in ; tlie former, 
because there nature vindicates her 
rights, aud triumphs over the evils in- 
flicted by the governments ; the latter, be- 
cause art conquers nature, and transforms 
a rude, ungenial land into a paradise of 
comfort and plenty. England is a gar- 
den. Under an ash-coloured sky, the fields 
have been combed and rolled till they 
appear to have been finished with a pencil 
instead of a plough. The solidity of the 
structures that compose the towns speaks 
the industry of ages. Nothing is left as it 
was made. Rivers, hills, valleys, the sea 
itself, feel the hand of a master. The 
long habitation of a powerful and ingeni- 
ous race has turned every rood of land to 
its best use, has found all the capabilities, 
the arable soil, the quarriable rock, the 
highways, the byways, the fords, the 
navigable waters ; and the new arts of 
intercourse meet you everywhere ; so that 
England is a huge phalanstery, where all 
that man wants is provided within the 
precinct. Cushioned and comforted in 
every manner, the traveller rides as on a 
cannon-ball, high and low, over rivers .and 
fcowns, through mountains, in tunnels of 
three or four miles, at near twice the 
speed of our trains ; and reads quietly the 
Times newspaper, which by its immense 
correspondence and reporting, seems to 
have machinised the rest of the world for 
his occasion. 

The problem of the traveller landing at 
Liverpool is, Why England is England. 
What are the elements of that power 
which tlie English hold over other 
nations ? If there be one test of national 
genius universally accepted, it is success ; 
and if there be one successful country in 
the universe for the last millennium, that 
country is England. 

A wise traveller will naturally choose to 
visit the best of actual nations ; and an 
American has more reasons than another 
to draw him to Britain, In all that is 
done or begun by the Americans towards 
right thinking or practice, we are met by a 
civilization already settled and overpower- 
ing. The culture of the day, the thoughts 
and aims of men are English thoughts 
and aims. A nation considerable for a 
thousand years since Egbert, it has, in the 
last centuries, obtained the ascendant, 
and stamped the knowledge, activity and 
power of mankind with its impress. Those 


^39 

who resist it do not feel it or obey it less. 
The Russian in his snows is aiming to be 
English. The Turk and Chinese also are 
making awkward efforts to be English. 
The practical common-sense of modern 
society, the utilitarian direction which 
labour, laws, opinion, religion take, is the 
natural genius of the British mind. The 
influence of France is a constituent of 
modern civility but not enough opposed 
to the English for the most wholesome 
effect. The American is only the con- 
tinuation of the English genius into new 
conditions, more or less propitious. 

See what books fill our libraries. Every 
book we read, every biography, play, ro- 
mance, in whatever form, is still English 
history and manners. So that a sensible 
Englishman once said to me, “ As long 
as you do not grant us copyright, wo 
shall have the teaching of you.” 

But wo have the same difficulty in 
making a social or moral estimate of 
England, as the sheriff finds in drawing 
a jury to try some cause which has agi- 
tated the whole community, and on which 
everybody finds himself an interested 
party. Officers, jurors, judges, havo 
all taken sides, England has in* 
oculated all nations with her civilization, 
intelligence, and tastes ; and, to resist the 
tyranny and prepossession of tho British 
element, a serious man must aid himself, 
by comparing with it the civilizations of 
the farthest east and west, the old Greek, 
the Oriental, and, much more, the ideal 
standard, if only by means of the very im- 
patience which English forms are sure to 
awaken in independent minds. 

Besides, if we will visit London, the 
present time is the best time, as some 
signs portend that it has reached its 
[highest point. It is observed that the 
English interest us a little less within a 
few years ; and hence the impression 
that the British power has culminated, 
is in solstice, or already declining. 

As soon as you enter England, which, 
with Wales, is no larger than the Stat^ 
of Georgia,* this little land stretches by 
an illusion to the dimensions of an em- 
pire. The innumerable details, the 
crowded succession of towns, cities, cathe- 
drals, castles, and great and decorated 
estates, the number and power of the 
trades and guilds, the military strength 
and splendour, the multitudes of rich and 
of remarkable people, the servants and 

* Add South Carolina, and you hare more 
than an equivalent for the luea of Scotland, 



i240 ENGLISH 

equipages — all these catching the eye, 
and never allowing it to pause, hide all 
boundaries, by the impression of magni- 
ficence and endless wealth. 

I reply to all the urgencies that refer 
me to this and that object indispensably 
to be seen — Yes, to see England well 
needs a hundred years ; for what they told 
me was the merit of Sir John Soane’s 
Museum, in London— that ; it ; was well 
packed and well saved — is the merit of 
England— -it is stuffed full, in all corners 
and crevices with towns, towers, churches, 
villas, palaces, hospitals, and charity- 
houses. In the history of art, it is along 
way from a cromlech to York’minster ; yet 
all the intermediate steps may still be 
traced in this all-preserving island. 

The territory has a singular perfection. 
The climate is warmer by many degrees 
than it is entitled to by latitude. Neither 
hot nor cold, there is no hour in the 
whole year when one cannot work. Here 
is no winter, but such days as we have in 
Massachusetts in November, a tempera- 
ture which makes no exhausting demand 
on human strength, but allows the attain- 
ment of the largest stature. Charles the 
Second said, “It invited men abroad 
more days in the [year and more hours 
in the day than another country.” Then 
England has all the materials of a work- 
ing country except wood. The constant 
rain — a rain with every tide, in some 
parts of the island — keeps its multitude of 
rivers full, and brings agricultural produc- 
tion up to the highest point. It has plenty 
of water, of stone, of potter’s clay, of coal, 
of salt, and of iron. The land naturally 
abounds with game, immense heaths and 
downs are paved with quails, grouse, and 
woodcock, and the shores are animated by 
water-birds, The rivers and the surround- 
ing sea spawn with fish; there are salmon 
for the rich, and sprats and herrings for 
the poor. In the northern lochs, the her- 
ring are in innumerable shoals; at one 
season, the country people say, the lakes 
contain one part water and two parts 
fish. 

The only drawback on this industrial 
conveniency is the darkness of its sky. 
The night and day are too nearly of a 
colour. It strains the eyes to read and to 
write. Add the coal-smoke. In the manu- 
facturing towns, the fine soot or blacks 
darken the day, give white sheep the 
colour of black sheep, discolour the human 
saliva, contaminate the air, poison many 
lants, and corrode the monuments andi 

uildingt I 


TRAlfS, 

The London fog aggravates the 
tempers of the sky, and sometimes jus- 
tifies the epigram on the climate by an 
English wit, “ in a fine day, looking up a 
chimney ; in a foul day, looking down 
one.” A gentleman in Liverpool told me 
that he found he could do without a fire 
in his parlour about one day in the year. 
It is however pretended, that the enor- 
mous consumption of coal in the island 
is also felt in modifying the general 
climate. 

Factitious climate, factitious position. 
England resembles a ship in its shape, 
and, if it w^ere one, its best admiral could 
not have worked it, or anchored it in a 
more judicious or effective position. Sir 
John Herschel said, “ London was the 
centre of the terrene globe.” The shop- 
keeping nation, to use a shop word, has 
a good stand. The old Venetians pleased 
themselves with the flattery, that Venice 
was in 45®, midway between the poles and 
the line ; as if that were an imperial cem 
trality. Long of old, the Greeks fancied 
Delphi the navel of the earth, in their 
favourite mode of fabling the earth to be 
an animal. The Jews believed Jerusalem 
to be the centre. I have seen a krato- 
metric chart designed to show that the 
city of Philadelphia was in tho same 
thermic belt, and, by inference, in the 
same belt of empire, as tho cities of 
Athens, Rome, and London. It was 
drawn by a patriotic Philadelphian, and 
was examined with pleasure, under his 
showing, by tho inhabitants of Chestnut 
Street. But, when carried to Charleston, 
to New Orleans, and to Boston, it some- 
how failed to convince the ingenious 
scholars of all those capitals. 

But England is anchored at the side 
of Europe, and right in the heart of the 
modern world. The sea, which, accord- 
ing to Virgil’s famous line, divided tho 
poor Britons utterly from tho world, 
proved to be the ring of marriage with all 
nations. It is not down in the books — it 
is written only in the geologic strata — 
that fortunate day when a wave of the 
German Ocean burst the old isthmus 
which joined Kent and Cornwall to 
France, and gave to this fragment of 
Europe its impregnable sea-wall, cutting 
off an island of eight hundred miles in 
length, with an irregular breadth reaching 
to three hundred miles ; a territory largo 
enough for independence enriched with 
every seed of national power, so near, 
that it can see the harvests of the con- 
tinent : and so far, that who would cross 



itACS. 


the strait must be an expert mariner, 
ready for tempests. As America, Europe, 
and Asia lie, these Britons have precisely 
the best commercial position in the whole 
planet, and are sure of a market for all the 
goods they can manufacture: And to 
make these advantages avail, the river 
Thames must dig its spacious outlet to 
the sea from the heart of the kingdom, 
giving road and landing to innumerable 
ships, and all hi© conveniency to trade, 
that a people so skilful and sufficient in 
economising water-front by docks, ware- 
houses, and lighters required. When 
James the First declared nis purpose of 
punishing London by removing his Court, 
the Lord Mayor replied, "that, in re- 
moving his royal presence from his lieges, 
they hoped he would leave them the 
Thames." 

In the variety of surface, Britain is a 
miniature of Europe, having plain, forest, 
marsh, river, sea-shore ; mines in Corn- 
wall ; caves in Matlock and Derbyshire ; 
delicious landscape in Dovedale, delicious 
sea-view at Tor Bay, Highlands in Scot- 
land, Snowdon in VVales; and, in West- 
moreland and Cumberland, a pocket 
Switzerland, in which the lakes and moun- 
tains are on a sufficient scale to fill the 
eye and touch the imagination. It is a 
nation conveniently small. Fontenelle 
thought, that nature had sometimes a 
little affectation ; and there is such an 
artificial completeness in this nation of 
artificers, as if there were a design from 
the beginning to elaborate a bigger Bir- 
mingham, Nature held counsel with, her- 
self, and said, " My Romans are gone. 
To build my new empire, I will choose a 
rude race, all masculine, with brutish 
strength. I will not grudge a competition 
of the roughest males. Let buffalo gore 
buffalo, and the pasture to the strongest ! 
For I have work that requires the best 
will and sinew. Sharp and temperate 
northern breezes shall blow, to keep that 
will alive and aiert. The sea shall disjoin 
the people from others, and knit them to 
a fierce nationality. It shall give them 
markets on every side. Long time I will 
keep them on their feet, by poverty, 
border-wars, seafaring, sea-risks, and the 
stimulus of gain. An island— but not so 
large, the people not so many as to glut 
the great markets and depress one 
another, but proportioned to the size of 
Europe and the continents,” 

With its fruits, and wares, and money, 
must its civil inffuence radiate. It is a 
iingular coincidence to this geographic 


2:] I 

centrality, the spiritual centrality: which 
Emanuel Swedenborg ascribes to th^ 
people. " For the English nation, the 
best of them are in the centre of all Chris= 
tians, because they have interim inteb 
lectual light. This appears conspicuously 
in the spiritual world. This light they 
derive from the liberty of speaking and 
writing, and thereby of thinking.” 


RACE. 

An ingenious anatomist has written a 
book* to prove that races are imperish- 
able, but nations are pliant political con- 
structions, easily changed or destroyed. 
But this writer did not found his assumed 
races on any necessary law, disclosing 
their ideal or metaphysical necessity ; nor 
did he, on the other hand, count with 
precision the existing races, and settle the 
true bounds ; a point of nicety, and the 
popular test of the theory. The indivi- 
duals at the extremes of divergence in one 
race of men are as unlike as the wolf to 
the lapdog. Yet each variety shades 
down imperceptibly into the next, and 
you cannot draw the line where a race 
begins or ends. Hence every writer 
makes a different count. Blumenbach 
reckons five races ; Humboldt, three ; and 
Mr. Pickering, who lately, in our Explor- 
ing Expedition, thinks he saw all the 
kinds of men that can be on the planet, 
makes eleven. 

The British Empire is reckoned to con- 
tain 222,000,000 souls — perhaps a fifth of 
the population of the globe ; and to com- 
prise a territory of 5,000,000 square miles. 
So far have British people predominated. 
Perhaps forty of these millions are of 
British stock. Add the United States of 
America, which reckon, exclusive of 
slaves, 20,000,000 of people, on a territory 
of 3,000,000 square miles, and in which 
the foreign element,* however consider- 
able, is rapidly assimilated, and you have 
a population of English descent and lan- 
guage, of 60,000,000, and governing a 
population of 245,000,000 souls. 

The British census proper reckons 
twenty-seven and a half millions in the 
home countries. What makes this census 
important is the quality of the units that 
compose it. They are free forcible men, 
in a country where life is safe, and hag 

* The Races, a Fragment* By Robert Knex, 
London: ^ 



2A2 


ENGLISH TRAITS. 


reached the greatest value. They give 
the bias to the current age ; and that, not 
by chance or by mass, but by their j 
character, and by the number of indivi- 
duals among them of personal ability. It 
has been denied that the English have 
genius. Be it as it may, men of vast in- 
tellect have been born on their soil, and 
they have made or applied the principal 
inventions. They have sound bodies, and 
supreme endurance in war and in labour. 
The spawning force of the race has 
sufficed to the colonisation of great parts 
of the world ; yet it remains to be seen 
whether they can make good the exodus 
of millions from Great Britain, amounting, 
in 1852, to more than a thousand a day. 
They have assimilating force, since they 
are imitated by their foreign subjects ; 
and they arc still aggressive and prop- 
agandist, enlarging the dominion of their 
arts and liberty. Their laws are hospit- 
able, and slavery does not exist under 
them. What oppression exists is inci- 
dental and temporary ; their success is 
not sudden or fortunate, but they have 
maintained constancy and self-equality 
for many ages. 

Is this power due to their race, or to 
some other cause ? Men hear gladly of 
the power of blood or race. Everybody 
likes to know that his advantages cannot 
be attributed to air, soil, sea, or to local 
wealth, as mines and quarries, nor to laws 
and traditions, nor to fortune, but to 
superior brain, as it makes the praise 
more personal to him. 

We anticipate in the doctrine of race 
something like that law of physiology, 
that, whatever bone, muscle, or essential 
organ is found in one healthy individual, 
the same part or organ may be found in 
or near the same place in its congener ; 
and we look to find in the son every 
mental and moral property that existed 
in the ancestor. In race, it is not the 
broad shoulders, or litheness, or stature 
that give advantage, but a symmetry that 
reaches as far as to tlie wit. Then the 
miracle and renown begin. Then first we 
care to examine the pedigree, and copy 
heedfully the training — what food they 
ate, what nursing, school and exercises 
they had, which resulted in this mother- 
wit, delicacy of thought, and robust wis- 
dom. How came such men as King 
Alfred, and Roger Bacon, William of 
Wykeham, Walter Raleigh, Philip Sidney, 
Isaac Newton, William Shakespeare, 
George Chapman, Francis Bacon, George 
Herbert, Henry Vane, to exist here? 


What made these delicate natures? vvns 
it the air ? was it the sea ? was it the 
parentage? For it is certain that these 
men are samples of their contemporaries. 
The hearing ear is always found close to 
the speaking tongue ; and no genius can 
long or often utter anything which is not 
invited and gladly entertained by men 
around him. 

It is race, is it not ? that puts the hun- 
dred millions of India under the dominion 
i of a remote island in the north of Europe, 
Race avails much, if that be true, which is 
alleged, that all Celts are Catholics, and 
all Saxons are Protestants; that Celts 
love unity of power, and Saxons the repre- 
sentative principle. Race is a controlling 
influence in the Jew, who, for two mil- 
lenniums, under every climate, has pre- 
served the same character and employ- 
ments. Race in the negro is of appalling 
importance. The French in Canada, cut 
off from all intercourse with the parent 
people, have held their national traits. I 
chanced to read Tacitus “ on the Manners 
of the Germans ' not long since, in 
Missouri, and the heart of Illinois, and X 
found abundant points of resemblance 
between the Germans of the Ilercynian 
forest, and our HoosierSt Stickers, and 
Badgers of the American woods. 

But whilst race works immortally to 
keep its own, it is resisted by other forces. 
Civilization is a re-agent, and eats away 
the old traits. The Arabs of to-day are 
I the Arabs of Pharaoh ; but the Briton of 
to-day is a very different person from 
Cassibelaunus or Ossian. Each religious 
' sect has its physiognomy. The Methodists 
have acquired a face ; the Quakers, a face ; 
the nuns a face. An Englishman will 
pick out a dissenter by his manners. 
Trades and professions carve their own 
lines on face and form. Certain circum- 
stances of English life are not less 
effective : as, personal liberty ; plenty of 
food ; good ale and mutton ; open market, 
or good wages for every kind of labour ; 
higli bribes to talent and skill ; the island 
life, or the million opportunities and out- 
lets for expanding and misplaced talent ; 
readiness of combination among them- 
selves for politics or for business ; strikes ; 
and sense of superiority founded on habit 
of victory in labour and in war ; and tho 
appetite for superiority grows by feeding. 

It is easy to add to the counteracting 
forces to race. Credence is a main element. 
'Tis said, that the views of nature held 
by any people determine all their institu- 
tions. Whatever infivences add to mental 



RACB. 


dr moral faculty, take man out of 

nationality, as out of other conditions, 
and make the national life a culpable 
compromise. 

These limitations of the formidable 
doctrine of race suggest others which 
threaten to undermine it, as not suffi- 
ciently based. The fixity or inconverti- 
bleness of races as we see them, is a weak 
argument for the eternity of these frail 
boundaries, since all our historical period 
is a point to the duration in which nature 
has wrought. Any the least and solitariest 
fact in our natural history, such as the 
melioration of fruits and of animal stocks, 
has the worth of a power in the oppor- 
tunity of geologic periods. Moreover, 
though we flatter the selMove of men and 
nations by the legend of pure races, all 
our experience is of the gradation and 
resolution of races, and strange resem- 
blances meet us everywhere. It need not 
puzzle us that Malay and Papuan, Celt 
and Roman, Saxon and Tartar, should 
mix, when we see the rudiments of tiger 
and baboon in our human form, and 
know that the barriers of races are not so 
firm, but that some spray sprinkles us 
from the antediluvian seas. 

The low organisations are simplest; a 
mere mouth, a jelly, or a straight worm. 
As the scale mounts, the organisations 
become complex. We are piqued with 
pure descent, but nature loves inocula- 
tion. A child blends in his face the faces 
of both parents, and some feature from 
every ancestor whose face hangs on the 
wall. The best nations are those most 
widely related ; and navigation, as effect- 
ing a world-wide mixture, is the most 
potent advancer of nations. 

The English composite character betrays 
a mixed origin. Everything English is a 
fusion of distant and antagonistic elements. 
The language is mixed ; the names of 
men are of different nations— three lan- 
guages, three or four nations — the currents 
of thought are counter: contemplation 
and practical skill; active intellect and 
dead conservatism ; world-wide enterprise, 
and devoted use and wont; aggressive 
freedom and hospitable law, with bitter 
class-legislation; a people scattered by 
their wars and aftairs over the face of the 
whole earth, and homesick to a man; a 
country of extremes — dukes and chartists, 
Bishops of Durham and naked heathen 
colliers— nothing can be praised in it 
without damning exceptions, and nothing 
denouncQ3 witbPUt palYpS of cprdial 

praiSQb I 


243 

Neither do this people appear to be of 
one stem; but collectively a better race 
than any from which they are derived. 
Nor is it easy to trace it homo to its 
original seats. Who can call by right 
names what races are in Britain ? Who 
can trace them historically? Who can 
discriminate them anatomically, or meta- 
physically ? 

In the impossibility of arriving at satis- 
faction on the historical question of race, 
and— come of whatever disputable an- 
cestry — the indisputable Englishman 
before me, himself very well marked, and 
nowhere else to be found — I fancied I 
could leave quite aside the choice of a 
tribe as his lineal progenitors. Defoe said 
in his wrath, “ the Englishman was the 
mud of all races." I incline to the belief, 
that, as water, lime, and sand make 
mortar, so certain temperaments marry 
well, and, by well-managed contrarieties, 
develop as drastic a character as the 
English. On the whole, it is not so much 
a history of one or of certain tribes of 
Saxons, Jutes, or Frisians, coming from 
one place, and genetically identical, as it 
is an anthology of temperaments out ol 
them all. Certain temperaments suit the 
sky and soil of England, say eight or ten 
or twenty varieties, as, out of a hundred 
pear-trees, eight or ten suit the soil of an 
orchard, and thrive, whilst all the un- 
adapted temperaments die out. 

The English derive their pedigree from 
such a range of nationalities, that there 
needs sea-room and land-room to unfold 
the varieties of talent and character. 
Perhaps the ocean serves as a galvanic 
battery to distribute acids at one pole, 
and alkalies at the other. So England 
tends to accumulate her liberals in 
America, and her conservatives at London. 
The Scandinavians in her race still hear 
in every age the murmurs of their mother, 
the ocean ; the Briton in the blood hugs 
the homestead still. 

Again, as if to intensate the influences 
that are not of race, what we think of 
when we talk of English traits really 
narrows itself to a small district. It ex- 
cludes Ireland, and ;Scotland, and Wales, 
and reduces itself at last to London, that 
is, to those who come and go thither. 
The portraits that hang on the walls in 
the Academy Exhibition at London, tha 
figures in Punch’s drawings of the public 
men, or of the club-houses, the prints in 
the shop-windows, are distinctive English, 
and not American, no, nor Scotch, nor 
Irish : bot 'tis a very restricted natiDoalityi 



244 


ENGLISH TRAITS. 


As you go north into tho manufacturing 
and agricultural districts, and to the 
population that never travels, as you go 
into Yorkshire, as you enter Scotland, the 
world’s Englishman is no longer found. 
In Scotland, there is a rapid loss of all 
grandeur of mien and manners; a pro- 
vincial eagerness and acuteness appear ; 
the poverty of the country makes itself 
remarked, and a coarseness of manners ; 
and, among the intellectual is the insanity 
of dialectics. In Ireland, are the same 
climate and soil as in England, but less 
food, no right relation to the land, 
political dependence, small tenantry, and 
an inferior or misplaced race. 

These queries concerning ancestry and 
blood may be well allowed, for there is no 
prosperity that seems more to depend on 
the kind of man than British prosperity. 
Only a hardy and wise people could have 
made this small territory great. We say, 
in a regatta or yacht-race, that if the boats 
are anywhere nearly matched, it is the 
man that wins. Put the best sailing- 
master into either boat, and he will win. 

Yet it is fine for us to speculate in face 
of unbroken traditions, though vague, and 
losing themselves in fable. The traditions 
have got footing, and refuse to be dis- 
turbed. The kitchen-clock is more con- 
venient than sidereal time. We must use 
the popular category as we do by the 
Linnaean classification, for convenience, 
and not as exact and final. Otherwise, 
we are presently confounded, when the 
best-settled traits of one race are claimed | 
by some new ethnologist as precisely 
characteristic of the rival tribe. 

I found plenty of well-marked English 
types, the ruddy complexion fair and I 
plump, robust men, with faces cut like a 
die, and a strong island speech and 
accent; a Norman type, with the com- 
placency that belongs to that constitution. 
Others, who might be Americans, for 
anything that appeared in their com- 
plexion or form : and their speech was 
much less marked, and their thought 
much less bound. We will call them 
Saxons. Then the Roman has implanted 
his dark complexion in the trinity or 
quaternity of bloods. 

I. The sources from which tradition 
derives their stock are mainly three. And, 
first, they are of the oldest blood of the 
world — the Celtic. Some peoples are 
deciduous or transitory, Where are the 
Greeks iwhere the Etrurians ? where the 
Romans ? But the Celts or Sidonides arc 


an old family, of whose beginning there H 
no memory, and their end is likely to be 
still more remote in the futuie ; for they 
I have endurance and productiveness. 

I They planted Britain, and gave to the 
seas and mountains names which are 
poems, and imitate the pure voices of 
nature. They are favourably remem- 
bered in the oldest records of Europo. 
They had no violent feudal tenure, but 
the husbandman owned the land. They 
had an alphabet, astronomy, priestly 
culture, and a sublime creed. They have 
a hidden and precarious genius. They 
made the best popular literature of the 
Middle Ages in the songs of Merlin, and 
the tender and delicious mythology of 
Arthur. 

2. The English come mainly from the 
Germans, whom the Romans found hard 
to conquer in two hundred and ten 
years — say, impossible to conquer — when 
one remembers the long sequel ; a people 
about whom, in the old empire, the 
rumour ran, there was never any that 
meddled with them that repented it not, 

3. Charlemagne, halting one day in a 
town of Narbonnese Gaul, looked out of a 
window, and saw a fleet of Northmen 
cruising in the Mediterranean. They 
even entered the port of the town where 
he was, causing no small alarm and 
sudden manning and arming of his galleys. 
As they put out to sea again, the emperor 
gazed long after them, his eyes bathed in 
tears. “ I am tormented with sorrow,” 
he said, “ when I foresee the evils they 
will bring on my posterity.” There was 
reason for these Xerxes’ tears. The men 
who have built a ship and invented the 
rig — cordage, sail, compass, and pump — 
the working in and out of port, have 
acquired much more than a ship. Now 
arm them, and every shore is at their 
mercy. For, if they have not numerical 
superiority where they anchor, they have 
only to sail a mile or two to find it, 
Bonaparte’s art of war, namely, of con- 
centrating force on the point of attack, 
must always be theirs who have the choice 
of the battle-ground. Of course they come 
into the fight from a higher ground of 
power (ban the land-nations ; and can 
engage them on shore with a victorious 
advantage in the retreat. As soon as the 
shores are sufficiently peopled to make 
piracy a losing business, the same skill and 
courage are ready for the service of trade. 

The Heimskringla* or Sagas of the 

* Heimskringla. Translated by Samuel 
Laingi Esq. bondoa ; X8441 



RACE, 


^45 


Rings of Norway, collected by Snorro 
Sturleson, is the Iliad and Odyssey of Eng- 
lish history. Its portraits, like Homer’s, 
are strongly individualised. The Sagas 
describe a monarchical republic like 
Sparta. The government disappears be- 
fore the importance of citizens. In Nor- 
way, no Persian masses fight and perish 
to aggrandise a king, but the actors are 
bonders or land-holders, every one of 
whom is named and personally and 
patronymically described, as the king’s' 
friend and companion. A sparse popu-* 
lation gives this high worth to every man. I 
Individuals are often noticed as very! 
handsome persons, which trait only brings 
the story nearer to the English race. 
Then the solid material interest predomi- 
nates, so dear to English understanding, 
wherein the association is logical, between 
merit and land. The heroes of the Sagas 
are not the knights of South Europe. 
No vapouring of France and Spain has 
corrupted them. They are substantial 
farmers, whom the rough times have 
forced to defend their properties. They 
have weapons which they use in a deter- 
mined manner, by no means for chivalry, 
but for their acres. They are people I 
considerably advanced in rural arts, living 
amphibiously on a rough coast, and draw- i 
ing half their food from the sea, and half! 
from the land. They have herds of cows, 
and malt, wheat, bacon, butter, and cheese. 
They fish in the fiord, and hunt the deer. 
A king among these farmers has a vary- 
ing power, sometimes not exceeding the 
authority of a sheriff. A king was main- 
tained much as, in some of our country 
districts, a winter-schoolmaster is quar- 
tered, a week here, a week there, and a 
fortnight on the next farm — on all the 
farmers in rotation. This the king calls 
going into guest-quarters ; and it was the 
only way in which, in a poor country, a 
poor king, with many retainers, could be 
kept alive, when he leaves his own farm 
to collect his dues through the kingdom. 

These Norsemen are excellent persons 
In the main, with good sense, steadiness, 
wise speech, and prompt action. But 
they have a singular turn for homicide ; 
their chief end of man is to murder or to 
be murdered ; oars, scythes, harpoons, 
crowbars peat-knives, and hayforks are 
tools valued by them all the more for 
their charming aptitude for assassinations. 
A pair of kings, after dinner, will divert 
themselves by thrusting each his sword 
through the other’s body, as did Yngve 
Alt Aaotber pair ride out on a 


morning for a frolic, and, finding no 
weapon near, will take the bits out of their 
horses’ mouths, and crush each other’s 
heads with them, as did Alric and Eric 
The sight of a tent-cord or a clcak-strino; 
puts them on hanging somebody, a wif^j. 
or a husband, or, best of all, a king. If a 
farmer has so much as a hayfork, he 
sticks it into a King Dag. King Ingiald 
finds it vastly amusing to bum up half a 
dozen kings in a hall, after getting them 
drunk. Never was poor gentleman so sur- 
feited with life, so furious to be rid of it, 
as the Northman. If ho cannot pick any 
other quarrel, he will get himself com- 
fortably gored by a bull’s horns, like Egil, 
or slain by a land-slide, like the agricultural 
King Onund. Odin died in his bed, in 
Sweden ; but it was a proverb of ill con- 
dition, to die the death of old age. King 
Hake of Sweden cuts and slashes in 
battle, as long as he can stand, then 
orders his war-ship, loaded with his dead 
men and their weapons, to be taken out 
to sea, the tiller shipped, and the sails 
spread ; being left alone, ho sets fire to 
some tar-wood, and lies down contented 
on deck. The wind blew off the land, the 
ship flew burning in clear flame, ouj 
between the islets into tho ocean, and 
there was the right end of King Hake. 

The early Sagas are sanguinary and 
piratical ; the later are of a noble strain. 
History rarely yields us better passages 
than the conversation between King 
Sigurd the Crusader, and King Eystein, 
his brother, on their respective merits— 
one, the soldier, and the other, a lover of 
the arts of peace. 

But the reader of the Norman history 
must steel himself by holding fast the 
remote compensations which result from 
animal vigour. As the old fossil world 
shows that the first steps of reducing the 
chaos were confided to saurians and other 
huge and horrible animals, so the founda- 
tions of the new civility were to be laid by 
the most savage men. 

The Normans came out of France into 
England worse men than they went into 
it, one hundred and sixty years before. 
They had lost their own language, and 
learned the Romance or barbarous Latin 
of the Gauls ; and had acquired, with the 
language, all the vices it had names for 
The conquest has obtained in the chro- 
nicles, the name of “ the memory of sor- 
row.” Twenty thousand thieves landed at 
Hastings. These founders of the House 
of Lords were greedy and ferocious dra- 
goons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirateji. 



24 ^ ENGLISH 

They wero all alike, they took everything 
they could carry, they burned, harried, 
violated, tortured, and killed, until every- 
thing English was brought to the verge 
of ruin. Such, however, is the illusion of 
antiquity and wealth, that decent and 
dignified men now existing boast their 
descent from these filthy thieves, who 
showed a far juster conviction of their 
own merits, by assuming for their types 
the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and 
snake, wliich tliey severally resembled. 

England yielded to the Danes and 
Northmen in the tenth and eleventh cen- 
turies, and was the receptacle into which 
all the mettle of that strenuous population 
was- poured. The continued draught of 
the best men in Norway, Sweden, and 
Denmark, to these piratical expeditions, 
exhausted those countries, like a tree 
which bears much fruit when young, and 
these have been second-rate powers ever 
since. The power of the race migrated, 
and left Norway void. King Olaf said : 
*' When King Harold, my father, went 
westward to England, the chosen men in 
Norway followed him ; but Norway was 
so emptied then, that such men have not 
since been to find in the country, nor 
especially such a leader as King Harold 
was for wisdom and bravery.” 

It was a tardy recoil of these invasions, 
when, in i8oi, the British Government 
sent Nelson to bombard the Danish forts 
in tho Sound ; and, in 1807, Lord Cath- 
cart, at Copenhagen, took Ithe entire 
Danish fleet, as it lay in the basins, and 
all the equipments from the Arsenal, and 
carried them to England. Konghelle, the 
town where the kings of Norway, Sweden, 
and Denmark were wont to meet, is now 
rented to a private English gentleman for 
a hunting-ground. 

It took many generations to trim, and 
comb, and perfume the first boat-load of 
Norse pirates into royal highnesses and 
most noble Knights of the Garter; but 
every sparkle of ornament dates back to 
the Norse boat. There will be time 
enough to mellow this strength into 
civility and religion. It is a medical fact, 
that the children of the blind see; the 
children of felons have a healthy con- 
science, Many a mean, dastardly boy is, 
at the age of puberty, transformed into a 
aerious and generous youth. 

The mildness of the following ages has 
not quite effaced these traits of Odin ; as 
the rudiment of a structure matured in 
the tiger is said to be still found un- 
Absorbed to the Cauc3.si^o Tho 


TRAITS. 

nation has a tough, acrid, animal natuisb 
1 which centuries of churching and civilising 
have ;not been able to sweeten, Alfieri 
j said, ** the crimes of Italy were the proof 
of the superiority of the stock and one 
I may say of England, that this watch 
moves on a splinter of adamant. The 
English uncultured are a brutal nation. 
The crimes recorded in their calendars 
leave nothing to be desired in the way of 
cold malignity, Dear to the English 
heart is a fair stand-up fight. The bru- 
tality of the manners in the lower class 
appears in the boxing, bear-baiting, cock- 
figliting, love of executions, and in the 
readiness for a set-to in the streets, 
delightful to the English of all classes. 
The costermongers of London streets hold 
cowardice in loathing — ‘‘we must work 
our fists well ; we are all handy with our 
fists.” The public schools are charged 
with being bear-gardens of brutal strength, 
and are liked by the people for that cause. 
The fagging is a trait of the same quality. 
Medwin, in the Life of Shelley, relates, 
that, at a military school, they rolled up a 
young man in a snowball, and left him so 
in his room, while the other cadets went 
to church — and crippled him for life. 
They have retained impressment, deck- 
flogging, army-flogging, and school- 
flogging. Such is the ferocity of the army 
discipline, that a soldier sentenced to 
flogging, sometimes prays that his sen- 
tence may be commuted to death. Flog- 
ging banished from the armies of Western 
Europe, remains here by the sanction of 
the Duke of Wellington. The right of tho 
husband to sell the wife has been retained 
down to our times. Tho Jews have been 
the favourite victims of royal and popular 
persecution, Henry III. mortgaged all 
the Jews in the kingdom to his brother, 
the Earl of Cornwall, as security for 
money which he borrowed. The torture 
of criminals, and the rack for extorting 
evidence, were slowly disused. Of the 
criminal statutes, Sir Samuel Romilly 
said, ” I have examined the codes of all 
nations, and ours is the worst, and worthy 
of the Anthropophagi.” In the last session, 
the House of Commons was listening to 
details of flogging and torture practised in 
the jails. 

As soon as this land, thus geographi- 
cally posted, got a hardy people into it, 
they could not help becoming the sailor# 
and factors of the globe. From childhood, 
they dabbled in water, they swum like 
fishes, their playthings were boats. In 
the case of the shjp-money, the judge# 



RACE. 


delivered it for law, that “ England being ] 
an island, the very midland shires therein 
are all to be accounted maritime : ’* and | 
Fuller adds, “ tlie genius even of land- ^ 
locked countries driving the natives with | 
a maritime dexterity.” As early as the I 
conquest, it is remarked in explanation of 
the wealth of England, that its merchants 
trade to all countries. 

The English, at the present day, have 
great vigour of body and endurance. 
Other countrymen look slight and under- 
sized beside them, and invalids. They 
are bigger men than the Americans. I 
suppose a hundred English taken at 
random out of the street would weigh a 
fourth more than so many Americans. 
Yet, I am told, the skeleton is not larger. 
They are round, ruddy, and handsome ; at 
least, the whole bust is well formed ; and 
there is a tendency to stout and powerful 
frames. I remarked the stoutness, on my 
first landing at Liverpool ; porter, dray- 
man, coachman, guard — what substantial, 
respectable, grandfatherly figures, with 
costume and manners to suit. The 
American has arrived at the old mansion- 
house, and finds himself among uncles, 
aunts, and grandsires. The pictures on 
the chimney-tiles of his nursery were 
pictures of these people. Here they are 
^n the identical costumes and air, which 
ao took him. ; 

It is the fault of their forms that they 
grow stocky, and the women have that 
disadvantage —few tall, slender figures of 
flowing shape, but stunted and thickset 
persons. The French say, that the English- 
women have two left hands. But, in all 
ages, they are a handsome race. The 
bronze monuments of crusaders lying 
cross-legged, in the Temple Church at 
London, and those in Worcester and in 
Salisbury Cathedrals, which are seven 
hundred years old, are of the same type 
as the best youthful heads of men now in 
England — please by beauty of the same 
character, an expression blending good- 
nature, valour, and refinement, and, 
mainly, by that uncorrupt youth in the 
face of manhood, which is daily seen in the 
ttreets of London. 

Both branches ot the Scandinavian race 
are distinguished for beauty. The anec- 
dote of the handsome captives which 
Saint Gregory found at Rome, A. D. 600, 
is matched by the testimony of the Norman 
chroniclers, five centuries later, who won- 
dered at the be'*uty and long flowing hair 
of the young English captives. Meantime, 
the Heimskringla has frequent occasion 


247 

to speak of the personal beauty of its 
heroes. When it is considered what 
humanity, what resources of mental and 
I moral power, the traits of the blond race 
I betoken — its accession to empire marks a 
new and finer epoch, wherein the old 
mineral force shall be subjugated at last 
by humanity, and shall pluugh in its 
furrow henceforward. It is not a final 
race, once a crab always crab, but a race 
with a future. 

On the English face are combined de- 
cision and nerve, with the fair complexion, 
blue eyes, and open and florid aspect. 
Hence the love of truth, hence the sensi- 
bility, the fine perception, and poetic 
construction. The fair Saxon man, with 
open front, and honest meaning, domestic, 
affectionate, is not the wood out of which 
cannibal, or inquisitor, or assassin is 
made. But he is moulded lor law, lawful 
trade, civility, marriage, the nurture of 
children, for colleges, churches, charities, 
and colonies. 

They are rather manly than warlike. 
When the war is over, the mask falls from 
the affectionate and domestic tastes, 
which make them women in kindness. 
This union of qualities is fabled in their 
national legend of ” Beauty and the Beast,' 
or long before, in the Greek legend of 
“ Hermaphrodite.” The two sexes are co- 
present in the English mind. I apply to 
Britannia, queen of seas and colonies, the 
words in which her latest novelist por- 
trays his heroine : ” She is as mild as she 
is game, and as game as she is mild.” 
The English delight in the antagonism 
which combines in one person the ex- 
tremes of courage and tenderness. 
Nelson, dying at Trafalgar, sends his love 
to Lord Collingwood, and, like an innocent 
school-boy that goes to bed, says, 
“ Kiss me, Hardy,” and turns to sleep. 
Lord Collingwood, his comrade, was of a 
nature the most affectionate and domestic. 
Admiral Rodney’s figure approached to 
delicacy and effeminacy, and he declared 
himself very sensible to fear, which he 
surmounted only by considerations of 
honour and public duty. Clarendon says, 
the Duke of Buckingham was so modest 
and gentle, that some courtiers attempted 
to put affronts on him, until they found 
that this modesty and effeminacy wai 
only a mask for the most terrible deter- 
mination. And Sir Edward Parry said, 
the other day, of Sir John Franklin, that, 
” if he found Wellington Sound open, he 
explored it ; for he was a man who never 
turned bis back on a danger, yet of that 

» • 



248 


ENGLISH TRAITS, 


tenderness, that he would not brush away 
a mosquito.” Even for their highwaymen 
the same virtue is claimed, and Robin 
Hood comes described to us as mUissimus 
pYadonwn^ the gentlest thief. But they 
know where their war-dogs lie. Cromwell, 
Blake, Marlborough, Chatham, Nelson, 
and Wellington are not to be trifled with, 
and the brutal strength which lies at the 
bottom of society, the animal ferocity of 
the quays and cockpits, the bullies of the 
costermongers of Shoreditch, Seven Dials, 
and Spitalfields, they know how to wake 
up. 

They have a vigorous health, and last 
well into middle and old age. The old 
men are as red as roses, and still hand- 
some. A clear skin, a peach-bloom com- 
plexion, and good teeth, are found all 
over the island. They use a plentiful 
and nutritious diet. The operative cannot 
subsist on water-cresses. Beef, mutton, 
wheat-bread, and malt-liquors are uni- 
versal among the first-class labourers. 
Good feeding is a chief point of national 
pride among the vulgar, and, in their 
caricatures, they represent the Frenchman 
as a poor, starved body. It is curious 
that Tacitus found the English beer 
already in use among the Germans : 
” they make from barley or wheat a drink 
corrupted into some resemblance to wine.” 
Lord Chief Justice Fortescue in Henry 
VI. ’s time, says; “The inhabitants of 
England drink no water, unless at certain 
times, on a religious score, and by way of 
penance.” The extremes of poverty and 
ascetic penance, it would seem, never | 
reach cold water in England. Wood, the 
antiquary, in describing the poverty and 
maceration of Father Lacey, an English 
Jesuit, does not deny him beer. He says, 
” his bed was under a thatching, and the 
way to it up a ladder ; his fare was 
coarse ; his drink, of a penny a gawn, or 
gallon.” 

They have more constitutional energy 
than any other people. They think, with 
Henri Quatre, that manly exercises are 
the foundation of that elevation of mind 
which gives one nature ascendant over 
another ; or, with the Arabs, that the days 
spent in the chase are not counted in the 
length of life. They box, run, shoot, ride, 
row, and sail from pole to pole. They 
eat and drink, and live jolly in the open 
air, putting a bar of solid sleep between 
day and day. They walk and ride as fast 
as they can, their heads bent forward, as 
if urged on some pressing affair. The 
French say, that Englishmen in the street 


always walk straight before tnem ItJM 
mad dogs. Men and women walk with 
infatuation. As soon as he can handle a 
gun, hunting is the fine art of every 
Englishman of condition, They are the 
most voracious people of prey that ever 
existed. Every season turns out the aris- 
tocracy into the country, to shoot and fish. 
The more vigorous run out of the island 
to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa, 
and Australia, to hunt with fury oy gun, 
by trap, by harpoon, by lasso, with dog, 
with horse, with elephant, or with drome- 
dary, all the game that is in nature. 
These men have written the game-books 
of all countries, as Hawker, Scropo, 
Murray, Herbert, Maxwell, Gumming, and 
a host of travellers. The people at home 
are addicted to boxing, running, leaping, 
and rowing matches. 

I suppose, the dogs and horses must be 
thanked for the fact, that the men have 
muscles almost as tough and supple as 
their own. If in every efficient man, there 
is first a fine animal, in the English race 
it is of the best breed, a wealthy, juicy, 
broad-chested creature, steeped in ale 
and good cheer, and a little overloaded by 
his flesh. Men of animal nature rely, like 
animals, on their instincts. The English- 
man associates well with dogs and horses. 
His attachment to the horse arises from 
the courage and address required to man- 
age it. The horse finds out who is afraid 
of it, and does not disguise its opinion. 

I Their young boiling clerks and lusty col- 
I legians like the company of horses better 
j than the company of professors. I sup- 
* pose, the horses are better company for 
them. The horse has more uses than 
Buffon noted. If you go into the streets, 
every driver in ’bus or dray is a bully, and, 
if I wanted a good troop of soldiers, I 
should recruit among the stables. Add a 
certain degree of refinement to the viva- 
city of these riders, and you obtain the 
precise quality which makes the men and 
women of polite society formidable. 

They come honestly by their horseman- 
ship, with Hengst and Horsa for their 
Saxon founders. The other branch of 
their race had been Tartar nomads. The 
horse was all their wealth. The children 
were fed on mares’ milk. The pastures of 
Tartary were still remembered by the 
tenacious practice of the Norsemen to oat 
horse-fiesh at religious feasts. In the 
Danish invasions, the marauders seized 
upon horses where they landed, and were 
at once converted into a body of expert 
cavalry, 



ABILITY. 


At one time, this skill seems to have 
declined. Two centuries ago, the English 
horse never performed any eminent service 
beyond the seas ; and the reason assigned, 
was, that the genius of the English hath 
always more inclined them to foot- 
service, as pure and proper manhood, 
without any mixture ; whilst, in a victory 
on horseback, the credit ought to be 
divided betwixt the man and his horse. 
But in two hundred years, a change has 
taken place. Now, they boast that they 
understand horses better than any other 
people in the world, and that their horses 
are become their second selves, 

“ William the Conqueror being,** says 
Camden, “ better affected to beasts than 
to men, imposed heavy fines and punish- 
ments on those that should meddle with 
his game.” The Saxon Chronicle says, 
he loved the tall deer as if he were their 
father.*' And rich Englishmen have fol- 
lowed his example, according to their 
ability, ever since, in encroaching on the 
tillage and commons with their game- 
preserves. It is a proverb in England, 
that it is safer to shoot a man than a hare. 
The severity of the game-laws certainly 
indicates an extravagant sympathy of the 
nation with horses and hunters. The 
gentlemen are always on horseback, and 
have brought horses to an ideal perfection 
— the English racer is a factitious breed. 
A score or two of mounted gentlemen may 
frequently be seen running like centaurs 
down a hill nearly as steep as the roof of 
a house. Every inn-room is lined with 
pictures of races; telegraphs communi- 
cate, every hour, tidings of the heats from 
Newmarket and Ascot ; and the House of 
Commons adjourns over the “ Derby Day.* 


ABILITY. 

The Saxon and the Northman are both 
Scandinavians. History does not allow us 
to fix the limits of the application of these 
names with any accuracy ; but from the 
residence of a portion of these people in 
France, and from some effect of that 
powerful soil on their blood and manners, 
the Norman has come popularly to repre- 
sent in England the aristocratic, and the 
Saxon the democratic principle. And 
though, I doubt not, the nobles are of both 
tribes, and the workers of both, yet we 
are forced to use the names a little mythi- 
cally, one to represent the worker, and the 
other the enjoyer. 


249 

The island was a prize for the best race* 
Each of the dominant races tried its for- 
tune in turn. The Phoenician, the Celt^ 
and the Goth, had already got in. The 
Roman came, but in the very day when his 
fortune culminated. Ho looked in the 
eyes of a new people that was to supplant 
his own. He disembarked his legions, 
erected his camps and towers — presently 
he heard bad news from Italy, and worse 
and worse, every year : at last, he made a 
handsome complement of roads and walls, 
and departed. But the Saxon seriously 
settled in the land, builded, tilled, fished, 
and traded, with German truth and ad- 
hesiveness. The Dane came, and divided 
with him. Last of all, the Norman, or 
French-Dane, arrived, and formally con* 
quered, harried, and ruled the kingdom. 
A century later, it came out, that the 
Saxon had the most bottom and longevity, 
had managed to make the victory speak 
the language and accept the law and 
usage of the victim ; forced the baron to 
dictate Saxon terms to Norman kings ; and 
step by step, got all the essential securities 
of civil liberty invented and confirmed. 
The genius of the race and the genius of 
the place conspired to this effect. 'The 
island is lucrative to free labour, but not 
worth possession on other terms. The 
race was so intellectual, that a feudal or 
military tenure could not last longer 
than the war. The power of the Saxon- 
Danes, so thoroughly beaten in the 
war, that the name of English and vil- 
lein were synonymous, yet so vivacious 
as to extort charters from the kings, 
stood on the strong personality of these 
people. Sense and economy must rule 
in a world which is made of sense and 
economy, and the banker, with his seven 
per cent., drives the earl out of his castle. 
A nobility of soldiers cannot keep down 
a commonalty of shrewd scientific per- 
sons. What signifies a pedigree of a hun- 
dred links, against a cotton-spinner with 
steam in his mill ; or, against a company 
of broad-shouldered Liverpool merchants, 
for whom Stephenson and Brunei are 
contriving locomotives and a tubular 
bridge ? 

These Saxons are the hands of man- 
kind. They have the taste for toil, a 
distaste for pleasure or repose, and the 
telescopi® appreciation of distant gain. 
They are the wealth-makers — and by dint 
of mental faculty which has its own con- 
ditions. The Saxon works after liking* 
or, only for himself ; and to set him at 
work* and to begin to draw his monstrouf 



250 


ENGLISH TRAITS. 


values out of barren Britain, all dishonour, 
fret, and barrier, must be removed, and 
then his energies begin to play. 

The Scandinavian fancied himself sur- 
rounded by Trolls — a kind of goblin men, 
with vast power of work and skilful pro- 
duction -divine stevedores, carpenters, 
reapers, smiths, and masons, swift to re- 
ward every kindness done them, with gifts 
of gold and silver. In all English history, 
this dream comes to pass. Certain Trolls 
or working brains, under the names of 
Alfred, Bede, Caxton, Bracton, Camden, 
Drake, Selden, Dugdale, Newton, Gibbon, 
Brindley, Watt, Wedgwood, dwell in the 
troll-mounts of Britain, and turn the 
sweat of their face to power and re- 
nown. 

If the race is good, so is the place. 
Nobody landed on this spell-bound island 
with impunity. The enchantments of 
barren shingle and rough weather trans- 
formed every adventurer into a labourer. 
Each vagabond tliat arrived bent his neck 
to the yoke of gain, or found the air too 
tense for him. The strong survived, the 
weaker went to the ground. Even the 
pleasure-hunters and sots of England are 
of a tougher texture. A hard tempera- 
ment had been formed by Saxon and 
Saxon-Dane, and such of these French or 
Normans as could reach it, were natural- 
ised in every sense. 

All the admirable expedients or means 
hit upon in England, must be looked at as 
growths or irresistible offshoots of the 
expanding mind of the race. A man of 
that brain thinks and acts thus; and his 
neighbour, being afflicted with the same 
kind of brain, though he is rich, and called 
a baron, or a duke, thinks the same thing, j 
and is ready to allow the justice of the! 
thought and act in his retainer or tenant, I 
though sorely against his baronial or ducal 
will 

The island was renowned in antiquity 
for its breed of mastiffs, so fierce, that 
when their teeth were set, you must cut 
their heads off to part them. The man 
was like his dog. The people have that 
nervous bilious temperament, which is 
known by medical men to resist every 
means employed to make its possessor 
subservient to the will of others. The 
English game is main force to main force, 
the planting of foot to foot, fair play and 
open field — a rough tug without trick or 
dodging, till one or both come to pieces. 
King Ethelwald spoke the language of his 
race, when he planted himself at Wim- j 
bgrao, said, •* be would do one of two I 


things, or there live, or there He.*' They 
hate craft and subtlety. They neithef 
poison, nor waylay, nor assassinate ; anf, 
when they have pounded each other to a 
poultice, they will shake hands and be 
friends for the remainder of their lives. 

You shall trace these Gothic touches at 
school, at country fairs, at the hustings, 
and in parliament. No artifice, no breach 
of truth and plain dealing — not so much as 
secret ballot, is suffered in the island. In 
parliament, the tactics of the opposition 
is to resist every step of the government, 
by a pitiless attack ; and in a bargain, no 
prospect of advantage is so dear to the 
merchant, as the thought of being tricked 
is mortifying. 

Sir Kenelm Digby, a courtier of Charles 
and James, who won the sea-fight of Scan- 
deroon, was a model Englishman in his 
day. “ His person was handsome and 
gigantic, he had so graceful elocution and 
I noble address, that, had he been dropt 
! out of the clouds in any part of the world, 

I he would have made himself respected ; 

' he was skilled in six tongues, and master 
of arts and arms.” * Sir Kenelm wrote a 
book, ” Of Bodies and of Souls,” in which 
he propounds, that ” syllogism do breed 
or rather are all the varieties of man’« 
life. They are the steps by which we 
walk in all our businesses. Man, as he ia 
man, doth nothing else but weave such 
chains. Whatsoever he doth, swarving 
from this work, lie doth as deficient from 
the nature of man : and, if he do aught 
beyond this, by breaking out into divers 
sorts of exterior actions, he findeth, 
nevertheless, in this linked sequel of sim- 
ple discourses, the art, the cause, the 
rule, the bounds, and the model of it.” + 

There spoke the genius of the English 
people. There is a necessity on them to 
be logical. They would hardly greet the 
good that did not logically fall— as if it 
excluded their own merit, or shook their 
understandings. They are jealous of 
minds that have much facility of associa- 
tion, [from an instinctive fear that the 
seeing many relations to their thought 
might impair this serial continuity and 
lucrative concentration. They are im- 
patient of genius, or of minds addicted to 
contemplation, and cannot conceal their 
contempt for sallies of thought, however 
lawful, whose steps they cannot count by 
their wonted rule. Neither do they reckon 
better a syllogism that ends in syllogism* 

* Antony Wood, 

Man’s boule, p. 



ABIUT?. 


for thfey havG a supreme eye to facts, 
and theirs is a logic that brings salt to 
soup, hammer to nail, oar to boat, the 
logic of cooks, carpenters, and chemists, 
following the sequence of nature, and one 
on which words make no impression. 
Their mind is not dazzled by its own 
means, but locked and bolted to results. 
They love men, who, like Samuel John- 
son, a doctor in the schools, would jump 
out of his syllogism the instant his major 
proposition was in danger, to save that, 
at all hazards. Their practical vision is 
spacious, and they can hold many threads 
without entangling them. All the steps 
they orderly take ; but with the high logic 
of never confounding the minor and 
major proposition ; keeping their eye on 
their aim, in all the complicity and delay 
incident to the several series of means 
they employ. There is room in their 
minds for this and that— a science of 
degrees. In the courts, the independence 
of the judges and the loyalty of the 
suitors are equally excellent. In Parlia- 
ment, they have hit on that capital inven- 
tion of freedom, a constitutional opposi- 
tion. And when courts and parliament 
are both deaf, the plaintiff is not silenced. 
Calm, patient, his weapon of defence 
from year to year is the obstinate repro- 
duction of the grievance, with calcula- 
tions and estimates. But, meantime, he 
is drawing numbers and money to his 
opinion, resolved that if all remedy fails, 
right of revolution is at the bottom of his 
charter-box. They are bound to see 
their measure carried, and stick to it 
through ages of defeat. 

Into this English logic, however, an 
infusion of justice enters, not so apparent 
in other races — a belief in the existence 
of two sides, and the resolution to see 
fair play. There is on every question, an 
appeal from the assertion of the parties, 
to the proof of what is asserted. They 
are impious in their scepticism of a 
theory, but kiss the dust before a fact. Is 
it a machine, is it a charter, is it a boxer 
in the ring, is it a candidate on the hust- 
ings — the universe of Englishmen will 
suspend their judgment until the trial 
can be had. They are not to be led by a 
phrase, they want a working plan, a work- 
ing machine, a working constitution, and 
will sit out the trial, and abide by the 
issue, and reject all preconceived theo- 
ries. In politics they put blunt questions, 
which must be answered ; who is to pay 
the taxes ? what will you do for trade ? 
what for com ? what for the spinne\T 


This singular fairness and its results 
strike the French with surprise. Philip 
de Commines says : “ Now, in my opinion, 
among all the sovereignties I know in the 
world, that in which the public good is 
best attended to, and the least violence 
exercised on the people, is that of Eng- 
land." Life is safe, and personal rights; 
and what is freedom, without security ? 
whilst, in France, “ fraternity," " equa- 
lity," and ‘‘ indivisible unity," are names 
for assassination. Montesquieu said: 
" England is the freest country in the 
world. If a man in England had as many 
enemies as hairs on his head, no harm 
would happen to him." 

Their self-respect, their faith in causa- 
tion, and their realistic logic or coupling 
of means to ends, have given them the 
leadersliip of the modern world, Mon- 
tesquieu said : “ No people have true 
common sense but those who are borji in 
England." This common sense is a per- 
ception of all the conditions of our 
earthly existence, of laws that can be 
stated, and of laws that cannot be stated, 
or that are learned only by practice, in 
' which allowance for friction is made. 
They are impious in their scepticism of 
theory, and in high departments they are 
cramped and sterile. But the uncondi- 
tional surrender to facts, and the choice 
of means to reach their ends, are as 
admirable as with ants and bees. 

The bias of the nation is a passion for 
utility. They love the lever, the screw, 
and pulley, the Flanders draught-horse, 
the waterfall, wind-mills, tide mills; the sea 
and the wind to bear their freight ships. 
More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, which 
glitters among their crown jewels, they 
prize that dull pebble which is wiser than 
a man, whose poles turn themselves to 
the poles of the world, and whose axis is 
parallel to the axis of the world. Now, 
their toys are steam and galvanism. They 
are heavy at the fine arts, but adroit at 
the coarse; not good in jewellery or 
mosaics, but the best iron-masters, col- 
liers, wool-combers, and tanners in 
Europe. They apply themselves to agri- 
culture, to draining, to resisting encroach- 
ments of sea, wind, travelling sands, cold 
and wet subsoil ; to fishery, to manufac- 
ture of indispensable staples — salt, plum- 
bago, leather, wool, glass, pottery, and 
brick— to bees and silkworms; and by 
their steady combinations they succeed. 
A manufacturer sits down to dinner in a 
suit of clothes which was wool on a sheep’6 
back at sunrise. You diae with a gently 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 


2sa 

man on venison, pheasant, quail, pigeons, 
poultry, mushrooms, and pine-apples, all 
the growth of his estate. They are neat 
husbands for ordering all their tools per- 
taining to house and field. All are well 
kept. There is no want and no waste. 
They study use and fitness in their 
building, in the order of their dwellings, 
and in their dress. The Frenchman in- 
vented the ruffle, the Englishman added 
the shirt. The Englishman wears a sen- 
sible coat buttoned to the chin, of rough 
but solid and lasting texture. If he is a 
lord, he dresses a little worse than a com- 
moner. They have diffused the taste for 
plain substantial hats, shoes, and coats 
through Europe. They think him the 
best dressed man, whose dress is so fit for 
his use that you cannot notice or re- 
member to describe it. 

They secure the essentials in their diet, 
in their arts, and manufactures. Every 
article of cutlery shows, in its shape, 
thought and long experience of workmen, 
They put the expense in the right place, 
as, in their sea-steamers, in the solidity 
of the machinery and the strength of the 
boat. The admirable equipment of their 
arctic ships carries London to the pole. 
They build roads, aqueducts, warm and 
ventilate houses. And they have im- 
pressed their directness and practical 
habit on modern civilization. 

In trade, the Englishman believes that 
nobody breaks who ought not to break ; 
and, that, if he do not make trade every- 
thing, it will make him nothing ; and acts 
on this belief. The spirit of system, at- 
tention to details, and the subordination 
of details, or, the not driving things too 
finely (which is charged on the Germans), 
constitute that despatch of business, which 
makes the mercantile power of England, 

In war, the Englishman looks to his 
means. He is of the opinion of Civilis, 
his German ancestor, whom Tacitus 
reports as holding “ that the gods are on 
the side of the strongest ” — a sentence 
which Bonaparte unconsciously trans- 
lated, when he said, “that he had 
noticed, that Providence always favoured 
the heaviest battalion.” Their military 
tTrtience propounds that if the weight of 
advancing column is greater than 
V'^at of the resisting, the latter is des- 
tsroyed. Therefore Wellington, when he 
came to the army in Spain, had every 
man weighed, first with accoutrements, 
and then without; believing that the 
terce of an army depended on the weight 
power of the individual soldiers, in 


spite of cannon. Lord Paimerston told 
the House of Commons, that more care 
is taken of the health and ct?mfort of 
English troops than of any other troops 
in the world ; and that hence the English 
can put more men into the rank, on the 
day of action, on the field of battle, than 
any other army. Before the bombard- 
ment of the Danish forts in the Baltic, 
Nelson spent day after day, himself in 
the boats, on the exhausting service of 
sounding the channel. Clerk of Eldin's 
celebrated manoeuvre of breaking the 
line of sea-battle, and Nelson’s feat of 
doubling, or stationing his ships one on' 
the outer bow, and another on the outer 
quarter of each of the enemy’s were only 
translations into naval tactics of Bona- 
parte’s rule of concentration. Lord 
Collingwood was accustomed to tell his 
men, that if they could fire three well- 
directed broadsides in five minutes, no 
vessel could resist them ; and from con- 
stant practice, they came to do it in three 
minutes and a half. 

But conscious that no race of better 
men exists, they rely most on the simp- 
lest means ; and do not like ponderous 
and difficult tactics, but delight to bring 
the affair hand to hand, where the victory 
lies with the strength, courage, and 
endurance of the iridividual combatants. 
They adopt every improvement in rig, in 
motor, in weapons, but they fundamen- 
tally believe that the best stratagem in 
naval war is to lay ycur ship close along- 
side of the enemy’s ship, and bring all 
your guns to bear on him, until you or ho 
go to the bottom. This is the old fashion, 
which never goes out of fashion, neither 
in nor out of England. 

It is not usually a point of honour, nor 
a religious sentiment, and never any 
whim that they will shed their blood for ; 
but usually property, and right measured 
by property, that breeds revolution. They 
have no Indian taste for a tomahawk- 
dance, no French taste for a badge or a 
proclamation. The Englishman is peace- 
ably minding his business and earning 
his day’s wages. But if you offer to lay 
hand on his day’s wages, on his cow, or 
his right in common, or his shop, he will 
fight to the Judgment. Magna-charta, 
jury-trial, habeas-corpus, star-chamber, 
ship-money. Popery, Plymouth colony, 
American Revolution, are all questions 
involving a yeoman’s right to his dinner, 
and, except as touching that, would not 
have lashed the British nation to rage and 
revolt. 



ABILITY. 


253 


Whilst they are thus instinct with a 
spirit of order, and of calculation, it must 
be owned they are capable of larger 
views ; but the indulgence is expensive to 
them, costs great crises, or accumulations, 
of mental power. In common, the horse I 
works best with blinders. Nothing is 
more in the line of English thought 
than our unvarnished Connecticut ques- 
tion: “Pray, sir, how do you get your 
living when you are at home ? ” The 
questions of freedom, of taxation, of privi- 
lege, are money questions. Heavy fellows, 
steeped in beer and flesh-pots, they are 
hard of hearing and dim of sight. Their 
drowsy minds need to be flagellated by 
war and trade and politics and persecu- 
tion. They cannot well read a principle, 
except by the light of fagots and of burning 
towns. I 

Tacitus says of the Germans, “ power- 
ful only in sudden efforts, they are im- 
patient of toil and labour.” This highly 
destined race, if it had not somewhere 
added the chamber of patience to its 
brain, would not have built London. I 
know not from which of the tribes and 
temperaments that went to the compo- 
sition of the people this tenacity was 
supplied, but they clinch every nail they 
drive. They have no running for luck, 
and no immoderate speed. They spend 
largely on their fabric, and await the slow 
return. Their leather lies tanning seven 
years in the vat. At Rogers’s mills, in 
Sheffield, where I was shown the process 
of making a razor and a penknife, I was 
told there is no luck in making good 
steel ; that they make no mistakes, every 
blade in the hundred and in the thousand 
is good. And that is characteristic of all 
their work — no more is attempted than is 
done. 

When Thor and his companions arrive 
at Utgard, he is told that “ nobody is 
permitted to remain hero, unless he 
understand some art, and excel in it all 
other men,” The same question is still 
put to the posterity of Thor. A nation of 
labourers, every man is trained in some 
one art or detail, and aims at perfection 
in that : not content unless he has some- 
thing in which he thinks he surpasses I 
all other men. Ho would rather not 1 
do anything at all, than not do it well.! 
I suppose no people have such thorough- 
ness; from the highest to the lowest, 
every man meaning to be master of his 
art. 

“To show capacity,’* a Frenchman 
described as the end of a speech in de- 


bate : ** no,” said an Englishman, “ but 
to set your shoulder to the wheel — to ad- 
vance the business.” Sir Samuel Romilly 
refused to speak in popt^ar assemblies, 
confining himself to the House of Com- 
j mons, where a measure can be carried by 
a speech. The business of the House of 
[ Commons is conducted by a few persons, 
but these are hard-worked. Sir Robert 
Peel “ knew the Blue Books by heart.” 
His colleagues and rivals carry Hansard 
in their heads. The high civil and legal 
offices are not beds of ease, but posts 
which exact frightful amounts of mental 
labour. Many of the great leaders, like 
Pitt, Canning, Castlereagh, Romilly, are 
soon worked to death. There are excellent 
judges in England of a good worker, and 
when they find one, like Clarendon, Sir 
Philip Warwick, Sir William Coventry, 
Ashley, Burke, Thurlow, Mansfield, Pitt, 
Eldon, Peel, or Russell, there is nothing 
too good or too high for him. 

They have a wonderful heat in the pur- 
suit of a public aim. Private persons 
exhibit, in scientific and antiquarian re- 
searches, the same pertinacity as the 
nations showed in the coalitions in which 
it yoked Europe against the Empire of 
Bonaparte, one after the other defeated, 
and still renewed, until the sixth hurled 
him from his seat. 

Sir John Herschel, in completion of the 
work of his father, who had made the 
catalogue of the stars of the northern 
hemisphere, expatriated himself for yean 
at the Cape of Good Hope, finished his 
inventory of the southern heaven, came 
home, and redacted it in eight years 
more — a work whose value does not begin 
until thirty years have elapsed, and 
thenceforward a record to all ages of the 
highest import. The Admiralty sent out 
the Arctic expeditions year after year, in 
search of Sir John Franklin, until, at last, 
they have threaded their way through 
polar pack and Behring’s Straits, and 
solved the geographical problem. Lord 
Elgin, at Athens, saw the imminent ruin 
of the Greek remains, set up his scaffold- 
ings, in spite of epigrams, and, after five 
years’ labour to collect them, got his 
marbles on shipboard. The ship struck 
a rock, and went to the bottom. He had 
them all fished up, by divers, at a vast 
expense, and brought to London; not 
knowing that Haydon, Fuseli, and Canova, 
and all good heads in all the world, were 
to be his applauders. In the same spirit, 
were the excavation and research by Sir 
Charles Fellowes for the Xanthian moau* 



^254 


ENGLISH TRAITS. 


meat; and of Layard, for his Nineveh 
sculptures. 

The nation sits in the immense city they 
have builded, a London extended into 
every man’s mind, though he live in Van 
Dieman’s Land or Capetown. Faithful 
performance of what is undertaken to be 
performed, they honour in themselves, 
and exact in others, as certificate of 
equality with themselves. The modern 
world is theirs. They have made and 
make it day by day. The commercial 
relations of the world are so intimately 
drawn to London, that every dollar on 
earth contributes to the strength of the 
English government. And if all the 
wealth in the planet should perish by war 
or deluge, they know themselves com- 
petent to replace it. 

They have approved their Saxon blood, 
by their sea-going qualities ; their descent 
from Odin’s smiths, by their hereditary 
skill in working in iron; their British 
birth, by husbandry and immense wheat 
harvests; and justified their occupancy of 
the centre of habitable land, by their 
supreme ability and cosmopolitan spirit. 
They have tilled, builded, forged, spun, 
and woven. They have made the island 
a thoroughfare; and London a shop, a 
law-court, a record-office, and scientific 
bureau, inviting to strangers ; a sanctuary 
to refugees of every political and religious 
opinion; and such a city, that almost 
every active man, in any nation, finds 
himself, at one time or other, forced to 
visit it. 

In every path of practical activity, they 
have gone even with the best. There is 
no secret of war, in which they have not 
shown mastery. The steam-chamber of 
Watt, the locomotive of Stephenson, the 
cotton-mule of Roberts, perform the 
labour of the world. There is no depart- 
ment of literature, of science, or of useful 
art, in which they have not produced a 
first-rate book. It is England, whose 
opinion is waited for on the merit of a 
new invention, an improved science. And 
in the complications of the trade and 
olitics of their vast empire, they have 
een equal to every exigency, with counsel 
and with conduct. Is it their luck, or is 
it in the chambers of their brain — it is 
their commercial advantage, that what- 
ever light appears in better method or 
happy invention, breaks out in their race. 
They are a family to which a destiny 
attaches, ^d the Banshee has sworn that 
a male heir shall never be wanting. They 
have a wealth of men to fill important 


posts, and the vigilance of party ciftielsm 
insures the selection of a competent person 

A proof of the energy of the British 
people is the highly artificial construction 
of the whole fabric. The climate and 
geography, I said, were factitious, as if 
the hands of man had arranged the con- 
ditions. The same character pervades 
the whole kingdom. Bacon said, “ Rome 
was a state not subject to paradoxes ; ” 
but England subsists by antagonisms and 
contradictions. The foundations of its 
greatness are the rolling waves; and, 
from first to last, it is a museum of anom- 
alies. This foggy and rainy country 
furnishes the world witn astronomical 
observations. Its short rivers do not 
afford water power, but the land shakes 
under the thunder of the mills. There is 
no gold-mine of any importance, but there 
is more gold in England than in all other 
countries. It is too far north for the 
culture of the vine, but the wines of all 
countries are in its docks. The French 
Comte de Lauraguais said ; “ no fruit 
ripens in England but a baked apple;” 
but oranges and pine apples are as cheap 
in London as in the Mediterranean. The 
Mark Lane Express, or the Custom 
House Returns bear out to the letter tho 
vaunt of Pope — 

*' Let India boast her palms, nor envy we 

The weeping amber, nor the spicy tree. 

While, by our oaks, those precious loads arc 
borne, 

And realms commanded which those trees 
adorn.** 

The native cattle are extinct, but the 
island is full of artificial breeds. The 
agriculturist Bakewell created sheep and 
cows and horses to order, and breeds in 
which everything was omitted but what 
is economical. The cow is sacrificed to 
'her bag, the ox to his sirloin. Stall- 
I feeding makes sperm-mills of the cattle, 
and converts the stable to a chemical fac- 
tory. The river, lakes, and ponds, too 
much fished, or obstructed by factories, 
are artificially filled with the eggs of sal- 
mon, turbot, and herring. 

Chat Moss and the fens of Lincolnshire 
and Cambridgeshire are unhealthy and too 
barren to pay rent. By cylindrical tiles, 
and gutta-percha tubes, five millions of 
acres of bad land have been drained and 
put on equality with the best, for rape- 
culture and grass. The climate too, 
which was already believed to have be- 
come milder and drier by the enormoua 
consumption of coal, is so far reached by 



ABILITY. 


this new action, that fogs and storms are 
said to disappear. In due course, all 
England will be drained and rise a second 
time out of the waters , The latest step 
was to call in the aid of steam to agricul- 
ture. Steam is almost an Englishman. I 
do not know but they will send him to 
Parliament, next, to make laws. He 
weaves, forges, saws, pounds, fans, and 
now he must pump, grind, dig, and plough 
for the farmer. The markets created by 
the manufacturing population have erec- 
ted agriculture into a great thriving and 
spending industry. The value of the 
houses in Britain is equal to the value of 
the soil. Artificial aids of all kinds are j 
cheaper than the natural resources. No 1 
man can afford to walk, when the parlia- 
mentary train carries him for a penny a 
mile. Gas-burners are cheaper than day- 
light in numberless floors in the cities. 
All the houses in London buy their water. 
The English trade does not exist for the 
exportation of native products, but on its 
manufactures, or the making well every- 
thing which is ill made elsewhere. They 
make ponchos for the Mexican, bandannas 
for the Hindoo, ginseng for the Chinese, 
beads for the Indian, laces for the Flem- 
ings, telescopes for astronomers, cannons 
for kings. 

The Board of Trade caused the best 
models of Greece and Italy to be placed 
within the reach of every manufacturing 
population. They caused to be translated 
from foreign languages and illustrated by 
elaborate drawings, the most approved 
works of Munich, Berlin, and Paris. They 
have ransacked Italy to find new forms, to 
add a grace to the products of their looms, 
their potteries, and their foundries.* 

The nearer we look, the more artificial 
is their social system. Their law is a net- 
work of fictions. Their property, a scrip 
or certificate of right to interest on money 
that no man ever saw. Their social 
classes are made by statute. Their ratios 
of power and representation are historical 
and legal. The last reform-bill took away 
political power from a mound, a ruin, and 
a stone-wall, (whilst Birmingham and Man- 
chester, whose mills paid for the wars of 
Europe, had no representative. Purity 
in the elective Parliament is secured by 
the purchase of seats.! Foreign power is 

• See Memorial of H. Greenough, pp. 66, 
New York, 1853. 

t Sir S. Romilly, purest of English patriots, 
decided that the only independent mode of 
entering Parliament was to buy a seat, and be 
bought Horsham* 


25S 

kept by armed colofiie* ; power at home 
by a standing army of police. The pauper 
lives better than the free labourer ; the 
thief better than the pauper; and the 
transported felon better than the one 
under imprisonment. The crimes are 
factitious, as smuggling, poaching, non- 
conformity, heresy, and treason. Better, 
they say in England, kill a man than a 
hare. The sovereignty of the seas is 
maintained by the impressment of sea- 
men. “The impressment of seamen," 
said Lord Eldon, " is the life of our 
navy." Solvency is maintained by means 
of a national debt, on the principle, “if 
you will not lend me the money, how can 
I pay you?" For the administration of 
justice, Sir Samuel Romilly’s expedient 
for clearing the arrears of business in 
Chancery, was, the Chancellor’s staying 
away entirely from his court. Their 
system of education is factitious. The 
Universities galvanise dead languages into 
a semblance of life. Their church is 
artificial. The manners and customs of 
society are artificial — made-up men with 
made-up manners — and thus the whole 
is Birminghamised, and we have a nation 
whose existence is a work of art — a cold, 
barren, almost arctic isle, being made the 
most fruitful, luxurious, and imperial land 
in the whole earth. 

Man in England submits to be a pro- 
duct of political economy. On a bleak 
moor, a mill is built, a banking-house is 
opened, and men come in, as water in a 
sluice-way, and towns and cities rise. 
Man is made as a Birmingham button. 
The rapid doubling of the population 
dates from WatFs steam-engine. A land- 
lord, who owns a province, says : “ the 
tenantry are unprofitable ; let me have 
sheep." He unroofs the houses, and 
ships the population to America. The 
nation is accustomed to the instantan- 
eous creation of wealth. It is the maxim 
of their economists : “ that the greater 
part in value of the wealth now existing in 
England, has been produced by human 
hands within the last twelve months." 
Meantime, three or four days’ rain will 
reduce hundreds to starving in London. 

One secret of their power is their 
mutual good understanding. Not only 
good minds are born among them, but 
all the people have good minds. Every 
nation has yielded some good wit, if, as 
has chanced to many tribes, only one, 
But the intellectual organisation of the 
English admits a communicableness ol 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 


256 

knowledge and ideas among them all. 
An electric touch by any of their national 
ideas, melts them into one family, and 
brings the hoards of power which their 
individuality is always hiving, into use 
and play for all. Is it the smallness of 
the country, or is it the pride and affection 
of race — they have solidarity, or responsi- 
bleness, and trust in each other. 

Their minds, like wool, admit of a dye 
which is more lasting than the cloth. 
They embrace their cause with more 
tenacity than their life. Though not 
military, yet every common subject by 
the poll is fit to make a soldier of. These 
private reserved mute family-men can 
adopt a public end with all their heat, and 
this strength of affection makes the ro- 
mance of their heroes. The difference of 
rank does not divide the national heart. 
The Danish poet Oehlenschlager com- 
plains, that who writes in Danish writes 
to two hundred readers. In Germany, 
there is one speech for the learned » and 
another for the masses, to that extent, 
that, it is said, no sentiment or phrase 
from the works of any great German 
writer is ever heard among the lower 
classes. But in England, the language of 
the noble is the language of the poor. 
In Parliament, in pulpits, in theatres, 
when the speakers rise to thought and 
passion, the language becomes idiomatic ; 
the people in the street best understand 
the best words. And their language 
■eems drawn from the Bible, the common 
law, and the works of Shakespeare, Bacon, 
Milton, Pope, Young, Cowper, Burns, and 
Scott. The island has produced two or 
three of the greatest men that ever exist- 
ed, but they were not solitary in their 
own time. Men quickly embodied what 
Newton found out, in Greenwich Observa- 
tories, and practical navigation. The 
boys knew all that Hutton knew of strata, 
or Dalton of atoms, or Harvey of blood- 
vessels ; and these studies, once danger- 
ous, are in fashion. So what is invented 
or known in agriculture, or in trade, or in 
war, or in art, or in literature, and an- 
tiquities. A great ability, not amassed 
on a few giants, but poured into the gene- 
ral mind, so tkat each of them could at 
a pinch stanil ta the shoes of the other ; 
and they are aCDore bound in character 
than differenced in ability or in rank. 
The labourer is a possible lord. The 
lord is a possible basket-maker. Every 
man carries the English system in his 
brain, knows what is confided to him, and 
4oo8 therein the best he can. The chan- 


cellor carries England on hfs mace, the 
midshipman at the point of his dirk, the 
smith on his hammer, the cook in the 
bowl of his spoon ; the postilion cracks 
his whip for England, and the sailor times 
his oars to “ God save the King ! ” The 
very felons have their pride in each 
other’s English staunchness. In politics 
and in war, they hold together as by hooks 
of steel. The charm in Nelson’s history, 
is, the unselfish greatness; the assurance 
of being supported to the uttermost by 
those whom he supports to the uttermost. 
Whilst they are some ages ahead of the 
rest of the world in the art of living ; 
whilst in some directions they do not 
represent the modern spirit, but consti- 
tute it — this vanguard of civility and 
power they coldly hold, marching in 
phalanx, lockstep, foot after foot, filo 
after file of heroes, ten thousand deep, 


MANNERS. 

I FIND the Englishman to be him of all 
men who stands firmest in his shoes. 
They have in themselves what they value 
in their horses, mettle and bottom. On 
the day of my arrival at Liverpool, a gen- 
tleman, in describing to me the Lord 
Lieutenant of Ireland, happened to say, 
[“ Lord Clarendon has pluck like a cock, 
and will fight till he dies ; ” and, what I 
I heard first I heard last, and the one thing 
I the English value, is pluck. The word is 
not beautiful, but on the quality they sig- 
I nify by it the nation is unanimous. The 
cabmen have it ; the merchants have it ; 
the bishops have it ; the women have it ; 
the journals have it ; the Times news- 
paper, they say, is the pluckiest thing in 
England, and Sidney Smith had made it 
a proverb, that little Lord John Russell, 
the minister, would take the command of 
the Channel fleet to-morrow. 

They require you to dare to be of your 
own opinion, and they hate the practical 
cowards who cannot in affairs answer 
directly yes or no. They dare to dis 
please, nay, they will let you break all the 
commandments, if you do it natively, and 
with spirit. You must be somebody ; 
then you may do this or that, aa you 
will. 

Machinery has been applied to all work, 
and carried to such perfection, that little 
is left for the men but to mind the engines 
and feed the furnaces. But the machines 
require punctual service, and as they 



MANNERS. 


257 


never tire, they prove too much for their 
tenders. Mines, forges, mills, breweries, 
railroads, steam-pump, steam-plough, 
drill of regiments, drill of police, rule of 
court, and shop-rule, have operated to 
give a mechanical regularity to all the 
habit and action of men. A terrible ma- 
chine has possessed itself of the ground, 
the air, the men and women, and hardly 
even thought is free. 

The mechanical might and organisation 
require in the people constitution and 
answering spirits ; and he who goes 
among them must have soma weight of 
metal. At last, you take your hint from 
the fury of life you find, and say, one 
thing is plain, this is no country for faint- 
hearted people : don’t creep about diffi- 
dently ; make up your mind ; take your 
own course, and you shall find respect 
and furtherance. 

It requires, men say, a good constitution 
to travel in Spain. I say as much of 
England, for other cause, simply on ac- 
count of the vigour and brawn of the 
people. Nothing but the most serious 
business, could give one any counter- 
weight to these Baresarks, though they 
were only to order eggs and muffins for 
their breakfast. The Englishman speaks 
with all his body. His elocution is sto- 
machic — as the American’s is labial. 
The Englishman is very petulant and 
precise about his accommodation at inns, 
and on the roads; a quiddle about his 
toast and his chop, and every species of 
convenience, and loud and pungent in his 
expressions of impatience at any neglect. 
His vivacity betrays itself, at all points, in 
his manners, in his respiration, and the 
inarticulate noises he makes in clearing 
the throat — all significant of burly 
strength. He has stamina ; he can take 
the initiative in emergencies. He has that 
aplomb, which results from a good adjust- 
ment of the moral and physical nature, 
and the obedience of all the powers to the 
will ; as if the axes of his eyes were united 
to his backbone, and only moved with the 
trunk. 

This vigour appears in the incuriosity, 
and stony neglect, each of every other. 
Each man walks, eats, drinks, shaves, 
dresses, gesticulates, and, in every 
manner, acts, and suffers without re- 
ference to the bystanders, in his own 
fashion, only careful not to interfere with 
them, or annoy them ; not that he is 
trained to neglect the eyes of his neigh- 
bours— he is really occupied with his own 
affair, and does not think of them. Every 


man in this polished country consults only 
his convenience, as much as a solitary 
pioneer in Wisconsin, I know not where 
any personal eccentricity is so freely 
allowed, and no man gives himself any 
concern with it. An Englishman walks 
in a pouring rain, swinging his closed 
umbrella like a walking-stick; wears a 
wig, or a shawl, or a saddle, or stands on 
his head, and no remark is made. And 
as he has been doing this for several gene- 
rations, it is now in the blood 

In short, every one of these islanders is 
an island himself, safe, tranquil, incom- 
municable. In a company of strangers, 
you would think him deaf ; his eyes never 
wander from his table and newspaper. 
He is never betrayed into any curiosity or 
unbecoming emotion. They have all been 
trained in one severe school of manners, 
and never put off the harness. He does 
not give his hand. He does not let you 
meet his eye. It is almost an affront to 
look a man in the face, without being 
introduced. In mixed or in select com- 
panies they do not introduce persons ; so 
that a presentation is a circumstance as 
valid as a contract. Introductions are 
sacraments. He withholds his name. At 
the hotel, he is hardly willing to whisper 
it to the clerk at the book-office. If he 
give you his private address on a card, it 
is like an avowal of friendship ; and his 
bearing on being introduced is cold, even 
though he is seeking your acquaintance, 
and is studying how ho shall ser\e 
you. 

It was an odd proof of this impressive 
energy, that, in my lectures, I hesitated 
to read and threw out for its impertinence 
many a disparaging phrase, which I had 
been accustomed to spin, about poor, 
thin, unable mortals ; so much had the 
fine physique and the personal vigour of 
this robust race worked on my imagina- 
tion. 

I happened to arrive in England at the 
moment of a commercial crisis. But it 
was evident that, let who will fail, England 
will not. These people have sat here a 
thousand years, and here will continue io 
sit. They will not break up, or arrive 
at any desperate revolution, like their 
neighbours ; for they have as much energy, 
as much continence of character, as they 
ever had. The power and possession which 
surround them are their own creation, and 
they exert the same commanding industry 
at this moment. 

They are positive, methodical, cleanly, 
and formal, loving routine and convea* 



2 58 SmUSH 

lional ways ; loving truth and religion, to 
be sure, but inexorable on points of form. 
All the world praises the comfort and 
private appointments of an English inn, 
and of English households. You are sure 
of neatness and of personal decorum. A 
Frenchman may possibly be clean: an 
Englishman is conscientiously clean. A 
certain order and complete propriety is 
found in his dress and in his belongings. 

Born in a harsh and wet climate, which 
keeps him indoors whenever he is at rest, 
and being of an affectionate and loyal 
temper, he dearly loves his house. If he 
is rich, he buys a demesne, and builds a 
hall ; if he is in middle condition, he 
spares no expense on his house. Without, 
it is all planted: within, it is wainscoted, 
carved, curtained, hung with pictures, and 
filled with good furniture. ’Tis a passion 
which survives all others, to deck and 
improve it. Hither he brings all that is 
rare and costly, and with the national 
tendency to sit fast in the same spot for 
many generations, it comes to be, in the 
course of time, a museum of heirlooms, 
gifts, and trophies of the adventures and 
exploits of the family. He is very fond of 
silver plate, and, though he have no 
gallery of portraits of his ancestors, he 
has of their punch-bowls and porringers. 
Incredible amounts of plate are found in 
good houses, and the poorest have some 
spoon or saucepan, gift of a godmother, 
saved out of better times. 

An English family consists of a few 
persons, who, from youth to age, are 
found revolving within a few feet of each 
other, arf if tied by some invisible ligature, 
tense as that cartilage which we have seen 
attaching the two Siamese, England pro- 
duces under favourable conditions of ease 
and culture the finest women in the world. 
And, as the men are affectionate and true- 
hearted, the women inspire and refine 
them. Nothing can be more delicate | 
without being fastastical, nothing morei 
firm and based in nature and sentiment, 
than the courtship and mutual carriage of 
the sexes. The song of 1596 says, “ The 
wife of every Englishman is counted 
blest.” The sentiment of Imogen in 
** Cymbeline” is copied from English na- 
ture ; and not less the Portia of Brutus, 
the Kate Percy, and the Desdemona. 
The romance does not exceed the height 
of noble passion in Mrs. Lucy Hutchin- 
son, or in Lady Russell, or even as one 
discerns through the plain prose of Pepys’ 
Diary the sacred habit of an English wife. 
Sir Samuel Romilly could not bear the 


TRAITS. 

death of his wife. Every Class has its 
noble and tender examples. 

Domesticity is the taproot which enables 
the nation to branch wide and high. The 
motive and end of their trade and empire 
is to guard the independence and privacy 
of their homes. Nothing so much marks 
their manners as the concentration on 
their household ties. This domesticity is 
carried into court and camp. Wellington 
governed India and Spain and his own 
troops, and fought battles like a good 
family-man, paid his debts, and, though 
general of an army in Spain, could not 
stir abroad for fear of public creditors. 
This taste for house and parish merits 
has, of course, its doting and foolish side. 
Mr. Cobbett attributes the huge popularity 
of Perceval, prime minister in 1810, to the 
fact that he was wont to go to church 
every Sunday, with a large quarto gilt 
prayer-book under one arm, his wife 
hanging on the other, and followed by a 
long brood of children. 

They keep their old customs, costumes, 
and pomps, their wig and mace, sceptre 
and crown. The Middle Ages still lurk in 
the streets of London. The Knights of 
the Bath take oath to defend injured 
ladies ; the gold-stick-in-waiting survives. 
They repeated the ceremonies of the 
eleventh century in the coronation of the 
present Queen. A hereditary tenure is 
natural to them. Offices, farms, trades, 
and traditions descend so. Their leases 
run for a hundred and a thousand years. 
Terms of service and partnership are life- 
long, or are inherited. “ Holdship has 
been with me,” said Lord Eldon, "eight- 
and-twenty years, knows all my business 
and books.” Antiquity of usage is sanc- 
tion enough. Word.sworth says of the 
small freeholders ofWestmoreland, '* Many 
of these humble sons of the hills had a 
consciousness that the land which they 
tilled had for more than five hundred 
years been possessed by men of the same 
name and blood.” The ship-carpenter in 
the public yards, my lord’s gardener and 
porter, have been there for more than a 
hundred years, grandfather, father, and 
son. 

The English power resides also in their 
dislike of change. They have difficulty 
in bringing their reason to act, and on all 
occasions use their memory first. As soon 
as they have rid themselves of some griev- 
ance, and settled the better practice, they 
make haste to fix it as a finality, and never 
wish to hear of alteration more. 

Every Englishman is an emliryoniq 



MANNERS. 


dumcellor : his instinct is to search for a 

f )recedent. The favourite phrase of their 
aw is, “a custom whereof the memory of 
man runneth not back to the contrary.” 
The barons say, '* Nolumus mutari;" and 
the cockneys stifle the curiosity of the 
foreigner on the reason of any practice, 
with, ” Lord, sir, it was always so.” They 
hate innovation. Bacon told them, ” Time 
was the right reformer ; ” Chatham, that 
'* confidence was a plant of slow growth ; ” 
Canning, to “advance with the times;” 
and Wellington, that “ habit was ten times 
nature.” All their statesmen learn the 
irresistibility of the tide of custom, and 
have invented many fine phrases to cover 
this slowness of perception, and prehen- 
sility of tail. 

A sea-shell should be the crest of Eng- 
land, not only because it represents a 
power built on the waves, but also the 
hard finish of the men. The Englishman 
is finished like a cowry or a murex. After 
the spire and the spines are formed, or, 
with the formation, a juice exudes, and a 
hard enamel varnishes every part. The 
keeping of the proprieties is as indis- 
pensable as clean linen. No merit quite 
countervails the want of this, whilst this 
Sometimes stands in lieu of all. “ ’Tis in 
bad taste,” is the most formidable word 
an Englishman can pronounce. But this 
Japan costs them dear. There is a prose 
in certain Englishmen, which exceeds in 
wooden deadness all rivalry with other 
countrymen. There is a knell in the con- 
ceit and externality of their voice, which 
seems to say, Leave all hope behind. In 
this Gibraltar of propriety, mediocrity 
gets intrenched, and consolidated, and 
founded in adamant. An Englishman 
of fashion is like one of those souvenirs, 
bound in gold vellum, enriched with deli- 
cate engravings, on thick hot-pressed 
paper, fit for the hands of ladies and 
princes, but with nothing in it worth 
reading or remembering. 

A severe decorum rules the court and 
the cottage. When Thalberg, the pianist, 
was oae evening performing before the 
Queen, at Windsor, in a private party, the 
Queen accompanied him with her voice. 
The circumstance took air, and all Eng- 
land shuddered from sea to sea. The in- 
decorum was never repeated. Cold, re- 
pressive manners prevail. No enthusiasm 
is permitted except at the opera. They 
avoid everything marked. They require I 
a tone of voica that excites no attention j 
in the room. Sir Philip Sidney is one of 
patron saints of England, of whom | 


259 

Wotton said, '* His wit w&B the measure 
of congruity.” 

Pretension and vapouring are once for 
all distasteful. They keep to the other 
extreme of low tone in dress and manners. 
They avoid pretension and go right to the 
heart of the thing. They hate nonsense, 
sentimentalism, and highflown expression; 
they use a studied plainness. Even Brum- 
mell their fop was marked by the severest 
simplicity in dress. They value them- 
selves on the absence of everything thea 
trical in the public business, and on con- 
ciseness and going to the point, in private 
affairs. 

In an aristocratical country, like Eng- 
land, not the Trial by Jury, but the dinner 
is the capital institution. It is the mode 
of doing honour to a stranger, to invite 
him to eat — and has been for many hun- 
dred years. “ And they think,’ says the 
Venetian traveller of 1500, “ no greater 
honour can be conferred or received, than 
to invite others to eat with them, or to ba 
invited themselves, and they would sooner 
give five or six ducats to provide an enter- 
tainment for a person, than, a groat to 
assist him in any distress.”* It is reserved 
to the end of the day, the family-hour 
being generally six, in London, and, if any 
company is expected, one or two hours 
later. Everyone dresses for dinner, in 
his own house, or in another man’s. The 
guests are expected to arrive within half 
an hour of the time fixed by card of in- 
vitation, and nothing but death or mutila- 
tion is permitted to detain them. The 
English dinner is precisely the model on 
which our own are constructed in the At- 
lantic cities. The company sit one or two 
hours, before the ladies leave the table. 
The gentlemen remain over their wine an 
hour longer, and rejoin the ladies in the 
drawing-room, and take coffee. The dress- 
dinner generates a talent of table-talk, 
which reaches great perfection : the stories 
are so good, that one is sure they must 
have been often told before, to have got 
such happy turns. Hither come all man* 
ner of clever projects, bits of popular 
science, of practical invention, of miscel- 
laneous humour; political, literary, an 4 
personal news ; railroads, horses, dia- 
monds, agriculture, horticulture, piscicul- 
ture, and wine. 

English stories, bon-mots, and the re- 
corded table-talk of their wits, are as good 
as the best of the French. In America, 

* Relation of England*” Printed by 
Camden Society, 



z6j 


ENGLISH TRAITS. 


we are apt scholars, but have not yet at- 1 
tained the same perfection : for the range 
of nations from which London draws, and 
the steep contrasts of condition create the 
picturesque in society, as broken country 
makes picturesque landscape, whilst our 
prevailing equality makes a prairie tame-i 
ness ; and secondly, because the usage of 
a dress-dinner every day at dark has a 
tendency to hive and produce to advan- 
tage everything good. Much attrition has 
worn every sentence into a bullet. Also 
one meets now and then with polished 
men, who know everything, have tried' 
everything, can do everything, and are 
quite superior to letters and science. 
What could they not, if only they would ? 


TRUTH, 

Th® Teutonic tribes have a national 
singleness of heart, which contrasts with 
the Latin races. The German name has 
a proverbial significance of sincerity and 
honest meaning. The arts bear testimony 
to it. The faces of clergy and laity in old 
sculptures and illuminated missals are 
charged with earnest belief. Add to this 
hereditary rectitude, the punctuality and 
precise dealing which commerce creates, 
and you have the English truth and credit. 
The government strictly performs its en- 
gagements, The subjects do not under- 
stand trifling on its parts. When any 
breach of promise occurred, in the old 
days of prerogative, it was resented by 
the people as an intolerable grievance. 
And, in modern times, any slipperiness in 
the government in political faith, or any 
repudiation or crookedness in matters of 
finance, would bring the whole nation to 
a committee of inquiry and reform. 
Private men keep their promises, never 
BO trivial. Down goes the flying word on 
the tablets, and is indelible as Domesday 
Book. 

Their practical power rests on their 
national sincerity. Veracity derives from 
instinct, and marks superiority in organi- 
sation. Nature has endowed some j 
animals with cunning, as a compensation 
for strength withheld ; but it has provoked 
the malice of all others, as if avengers of 
public wrong. In the nobler kinds, where 
strength could be afforded, her races are 
loyal to truth, as truth is the foundation 
of the social state. Beasts that make no 
truce with man, do not break faith with 
•ach other. ’Tis said, that the wolf, who 


makes a cache of his prey, and brin|;s hl9 
fellows with him to the spot, if, on digging 
it is not found, is instantly and unresist- 
ingly tom in pieces. English veracity 
seems to result on a sounder animi 
structure, as if they could afford it. They 
are blunt in saying what they think, 
sparing of promises, and they require 
plain dealing of others. We will not 
have to do with a man in a mask. Let 
us know the truth. Draw a straight line, 
hit whom and where it will. Alfred, 
whom the affection of the nation makes 
the type of their race, is called by a 
writer at the Norman Conquest, the truths 
speaker; Alueredus veridicus, Geoffrey 
of Monmouth says of King Aurelius, uncle 
of Arthur, that “ above all things he hated 
a lie." The Northman Guttorm said to 
King Olaf, " It is royal work to fulfil royal 
words." The mottoes of their families 
are monitory proverbs, as, Fare fac — Say, 
do— of the Fairfaxes ; Say and seal, of the 
house of Fiennes ; Vero nil verius, of the 
De Veres. To be king of their word, is 
their pride. When they unmask cant, 
they say, " The English of this is," &c. ; 
and to give the lie is the extreme insult. 
The phrase of the lowest of the people is 
‘‘ honour-bright," and their vulgar praise, 
" his word is as good as his bond." They 
hate shuffling and equivocation, and the 
I cause is damaged in the public opinion, 
on which any paltering can be fixed. 
Even Lord Chesterfield, with his French 
breeding, when he came to define a 
gentleman, declared that truth made his 
distinction ; and nothing ever spoken by 
him would find so hearty a suffrage from 
his nation. The Duke of Wellington, who 
had the best right to say so, advises the 
French General Kellermann, that he may 
rely on the parole of an English officer. 
The English, of all classes, value them- 
selves on this trait, as distinguishing them 
from the French, who, in the popular 
belief, are more polite than true. An 
Englishmen understates, avoids the super- 
lative, checks himself in compliments, 
alleging, that in the French language, one 
cannot speak without lying. 

They love reality in wealth, power, 
hospitality, and do not easily learn to 
make a show, and take the world as it 
goes. They are not fond of ornaments, 
and if they wear them, they must be 
gems. They read gladly in old Fuller, 
that a lady, in the reign of Elizabeth, 
" would have as patiently digested a lie, 
as the wearing of false stones or pendants 
of counterfeit pearl," They have tbs 



TRUTH. 


261 


earth-hunger, or preference tor property 
in land, which is said to mark the 
Teutonic nations. They build of stone ; 
public and private buildings are massive 
and durable. In comparing their ships’ 
houses, and public offices with the Ameri- 
can, it is commonly said, that they spend 
a pound, where we spend a dollar. Plain 
rich clothes, plain rich equipage, plain 
rich finish throughout their house and 
belongings, mark the English truth. 

They confide in each other — English 
believes in English. The French feel the 
superiority of this probity. The English- 
man is not springing a trap for his admi- 
ration, but is honestly minding his busi- 
ness. The Frenchman is vain. Madame 
de Stael sa5's, that the English irritated 
Napoleon, mainly, because they have 
found out how to unite success with 
honesty. She was not aware how wide 
an application her foreign readers would 
give to the remark. Wellington dis- 
covered the ruin of Bonaparte’s affairs, 
by his own probity. He augured ill of 
the empire, as soon as he saw that it was 
mendacious, and lived by war. If war do 
not bring in its sequel new trade, better 
jigriculture and manufactures, but only 
games, fireworks, and spectacles — no 
prosperity could support it ; much less, a 
nation decimated for conscripts, and out 
of pocket, like France. So he drudged 
lor years on his military works at Lisbon, 
and from this base at last extended his 
gigantic lines to Waterloo, believing in: 
his countrymen and their syllogisms above 
all the rhodomontade of Europe. 

At a St. George’s festival, in Montreal, 
where I happened to be a guest, since my 
return home, I observed that the chair- 
man complimented his compatriots, by 
saying, “ they confided that wherever they 
met an Englishman, they found a man 
who would speak the truth.” And one 
cannot think this festival fruitless, if, all 
over the world, on the 23rd of April, 
wherever two or tlireo English are found, 
they meet to encourage each other in the 
nationality of veracity. 

In the power of saying rude truth, some- 
times in the lion’s mouth, no men surpass 
them. On the king’s birthday, when each 
bishop was expected to offer the king a 
purse of gold, Latimer gave Henry VIII. 
a copy of the Vulgate, with a mark at the 
passage, ” Whoremongers and adulterers 
God will judge ; ” and they so honour 
stoutness in each other, that the king 
passed it over. They are tenacious of 
tboir belief, and cannot easily change 


their opinions to suit the hour. They are 
like ships with too much head on to coma 
quickly about, nor will prosperity or even 
adversity be allowed to shake their habi- 
tual view of conduct. Whilst I was in 
j London, M. Guizot arrived there on bia 
i escape from Paris, in February, 1848. 

I Many private friends called on him. Hii 
'name was immediately proposed as an 
honorary member to the Athenaeum, M. 
Guizot was blackballed. Certainly, they 
knew the distinction of his name. But 
the Englishman is not fickle. He had 
really made up his mind, now for years aa 
he read his newspaper, to hate and des- 
pise M. Guizot ; and the altered position 
of the man as an illustrious exile, and a 
guest in the country, makes no difference 
to him, as it would instantly, to an Ameri- 
can. 

They require the same adherence, tho- 
rough conviction and reality in public 
men. It is the want of character which 
makes the low reputation of the Irish 
members. ” See them,” they said, ” one 
hundred and twenty-seven all voting like 
sheep, never proposing anything, and all 
but four voting the income tax ” — which 
was an ill-judged concession of the govern- 
ment, relieving Irish property from the 
burdens charged on English, 

They have a horror of adventurers in or 
out of Parliament. The ruling passion 
of Englishmen, in these days, is a terror 
of humbug. In the same proportion, they 
value honesty, stoutness, and adherence 
to your own. They like a man committed 
to his objects. They hate the French, as 
frivolous ; they hate the Irish, as aimless ; 
they hate the Germans, as professors. 
In February, 1848, they said : Look, the 
French king and his party fell for want of 
a shot ; they had not conscience to shoot, 
so entirely was the piUi and heart of 
monarchy eaten out. 

They attack their own politicians every 
day, on the same grounds, as adventurers. 
They love stoutness in standing for your 
right, in declining money or promotion 
that costs any concession. The barrister 
refuses the silk gown of Queen’s Counsel, 
if his junior have it one day earlier. Lord 
Collingwood would not accept his medal 
for victory on 14th February, 1797, if ho 
did not receive one for victory on ist June, 
1794; and the long-withholden medal wai 
accorded. When Castlereagh dissuaded 
Lord Wellington from going to the king’s 
levee, until the unpopular Cintra business 
had been explained, he replied ; ” You 
furnish me a reason for going. I will go 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 


to this, or I will never go to a king’s levee." 
The radical mob at Oxford cried after the 
tory Lord Eldon, " There’s old Eldon ; 
cheer him ; he never ratted." They have 
given the parliamentary nickname of 
Trimmers to the time-servers, whom Eng- 
lish character does not love.* 

They are very liable in their politics to 
extraordinary delusions, thus, to believe 
what stands recorded in the gravest books, 
that the movement of loth April, 1848, 
was urged or assisted by foreigners : 
which, to be sure, is paralleled by the 
democratic whimsy in this country, which 
I have noticed to be shared by men sane 
on other points, that the English are at 
the bottom of the agitation of slavery, in 
American politics : and then again to the 
French popular legends on the subject of 
perfidious Albion. But suspicion will make 
fools of nations as of citizens. 

A slow temperament makes them less 
rapid and ready than other countrymen, 
and has given occasion to the observation 
that English wit comes afterwards — which 
the French denote as esprit d'escalier. 
This dulness makes their attachment to 
home, and their adherence in all foreign 
countries to home habits. The English- 
man who visits Mount Etna will carry his 
tea-kettle to the top. The old Italian 
author of the " Relation of England ’’ (in 
1500) says: ‘‘ I have it on the best infor- 
mation, that, when the war is actually 
raging most furiously, they will seek for 
good eating, and all their other comforts, 
without thinking what harm. might befall 
them." Then their eyes seem to be set 
at the bottom of a tunnel, and they affirm 
the one small fact they know, with the 
best faitn in the world that nothing else 
exists. And. as their own belief in 
guineas is perfect, they readily, on all 
occasions, apply the pecuniary argument 
as final. Thus when the Rochester rap- 
pings began to be heard of in England, a 
man deposited £100 in a sealed box in 
the Dublin Bank, and then advertised in 
the newspapers to all somnambulists, 
mesmerisers, and others, that whoever 

♦ It is an unlucky moment to remember these 
sparkles of solitary virtue in the face of the 
honours lately paid in England to the Emperor 
Eouis Napoleon. I am sure that no English- 
aian whom I had the happiness to know, con- 
sented, when the aristocracy and the commons 
of London cringed like a Neapolitan rabble, 
before a successful thief. But — how to resist 
one step, though odious, in a linked series of 
state necessities ? — Governments must always 
learn too late, that the use of dishonest agents 
U M ruinous for nations as for single men. 


could tell him the number of his note 
should have the money. He let it lie 
there six months, the newspapers now 
and then, at his instance, stimulating the 
attention of the adepts ; but none could 
ever tell him ; and he said : " Now let me 
never be bothered more "with this proven 
lie." It is told of a good Sir John, that 
he heard a case stated by counsel, and 
made up his mind ; then the counsel for 
the other side taking their turn to speak, 
he found himself so unsettled and per- 
plexed, that he exclaimed : " So help me 
God I I will never listen to evidence 
again.” Any number of delightful ex- 
amples of this English stolidity are the 
anecdotes of Europe. I knew a very 
worthy man — a magistrate, I believe he 
was, in the town of Derby — who went to 
the opera, to see Malibran. In one scene, 
the heroine was to rush across a ruined 
bridge. Mr. B. arose, and mildly yet 
firmly called the attention of the audience 
and the performers to the fact that, in his 
judgment, the bridge was unsafe! This 
English stolidity contrasts with French 
wit and tact. The French, it is commonly 
said, have greatly more influence in 
Europe than the English. What influence 
the English have is by brute force of 
wealth and power; that of the French by 
affinity and talent. The Italian is subtle, 
the Spaniard treacherous : tortures, it 
was said, could never wrest from an 
Egyptian the confession of a secret. None 
of these traits belong to the Englishman. 
His choler and conceit force everything 
out. Defoe, who knew his countrymen 
well, says of them : — 

“ In close intrigue, their faculty’s but weak, 
For generally whate’er they know, they 
speak, 

And often their own counsels undermine 
By mere infirmity without design ; 

From whence, the learned say, it doth pro- 
ceed, 

That English treasons never can succeed ; 
For they’re so open-hearted, you may know 
Their own most secret thoughts, and other’s 
too." 


CHARACTER, 

The English race are reputed morose 
I do not know that they have sadder 
brows than their neighbours of northern 
climates. They are sad by comparison 
with the singing and dancing nations ; not 
sadder, but slow and staid, as finding 
their joys at home. They, too, believe 
that where there is no enjoyment of life* 



CHARACTER. 




there can be no vigour and art in speech 
or thought; that your merry heart goes 
all the way, your sad one tires in a mile. 
This trait of gloom has been fixed on them 
by French travellers, who, from Froissart, 
Voltaire, Le Sage, Mirabeau, down to the 
lively journalists of the feuilletons, have 
spent their wit on the solemnity of their 
neighbours. The French say, gay con- 
versation is unknown in their island : the 
Englishman finds no relief from reflection 
except in reflection : when he wishes for 
amusement, he goes to work : his hilarity 
is like an attack of fever. Religion, the 
theatre, and the reading the books of his 
country, all feed and increase his natural 
melancholy. The police does not inter- 
fere with public diversions. It thinks it- 
self bound in duty to respect the pleas- 
ures and rare gaiety of this inconsolable 
nation ; and their well-known courage is 
entirely attributable to their disgust of 
life. 

I suppose their gravity of demeanour 
and their few words have obtained this 
reputation. As compared with the Ameri- 
cans, I think them cheerful and con- 
tented. Young people, in this country, 
are much more prone to melancholy. The 
F.nglish have a mild aspect, and a ringing 
cheerful voice. They are large-natured, 
and not so easily amused as the southern- 
ers, and are among them as grown people 
among children, requiring war, or trade, 
or engineering, or science, instead of 
frivolous games. They are proud and 
private, and, even if disposed to recrea- 
tion, will avoid an open garden. They 
sported sadly ; ils s'amusaient tristement, 
scion la coutumc de leur pays, said Frois- 
sart ; and, I suppose, never nation built 
their party walls so thick, or their garden 
fences so high. Meat and wine produce 
no effect on them ; they are just as cold, 
quiet, and composed, at the end, as at the 
beginning of dinner. 

The reputation of taciturnity they have 
enjoyed for six or seven hundred years; 
and a kind of pride in bad public speaking 
is noted in the House of Commons, as if 
they were willing to show that they did 
not live by their tongues, or thought they 
spoke well enough if they had the tone of 
gentlemen. In mixed company, they shut 
their mouths. A Yorkshire mill-owner 
told me, he had ridden more than once 
all the way from London to Leeds, in the 
first-class carriage, with the same persons, 
and no word exchanged. The club-houses 
were established to cultivate social habits, 
and it is rare that ipore than tvro eat 


263 

together, and oftenest one eats aiene* 
Was it then a stroke of humour in the 
serious Swedenborg, or was it only his 
pitiless logic, that made him shut up the 
English souls in a heaven by themselves ? 

They are contradictorily described as 
sour, splenetic, and stubborn— and as 
mild, sweet, and sensible. The truth 
is, they have great range and variety 
of character. Commerce sends abroad 
multitudes of different classes. The cho- 
leric Welshman, the fervid Scot, the 
bilious resident in the East or West 
Indies, are wide of the perfect behaviour 
of the educated and dignified man of 
family. So is the burly farmer; so is 
the country squire, with his narrow and 
violent life. In every inn, is the Com- 
mercial-Room, in which “ travellers,” or 
bagmen, who carry patterns, and solicit 
orders, for the manufacturers, are wont to 
be entertained. It easily happens that 
this class should characterise England to 
the foreigner, who meets them on the 
road, and at every public house, whilst 
the gentry avoid the taverns, or seclude 
themselves whilst in them. 

But these classes are the right English 
stock, and may fairly show the national 
qualities, before yet art and education have 
dealt with them. They are good lovers, 
good haters, slow but obstinate admirers, 
and, in all things, very much steeped 
in their temperament, like men hardly 
awaked from deep sleep, which they enjoy* 
Their habits and instincts cleave to nature. 
They are of the earth, earthy ; and of the 
sea, as the sea-kinds, attached to it for 
what it yields them, and not from any 
sentiment. They are full of coarse 
strength, rude exercise, butcher’s meat, 
and sound sleep ; and suspect any poetic 
insinuation or any hint for the conduct 
of life which reflects on this animal exist- 
ence, as if somebody were fumbling at tha 
the umbilical cord and might stop their 
supplies. They doubt a man’s sound 
judgment if he does not eat with appetite, 
and shake their heads if he is particularly 
chaste. Take them as they come, you 
shall find in the common people a surly 
indifference, sometimes gruffness and ill 
temper; and, in minds of more power, 
magazines of inexhaustible war, chal* 
lenging 

**Tbe ruggedest hour that time and spite dare 

bring 

To frown upon the enraged Northumber^ 

laud.” 

They are U^adstrong believers and 

s 



264 


Bf^GLISH TRAITS. 


fenders of their opinions, and not less 
resolute in maintaining their whim and 
perversity. Hezekiah Woodward wrote a 
book against the Lord’s Prayer. And one 
can believe that Burton, the Anatomist of 
Melancholy, having predicted from the 
stars the hour of his death, slipped the 
knot himself round his own neck, not to 
falsify his horoscope. 

Their looks bespeak an invincible stout- 
ness ; they have extreme difficulty to run 
away, and will die game. Wellington said 
of the young coxcombs of the Life Guards 
delicately brought up, “ But the puppies 
fight well ; ” and Nelson said of his 
sailors, “ They really mind shot no more 
than peas.” Of absolute stoutness no 
nation has more or better examples. 
They are good at storming redoubts, at 
boarding frigates, at dying in the last 
ditch, or any desperate service which has 
daylight and honour in it; but not, I 
think, at enduring the rack, or any passive 
obedience, like jumping off a castle-roof 
at the word of a czar. Being both vascu- 
lar and highly organised, so as to be very 
sensible of pain ; and intellectual, so as 
to see reason and glory in a matter. 

Of that constitutional force, which yields 
the supplies of the day, they have more 
than enough, the excess which creates 
courage on fortitude, genius in poetry, 
invention in mechanics, enterprise in 
trade, magnificence in wealth, spendour 
in ceremonies, petulance and projects in 
youth. The young men have a rude health 
which runs into peccant humours. They 
drink brandy like water, cannot expend 
their quantities of waste strength on rid- 
ing, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and 
run into absurd frolics with the gravity of 
the Eumenides. They stoutly carry into 
every nook and corner of the earth their 
turbulent sense : leaving no lie uncontra- 
dicted ; no pretension unexamined. They 
chew hasheesh ; cut themselves with 
poisoned creases; swing their hammock 
in the boughs of the Bohon Upas ; taste 
every poison; buy every secret; at Na- 
ples, they put St. Januarius’s blood in an 
alembic ; they saw a hole into the head of 
the ” winking Virgin,” to know why she 
winks ; measure with an English foot-rule 
every cell of the Inquisition, every Tur- 
kish caaba, every Holy of holies ; translate 
and send to Bentley the arcanum bribed 
and bullied away from shuddering Brah- 
mins ; and measure their own strength by 
the terror they cause. These travellers 
are of every class, the best and the worst; 
and it may easily happen that those of 


rudest behaviour are taken notice of and 
remembered. The Saxon melancholy in 
the vulgar rich and poor appears as gushes 
of ill-humour, which every cheek exas- 
perates into sarcasm and vituperation. 
There are multitudes of rude young Eng- 
lish who have the self-sufficiency and 
bluntness of their nation, and who, with 
their disdain of the rest of mankind, and 
with this indigestion and choler, have 
made the English traveller a proverb for 
uncomfortable and offensive manners. It 
was no bad description of the Briton 
generically, what was said two hundred 
years ago, of one particular Oxford 
scholar: “he was a very bold man, 
uttered anything that came into his mind, 
not only among his companions, but in 
public coffee-houses, and would often 
speak his mind of particular persons then 
accidentally present, without examining 
the company he was in ; for which he was 
often reprimanded, and several times 
threatened to be kicked and beaten.” 

The common Englishman is prone to 
forget a cardinal article in the bill of social 
rights, that every man has a right to his 
own ears. No man can claim to usurp 
more than a few cubic feet of the audibili- 
ties of a public room, or to put upon the 
company with the loud statements of his 
crochets or personalities. 

But it is in the deep traits of race that 
the fortunes of nations are written, and 
however derived, whether a happier tribe 
or mixture of tribes, the air, or what cir- 
cumstance, that mixed for them the golden 
mean of temperament— here exists the 
best stock in the world, broad-fronted, 
broad-bottomed, best for depth, range, 
and equability, men of aplomb and re- 
serves, great range and many moods, 
strong instincts, yet apt for culture ; war* 
class as well as clerks ; earls and trades- 
men; wise minority, as well as foolish 
majority ; abysmal temperament, hiding 
wells of wrath, and glooms on which no 
sunshine settles; alternated with a com- 
mon sense and humanity which holds 
them fast to every piece of cheerful duty ; 
making this temperament a sea to which 
all storms are superficial ; a race to which 
their fortunes flow, as if they alone had 
the elastic organisation at once fine and 
robust enough for dominion ; as if the 
burly inexpressive, now mute and contu- 
macious, now fierce and sharp-tongued 
dragon, which once made the island light 
with his fiery breath, had bequeathed his 
ferocity to his conqueror, They hide 
virtues under vices, or the semblance of 



CHARACTER, 


26$ 


lh«m. It is the misshapen hairy Scandi- 
navian troll again, who lifts the cart out 
of the mire, or “ threshes the corn that 
ten day-labourers could not end,” but it is 
done in the dark, and with muttered male- 
dictions. He is a churl with a soft place 
in his heart, whose speech is a brash of 
bitter waters, butlwho loves to help you at 
a pinch. He says no, and serves you, and 
your thanks disgust him. Here was lately 
a cross-grained miser, odd and ugly, re- 
sembling in countenance the portrait of 
Punch, with the laugh left out; rich by 
his own industry; sulking in a lonely 
house ; who never gave a dinner to any 
man, and disdained all courtesies ; yet as 
true a worshipper of beauty in form and 
colour as ever existed, and profusely pour- 
ing over the cold mind of his countrymen 
creations of grace and truth, removing the 
reproach of sterility from English art, 
catching from their savage climate every 
fine hint, andi mporting into their galleries 
every tint and trait of sunnier cities and 
skies ; making an era in painting ; and, 
when he saw that the splendour of oae of 
his pictures in the Exhibition dimmed his 
rival’s that hung next it, secretly took a 
brush and blackened his own. 

They do not wear their heart in their 
sleeve for daw’s to peck at. They have 
that phlegm or staidness, which it is a com- 
pliment to disturb. ” Great men,” said 
Aristotle, ” are always of a nature origi- 
nally melancholy.” ‘Tis the habit of a 
mind which attaches to abstractions with 
a passion which gives vast results. They 
dare to displease, they do not speak to 
expectation. They like the sayers of No, 
better than the sayers of Yes, Each of 
them has an opinion which he feels it be- 
comes him to express all the more that it 
differs from yours. They are medita- 
ting opposition. This gravity is insepara- 
ble from minds of great resources. 

There is an English hero superior to 
the French, the German, the Italian, or 
the Greek. When he is brought to the 
strife with fate, he sacrifices a richer ma- 
terial possession, and on more purely 
metaphysical grounds. He is there with 
his own consent, face to face with fortune, 
which he defies. On deliberate choice 
and from grounds of character, he has 
elected his part to live and die for, and 
dies with grandeur. This race has added 
new elements to humanity, and has a 
deeper root in the world. 

They have great range of scale, from 
ferocity to exquisite refinement. With 
larger eoale, they have great retrieving 


power. After running each tendency to 
an extreme, they try another tack with 
equal heat. More intellectual than other 
races, when they live with other races, 
they do not take their language, but be- 
stow their own. They subsidise other 
nations, and are not subsidised. They 
proselyte, and are not proselyted. They 
assimilate other races to themselves, and 
are not assimilated. The English did 
not calculate the conquest of the Indies. 
It fell to their character. So they admin- 
ister in different parts of the world, the 
codes of every empire and race ; in 
Canada, old French law ; in the Mauritius, 
the Code Napoleon ; in the West Indies, 
the edicts of the Spanish Cortes ; in the 
East Indies, the Laws of Menu ; in the 
Isle of Man, of the Scandinavian Thing ; 
at the Cape of Good Hope, of the old 
Netherlands; and in the Ionian Islands, 
the Pandects of Justinian. 

They are very conscious of their ad- 
vantageous position in history. England 
is the lawgiver, the patron, the instructor, 
the ally. Compare the tone of the French 
and of the English press : the first queru- 
lous, captious, sensitive, about English 
opinion ; the English press is never tim- 
orous about French opinion ; but arrogant 
and contemptuous. 

They are testy and headstrong through 
an excess of will and bias ; churlish as 
men sometimes please to be who do not 
forget a debt, who ask no favours, and 
who will do what they like with their own, 
With education and intercourse these as- 
perities wear off, and leave the good-will 
pure. If anatomy is reformed according 
to national tendencies, I suppose the 
spleen will hereafter be found in the 
Englishman, not found in the American, 
and differencing the one from the other. 
I anticipate another anatomical discovery, 
that this organ will be found to be cortical 
and caducous, that they are superficially 
morose, but at last tender-hearted, herein 
differing from Rome and the Latin 
nations. Nothing savage, nothing mean 
resides in the English heart. They are 
subject to panics of credulity and of rage, 
but the temper of the nation, however 
disturbed, settles itself soon and easily, 
as, in this temperate zone, the sky after 
whatever storms clears again, and serenity 
is its normal condition. 

A saving stupidity masks and protects 
their perception as the curtain of the 
eagle’s eye. Our swifter Americans, 
when they first deal with English, pro- 
nounce them stupid ; but, lateri dQ then 



266 


ENGLISH TRAITS. 


fustice as people who wear well, or hide 
their strength. To understand the power 
of performance that is in their finest wits, 
in the patient Newton, or in the versatile 
transcendent poets, or in the Dugdales, 
Gibbons, Hallams, Eldons, and Peels, one 
should see how English day-labourers 
hold out. High and low, they are of an 
unctuous texture. There is an adipocere 
in their constitution, as if they had oil 
also for their mental wheels, and could 
perform vast amounts of work without 
damaging themselves. 

Even the scale of expense on which 
people live, and to which scholars and 
professional men conform, proves the ten- 
sion of their muscle, when vast numbers 
are found who can each lift this enor- 
mous load. I might even add, their daily 
feasts argue a savage rigour of body. 

No nation was ever so rich in able men : 

Gentlemen,” as Charles I. said of Straf- 
ford, ‘‘whose abilities might make a 
prince rather afraid than ashamed in the 
greatest affairs of state ” : men of such 
temper, that, like Baron Vere, ‘‘ had one 
seen him returning from a victory, he 
would by his silence have suspected that 
he had lost the day; and, had he beheld 
him in a retreat, he would have collected 
him a conqueror by tlie cheerfulness of 
his spirit.”* 

The following passage from the Heims- 
kringla might almost stand as a portrait' 
of the modern Englishman : “ Haldor 
was very stout and strong, and remarkably 
handsome in appearances. King Harold 
gave him this testimony, that he, among 
all his men, cared least about doubtful 
circumstances, whether they betokened 
danger or pleasure ; for, whatever turned i 
up, he was never in higher nor in lower] 
spirits, never slept less nor more on 
account of them, nor ate nor drank buti 
according to his custom. Haldor was] 
not a man of many words, but short in 
conversation, told his opinion bluntly, 
and was obstinate and hard ; and this 
could not please the king, who had many 
clever people about him, zealous in his 
service. Haldor remained a short time 
with the king, and then came to Iceland, 
where he took up his abode in Hiardaholt, 
and dwelt in that farm to a very advanced 
age.”t 

The national temper, in the civil his- 
tory, is not flashy or whiffling. The slow, 
deep English mass smoulders with fire, 

♦ Fuller. Worthies of England. 

i Heimskringla, Laias^’s translation, Vol. 
III. P. 37* 


which at last sets all its borders in flame. 
The wrath of London is not French wrath, 
but has a long memory, and In its hottest 
heat, a register and rule. 

Half their strength they put not forth. 
They are capable of a sublime resolution, 
and if hereafter the war of races, often 
predicted, and making itself a war of 
opinions also (a question of despotism 
and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), 
should menace the English civilisation, 
these sea-kings may take once again to 
their floating castles, and find a new home 
and a second millennium of power in their 
colonies. 

The stability of England is the security 
of the modern world. If the English race 
were as mutable as the French, what reli- 
ance ? But the English stand for liberty. 
The conservative, money - loving, lord- 
loving English are yet liberty-loving ; and 
so freedom is safe : for they have more 
personal force than other people. The 
nation always resist the immoral action of 
their government. They think humanely 
on the affairs of France, of Turkey, of 
Poland, of Hungary, of Schleswig Holsteiiv 
though overborne by the statecraft of the 
rulers at last. 

Does the early history of each tribe 
show the permanent bias, which, though 
not less potent, is masked, as the tribe 
spreads its activity into colonies, com- 
merce, codes, arts, letters ? The early 
history shows it, as the musician plays 
the air which he proceeds to conceal in a 
tempest of variations. In Alfred, in the 
Northmen, one may read the genius of 
the English society, namely, that private 
life is the place of honour. Glory, a 
career, and ambition, words familiar to 
the longitude of Paris, are seldom heard 
in English speech. Nelson wrote from 
their hearts his homely telegraph, ” Eng- 
land expects every man to do his duty.” 

For actual service, for the dignity of a 
profession, or to appease diseased or in- 
flamed talent, the army and navy may be 
entered (the worst boys doing well in the 
navy); and the civil service, in depart- 
ments where serious official work is done ; 
and they hold in esteem the barrister en- 
gaged in the severer studies of the law. 
But the calm, sound, and most British 
Briton shrinks from public life, as char- 
latanism , and respects an economy founded 
on agriculture, coal-mines, manufactures, 
or trade, which secures an independence 
through the creation of real values. 

They wish neither to command or obey, 
but to be kiuga jo their cwo bouses. They 



COCKAYME. 


267 


ftTd Intellectual and deeply enjoy litera- 
ture; they like well to have the world 
served up to them in books, maps, models, 
and every mode of exact information, and, 
though not creators in the art, they value 
its refinement. They are ready for leisure, 
can direct and fill their own day, nor need 
so much as others the constraint of a 
necessity. But the history of the nation 
discloses, at every turn, this original pre- 
dilection for private independence, and, 
however this inclination may have been 
disturbed by the bribes with which their 
vast colonial power has warped men out 
of orbit, the inclination endures, and 
forms and reforms the laws, letters, man- 
ners, and occupations. They choose that 
welfare which is compatible with the com- 
monwealth, knowing that such alone is 
stable ; as wise merchants prefer mvest- 
ments in three per cents. 


COCKAYNE. 

The English are a nation of humourists. 
Individual right is pushed to the uttermost 
bound compatible with public order. Pro- 
perty is so perfect, that it seems the craft 
of that race, and not to exist elsewhere. 
The king cannot step on an acre which 
the peasant refuses to sell, A testator 
endows a dog or a rookery, and Europe 
cannot interfere with his absurdity. Every 
individual has his particular way of living, 
which he pushes to folly, and the decided 
sympathy of his compatriots is engaged 
to back up Mr. Crump’s whim by statutes, 
and chancellors, and horse-guards. There 
is no freak so ridiculous but some English- 
man has attempted to immortaliso by 
money and law. British citizenship is as 
omnipotent as Roman was. Mr. Cockayne 
is very sensible of this. The pursy man 
means by freedom the right to do as he 
pleases, and does wrong in order to feel 
his freedom, and makes a conscience of 
persisting in it. 

He is intensely patriotic, for his country , 
is so small. His confidence in the power 
and performance of his nation makes 
him provokingly incurious about other 
nations. Ho dislikes foreigners. Sweden- 
borg, who lived much in England, notes 
" the similitude of minds among the Eng- 
lish, in consequence of which they con- 
tract familiarity with friends who are of 
that nation, and seldom with others ; and 
they regard foreigners, as one looking 
through a telescope from the top of a 


palace regards those who dwell or wandei 
about out of the city." A much older 
traveller, the Venetian who wrote the 
" Relation of England,"* in 1500, says : 
" The English are great lovers of them- 
selves, and of everything belonging to 
them. They think that there are no other 
men than themselves, and nO other world 
but England ; and, whenever they see a 
handsome foreigner, they say that he 
looks like an Englishman, and it is a great 
pity he should not be an Englishman ; and 
whenever they partake of any delicacy 
with a foreigner, they ask him whether 
such a thing is made in his country." 
When he adds epithets of praise, bis 
climax is " so English ’’ ; and when he 
wishes to pay you the highest compliment 
he says, I should not know you from an 
Englishman. France is, by its natural 
contrast, a kind of blackboard on which 
English character draws its own traits in 
chalk. This arrogance habitually ex- 
hibits itself in allusions to the French. I 
suppose that all men of English blood in 
America, Europe, or Asia, have a secret 
feeling of joy that they are not French 
natives. Mr. Coleridge is said to have 
given public thanks to God, at the close of 
a lecture, that he had defended him from 
being able to utter a single sentence in the 
French language. I have found that 
Englishmen have such a good opinion of 
England, that the ordinary phrases, in all 
good society, of postponing or disparaging 
one's own things in talking with a stranger, 
are seriously mistaken by them for an in- 
suppressible homage to the merits of 
their nation ; and the New-Yorker or 
Pennsylvanian who modestly laments the 
disadvantage of a new country, log-huts, 
and savages, is surprised by the instant 
and unfeigned commiseration of the whole 
company, who plainly account all the 
world out of England a heap of rubbish. 

The same insular limitation pinches 
his foreign politics. He sticks to his tra- 
ditions and usages, and, so help him God , 
he will force his island by-laws down the 
throat of great countries, like India, 
China, Canada, Australia, and not only 
so, but impose Wapping on tlie Con- 
gress of Vienna, and trample down all 
nationalities with his taxed boots. Lord 
Chatham goes for liberty, and no taxation 
without representation — for that is British 
law ; but not a hobnail shall they make 
in America, but buy their nails in England 
— for that also is British law ; and the 

* Printed by the Camden Sccietyi 



268 


ENGLISH TRAITS. 


fact that British commerce was to be re- 
created by the independence of America, 
took them all by surprise. 

In short, I am afraid that English 
nature is so rank and aggressive as to be 
a little incompatible with every other. 
The world is not wide enough for two. 

But, beyond this nationality, it must 
be admitted, the island offers a daily wor- 
ship to the old Norse god Brage, cele- 
brated among our Scandinavian fore- 
fathers, for his eloquence and majestic 
air. The English have a steady courage, 
that fits them for great attempts and en- 
durance : they have also a petty courage, 
through which every man delights in show- 
ing himself for what he is, and in doing 
what he can : so that, in all companies, 
each of them has too good an opinion of 
himself to imitate anybody. He hides no 
defect of his form, features, dress, con- 
nection, or birthplace, for he thinks every 
circumstance belonging to him comes re- 
commended to you. If one of them have 
a bald, or a red, or a green head, or bow 
legs, or a scar, or mark, or a paunch, or a 
squeaking or a raven voice, he has per- 
suaded himself that there is something 
modish and becoming in it, and that it sits 
well on him. 

But nature makes nothing in vain, and 
this little superfluity of self-regard in the 
English brain is one of the secrets of their 
power and history. For it sets every man 
on being and doing what he really is and 
can. It takes away a dodging, skulking, 
secondary air, and encourages a frank and 
manly bearing, so that each man makes 
the most of himself, and loses no oppor- 
tunity for want of pushing. A man’s per- 
sonal defects will commonly have with the 
rest of the world precisely that importance 
which they have to himself. If he makes 
light of them, so will other men. We all 
find in these a convenient meter of charac- 
ter, since a little man would be ruined by 
the vexation, 1 remember a shrewd 
politician, in one of our Western cities, 
told me, ‘ ‘ that he had known several suc- 
cessful statesmen made by their foible.” 
And another, an ex-governor of Illinois, 
said to me : ” If a man knew anything, he 
would sit in a corner and be modest ; but 
he is such an ignorant peacock, that he 
goes bustling up and down, and bits on 
extraordinary discoveries.” 

^ There is also this benefit in brag, that 
the speaker is unconsciously expressing 
bis own ideal. Humour him by all means, 
draw it all out, and hold him to it. Their 
CUfitare enables the travelled 


English to avoid any ridiculous extremes 
of this self-pleasing, and to give it ao 
agreeable air. Then the natural dis- 
I position is fostered by the respect which 
they find entertained in the world for 
F2nglish ability. It was said of Louis XIV., 
that his gait and air were becoming enough 
in so great a monarch, yet would have 
been ridiculous in another man ; so the 
prestige of the English name warrants a 
certain confident bearing, which a French- 
man or Belgian could not carry. At all 
events, they feel themselves at liberty to 
assume the most extraordinary tone on 
the subject of English merits. 

An English lady on the Rhine hearing a 
German speaking of her party as foreigners, 
exclaimed, “No, we are not foreigners; 
we are English; it is you that are 
foreigners.” They tell you daily, in Lon- 
don, the story of the Frenchman and the 
Englishman who quarrelled. Both were 
unwilling to fight, but their companions 
put them up to it ; at last, it was agreed, 
that they should fight alone, in the dark, 
and with pistols ; the candles were put 
out, and the Englisliman, to make sure 
not to hit anybody, fired up the chimney, 
and brought down the Frenchman. They 
have no curiosity about foreigners, and 
answer any information you may volunteer 
with, “ Oh, Oh ! ” until the informant 
makes up his mind, that they shall die in 
their ignorance, for any help he will offer. 
There are really no limits to this conceit, 
though brighter men among them make 
painful efforts to be candid. 

The habit of brag runs through all 
classes, from the Times newspaper through 
politicians and poets, through Words- 
worth, Carlyle, Mill, and Sydney Smith, 
down to the boys of Eton. In the gravest 
treatise on political economy, in a philoso- 
phical essay, in books of science, one is 
surprised by the most innocent exhibition 
of unflinching nationality. In a tract on 
Corn, a most amiable and accomplished 
gentleman writes thus: “ Though Britain, 
according to Bishop Berkeley’s idea, were 
surrounded by a wall of brass ten thousand 
cubits in height, still, she would as far 
excel the rest of the globe in riches, as 
she nov» does, both in this secondary 
quality, and in the more important ones 
of freedom, virtue, and science.”* 

The English dislike the American 
structure of society, whilst yet trade, 
mills, public education, and chartism are 
doing what they can to create in 

• William Soenom 



WEALTH. 


England tha same social condition. 
America is the paradise of the econornists; 
36 the favourable exception invariably 
quoted to the rules of ruin ; but when he 
speaks directly of the Americans, the 
islander forgets his philosophy, and 
remembers his disparaging anecdotes. 

But this childish patriotism costs 
something, like all narrowness. The 
English sway of tlieir colonies has no 
root of kindness. They govern by their 
arts and ability ; they are more just than 
kind; and, whenever an abatement ofj 
their power is felt, they have not con-i 
ciliated the affection on which to rely. ' 

Coarse local distinctions, as those of 
nation, province, or town, are useful in 
the absence of real ones ; but we must not 
insist on these accidental lines. Individual 
traits are always triumphing over national 
ones. There is no fence in metaphysics 
discriminating Greek, or English, or 
Spanish science. ^Esop, and Montaigne, 
Cervantes and Saadi, are men of the 
world ; and to wave our own flag at the 
dinner-table or in the University, is to! 
carry the boisterous dulness of a fire-club 
into a polite circle. Nature and destiny 
are always on the watch for our follies. 
Nature trips us up when we strut ; and 
there are curious examples in history on 
this very point of national pride. 

George of Cappadocia, born at Epi- 
phania in Cilicia, was a low parasite, who 
got a lucrative contract to supply the army 
with bacon, A rogue and informer, he 
got rich, and was forced to run from 
justice. Ho saved his money, embraced 
Arianism, collected a library, and got 
promoted by a faction to the episcopal 
throne of Alexandria. When J ulian came, 
A.D. 361, George was dragged to prison; 
the prison was burst open by the mob, 
and George was lynched, as he deserved. 
And this precious knave became, in good 
time. Saint George of England, patron of 
chivalry, emblem of victory and civility, 
and the pride of the best blood of the 
modern world. j 

Strange, that the solid truth-speaking 
Briton should derive from an impostor. 
Strange, that the New World should have 
no better luck — that broad America must 
wear the name of a thief. Amerigo 
Vespucci, the pickle-dealer at Seville, 
who went out, in 1499, a subaltern with 
Hojeda, and whose highest naval rank was 
boatswain’s mate in an expedition that 
never sailed, managed in this lying world 
to supplant Columbus, and baptize half 
tb« earth with his own dishonest name. 


269 

Thus nobody can throw stones. We are 
equally badly off in our founders r and the 
false pickle-dealer is an offset to the false 
bacon-seller. 


WEALTH. 

There is no country in which so absolute 
a homage is paid to wealth. In America, 
[there is a touch of shame when a man 
exhibits the evidences of large property, 
as if, after all, it needed apology. But the 
Englishman has pure pride in his wealth, 
and esteems it a final certificate. A 
coarse logic rules throughout all English 
souls ; if you have merit, can you not 
show it by your good clothes, and coach, 
and horses ? How can a man be a gentle- 
man without a pipe of wine ? Haydon 
says, “There is a fierce resolution to 
make every man live according to the 
means he possesses.” There is a mixture 
of religion in it. They are under the 
Jewish law, and read with sonorous em- 
phasis that their days shall be long in the 
land, they shall have sons and daughters, 
flocks and herds, wine and oil. In exact 
proportion is the reproach of poverty. 
They do not wish to be represented except 
by opulent men. An Englishman who has 
lost his fortune is said to have died of a 
broken heart, The last term of insult is, 
” a beggar.” Nelson said, “ The want of 
fortune is a crime which I can never get 
over.” Sydney Smith said, ” Poverty is 
infamous in England.” And one of their 
recent writers speaks, in reference to a 
private and scholastic life, of ” the grave 
moral deterioration which follows an 
empty exchequer.” You shall find this 
sentiment, if not so frankly put, yet deeply 
implied, in the novels and romances of 
the present century, and not only in these, 
but in biography, and in the votes of 
public assemblies, in the tone of the 
preaching, and in the table-talk. 

I was lately turning over Wood's 
A thcna Oxonienses, and looking naturally 
for another standard in a chronicle of the 
scholars of Oxford for two hundred years. 
But I found the two disgraces in that, as 
in most English books, are, first, disloyalty 
to Church and State, and, second, to be 
born poor, or to come to poverty. A 
natural fruit of England is the brutal 
political economy. Malthus finds no cover 
laid at nature’s table for the labourer's 
son. In 1809, the majority in Parliament 
expressed itself by the language of Mr* 



EmUSH TRAITS. 


Fuller in the House of Commons, "If 
you do not like the country, damn you, 
you can leave it." When Sir S. Romilly 
proposed his bill forbidding parish officers 
to bind children apprentices at a greater 
distance than forty miles from their home, 
Peel opposed, and Mr. Wortley said, 
•* though, in the higher ranks, to cultivate 
family affections was a good thing, it was 
Botso among the lower orders. Better 
take them away from those who might 
deprave them. And it was highly injurious 
to trade to stop binding to manufacturers, 
as it must raise the price of labour, and of 
manufactured goods." 

The respect for truth of facts in England 
is equalled only by the respect for wealth. 
It is at once the pride of art of the Saxon, 
as he is a wealth-maker, and his passion 
for independence. The Englishman be- 
lieves that every man must take care of 
himself,' and has himself to thank, if he 
do not mend his condition. To pay their 
debts is their national point of honour. 
From the Exchequer and the East India 
House to the huxter’s shop, everything 
prospers, because it is solvent. The 
British armies are solvent, and pay for 
what they take. The British empire is 
solvent ; for, in spite of the huge national 
debt, the valuation mounts. During the 
war from 1789 to 1815, whilst they com- 
plained that they were taxed within an 
inch of their lives, and, by dint of enor- 
mous taxes, were subsidising all the con- 
tinent against France, the English were 
growing rich every year faster than any 
people ever grew before. It is their 
maxim, that the weight of taxes must be 
calculated, not by what is taken, but by 
what is left. Solvency is in the ideas 
and mechanism of an Englishman. The 
Crystal Palace is not considered honest 
until it pays ; no matter how much con- 
venience, beauty, or ^clat, it must be self- 
supporting. They are contented with 
slower steamers, as long as they know 
that swifter boats lose money. They pro- 
ceed logically by the double method or 
labour and thrift. Every household ex- 
hibits an exact economy, and nothing 01 
that uncalculated headlong expenditure 
which families use in America. If they 
cannot pay, they do not buy ; for they 
have no presumption of better fortunes 
next year, as our people have ; and they 
say without shame, I cannot afford it. 
Gentlemen do not hesitate to ride in the 
second-class cars, or in the second cabin. 
An economist, or a man who can propor- 
^ioo his means and bis ambition, or bring 


the year round 5vith expenditure which 
expresses his character, without embar- 
rassing one day of his future, is already a 
master of life, and a freeman. Lord 
Burleigh writes to his son, " that one 
ought never to devote more than two 
thirds of his income to the ordinary ex- 
penses of life ; since the extraordinary 
will be certain to absorb the other 
third." 

The ambition to create value evokes 
every kind of ability, government becomes 
a manufacturing corporation, and every 
house a mill. The headlong bias to 
utility will let no talent lie in a napkin — 
if possible, will teach spiders to weave 
silk stockings. An Englishman, while ho 
eats and drinks no more, or not much 
more than another man, labours three 
times as many hours in the course of a 
year, as any other European ; or, his life 
as a workman is three lives. He works* 
fast. Everything in England is at a quick 
pace. They have reinforced their own 
productivity, by the creation of that mar- 
vellous machinery which differences this 
age from any other age. 

'Tis a curious chapter in modern his- 
tory, the growth of the machine-shop. Six 
hundred years ago, Roger Bacon explained 
the precession of the equinoxes, the con- 
sequent necessity of the reform of the 
calendar , measured the length of the 
year, invented gunpowder; and announced 
(as if looking from his lofty cell, over five 
centuries, into ours) “ that machines can 
be constructed to drive ships more rapidly 
than a whole galley of rowers could do : 
nor would they need anything but a pilot 
to steer them. Carriages also might be 
constructed to move with an incredible 
speed, without the aid of any animal. 
Finally, it would not be impossible to 
make machines, which, by means of a suit 
of wings, should fly in the air in the man- 
ner of birds." But the secret slept with 
Bacon. The six hundred years have not 
yet fulfilled his words. Two centuries 
ago, the sawing of timber was done by 
hand ; the carriage wheels ran on wooden 
axles; the land was tilled by wooden 
ploughs. And it was to little purpose that 
they had pit-coal or that looms were im- 
proved, unless Watt and Stephenson had 
taught them to work force-pumps and 
power-looms by steam. The great strides 
were all taken within the last hundred 
years. The life of Sir Robert Peel, who 
died, the other day, the model English- 
man, very properly has, for a frontispiece, 
a drawing of the spinniag-jenny, whicl^ 



WEALTH. 


wove the web of his fbrturies. Hargreaves 
Invented the spinning-jenny, and died in 
a workhouse. Arkwright improved the 
invention ; and the machine dispensed 
with the work of ninety-nine men : that is, 
one spinner could do as much work as one 
hundred had done before. The loom was 
improved further. But the men would 
sometimes strike for wages, and combine 
against the masters, and, about 1829-30, 
much fear was felt, lest the trade would 
be drawn away by these interruptions, and 
the emigration of the spinners, to Bel- 
gium and the United States. Iron and 
steel are very obedient. Whether it were 
not possible to make a spinner that would 
not rebel, nor mutter, nor scow l, nor strike 
for wages, nor emigrate ? At the solicita- 
tion of the masters, after a mob and riot 
at Staley Bridge, Mr. Roberts of Man- 
chester undertook to create this peaceful 
fellow, instead of the quarrelsome fellow 
God had made. After a few trials, he 
succeeded, and, in 1830, procured a patent 
for his self-acting mule ; a creation, the 
delight of mill-owners, and “destined,” 
they said, “ to restore order among the 
industrious classes ” ; a machine requiring 
only a child’s hand to piece the broken 
yarns. As Arkwright had destroyed do- 
mestic spinning, so Roberts destroyed the 
factory spinner. The power of machinery 
in Great Britain, in mills, has been com- 
puted to be equal to 600,000,000 men, one 
man being able by the aid of steam to do 
the work which required two hundred and 
fifty men to accomplish fifty years ago. 
The production has been commensurate. 
England already had this labourious race, 
rich soil, water, w’ood, coal, iron, arni 
favourable climate. Eight hundred years 
ago, commerce had made it rich, and it 
was recorded, “ England is the richest of 
all the northern nations.” The Norman 
historians recite, that ” in 1067, William 
carried with him into Normandy, from 
England, more gold and silver than had 
ever before been seen in Gaul. But when, 
to this labour and trade, and these native 
resources was added this goblin of steam, 
with his myriad arms, never tired, work- 
ing night and day everlastingly, the 
amassing of property has run out of all 
figures. It makes tlie motor of the last 
ninety years. The steam-pipe has added 
to her population and wealth the equi- 
valent of four or five Englands. Forty 
thousand ships are entered in Lloyd’s 
lists. The yield of wheat has gone on 
from 2,000,000 quarters in the time of the 
Stuarts, to 13.000,000 in 1854. A thousand 


271 

million of pounds sterling are said to 
compose the floating money of commerce. 
In 1848, Lord John Russell stated that the 
people of this country had laid out 
;^30o,ooo,ooo of capital in railways, in the 
last four years. But a better measure 
than these sounding figures is the esti- 
mate, that there is wealth enough in 
England to support the entire population 
in idleness for one year. 

The wise, versatile, all-giving machinery 
makes chisels, roads, locomotives, tele- 
graphs. Whitworth divides a bar to a 
millionth of an inch. Steam tv/ines huge 
cannon into wreaths, as easily as It braids 
straw, and vies with the volcanic forces 
which twisted the strata. It can clothe 
shingle mountains with ship-oaks, make 
sword-blades that will cut gun-barrels in 
two. In Egypt, it can plant forests, and 
bring rain after three thousand years. 
Already it is ruddering the balloon, and 
the next war will be fought in the air. 
But another machine more potent in 
England than steam, is the Bank. It 
votes an issue of bills, population is stimu- 
lated, and cities rise ; it refuses loans, 
and emigration empties the country ; 
trade sinks; revolutions breakout; kings 
are dethroned. By these new agents our 
social system is moulded. By dint of 
steam and of money, war and commerce 
are changed. Nations have lost their 
old omnipotence; the patriotic tie does 
not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, 
we go and live where we will. Steam has 
enabled men to choose what law they 
will live under. Money makes place for 
tliem. The telegraph is a limp-band that 
will hold the Fenris-wolf of w'ar. For now, 
that a telegraph line runs through France 
and Europe, from London, every messago 
it transmits makes stronger by one thread 
the band which war will have to cut. 

The introduction of these elements 
gives new resources to existing pro- 
prietors. A sporting duke may fancy that 
I the state depends on the House of Lords, 
but the engineer sees, that every stroke 
of the steam-piston gives value to the 
duke’s land, fills it with tenants; doubles, 
quadruples, centuples the duke’s capital, 
and creates new measures and new neces- 
sities for the culture of his children. Of 
course, it draws the nobility into the com- 
petition as stockholders in the mine, the 
canal, the railway, in the application of 
steam to agriculture, and sometimes into 
trade. But it also introduces large classes 
into the same competition ; the old energy 
of the Nor8€ race arms itself with these 



72 


ENGLISH TRAITS. 


magnificettt powers; new men prove an 
overmatch for the land-owner, and the 
mill buys out the castle. Scandinavian 
Thor, who once forged bis bolts in icy 
Hecla, and built galleys by lonely fiords ; 
in England, has advanced with the times, 
has shorn his beard, enters Parliament, 
sits down at a desk in the India House, 
and lends Miollnir to Birmingham for a 
Steam-hammer. 

The creation of wealth in England in 
the last ninety years is a main fact in 
modern history. The wealth of London 
determines prices all over the globe. All 
things precious, or useful, or amusing, or 
intoxicating, are sucked into this com- 
merce and floated to London. Some 
English private fortunes reach, and some 
exceed, a million of dollars a year. A 
hundred thousand palaces adorn the is- 
land. All that can feed the senses and 
passions, all that can succour the talent, 
or arm the hands of the intelligent middle 
class who never spare in what they buy 
for their own consumption ; all that can 
aid science, gratify taste, or soothe com- 
fort, is in open market. Whatever is ex- 
cellent and beautiful in civil, rural, or 
ecclesiastic architecture; in fountain, 
garden, or grounds; the English noble 
crosses sea and land to see and to copy 
at home, The taste and science of thirty 
peaceful generations ; the gardens which 
Evelyn planted ; the temples and pleasure- 
houses which Inigo Jones and Christopher 
Wren built; the wood that Gibbons 
carved ; the taste of foreign and domestic 
artists, Shenstone, Pope, Brown, Loudon, 
Paxton, are in the vast auction, and the 
hereditary principle heaps on the owner 
of to-day the benefit of ages of owners. 
The present possessors are to the full as 
absolute as any of their fathers, in choosing 
and procuring what they like. This com- 
fort and splendour, the breadth of lake 
and mountain, tillage, pasture, and park, 
sumptuous castle and modern villa — all 
consist with perfect order. They have no 
revolutions ; no horse-guards dictating to 
the crown; no Parisian poissardes and 
barricades; no mob; but drowsy habi- 
tude, daily dress-dinners, wine, and ale, 
and beer, and gin, and sleep. 

With this power of creation, and this 
passion for independence, property has 
reached an ideal perfection. It is felt and 
treated as the national life-blood. The 
laws are framed to give property the 
securest possible basis, and the provisions 
to lock and transmit it have exercised the 
cunningest heads in a profession which | 


never admits a fool. The rights of pfO* 
petty nothing but felony and treason caa 
override. The house is a castle which 
[the king cannot enter. The Bank is a 
strong box to which the king has no key. 
Whatever surly sweetness possession caa 
give, is tasted in England to the dregs. 
Vested rights are awful things, and abso- 
lute possession gives the smallest free- 
holder identity of interest with the duke. 
High stone fences, and padlocked garden- 
gates announce the absolute will of the 
owner to be alone. Every whim of exag* 
gerated egotism is put into stone and iron, 
into silver and gold, with costly delibera- 
tion and detail. 

An Englishman hears that the Queen 
Dowager wishes to establish some claim 
to put her park paling a rod forward into 
his grounds, so as to get a coachway, and 
save her a mile to the avenue. Instantly 
he transforms his paling into stone ma- 
sonry, solid as the walls of Cuma, and all 
Europe cannot prevail on him to sell or 
compound for an inch of the land. They 
delight in a freak as the proof of their 
sovereign freedom. Sir Edward Boynton 
at Spic Park, at Cadenham, on a preci- 
pice of incomparable prospect, built a 
house like a long barn, which had not a 
window on the prospect side. Strawberry 
Hill of Horace Walpole, Fonthill Abbey 
of Mr. Beckford, were freaks ; and New- 
stead Abbey became one in the hands of 
Lord Byron. 

But the proudest result of this creation 
has been the great and refined forces it 
has put at the disposal of the private 
citizen. In the social world, an English- 
man to-day has the best lot. He is a king 
in a plain coat. He goes with the most 
powerful protection, keeps the best com- 
pany, is armed by the best education, is 
seconded by wealth ; and his English 
name and accidents are like a flourish of 
trumpets announcing him. This, with his 
quiet stylo of manners, gives him the 
power of a sovereign, without the incon- 
veniences which belong to that rank. I 
much prefer the condition of an English 
gentleman of the better class, to that of 
any potentate in Europe — whether for 
travel, or for opportunity of society, or for 
access to means of science or study, or 
for mere comfort and easy healthy relatioa 
to people at home, 

Such as we have seen is the wealth of 
England, a mighty mass, and made good 
in whatever details we care to explore. 
The cause and spring of it is the wealth 
of temperament in the people. The won j 



WEALTH. 


de? of Britain in this plenteous nature. 
Her worthies are ever surrounded by as 
good men as themselves ; each is a cap- 
tain a hundred strong, and that wealth of 
men is represented again in the faculty 
of each individual — that he has waste 
fctrength, power to spare. The English 
are so rich, and seem to have established 
a taproot in the bowels of the planet, be- 
cause they are constitutionally fertile and 
creative. 

But a man must keep an eye on his 
servants, if he would not have them rule 
him. Man is a shrewd inventor, and is 
ever taking the hint of a new machine 
from his own structiiro, adapting some 
secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, 
and leather, to some required function in 
the work of the world. But it is found that 
the machine unmans the user. What he 
gains in making cloth, he loses in general 
pov/er. There should be temperance in 
making cloth, as well as in eating. A 
man should not be a silkworm ; nor a 
nation a tent of caterpillars. The robust 
rural Saxon degenerates in the mills to 
the Leicester stockinger, to the imbecile 
Manchester spinner — ^far on the way to be 
spiders and needles. The incessant re- 
petion of the same hand-work dwarfs the 
man, robs him of his strength, wit, and 
versatility, to make a pin-polisher, a 
buckle-maker, or any other specialty ; and 
presently, in a change of industry, whole 
iowns are sacrificed like ant-hills, when 
the fashion of shoe-strings supersedes 
buckles, when cotton takes the place of 
linen, or railways of turnpikes, or when 
commons are enclosed by landlords. 
Then society is admonished of the mis- 
chief of the division of labour, and that 
the best political economy is care and 
culture of men ; for, in these crises, all 
are ruined except such as are proper in- 
dividuals, capable of thought, and of new 
choice and the application of their talent 
to new labour. Then again come in new 
calamities, England is aghast at the dis- 
closure of her fraud in the adulteration of 
food, of drugs, and of almost every fabric 
in her mills and shops ; finding that milk 
will not nourish, nor sugar sweeten, nor 
bread satisfy, nor pepper bite the tongue, 
nor glue stick. In true England all is 
false and forged. This too is the reaction 
of machinery, but of the larger machinery 
of commerce. 'Tis not, I suppose want 
of probity, so much as the tyranny of 
trade, which necessitates a perpetual com- 
petition of underselling, and that again a 
perpetual deterioration of the fabric. 


^73 

The machinery has proved- like the 
balloon, unmanageable, and hies away 
with the aeronaut. Steam from the first 
hissed and screamed to warn him ; it was 
dreadful with its explosion, and crushed 
the engineer. The machinist has wrought 
and watched, engineers and firemen with- 
out number have been sacrificed in learn- 
ing to tame and guide the monster. But 
harder still it has proved to resist and 
rule the dragon Money, with his paper 
wings. Chancellors and Boards of Trade, 
Pitt, and Peel, and Robinson, and their 
Parliaments, and their whole generation, 
adopted false principles, and went to their 
graves in the belief that they were en- 
riching the country which they were im- 
poverishing. They congratulated each 
other on ruinous expedients. It is rare 
to find a merchant who knows why a 
crisis occurs in trade, why prices rise or 
fall, or who knows the mischief of paper 
money. In the culmination of national 
prosperity, in the annexation of countries; 
building of ships, depots, towns ; in the 
influx of tons of gold and silver ; amid the 
chuckle of chancellors and financiers, it 
was found that bread rose to famine 
prices, that the yeoman was forced to 
'sell his cow and pig, his tools, and his 
acre of land ; and the dreadful barometer 
of the poor-rates was touching the point 
of ruin. The poor-rate was sucking in the 
solvent classes, and forcing an exodus of 
farmers and mechanics. What befalls 
from the violence of financial crises, be- 
falls daily in the violence of artificial 
legislation, 

Such a wealth has England earned, 
ever new, bounteous, and augmenting. 
But the question recurs, does she take 
the step beyond, namely, to the wise use, 
in view of the supreme wealth of nations ? 
We estimate the wisdom of nations by 
seeing what they did with tlieir surplus 
capital. And, in view of these injuries, 
some compensation has been attempted 
in England. A part of the money earned 
returns to the brain to buy schools, lib- 
raries, bishops, astronomers, chemists, 
and artists with ; and a part to repair the 
wrongs of this intemperate weaving, by 
hospitals, savings-banks, Mechanics’ In- 
stitutes, public grounds, and other chari- 
ties and amenities. But the antidotes are 
frightfully inadequate, and the evil re- 
quires a deeper cure, which time and a 
simpler social organisation must supply. 
At present, she does not rule her wealth. 
She is simply a «;ood England, but no 



2/4 ENGLISH TRAITS. 


divinity, or wise aiid instructed soul. She 
too is in the stream of fate, one victim 
more in a common catastrophe. 

But being in the fault, she has the mis- 
fortune of greatness to be held as the 
chief offender. England must be held 
responsible for the despotism of expense. 
Her prosperity, the splendour which so 
much manhood and talent and perseve- 
rance has thrown upon vulgar aims, is the 
very argument of materialism. Her suc- 
cess strengthens the hands of base wealth. 
Who can propose to youth poverty and 
wisdom, when mean gain has arrived at 
the conquest of letters and arts ; when 
English success has grown out of the 
very renunciation of principles, and the 
dedication to outsides. A civility of 
trifles, of money and expense, an erudi- 
tion of sensation takes place, and the 
putting as many impediments as we can, 
between the man and his objects. Hardly 
the bravest among them have the manli- 
ness to resist It successfully. Hence, it 
has come, that not the aims of a manly 
life, but the means of meeting a certain 
ponderous expense, is that which is to be 
considered by a youth in England, emer- 
ging from his minority. A large family is 
reckoned a misfortune. And it is a con- 
solation in the death of the young, that a 
source of expense is closed. 


ARISTOCRACY. 

The feudal character of the English 
state, now that it is getting obsolete, glares 
a little, in contrast with the democratic 
tendencies. The inequality of power and 
property shocks republican nerves. Pal-^ 
a4es, halls, villas, walled parks, all over 
England, rival the splendour of royal 
Beats. Many of the halls, like Haddon, 
or Kedleston, are beautiJful desolations. 
The proprietor never saw them, or never 
lived in them. Primogeniture built these 
sumptuous piles, and, I suppose, it is 
the sentiment of every traveller, as it was 
mine, 'Tv/as well to come ere these 
were gone. Primogeniture is a cardinal 
rule of English property and institutions. 
Laws, customs, manners, the very persons 
and faces affirm it. 

The frame of society is aristocratic, the 
taste of the people is loyal. The estates, 
names, and manners of the nobles flatter 
tile fancy of the people, and conciliate the 
necessary support. In spite of broken 
faith, stolen charters, and the devastation 


of society by the profligacy 6f tile coiirf, 
we take sides as we read for the loyal 
England and King Charles’s ' return to 
his right” with his Cavaliers — knowing 
what a heartless trifler he is, and wliat a 
crew of God -forsaken robbers they are, 
The people of England knew as much. 
But the fair idea of a settled govern- 
ment connecting itself with heraldic 
names, with the written and oral history 
of Europe; and, at last, with the Hebrew 
religion, and the oldest traditions of the 
world, was too pleasing a vision to be 
shattered by a few offensive realities, and 
the politics of shoemakers and coster- 
mongers. The hopes of the commoner^ 
take the same direction with the interest 
of the patricians. Every man who be- 
comes rich buys land, and does what he 
can to fortify the nobility, into which he 
hopes to rise. The Anglican clergy are 
identified with the aristocracy. Time and 
law have made the joining and moulding 
perfect in every part. The Cathedrals, 
the Universities, the national music, tha 
popular romances, conspire to uphold tha 
heraldry, which the current politics of the 
day are sapping. The taste of the people 
is conservative. They are proud of the 
castles, and of the language and symbol 
of chivalry. Even the word “ lord ” is th^ 
luckiest style that is used in any language 
to designate a patrician. The superior 
education and manners of the nobles re- 
commend them to the country. 

The Norwegian pirate got what he could, 
and held it for his eldest son. The Norman 
noble, who was the Norwegian pirate bap- 
tised, did likewise. There was this advan- 
tage of Western over Oriental nobility, 
that this was recruited from below. Eng- 
lish history is aristocracy with the doors 
open. Who has courage and faculty, let 
him come in. Of course, the terms ol 
admission to this club are hard and high. 
The selfishness of the nobles comes in aid 
of the interest of the nation to require 
signal merit. Piracy and war gave place 
to trade, politics, and letters ; the war- 
lord to the law-lord ; the law-lord to the 
merchant and the mill-owner; but the 
privilege was kept, whilst the means of 
obtain mg it were changed. 

The foundations of these families lie 
deep in Norwegian exploits by sea, and 
Saxon sturdiness on land. All nobility in 
its beginnings was somebody’s natural 
superiority. The things these English 
have done were not done without peril 
of life, nor without wisdom and conduct ; 
and the first hands, it may be presjmod 



ARISTOCRACY. 


275 


were often challenged to show their right 
to their honours, or yield them to better 
men. “ He that will bo a head, let him 
be a bridge,” said the Welsh chief Bene- 
gridran, when he carried all his men over 
the river on his back. ” He shall have 
the book,” said the mother of Alfred, ” who 
can read it;” and Alfred won it by that 
title: and I make no doubt that feudal 
tenure was no sinecure, but baron, knight, 
and tenant often had their memories re- 
freshed, in regard to the service by which 
they held their lands. The De Veres, 
Bohuns, Mowbrays, and Plantagenets were 
not addicted to contemplation. The Middle 
Age adorned itself with proofs of manhood 
and devotion. Of Richard Beauchamp, Earl 
of Warwick, the Emperor told Henry V. 
that no Christian king had such another 
knight for wisdom, nurture, and manhood, 
and caused him to be named ” Father of 
curtesie.” ” Our success in France,” says 
the historian, ” lived and died with him.”* 

The war-lord earned his honours, and 
no donation of land was large, as long as 
it brought the duty of protecting it, hour 
by hour, against a terrible enemy. In 
France and in England, the nobles were, 
down to a late day, born and bred to war ; 
and the duel, which in peace still held 
them to the risks of war, diminished the 
envy that, in trading and studious nations, 
V, Diild else have pried into their title. They 
were looked on as men who played high 
for a great stake. 

Great estates are not sinecures, if they 
are to be kept great. A creative economy 
is the fuel of magnificence. In the same 
line of Warwick, the successor next but 
one to Beauchamp, was the stout earl of 
Henry VI. and Edward IV. Few esteemed 
themselves in the mode, whose heads were 
not adorned with the black ragged staff, 
his badge. At his house in London, six 
oxen were daily eaten at a breakfast ; and 
every tavern was full of his meat; and 
who had any acquaintance in his family, 
should have as much boiled and roast as 
he could carry on a long dagger. 

The new age brings new qualities into 
request, the virtues of pirates gave way to 
those of planters, merchants, senators, 
and scholars. Comity, social talent, and 
fine manners, no doubt, have had their 
part also. I have met somewhere with a 
historiette, which, whether more or less 
true in its particulars, carries a general 
truth. ” How came the Duke of Bedford 
by his great landed estates ? His ancestor 


having travelled on the continent, a lively 
pleasant man, became the companion of a 
foreign prince wrecked on the Dorsetshire 
coast, where Mr. Russell lived. The prince 
recommended him to Henry VIII., who, 
liking his company, gave him a large share 
of the plundered church lands.” 

The pretence is that the noble is of un- 
broken descent from the Norman, and has 
never worked for eight hundred years. 
But the fact is otherwise. Where is Bohun? 
where is De Vere ? The lawyer, the farmer, 
the silk-mercer, lies perdu under the coro- 
net, and winks to the antiquary to say 
nothing ; especially skilful lawyers, no-^ 
body’s sons, who did some piece of work 
at a nice moment for government, and 
were rewarded with ermine. 

The national tastes of the English do 
not lead them to the life of the courtiev, 
but to secure the comfort and indepen- 
dence of their homes. The aristocracy are 
marked by their predilection for country- 
life. They are called the county-families. 
They have often no residence in London, 
and only go thither a short time, dunni* 
the season, to see the opera ; but they 
concentrate the love and labour of many 
generations on the building, planting, and 
decoration of their homesteads. Some of 
them are too old and too proud to wear 
titles, or, as Sheridan taid of Coke, ” dis- 
dain to hide their head in a coronet ; ” and 
some curious examples are cited to show 
the stability of English families. Their 
proverb is, that, fifty miles from London, 
a family will last a hundred years ; at a 
hundred miles, two hundred years ; and 
so on ; but I doubt that steam, the enemy 
of time, as well as of space, will disturb 
these ancient rules. Sir Henry Wotton 
says of the first Duke of Buckingham : 
‘‘ He v/as born at Brookeby in Leicester- 
shire, where his ancestors had chiefly con- 
tinued about the space of four hundred 
years, rather without obscurity, than with 
any great lustre.”* Wraxall says, that, in 
1781, Lord Surrey, afterwards Duke of 
Norfolk, told him, that when the year 
1783 should arrive, he meant to give a 
grand festival to all the descendants of 
the body of Jockey of Norfolk, to mark 
the day when the dukedom should have 
remained three hundred years in their 
house, since its creation by Richard III. 
Pepys tells us, in writing of an Earl Ox- 
ford, in 1666, tliat the honour had now 
remained in that name and blood six hun- 
dred years* 


• Mlar*® Woyfhie» II* p, 


EeliguitS WottoolamOo p. 306* 



276 


ENGLISH TRAITS. 


This long descent of families and this 
cleaving through ages to the same spot of 
ground captivates the imagination. It 
has too a connection with the names of 
the towns and districts of the country. 

The names are excellent— an atmo- 
sphere of legendary melody spread over 
the land. Older than all epics and his- 
tories, which clothe a nation, this under- 
shirt sits close to the body. What history 
too, and what stores of primitive and 
savage observation it unfolds ! Cambridge 
is the bridge of the Cam ; Sheffield the 
field of the river Sheaf; Leicester the 
castra or camp of the Lear or Leir (now 
Soar) ; Rochdale, of the Roch ; Exeter or 
Excester, the castra of the Ex ; Exmouth, 
Dartmouth, Sidmouth, Teignmouth, the 
mouths of the Ex, Dart, Sid, and Teign 
rivers. Waltham is strong town; Rad- 
cliffe is red cliff ; and so on — a sincerity 
and use in naming very striking to an 
American, whose country is whitewashed 
all over by unmeaning names, the cast-off 
clothes of the country from which its emi- 
grants came ; or, named at a pinch from 
a psalm-tune. But the English are those 
“ barbarians ” of Jamblichus, who “ are 
Stable in their manners, and firmly con- 
tinue to employ the same words, which 
also are dear to the gods.” 

'Tis an old sneer, that the Irish peerage 
drew their names from playbooks. The 
English lords do not call their lands after 
their own names, but call themselves after 
their lands; as if the man represented the 
country that bred him ; and they rightly 
wear the token of the glebe that gave them 
birth *, suggesting that the tie is not cut, 
but that there in London — the crags of 
Argyle, the kail of Cornwall, the downs of 
Devon, the iron of Wales, the clays of 
Stafford, are neither forgetting nor for- 
gotten, but know the man who was bom 
by them, and who, like the long line of 
his fathers, has carried that crag, that 
shore, dale, fen, or woodland, in his blood 
and manners. It has, too, the advantage 
of suggesting responsibleness. A suscep- 
tible man could not wear a name which 
represented in a strict sense a city or a 
county of England, without hearing in it 
a challenge to duty and honour. 

The predilection of the patricians for 
residence in the country, combined with 
the degree of liberty possessed by the 
easant, makes the safety of the English 
all, Mirabeau wrote prophetically from 
England, in 1784; “If revolution break 
out in France, I tremble for the aristo- 
cracy : their chateaux will be reduced to 


ashes, and their blood spilt In torr«ntf« 
The English tenant would defend his lord 
to the last extremity.” The English go 
to their estates for grandeur. The French 
live at court, and exile themselves to their 
estates for economy. As they do not 
mean to live with their tenants, they do 
not conciliate them, but wring from them 
the last sous. Evelyn writes from Blois, 
in 1644 ; “ The wolves are here in such 
numbers, that they often come and taka 
children out of the streets ; yet will not 
the Duke, who is sovereign here, permit 
them to be destroyed.” 

In evidence of the wealth amassed by 
ancient families, the traveller is shown the 
palaces in Piccadilly, Burlington House, 
Devonshire House, Lansdowne Plouse in 
Berkshire Square, and, lower down in the 
city, a few noble houses which still with- 
stand in all their amplitude the encroach- 
ment of streets. The Duke of Bedford 
includes or included a mile square in the 
heart of London, where the British Mu- 
seum, once Montague House, now stands* 
and the land occupied by Woburn Square, 
Bedford Square, Russell Square. The 
Marquis of Westminster built within a 
few years the series of squares called Bel- 
gravia. Stafford House is the noblest 
palace in London. Northumberland House 
holds its place by Charing Cross. Ches- 
terfield House remains in Audley Street. 
Sion House and Holland House are in 
the suburbs. But most of the historical 
houses are masked or lost in the modern 
uses to w'hich trade or charity has con- 
verted them. A multitude of town palaces 
contain inestimable galleries of art. 

In the country, the size of private 
estates is more impressive. From Bar- 
nard Castle I rode on the highway twenty- 
three miles from High Force, a fall of the 
Tees, towards Darlington, past Raby 
Castle, through the estate of the Duke of 
Cleveland. The Marquis of Breadalbane 
rides out of his house a hundred miles in 
a straight line to the sea, on his own pro- 
perty. The Duke of Sutherland owns the 
county of Sutherland, stretching across 
Scotland from sea to sea. The Duke of 
Devonshire, besides his other estates, 
owns 96,000 acres in the county of Derby. 
The Duke of Richmond has 40,000 acres 
at Goodwood, and 300,000 at Gordon 
Castle. The Duke of Norfolk’s park in 
Sussex is fifteen miles in circuit. An 
agriculturist bought lately the island of 
Lewes, in Hebrides, containing 500,000 
acres. The possessions of the Earl of 
Lonsdale gave him eight seats in Parlia- 



ARISTOCRACY, 


ment. This is the Heptarchy again : and 
before the Reform of 1832, one hundred 
and fifty-four persons sent three hundred 
and seven members to Parliament. The 
borough-mongers governed England. 

These large domains are growing larger. 
The great estates are absorbing the small 
freeholds. In 1786, the soil of England 
was owned by 250,000 corporations and 
proprietors; and, in 1822, by 32,000. 
These broad estates find room in this 
narrow island. All over England, scattered 
at short intervals among ship-yards, mills, j 
mines, and forges, are the paradises of 
the nobles, where the livelong repose and j 
refinement are heightened by tlie contrast 
with the roar of industry and necessity, 
out of which you have stepped aside. 

I was Burprised to observe the very 
small attendance usually in the House of 
Lords. Out of 573 peers, on ordinary 
days, only twenty or thirty. Where are 
they ? I asked. “ At home on their estates, 
devoured by ennui, or in the Alps, or up 
the Rhino, in the Harz Mountains, or in 
EgypL or in India, on the Ghauts.” But, 
v/ith such interests at stake, how can these 
men afford to neglect them ? ” Oh,” 
replied my friend, ” why should they work 
for themselves, when every man in Eng- 
land works for them, and will suffer before 
they come to harm?” The hardest 
radical instantly uncovers, and changes 
his tone to a lord. It was remarked on 
the loth April, 1848 (the day of the 
Chartist demonstration), that the upper 
classes were, for the first time, actively 
interesting themselves in their own 
defence, and men of rank were sworn 
special constables, with the rest. ” Be- 
sides, why need they sit out the debate ? 
Has not the Duke of Wellington, at this 
moment, their proxies — the proxies of 
fifty peers in his pocket, to vote for them, 
if there be an emergency ? '* 

It is however true that the existence of 
the House of Peers as a branch of the 
government entitles them to fill half the 
Cabinet ; and their weight of property and 
station give them a virtual nomination of 
the other half; whilst they have their 
share in the subordinate offices, as a 
school of training. This monopoly of 
political power has given them their in- 
tellectual and social eminence in Europe. 
A few law lords and a few political lords 
take the brunt of public business. In the 
army, the nobility fill a large part of the 
high commissions, and give to these a 
ton« of expense and splendour, and also 


277 

of exclusiveness. They have borne theif 
full share of duty and danger in this ser- 
vice ; and there are few noble families 
which have not paid in some of their 
members, the debt of life or limb, in the 
sacrifices of the Russian war. For the 
rest, the nobility have the lead in matters 
of state, and of expense; in questions of 
taste, in social usages, in convivial and 
domestic hospitalities. In general, all 
that is required of them is to sit securely, 
to preside at public meetings, to counte- 
nance charities, and to give the example 
of that decorum so dear to the British 
heart. 

If one asks, in the critical spirit of the 
day, what service this class have rendered? 
uses appear, or they would have perished 
long ago. Some of these are easily 
enumerated, others more subtle make a 
part of unconscious history. Their insti- 
tution is one step in the progress of 
society. For a race yields a nobility in 
some form, however we name the lords, 
as surely as it yields women. 

The English nobles are high-spirited, 
active, educated men, born to wealth and 
power, who have run through every coun* 

I try, and kept in every country the best 
company, have seen every secret of art 
and nature, and, when men of any ability 
or ambition, have been consulted in the 
conduct of every important action. You 
cannot wield great agencies without lend- 
ing yourself to them, and when it happens 
that the spirit of the earl meets his rank 
and duties, we have the best examples of 
behaviour. Power of any kind readily 
appears in the manners ; and benefieext 
power, le talent de bien fairCt gives a 
majesty which cannot be concealed or 
resisted. 

These people seem to gain as much as 
they lose by their position. They survey 
society, as from the top of St. Paul’s, 
and if they never hear plain truth from 
men, they see the best of everything, in 
every kind, and they see things so grouped 
and amassed as to infer easily the sum 
and genius, instead of tedious particulari- 
ties. Their good behaviour deserves all 
its fame, and they have that simplicity, 
and that air of repose, which are the 
finest ornament of greatness. 

The upper classes have only birth, say 
the people here, and not thoughts. Yes, 
but they have manners, and, 'tis wonder- 
ful, how much talent runs into manners ; 
nowhere and never so much as in England, 
They have the sense of superiority, the 
absence of all the ambitious effort which 



278 


ENGLISH TRAITS. 


disgusts in the aspiring classes, a pure 
tone of thought and feeling, and the 
power to command, among their other 
luxuries, the presence of the most accom- 
plished men in their festive meetings. 

Loyalty is in the English a sub-religion. 
They wear the laws as ornaments, and 
walk by their faith in their painted May- 
fair, as if among the forms of gods. The 
economist of 1855 who asks, of what use 
are the lords ? may learn of Franklin to 
ask, of what use is a baby ? They have 
been a social church proper to inspire 
sentiments mutually honouring the lover 
and the loved. Politeness is the ritual of 
society, as prayers are of the church ; a 
school of manners, and a gentle blessing 
to the age to which it grew. 'Tis a ro- 
mance adorning English life with a larger 
horizon; a midway heaven, fulfilling to 
their sense their fairy tales and poetry. 
This, just as far as the breeding of the 
nobleman, really made him brave, hand- 
some, accomplished, and great-hearted. 

On general grounds, whatever tends to 
form manners, or to finish men, has a 
great value. Everyone who has tasted 
the delight of friendship, will respect 
every social guard which our manners 
can establish, tending to secure from the 
intrusion of frivolous and distasteful 
people. The jealousy of every class to 
guard itself, is a testimony to the reality 
they have found in life. When a man 
once knows that he has done justice to 
himself, let him dismiss all terrors of 
aristocracy as superstitions, so far as he 
is concerned. He who keeps the door of 
a mine, whether of cobalt, or mercury, or 
nickel, or plumbago, securely ktows that 
the world cannot do without him. Every- 
body who is real is open and ready for 
that which is also real. 

Besides, these are they who make 
England that strong-box and museum it 
is ; who gather and protect works of art, 
dragged from amidst burning cities and 
revolutionary countries, and brought 
hither out of all the world. I look with 
respect at houses six, seven, eight hun- 
dred, or, like Warwick Castle, nine hun- 
dred years old. I pardoned high park 
fences, when I saw, that, besides does and 
pheasants, these have preserved Arundel 
marbles, Townley galleries, Howard and 
Spenserian libraries, Warwick and Port- 
land vases, Saxon manuscripts, monastic 
architectures, millennial trees, and breeds 
of cattle elsewhere extinct. In these 
manors, after the frenzy of war and des- 
truction subsides little, tho antiejuery 


finds the frailest Roman Jar, or crumbling 
Egyptian mummy case, without so much 
as a new layer of dust, keeping the series 
of history unbroken, and waiting for its 
interpreter, who is sure to arrive. These 
lords are the treasurers and librarians of 
mankind, engaged by their pride and 
wealth to this function. 

Yet there were other works for British 
dukes to do. George Loudon, Quintinye, 
Evelyn, had taught them to make gardens. 
Arthur Young, Hakewell, and Mechi have 
made them agricultural. Scotland was a 
camp until the day of Culloden. The 
Dukes of Athole, Sutherland, Buccleuch, 
and the Marquis of Breadalbane have 
introduced the rape-culture, the sheep- 
farm, wheat, drainage, the plantation of 
forests, the artificial replenishment of 
lakes and ponds with fish, the renting of 
game-preserves. Against the cry of the 
old tenantry, and the sympathetic cry of 
the English press, they have rooted out 
and planted anew, and now six millions 
of people live, and live better on the same 
land that fed three millions. 

The English barons, in every period 
have been brave and great, after the esti- 
mate and opinion of their times. The 
grand old halls scattered up and down in 
England are dumb vouchers to the state 
and broad hospitality of their ancient 
lords. Shakespeare’s portraits of good 
Duke Humphrey, of Warwick of North- 
umberland, of Talbot, were drawn in 
strict consonance with the traditions. A 
sketch of the Earl of Shrewsbury, from 
the pen of Queen Elizabeth’s Archbishop 
Parker ; * Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s 
autobiography; the letters and essays of 
Sir Philip Sidney; the anecdotes pre- 
served by the antiquaries Fuller and 
j Collins ; some glimpses at the interiors of 
noble houses, which we owe to Pepys and 
Evelyn; the details which Ben Jonson’s 
masques (performed at Kenilworth, Al- 
thorpe, Belvoir, and other noble houses), 
record or suggest ; down to Aubrey’s pas- 
sages of the life of Hobbes in the house 
of the Earl of Devon, are favourable pic- 
tures of a romantic style of manners. 
Penshurst still shines for us, and its 
Christmas revels, “where logs not bum, 
but men.” At Wilton House the “Ar- 
cadia” was written, amidst conversations 
with Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, a man 
of no vulgar mind, as his own poems 
declare him. 1 must hold Ludlow Castlo 
an honest house, for which Milton’s 

* D;bdm’9 Literary RemlnlocenoMi Voh I« A 



ARISTOCRACY. 


**Comus” was written, and the company 
nobly bred which performed it with know- 
ledge and sympathy. In the roll of nobles 
are found poets, philosophers, chemists, 
astronomers, also men of solid virtues 
and of lofty sentime its ; often they have 
been the friends and patrons of genius 
and learning, and especially of the fine 
arts ; and at this moment almost every 
great house has its sumptuous picture- 
gallery. 

Of course, there is another side to this 
gorgeous show. Every victory was the de- 
feat of a party only less worthy. Castles 
are proud tilings, but ’tis safest to be 
outside of them. War is a foul game, 
and yet war is not the worst part of 
aristocratic history. In later times, when 
the baron, educated only for war, with his 
brains paralysed by his stomach, found 
himself idle at home, he grew fat and 
wanton, and a sorry brute. Grammont, 
Pepys, and Evelyn show the kennels to 
which the king and court went in quest 
of pleasure. Prostitutes taken from the 
theatres were made duchesses, their 
bastards dukes and carls. “ The young 
men sat uppermost, the old serious lords 
were out of favour.” The discourse that 
the king’s companions had with him was 
" poor and frothy.” No man who valued 
his head might do what these pot-com- 
panions familiarly did with the king. In 
logical sequence of these dignified revels, 
Pepys can tell the beggarly shifts to which 
the king was reduced, who could not find 
paper at his council table, and ** no 
handkerchers ” in his wardrobe, “ and 
but three bands to his neck,” and the 
linendraper and the stationer were out of 
pocket, and refusing to trust him, and the 
baker will not bring bread any longer. 
Meantime, the English Channel was 
swept, and London threatened by the 
Dutch fleet, manned too by English 
sailors, who, having been cheated of their 
pay for years by the king, enlisted with 
the enemy. 

The Selwyn correspondence in the 
reign of George III., discloses a rotten- 
ness in the aristocracy, which threatened 
to decompose the Stale. The sycophancy 
and sale of votes and honour, for place 
and title; lewdness, gaming, smuggling, 
bribery, and cheating; the sneer at the 
childish indiscretion of quarrelling with 
ten thousand a year ; the want of ideas ; 
the splendour of the titles, and the apathy 
of the nation, are instructive, and make 
the reader pause and explore the firm 
bounds which confined these vices to u 


279 

handful of rich men. In the reign of the 
Fourth George, things do not scorn to 
have mended ; and the rotten debaucliee 
let down from a window by an inclined 
plane into his coach to take the air, was 
a scandal to Europe, which the ill fame 
of his queen and of his family did nothing 
to retrieve. 

Under the present reign, the perfect 
decorum of the Court is thought to have 
put a check on the gross vices of the aris- 
tocracy ; yet gaming, racing, drinking, 
and mistresses bring them down, and the 
democrat can still gather scandals, if he 
will. Dismal anecdotes abound, verifying 
the gossip of the last generation of dukca 
served by bailiffs, with all their plate in 
pawn ; of great lords living by the show- 
ing of their houses ; and of an old man 
wheeled in his chair from room to room, 
whilst his chambers are exhibited to the 
visitor for money*, of ruined dukes and 
earls living in exile for debt. The historic 
names of the Buckinghams, Beauforts, 
Marlboroughs, and Hertfords have gained 
no new lustre, and now and then darker 
scandals break out, ominous as the new 
chapters added under the Orleans dynasty 
to the ' ‘ Causes CiUhres ’ ’ in France. Even 
peers, who are men of worth and public 
spirit, are overtaken and embarrassed by 
their vast expense. The respectable Duke 
of Devonshire, willing to be the Mecaenas 
and Luculliis of his island, is reported to 
have said that he cannot live at Chats- 
worth but one month in the year. Their 
many houses eat them up. They cannot 
sell them, because they are entailed. 
They will not let them, for pride’s sake, 
but keep them empty, aired, and the 
grounds mown and dressed, at a cost of 
four or five thousand pounds a year. The 
spending is for a great part in servants, 
in many houses exceeding a hundred. 

Most of them are only chargeable with 
idleness, which, because it squanders such 
vast power of benefit, has the mischief of 
crime. ‘ ' They might be little Providences 
on earth,” said my friend, “ and they are, 
for the most part, jockeys and fops.'* 
Campbell says: ” Acquaintance with the 
nobility, I could never keep up. It requires 
a life of idleness, dressing, and attendance 
on their parties.” I suppose, too, that a 
feeling of self-respect is driving cultivated 
men out of this society, as if the noble 
were slow to receive the lessons of the 
times, and had not learned to disguise hia 
pride of place. A man of wit, who is 
also one of the celebrities of wealth and 
fashion, confessed to ^his friend, that ha 

T 



2S0 


ENGLISH TRAITS, 


could not enter their houses without being The road that grandeur levek fbc hi« 
made to feel that they were great lords, and coach, toil can travel in his cart, 
he a low plebeian. With the tribe of ay- This is more manifest every day, but 
including the musical tribe, the patri- I think it is true throughout English his- 
cian morgue keeps no terms, but excludes tory. English history, wisely read, is the 
them. When Julia Grisi and Mario sang vindication of the brain of that people, 
at the houses of the Duke of Welling- Here, at last, were climate and condition 
ton and other grandees, a ribbon was friendly to the working faculty. Who now 
stretched between the singer and the will work and dare, shall rule. ^ This is 
company. the charter, or the chartism, which fogs, 

When every noble was a soldier, they and seas, and rains proclaimed — that 
were carefully bred to great personal intellect and personal force should make 
prowess. The education of a soldier is the law ; that industry and administrative 
a simpler affair than that of an earl in the talent should administer ; that work should 
nineteenth century. And this was very wear the crown. I know that not this, but 
seriously pursued ; they were expert in something else is pretended. The fiction 
every species of equitation, to the most with which the noble and the bystander 
dangerous practices, and this down to the equally please themselves is, that the 
accession of William of Orange. But former is of unbroken descent from the 
graver men appear to have trained their Norman, and so has never worked for 
sons for civil affairs. Elizabeth extended eight hundred years. All the families are 
her thought to the future; and Sir Philip new, but the name is old, and they have 
Sidney in his letter to his brother, and made a covenant with their memories not 
Milton and Evelyn, gave plain and hearty to disturb it. But the analysis of the 
council. Already, too, the English noble peerage and gentry shows the rapid decay 
and squire were preparing for the career and extinction of old families, the cOn- 
of the country-gentleman, and his peace- tinual recruiting of these from new blood, 
able expense. They went from city to The doors, though ostentatiously guarded, 
city, learning receipts to make perfumes, are really open, and hence the power of 
sweet powders, pomanders, antidotes, the bribe. All the barriers to rank only 
gathering seeds, gems, coins, and divers whet the thirst, and enhance the prize, 
curiosities, preparing for a private life, “ Now,” said Nelson, when clearing for 
thereafter, in which they should take battle,” a peerage, orWestminster Abbey! ” 
pleasure in these recreations, “I have no illusion left,” said Sidney 

All advantages given to absolve the Smith, ” but the Archbishop of Canter- 
young patrician from intellectual labour bury.” ” I'he lawyers,” said Burke, ” are 
are of coarse mistaken. ” In the univer- only birds of passage in this House of 
sity, noblemen are exempted from the Commons,” and then added, with a new 
public exercises for the degree, &c., by figure, ” they have their best bowxjr anchor 
which they attain a degree called honorary, in the House of Lords. 

At the same time the fees they have to Another stride that has been taken, 
pay for matriculation, and on all other appears in the perishing of heraldry, 
occasions, are much higher.”* Fuller Whilst the privileges of nobility are pass- 
records “the observation of foreigners, ing to the middle class, the badgeisdis- 
thatEnglishmen, by making their children credited, and the titles of lordship are 
gentlemen, before they are men, cause getting musty and cumbersome. I won- 
they are so seldom wise men.” This der that sensible men have not been 
cockering justifies Dr. Johnson’s bitter already impatient of them. They belong, 

• apology for primogeniture, ” that it makes with wigs, powder, and scarlet coats, to an 
but one fool in a family.’* earlier age, and may be advantageously 

The revolution in society has reached consigned, with paint and tattoo, to the 
this class. The great powers of indus- dignitajries of Australia and Polynesia, 
trial art have no exclusion of name or A multitude of English, educated at tha 
blood. The tools of our time, namely, universities, bred into their society with 
steam, ships, printing, money, and popu- manners, ability, and the gifts of fortune, 
lar education, belong to those who can are every day confronting the peers on a 
handle them; and their effect has been, that footing of equality, and outstripping them 
advantages once confined to men of family as often, in the race of honour and infiu- 
•ro now open to the whole middle class, ence. That cultivated class is large and 

ever enlarging. It is computed that, with 
* Haber, History of English Univenltiei;. titles and withouti there a^e sevehty 



VNiVERSITIES. 


thousand of these people coming and 
going in London, who make up what is 
called high society. They cannot shut 
their eyes to the fact that an untitled no- 
bility possess all the power without the 
itioonveniences that belong to rank, and 
the rich Finglishman goes over the world 
at the present day, drawing more than all 
the advantages which the strongest of his 
kings could command. 


UNIVERSITIES. 

Of British universities, Cambridge has 
the most illustrious names on its list. At 
the present day, too, it has the advantage 
of Oxford, counting in its alumni a greater 
number of distinguished scholars. I re- 
gret that I had but a single day wherein 
to see King’s College Chapel, the beauti- 
ful lawns and gardens of the colleges, and 
a few of its gownsmen. 

But I availed myself of some repeated 
invitations to Oxford, where I had intro- 
ductions to Dr. Daubeny, Professor of 
Botany, and to the Regius Professor of 
Divinity, as well as to a valued friend, a 
Fellow of Oriel, and went thither on the 
hist day of March, 1848. I was the guest 
-of my friend in Oriel, was housed close 
upon that college, and I lived on college 
hospitalities. 

My new friends showed me their clois- 
ters, the Bodleian Library, the Randolph 
Gallery, Merton Hall, and the rest. I 
saw several faithful, high-minded young 
men, some of them in the mood of making 
sacrifices for peace of mind — a topic, of 
course, on which I had no counsel to 
offer. Their affectionate and gregarious 
ways reminded me at once of the habits 
of our Cambridge men, though I imputed 
to these English an advantage in their 
secure and polished manners. The halls 
are rich with oaken wainscoting and ceil- 
ing. The pictures of the founders hang 
from the walls; the tables glitter with 
plate. A youth came fonv’ard to the upper 
table, and pronounced the ancient form 
of grace before meals, which, I suppose, 
has been in use here for ages, Benedictus 
l?encdicat ; benedictur, benedicatur. 

It is a curious proof of the English use 
and wont, or of their good-nature, that 
these young men are locked up every 
night at nine o’clock, and the porter at 
each hall is required to give the name of 
any belated student who is admitted after | 
that hour, Still more descriptive is the  


2^1 

fact, that out of twelve hundred young 
men, comprising the most spirited of the 
aristocracy, a duel has never occurred. 

Oxford is old, even in England; and 
conservative. Its foundations date from 
Alfred, and even from Arthur, if, as is 
alleged, the Pheryllt of the Druids had a 
seminary here. In the reign of Edward I., 
it is pretended, here were thirty thousand 
students ; and nineteen most noble founda- 
tions were then established. Chaucer 
found it as firm as if it had always stood ; 
and it is in British story, rich with great 
names, the school of the island, and the 
link of England to the learned of Europe. 
Hither came Erasmus, with delight, in 
1497* Albericus Gentilis, in 15S0, was re- 
lieved and maintained, by the university. 
Albert Alaskie, a noble Polonian, Prince 
of Sirad, who visited England to admire 
the wisdom of Queen Elizabeth, was en- 
tertained with stage-plays in the Refectory 
of Christ Church, in 1583. Isaac Casau- 
bon, coming from Henri Quatre of France, 
by invitation of James I., was admitted to 
Christ’s College, in July, 1613. I saw the 
Ashmolean Museum, whither Elias Ash- 
mole, in 1682, sent tw'elve cart-loads of 
rarities. Here indeed was the Olympia 
of all Antony Wood’s and Aubrey’s games 
and heroes, and every inch of ground has 
its lustre. For Wood’s A thence Oxonienses, 
or calendar of the writers of Oxford for 
two hundred years, is a lively record of 
Engliish manners and merits, and as much 
a national monument as Purchas’s Pil- 
grims or Hansard’s Register. On every 
[ side, Oxford is redolent of age and autho- 
rity. Its gates shut of themselves against 
modern innovation. It is still governed 
by the statutes of Archbishop Laud. The 
books in Merton Library are still chained 
to the wall. Here, on August 27, 1660, 
John Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano De- 
fensio and Icoitoclastes were committed to 
the flames. I saw the school-court or 
quadrangle, where, in 1683, the Convoca- 
tion caused the Leviathan of Thomas 
Hobbes to be publicly burnt. I do not 
know whether this learned body have yet 
heard of the Declaration of American In- 
dependence, or whether the Ptolemaic 
astronomy does not still hold its ground 
against the novelties of Copernicus. 

As many sons, almost so many benefac- 
tors. It is usual for a nobleman, or in- 
deed for almost every wealthy student, on 
quitting college, to leave behind him som« 
article of plate ; and gifts of all values, 
from a hall, or a fellowship, or a library, 
down to a picture or a spoon, are continu* 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 


2S2 

ally accruing, in the course of a century. 
My friend Dr. J. gave me the following 
anecdote. In Sir Thomas Lawrence’s 
collection at London were the cartoons of 
Raphael and Michel Angelo. This ines- 
timable prize was offered to Oxford Uni- 
versity for seven thousand pounds. The 
offer was accepted, and the committee 
charged with the affair had collected three 
thousand pounds, when among other 
friends they called on Lord Eldon. In- 
stead of a hundred pounds, he surprised 
them by putting down his name for three 
thousand jKDunds. They told him they 
should now very easily raise the remain- 
der. “ No,‘’ he said, “ your men have 
probably already contributed all they can 
spare ; I can as well give the rest : ” and 
he withdrew his cheque for three thousand, 
and wrote four thousand pounds. I saw 
the whole collection in April, 1848. 

In the Bodleian Library, Dr. Bandinel 
showed me the manuscript Plato, of the 
date of A.D. 8g6, brought by Dr. Clarke 
from Egypt ; a manuscript Virgil, of the 
same century ; the first Bible printed at 
Mentz (I believe in ^450) ; and a duplicate 
of the same, which had been deficient in 
about twenty leaves at the end. But, one 
day, being in Venice, he bought a room 
full of books and manuscripts—every scrap 
and fragment — for four thousand louis 
d’ors, and had the doors locked and sealed 
by the consul. On proceeding, afterwards, 
to examine his purchase, he found the 
twenty deficient pages of his Mentz Bible, 
in perfect order ; brought them to Oxford, 
with the rest of his purchase, and placed 
them in the volume; but has too much 
awe for the Providence that appears in 
bibliography also, to suffer the reunited 
parts to be rebound. The oldest building 
here is two hundred years younger than 
the frail manuscript brought by Dr. Clarke 
from Egypt. No candle or fire is ever 
lighted in the Bodleian. Its catalogue is 
the standard catalogue on the desk of 
every library in Oxford. In each several 
college, they underscore in red ink on this 
catalogue the titles of books contained in 
the library of that college, the theory being 
that the Bodleian has all books. This rich 
library spent during the last year (1847) 
for the purchase of books ;^i,668. 

The logical English train a scholar as 
they train an engineer. Oxford is a Greek 
factory, as Wilton mills weave carpet, and 
Sheffield grinds steel. They know the use 
of a tutor, as they know the use of a horse ; 
and they draw the greatest amount of 
bonofit out of both. The reading men are 


kept by hard walking, hard riding, and 
measured eating and drinking, at the top 
of their conditic«, and two days before 
the examination, do no work, but lounge, 
ride, or run, to be fresh on the college 
doomsday. Seven years residence is the 
theoretic period for a master’s degree. In 
point of fact, it has long been three years 
residence, and four years more of standing. 
This three years ” is about twenty-one 
months in all.* 

“ The whole expense,” says Professor 
Sewel, *‘ of ordinary college tuition at 
Oxford, is about sixteen guineas a year.” 
But this plausible statement may deceive 
a reader unacquainted with the fact, that 
the principal teaching relied on is private 
tuition. And the expenses of private 
tuition are reckoned at from £50 to £jo a 
year, or $1,000 for the whole course of 
three years und a half. At Cambridge 
$7 50 a year is economical, and $1,500 
not extravagant, f 

The number of students and of residents, 
the dignity of the authorities, the value of 
the foundations, the history and the ar- 
chitecture, the known sympathy of entire 
Britain in what is done there, justify a 
dedication to study in the undergraduate, 
such as cannot easily be in America, 
where his college is half suspected by the 
Freshman to be insignificant in the scale 
beside trade and politics. Oxford is a 
little aristocracy in itself, numerous and 
dignified enough to rank with other 
estates in the realm ; and where fame and 
secular promotion are to be had for study, 
and in a direction which has the unani- 
mous respect of all cultivated nations. 

This aristocracy, of course, repairs ita 
own losses ; fills places, as they fall vacant, 
from the body of students. The number 
of fellowships at Oxford is 540, averaging 
£200 a year, with lodging and diet at the 
college. If a young American, loving 
learning, and hindered by poverty, were 
offered a home, a table, the walks, and the 
library, in one of these academical pal- 
aces, and a thousand dollars a year as 
long as he chose to remain a bachelor, he 
would dance for joy. Yet these young 
men thus happily placed, and paid to 
read, are impatient of their few checks, 
and many of them preparing to resign 
their fellowships. They shuddered at the 
prospect of dying a Fellow, and they 
pointed out to me a paralytic old man, 
who was assisted into the hall. As the 

* Huber, II. p. 304. 

t Bristed Five Years at an English UaivMV 

•Uy, 



UNIVERSITIES, 


number of undergraduates at Oxford is 
only about 1,200 or 1,300, and many of 
these are never competitors, the chance 
of a fellowship is very great. The income 
of the nineteen colleges is conjectured at 
£150,000 a year. 

The effect of this drill is the radical 
knowledge of Greek and Latin, and of 
mathematics, and the solidity and taste of 
English criticism. Whatever luck there 
may be in this or that award, an Eton 
captain can write Latin longs and shorts, 
can turn the Court Guide into hexameters, 
and it is certain that a Senior Classic can 
quote correctly from the “ Corpus Poet- j 
arum,” and is critically learned in all the 
humanities. Greek erudition exists on 
the Isis and Cam, whether the Maud man 
or the Brazen Nose man be properly 
ranked or not ; the atmosphere is loaded 
with Greek learning ; the whole river has 
reached a certain height, and kills all that 
growth of weeds, which this Castalian 
water kills. The English nature takes 
culture kindly. So Milton thought. It 
refines the Norseman. Access to the 
Greek mind lifts his standard of taste. 
He has enough to think of, and, unless of 
an impulsive nature, is indisposed from 
writing or speaking, by the fulness of his 
mind, and the new severity of his taste. 
The great silent crowd of thorough-bred 
Grecians always known to be around him, 
the English writer cannot ignore. They 
prune his orations, and point his pen. 
Hence, the style and tone of English 
journalism. The men have learned ac - 1 
curacy and comprehension, logic, and 
pace, or speed of working. They have j 
bottom, endurance, wind. When born | 
with good constitutions, they make those 
eupeptic studying-mills, the cast-iron men, 
the dura ilia, whose powers of perform- 
ance compare with ours, as the steam- 
hammer with the music-box ; Cokes, 
Mansfields, Seldeus, and Bentleys, and 
when it happens that a superior brain 
puts a rider on this admirable horse, we 
obtain those masters of the world who 
combine the highest energy in affairs with 
a supreme culture. 

It is contended by those who have been 
bred at Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and West- 
minster, that the public sentiment within 
each of those schools is high-toned and 
manly ; that, in their playgrounds, courage 
is universally admired, meanness despised, 
manly feelings and generous conduct are 
encouraged; that an unwritten code of 
honour deals to the spoiled child of rank 
and to the child of upstart wealth an even- 


handed justice, purges their fiOnsefi«e out 
of both, and does all that can be done to 
make them gentlemen. 

Again, at the universities, it is urged, 
that all goes to form what England values 
as the flower of its national life — a well- 
educated gentleman. The German, Huber, 
in describing to his countrymen the attri- 
butes of an English gentleman, frankly 
admits, that “ in Germany, we have 
nothing of the kind. A gentleman must 
possess a political character, an indepen- 
dent and public position, or, at least, the 
right of assuming it. He must have 
average opulence, either of his own, or in 
his family. He should also have bodily 
activity and strength, unattainable by our 
sedentary life in public offices. The race 
of English gentlemen presents an appear- 
ance of manly vigour and form, not else- 
where to be found among an equal number 
of persons. No other nation produces 
the stock. And in England, it has dete- 
riorated. The university is a decided 
presumption in any man’s favour. And 
so eminent are the members that a glance 
at the calendars will show that in all the 
world one cannot be in better company 
than on the books of one of the larger 
Oxford or Cambridge colleges.”* 

These seminaries are finishing schools 
for the upper classes, and not for the poor. 
The useful is exploded. The definition 
of a public school is ” a school which ex- 
cludes all that could fit a man for standing 
behind a counter.”f 

No doubt, the foundations have been 
perverted. Oxford, which equals in wealth 
several of the smaller European states, 
shuts up the lectureships which were 
made ” public for all men thereunto to 
have concourse ; ” misspends the revenues 
bestowed for such youths ‘‘as should be 
most meet for towardness, poverty, and 
painfulness ; ” there is gross favouritism ; 
many chairs and many fellowships are 
made beds of ease ; and ’tis likely that 
the university will know how to resist and 
make inoperative the terrors of parlia- 
mentary inquiry no doubt, their learning 
is grown obsolete ; but Oxford also has 
its merits, and I found here also proof of 
the national fidelity and thoroughness. 
Such knowledge as they prize they 
possess and impart. Whether in course 
or by indirection, whether by a cramming 
tutor or by examiners with prizes and 

* Huber, History of the English UniversiUea. 
Newman’s Translation, 

t See Bristed, Five Years in an English Uhi* 
versity. New Yorlo i8ja. 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 


284 

foundation scholarships, education ac- 
cording to the English notion of it is 
arrived at. I looked over the Examina- 
tion Papers of the year 1848, for the 
Tarious scholarships and fellowships, the 
Lusby, the Hertford, the Dean-Ireland, 
and the University (copies of which were 
kindly given me by a Greek professor),^ 
containing the tasks which many competi- 
tors had victoriously performed, and I 
believed they would prove too severe tests 
for the candidates fora Bachelor's degree 
in Yale or Harvard. And, in general, here 
was proof of a more searching study in 
the appointed directions, and the know- 
ledge pretended to be conveyed was con- 
veyed. Oxford sends out yearly twenty 
or thirty very able men, and three or four 
hundred well-educated men. 

The diet and rough exercise secure a 
certain amount of old Norse power. A 
fop will fight, and, in exigent circumstan- 
ces, will play the manly part. In seeing 
these youths, I believed I saw already an 
advantage in vigour and colour and gene- 
ral habit, over their contemporaries in 
the American colleges. No doubt much 
of the power and brilliancy of the reading- 
men is merely constitutional or hygienic. 
With a hardier habit and resolute gym- 
nastics, with five miles more walking, or 
five ounces less eating, or with a saddle 
and gallop of twenty miles a day, with 
skating and rowing-matches, the American 
would arrive at as robust exegesis, and 
cheery and hilarious tone. I should readily 
concede these ad vantages, which it would be 
easy to acquire, if I did not find also that 
they read better than we, and write better. 

English wealth falling on their school 
and university training, makes a systema- 
tic reading of the best authors, and to the 
end of a knowledge how the things where- 
of they treat really stand : whilst pamph- 
leteer or journalist reading for an argu- 
ment for a party,or reading to write, or, at 
all events for some by-ends imposed on 
them, must read meanly and fragmentarily. 
Charles I. said, that he understood English 
law as well as a gentleman ought to under- 
stand it. 

Then they have access to books ; the 
rich libraries collected at every one of 
many thousands of houses, give an advan- 
lage not to be attained by a youth in this 
country, when one thinks how much more 
and better mAy be learned by a scholar, 
who, immediately on hearing of a book, 
can consult it, than by one who is on the 
quest, for years, and reads inferior books, 
because he cannot &nd the best 


Again, the great number of cultitated 
I men keep each other up to a high stan- 
dard. The habit of meeting well-read 
and knowing men teaches the art of omis- 
sion and selection. 

Universities are, of course, hostile to 
geniuses ; which seeing and using ways of 
their own, discredit the routine: as 
churches and monasteries persecute 
youthful saints. Yet we all send our sons 
to college, and, thougti he be a genius, he 
must take his chance. The university 
must be retrospective. The gale that 
gives direction to the vanes on all its 
towers blows out of antiquity. Oxford is 
a library, and the professors must be li- 
brarians. And I should as soon think of 
quarrelling with the janitor for not magni- 
fying his office by hostile sallies into the 
street, like the Governor of Kertch or Kiln- 
burn, as of quarrelling with the professors 
for not admiring the young neologists 
who pluck the beards of Euclid and Aris- 
totle, or for not attempting themselves to 
fill their vacant shelves as original writers. 

It is easy to carp at colleges, and the 
college, if we will wait for it, will have its 
own turn. Genius exists there also, but 
will not answer a call of a committee of 
the House of Commons. It is rare, pre- 
carious, eccentric, and darkling. England 
is the land of mixture and surprise, and 
when you have settled it that the univer- 
sities are moribund, out comes a poetic 
influence from the heart of Oxford, to 
mould the opinions of cities, to build 
their houses as simply as birds their nests, 
to give veracity to art, and charm man- 
kind, as an appeal to moral order always 
must. But besides this restorative genius, 
the best poetry of England of this age, in 
the old forms, comes from two graduates 
of Cambridge, 


RELIGION. 

No people at the present day can be ex- 
plained by their national religion. They 
do not feel responsible for it ; it lies far 
outside of them. Their loyalty to truth, 
and their labour and expenditure rest on 
real foundations, and not on a national 
church. And English life, it is evident, 
does not grow out of the Athanasian creed, 
or the Articles, or the Eucharist. It i^ 
with religion as with marriage, A youth 
marries in haste ; afterwards, when hia 
mind is opened to the reason of the con- 
duct of hfe, he is asked, what he thinks of 
the institution of marriage, and of the 



RELIGION. 


right relations of the sexes. * 1 should have 
much to say,’ he might reply, ‘ if the ques- 
tion were open, but I have a wife 
and children, and all question is closed 
for me.’ In the barbarous days of 
a nation, some cuUus is formed or 
imported ; altars are built, tithes are paid, 
priests ordained. The education and ex- 
penditure of the country take that direc- 
tion, and when wealth, refinement, great 
men, and ties to the world, supervene, its 
prudent men say, why fight against Fate, 
or lift these absurdities which are now 
mountainous ? Better find some niche or 
crevice in this mountain of stone which 
religious ages have quarried and carved, 
wherein to bestow yourself, than attempt 
anything ridiculously and dangerously 
above your strength, like removing it. 

In seeing old castles and cathedrals, I 
sometimes say, as to-day, in front of Dun- 
dee church tower, which is eight hundred 
years old, ‘ this was built by another and 
a better race than any that now look on it.’* 
And, plainly, there has been great power 
of sentiment in this island, of which these 
buildings are the proofs : as volcanic basalts 
show the work of fire which has been ex- 
tinguished for ages, England felt the full 
heat of the Christianity which fermented 
Europe, and drew like the chemistry of 
fire, a firm line between barbarism and 
culture. The power of the relgious senti- 
ment put an end to human sacrifices, 
checked appetite, inspired the cnisades, in- 
spired resistance to tyrants, inspired self- 
respect, set bounds to serfdom and slavery, 
founded liberty, created the religious 
architecture — York, Newstead, West- 
minster, Fountains Abbey, Ripon, Bever- 
ley, and Dundee — works to which the key 
is lost, with the sentiment which created 
them ; inspired the English Bible, the 
liturgy, the monkish histories, the chroni- 
cle of Richard of Devizes. The priest 
translated the Vulgate, and translated the 
sanctities of old hagiology into English 
virtues on English ground. It was a certain 
affirmative or aggressive state of the Cau- 
casian races. Man awoke refreshed by 
the sleep of ages. The violence of the 
northern savages exasperated Christianity 
into power. It lived by the love of the 
people. Bishop Wilfrid manumitted two 
hundred and fifty serfs, whom he found 
attached to the soil. The clergy obtained 
respite from labour for the boor on the 
Sabbath, and on church festivals. “ The 
lord who compelled his boor to labour be- 
tween sunset on Saturday and sunset on 
Sunday, forfeited him altogether.” The 


285 

priest came out of the people, and sympa- 
thized with his class. The church was 
the mediator, check, and democratic prin- 
ciple in Europe. Latimer, WycVffie, 
Arundel, Cobham, Antony Parsons, Sir 
Harry Vane, George Fox, Penn, Bunyan, 
are the democrats, as well as the saints of 
their times. The Catholic Church, thrown 
on this toiling, serious people, has made 
in fourteen centuries a massive system, 
close fitted to the manners and genius of 
the country, at once domestical and stately. 
In the long time, it has blended with 
everything in heaven above and the earth 
beneath. It moves through a zodiac of 
feasts and fasts, names 6very day of the 
year, every town and market and head- 
land and monument, and has coupR.d 
itself with the almanac, that no court can 
be held, no field ploughed, no horse shod, 
without some leave from the church. All 
maxims of prudence or shop or farm are 
fixed and dated by the church. Hence, 
its strength in the agricultural districts. 
The distribution of land into parishes en- 
forces a church sanction to every civil 
privilege : and the gradation of the clergy, 
— prelates for the rich, and curates for the 
poor — with the fact that a classical educa- 
tion has been secured to the clergyman, 
makes them, ” the link which unites tha 
sequestered peasantry with the intellec- 
tual advancement of the age.”* 

The English Church has many certifi- 
cates to show, of humble effective service 
in humanizing the people, in cheering and 
refining men, feeding, healing, and educa- 
ting. It has the seal of martyrs and con- 
fessors : the noblest books ; a sublime 
architecture ; a ritual marked by the same 
secular merits, nothing cheap or purchase- 
able. 

From this slow-grown church important 
reactions proceed ; much for culture, much 
for giving a direction to the nation’s affec- 
tion and will to-day. The carved and 
pictured chapel — its entire surface ani- 
mated with image and emblem — made the 
parish church a sort of book and Bible to 
the people’s eye. 

Then when the Saxon instinct had 
secured a service in the vernacular tongue, 
it was the tutor and the university of the 
people. In York minster, on the day of 
the enthronization of tlie new archbishop, 
I heard the service of evening prayer read 
and chanted in the choir. It was strange 
to hear the pretty pastoral of the betrothal 
of Rebecca and Isaac, in the morning of 


* Wordsworth. 



t86 ENGLISH 

the world, read with circumstantiality in 
York minster, on the 13th January, 1848, 
to the decorous English audience, just 
fresh from the Times newspaper and their 
wine ; and listening with all the devotion 
of national pride. That was binding old 
and new to some purpose. The reverence 
for the Scriptures is an elementjof civiliza- 
tion, for thus has the history of the world 
been preserved, and is preserved. Here 
in England every day a chapter of Genesis, 
and a leader in the Times. 

Another part of the same service on 
this occasion was not insignificant. Han- 
del’s coronation anthem, God save the 
King, was played by Dr. Camidge on the 
organ, with sublime effect. The minster 
and the music were made for each other. 
It was a hint of the part the church plays 
as a political engine. From his infancy 
every Englishman is accustomed to hear 
daily prayers for the queen, for the royal 
family, and the Parliament, by name; 
and this life-long consecration of these 
personages cannot be without influence 
on his opinions. 

The universities, also, are parcel of the 
ecclesiastical system, and their first design 
IS to form the clergy. Thus the clergy for 
a thousand years have been the scholars 
of the nation. 

The national temperament deeply en- 
joys the unbroken order and tradition of 
its church ; the liturgy, ceremony, archi- 
tecture; the sober grace, the good com- 
pany, the connection with the throne, and 
with history, which adorn it. And whilst 
it endears itself thus to men of more taste 
than activity, the stability of the English 
nation is passionately enlisted to its sup- 
port, from its inextricable connection with 
the cause of public order, with politics 
and with the funds. 

Good churches are not built by bad 
men ; at least there must be probity and 
enthusiasm somewhere in society. These 
minsters were neither built nor filled by 
atheists. No church has had more learned, 
industrious, or devoted men ; plenty of 
‘clerks and bishops, who, out of their 
gowns, would turn their backs on no 
man.”* Their architecture still glows 
with faith in immortality. Heats and 
genial periods arrive in history, or, shall 
we say, plenitudes of Divine Presence, by 
which high tides are caused in the human 
spirit, and great virtues and talents appear, 
as in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and 
again in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
* Fuller. 


TRAITS, 

centuries, when the nation was full of 
genius and piety. 

But the age of the Wycliffes, Cobhams, 
Arundels, Beckets ; of the Latimers, 
Mores, Cranmers ; of the Taylors, Leigh- 
tons, Herberts ; of the Sherlock^, and 
Butlers, is gone. Silent revolutions in 
opinion have made it impossible that men 
like these should return or find a place in 
their once sacred stalls. The spirit that 
dwelt in this church has glided away to 
animate other activities; and they who 
come to the old shrines find apes and 
players rustling the old garments. 

The religion of England is part of good 
breeding. When you see on the Continent 
the w'ell-dressed Englishman come into his 
ambassador’s chapel, and put his face for 
silent prayer into his smooth-brushed hat, 
one cannot help feeling how much national 
pride prays with him, and the religion of 
a gentleman. So far is he from attaching 
any meaning to the words, that he believes 
himself to have done almost the generous 
thing, and that it is very condescending in 
him to pray to God. A great duke said 
on the occasion of a victory in the House 
of Lords, that he thought the Almighty 
God had not been well used by them, and 
that it would become their magnanimity 
after so great successes, to take order that 
a proper acknowledgment be made. It is 
the church of the gentry ; but it is not the 
church of the poor. The operatives do 
not own it, and gentlemen lately testified 
in the House of Commons that in their 
lives they never saw a poor man in a 
ragged coat inside a church. 

The torpidity on the side of religion of 
the vigorous English understanding shows 
how much wit and folly can agree in one 
brain. Their religion is a quotation ; 
their church is a doll ; and any examina- 
tion is interdicted with screams of terror. 
In good company, you expect them to 
laugh at the fanaticism of the vulgar j but 
they do not ; they are the vulgar. 

The English, in common perhaps with 
Christendom in the nineteenth century, 
do not respect power, but only perform- 
ance ; value ideas only for an economic 
result. Wellington esteems a saint only 
as far as he can be an army chaplain : 
“ Mr. Briscoll, by his admirable conduct 
and good sense, got the better of Metho- 
dism, which had appeared among the 
soldiers, and once among the officers,". 
They value a philosopher as they value 
an apothecary who brings bark or a 
drench; and inspiration is only somo 
blowpipe, or a finer mechanical aid. 



RELIGION, 


1 inspect that thete is in an English- 
man’s brain a valve that can be closed at 
pleasure, as an engineer shuts off steam. 
The most sensible and well-informed men 
possess the power of thinking just so far 
as the bishop in religious matters, and as 
the chancellor of the exchequer in politics. 
They talk with courage and logic, and 
Bliow you magnificent results, but the 
aame men who have brought free trade or 
geology to their present standing, look 
grave and lofty, and shut down their valve, 
as soon as the conversation approaches 
the English Church. After that, you talk 
with a box-turtle. 

The action of the university, both in 
what is taught, and in the spirit of the 
place, is directed more on producing an 
English gentleman, than a saint or a 
psychologist. It ripens a bishop, and 
extrudes a philosopher. I do not know 
that there is more cabalism in the Angli- 
can, than in other churches, but the 
Anglican clergy are identified with the 
aristocracy. They say here, that if you 
talk with a clergyman, you are sure to 
find him well bred, informed, and candid. 
He entertains your thought or your project 
with sympathy and praise. But if a 
second clergyman come in, the sympathy 
is at an end : two together are inaccessible 
to your thought, and, whenever it comes 
to action, the clergyman invariably sides 
with his church. 

The Anglican church is marked by the 
grace and good sense of its forms, by the 
manly grace of its clergy. The gospel it 
preaches is, ‘ By taste are ye saved.’ It 
keeps the old structures in repair, spends 
a world of money in music and building ; 
and in buying Pugin, and architectural 
literature. It has a general good name 
for amenity and mildness. It is not in 
ordinary a persecuting church ; it is not 
inquisitorial, not even inquisitive, is 
perfectly well bred, and can shut its eyes 
on all proper occasions.* If you let it 
alone, it will let you alone. But its i 
instinct is hostile to all change in politics, 
literature, or social arts. The church has 
not been the founder of the London Uni- 
versity of the Mechanics’ Institutes, of 
the Free School, or whatever aims at 
diffusion of knowledge. The Platonists 
of Oxford are as bitter against this heresy, 
as Thomas Taylor. 

The doctrine of the Old Testament is 
the religion of England. The first leaf of 
the New Testament it does not open. It 
believes in a Providence which does not 
treat with levity a pound eterling. They 


287 

are neither transcendentalistg nor Chris- 
tians. They put up no Socratic prayer, 
much less any saintly prayer for the 
queen’s mind ; ask neither for light nor 
right, but say bluntly, “Grant her in 
health and wealth long to live,’’ And one 
traces this Jewish prayer in aP English 
private history, from the prayeis of King 
Richard, in Richard of Devizes’ Chronicle, 
to those in the diaries of Sir Samuel 
Romilly, and of Haydon the painter, 
“ Abroad with my wife,’’ writes Pepys 
piously, “ the first time that ever I rode 
in my own coach ; which do make my 
heart rejoice and praise God, and pray 
him to bless it to me, and continue it.’* 
The bill for the naturalization of the Jews 
(in 1753) was resisted by petitions from 
all parts of the kingdom, and by petition 
from the city of London, reprobating this 
bill, as “ tending extremely to the dis 
honour of the Christian religion, and 
extremely injurious to the interests and 
commerce of the kingdom in general, and 
of the city of London in particular.” 

But they have not been able to congeal 
humanity by act of Parliament. “The 
heavens journey still and sojourn not,” 
and arts, wars, discoveries, and opinion 
go onward at their own pace. The new 
age has new desires, new enemies, new 
trades, new charities, and reads the 
Scriptures with new eyes. The chatter of 
French politics, the steam-whistle, the 
hum of the mill, and the noise of em- 
barking emigrants, had quite put most of 
the old legends out of mind ; so that when 
you came to read the liturgy to a modern 
congregation, it was almost absurd in its 
unfitness, and suggested a masquerade of 
old costumes. 

No chemist has prospered in the 
attempt to crystallize a religion. It is 
endogenous, like the skin, and other 
vital organs. A new statement everyday. 
The prophet and apostle knew this, and 
the nonconformist confutes the con- 
formists, by quoting the texts they must 
allow. It is the condition of a religion, 
to require religion for its expositor. 
Prophet and apostle can only be rightly 
understood by prophet and apostle. The 
statesman knows that the religious ele- 
ment will not fail, any more than the 
supply of fibrine and chyle : but it is in 
! its nature constructive, and will organize 
such a church as it wants. The wise 
legislator will spend on temples, schools, 
libraries, colleges, but will shun the en- 
riching of priests. If, in any manner, he 
can leave election and paying of the 



a88 ENGLISH TRAITS. 


priest to the people, he will do well. Like 
the Quakers, he may resist the separation 
of a class of priests, and create opportu- 
nity and expectation in the society, to run 
to meet natural endowment, in this kind. 
But, when wealth accrues to a chaplaincy, 
a bishopric, or rectorship, it requires 
moneyed men for its stewards, who will 
give it another direction than to the 
mystics of their day. Of course, money 
will do after its kind, and will steadily 
work to unspiritiialize and unchurch the 
people to whom it was bequeathed. The 
class certain to be excluded from all pre- 
ferment, are the religious — and driven to 
other churches ; which is nature’s vis 
medicatrix. 

The curates are ill-paid, and the pre- 
lates are overpaid. This abuse draws 
into the church the children of the nobility, 
and other unfit persons, who have a taste 
for expense. Thus a bishop is only a 
surpliced merchant. Through his lawn, I 
can see the bright buttons of the shop- 
man’s coat glitter. A wealth like that of 
Durham makes almost a premium on 
felony. Brougham, in a speech in the 
House of Commons on the Irish elective 
franchise, said, “ How will the reverend 
bishops of the other house be able to ex- 
press their due abhorrence of the crime of 
perjury, who solemnly declare in the pre- 
sence of God, that when they are called 
opon to accept a living, perhaps of £4000 
a year, at that very instant, they are 
moved by the Holy Ghost to accept the 
office and administration thereof, and for 
no other reason whatever ? ” The modes 
of initiation are more damaging than cus- 
tom-house oaths. The Bishop is elected 
by the Dean and Prebends of the cathe- 
dral. The Queen sends these gentlemen 
a conge d'Slire, or leave to elect ; but also 
sends them the name of the person whom 
they are to elect. They go into the 
cathedral, chant and pray, and beseech 
the Holy Ghost to assist them in their 
choice : and, after these invocations, in- 
variably find that the dictates of the Holy 
Ghost agree with the recommendations 
of the Queen. 

But you must pay for conformity, All 
goes well as long as you run with confor- 
mists, But you, who are honest men in 
other particulars, know, that there is alive 
somewhere a man whose honesty reaches 
to this point also, that he shall not kneel to 
false gods, and, on the day when you meet 
him, you' sink into the class of counterfeits. 
Besides, this succumbing has grave penal- 
ties, If you take in a lie, you must take 


in all that belongs to it. England accepts 
this ornamented national church, and it 
glazes the eyes, bloats the flesh, gives the 
voice a stertorous clang, and clouds the 
understanding of the receivers. 

The English Church, undermined by 
German criticism, had nothing left but 
tradition, and was led logically back to 
Romanism. But that was an element 
which only hot heads could breathe : in 
view of the educated class generally it 
was not a fact to front the sun ; and the 
alienation of such men from the church 
became complete. 

Nature, to be sure, had her remedy. 
Religious persons are driven out of the 
Established Church Into sects, which in- 
stantly rise to credit, and hold the Estab- 
lishment in check. Nature has sharper 
remedies, also. The English, abhorring 
change in all things, abhorring it most in 
matters of religion, cling to the last rag 
of form, and are dreadfully given to cant. 

I The English (and I wish it were confined 
! to them, but 'tis a taint in the Anglo-Saxon 
blood in both hemispheres), the English 
and the Americans cant beyond all other 
nations. The French relinquish all that 
industry to them. What is so odious as the 
polite bows to God, in our books and news- 
papers ? The popular press is flagitious 
in the exact measure of its sanctimony, 
and the religion of the day is a theatrical 
Sinai, where the thunders are supplied by 
the property-man. The fanaticism and 
hypocrisy create satire. Punch finds an 
inexhaustible material. Dickens writes 
novels on Exeter Hall humanity. Thack- 
eray exposes the heartless high life. 
Nature revenges herself more summarily 
by the heathenism of the lower classes, 
Lord Shaftesbury calls the poor thieves to- 
gether, and reads sermons to them, and 
they call it “ gas.” George Borrow sum- 
mons the Gipsies to hear his discourse 
on the Hebrews in Egypt, and reads to 
them the Apostles’ Creed in Romany. 
** When I had concluded,” he says, ” I 
looked around me. The features of the 
assembly were twisted, and the eyes of 
all turned upon me with a frighful squint: 
not an indrvidual present but squinted ; 
the genteel Pepa, the good-humoured 
Chicharona, the Cosdami, all squinted: 
the Gipsy jockey squinted worst of all. 

The church at this moment is much to 
be pitied. She has nothing left but pos- 
session. If a bishop meets an intelligent 
gentleman, and reads fatal interrogations 
in his eyes, he has no resource but to 
take wine with him. False paiition In- 



LITERATURE. 


troduces cant, perjury, simony, and ever a 
lower class of mind and character into the 
clergy ; and, when the hierarchy is afraid 
of science and education, afraid of piety, 
afraid of traditi on, and afraid of theology, 
there is nothing left but to quit a church 
which is no longer one. 

But the religion of England— is it the 
Established Church ? no ; is it the sects ? 
no ; they are only perpetuations of some 
private man’s dissent, and are to the 
Established Church as cabs are to a 
coach, cheaper and more convenient, but 
really the same thing. Where dwells the 
religion ? Tell me first where dwells 
electricity, or motion, or thought, or 
gesture. They do not dwell or stay at all. 
Electricity cannot be made fast, mortared 
up and ended, like London Monument, or 
the Tower, so that you shall know where I 
to find it, and keep it fixed, as the English 
do with their things, for evermore ; it is 
passing, glancing, gesticular; it is a 
traveller, a newness, a surprise, a secret, 
which perplexes them, and puts them 
out. Yet, if religion be the doing of all 
good, and for its sake the suffering of all 
evil, souffrir de tout le mondc et ne faire 
zoujfrir personne, that divine secret has 
existed in England from the days of Alfred 
to those of Rom illy, of Clarkson, and of 
Florence Nightingale, and in thousands 
who have no kme. 


LITERATURE. 

A STRONG common sense, which it is not 
easy to unseat or disturb, marks the Eng- 
lish mind for a thousand years; a rude 
strength newly applied to thought, as of 
sailors and soldiers who had lately learned 
to read. They have no fancy, and never 
are surprised into a covert or witty word, 
such as pleased the Athenians and Italians, 
and was convertible into a fable not long 
after; but they delight in strong earthy 
expression, not mistakable, coarsely true 
to the human body, and, though spoken 
among princes, equally fit and welcome to 
the mob. This homeliness, veracity, and 
plain style appear in the earliest extant 
works, and in the latest. It imports into 
songs and ballads the smell of the earth, 
the breath of cattle, and, like a Dutch 
ainter, seeks a household charm, though 
y pails and pans. They ask their con- 
stitutional utility in verse. The kail and 
herrings are never out of sight. The poet 
nimbly recovers himself from every sally 
of the imagination. The Enoliah muse | 


289 

loves the farm-yard, the lane and market. 
She says, with De Sta6l, “ I tramp in the 
mire with wooden shoes, whenever they 
would force me into the clouds.” For 
the Englishman has accurate perceptions ; 
takes hold of things by the right end, and 
there is no slipperiness in his grasp. He 
loves the axe, the spade, the oar, the gun, 
the steam-pipe : he has built the engine he 
uses. He is materialist, economical, mer- 
cantile. He must be treated with sin- 
cerity and reality, with muffins and not 
the promise of muffins; and prefers his 
hot chop, with perfect security and con- 
venience in the eating of it, to the chances 
of the amplest and Frenchiest bill of fare, 
engraved on embossed paper. When he 
is intellectual, and a poet or a philosopher, 
he carries the same hard truth and the 
same keen machinery into the mental 
sphere. His mind must stand on a 
fact. He will not be baffled, or catch at 
clouds, but the mind must have a symbol 
palpable and resisting. What he relishes 
in Dante, is the vice-like tenacity with 
which he holds a mental image before the 
eyes, as if it were a scutcheon painted on 
a shield. Byron ” liked something craggy 
to break his mind upon.” A taste for 
plain strong speech, what is called a bibli- 
cal style, marks the English. It is in 
Alfred, and the Saxon Chronicle, and in 
the Sagas of the Northmen. Latimer was 
homely. Hobbes was perfect in the 
** noble vulgar speech.” Donne, Bunyan 
Milton, Taylor, Evelyn, Pepys, Hooker, 
Cotton, and the translators, wrote it. How 
realistic or materialistic in treatment of 
his subject is Swift. He describes his 
fictitious persons as if for the police. 

I Defoe has no insecurity or choice. Hudi- 
bras has the same hard mentality — keep- 
ing the truth at once to the senses, and to 
the intellect. 

It is not less seen in poetry. Chaucer’s 
hard painting of his Canterbury pilgrims 
satisfies the senses. Shakespeare, Spen- 
ser, and Milton, in their loftiest ascents, 
have this national grip and exactitude of 
mind. This mental materialism makes 
the value of English transcendental genius ; 
in these writers, and in Herbert, Henry 
More, Donne, and Sir Thomas IBrowne. 
The Saxon materialism and narrowness, 
exalted into the sphere of intellect, makes 
the very genius of Shakespeare and Milton. 
When it reaches the pure element, it 
treads the clouds as securely as the ada- 
mant. Even in its elevations, materialistic, 
its poetry is common sense inspired » of 
iron raised to white heat. 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 


ago 

The marriage of the two qualities is in 
their speech. It is a tacit rule of the 
language to make the frame or skeleton, of 
Saxon words, and when elevation or 
ornament is sought, to interweave Roman ; 
but sparingly ; nor is a sentence made of 
Roman words alone, without loss of 
strength. The children and labourers use 
the Saxon unmixed. The Latin unmixed 
is abandoned to the colleges and Parlia- 
ment. Mixture is a secret of the English 
island ; and in their dialect, the male 
principle is the Saxon ; the female, the 
Latin ; and they are combined in every 
discourse. A good writer, if he has in- 
dulged in a Roman roundness, makes 
haste to chasten and nerve his period by 
English monosyllables. 

When the Gothic nations came into 
Europe, they found it lighted with the 
sun and moon of Hebrew and of Greek 
genius. The tablets of their brain, long 
kept in the dark, were finally sensible to 
the double glory. To the images from this 
twin source (of Christianity and art), the 
mind became fruitful as by the incubation 
of the Holy Ghost. The English mind 
flowered in every faculty. The common 
sense was surprised and inspired. For 
two centuries, England was philosophic, 
religious, poetic. The mental furniture 
seemed of larger scale ; the memory 
capacious like the storehouse of the 
rains ; the ardour and endurance of 
study; the boldness and facility of their 
mental construction; their fancy, and 
imagination, and easy spanning of vast 
distances of thought ; the enterprise or 
accosting of new subjects; and, generally, 
the easy exertion of power, astonish, like 
the legendary feats of Guy of Warwick. 
The union of Saxon precision and Oriental 
sending, of which Shakespeare is the per- 
fect example, is shared in less degree by 
the writers of two centuries. I find not 
only the great masters out of all rivalry 
and reach, but the whole writing of the 
time charged with a masculine force and 
freedom. 

There is a hygienic simpleness, rough 
vigour, and closeness to the matter in 
hand, even in the second and third class 
cf writers ; and, I think, in the common 
style of the people, as one finds it in the 
citation of wills, letters, and public docu- 
ments, in proverbs, and forms of speech. 
The more hearty and sturdy expression 
may indicate that the savageness of the 
Norseman was not all gone. Their dy- 
namic brains hurled off their words, as the 
revolving stone hurls off scraps of grit. I 


could cite from the seventeenth cen^^iry 
sentences and phrases of edge not tc be 
matched in the nineteenth. Their poets 
by simple force of mind equalized them- 
selves with the accumulated science of 
ours. The country gentleman h5.i a posset 
or drink they called October; and the 
poets, as if by this hint, knew how to distil 
the whole season into their autumnal 
verses: and, as nature, to pique the 
more, sometimes works up deformities 
into beauty, in some rare Aspasia, or 
Cleopatra ; and, as the Greek art wrought 
many a vase or column, in which too long, 
or too lithe, or nodes, or pits and flaws, 
are made a beauty of ; so these were so 
quick and vital, that they could charm and 
enrich by mean and vulgar objects. 

A man must think that agfi well taught* 
and thoughtful, by which masques and 
poems, like those of Ben Jonson, full of 
heroic sentiment in a manly style, were 
received with favour. The unique fact in 
literary history, the unsurprised reception 
of Shakespeare — the recei^tion proved by 
his making his fortune ; and the apathy 
proved by the absence of all contemporary 
panegyric — seems to demonstrate an ele- 
vation in the mind of the people. Judge 
of the splendour of a nation, by the insig- 
nificance of great individuals in it. The 
manner in which they learned Greek and 
Latin, before our modern facilities were 
yet ready, without dictionaries, grammars, 
or indexes, by lectures of a professor, 
followed by their own searchings— re- 
quired a more robust memory, and 
co-operation of all the faculties; and 
their scholars, Camden, Usher, Selden, 
Mede, Gataker, Hooker, Taylor, Burton, 
Bentley, Brian Walton, acquired the 
solidity and method of engineers. 

The influence of Plato tinges the British 
genius. Their minds loved analogy ; were 
cognizant of resemblances, and climbers 
on the staircase of unity. ’Tis a very old 
strife between those who elect to see 
identity, and those who elect to see dis- 
crepancies ; and it renews itself in Britain. 
The poets, of course, are of one part ; the 
men of the world, of the other. But 
Britain had many disciples of Plato — 
More, Hooker, Bacon, Sidney, Lord 
Brooke, Herbert, Browne, Donne, Spen- 
ser, Chapman, Milton, Crashaw, Norris, 
Cudworth, Berkeley, Jeremy Taylor. 

Lord Bacon has the English duality. 
His centuries of observations, on useful 
science, and his experiments, I suppose, 
were worth nothing. One hint of Franklin, 
or Watt, or Dalton, or Davy, or any on^ 



LITERATURE. 


who had a talent for experiment, was 
worth all his lifetime of exquisite trifles. 
But he drinks of a diviner stream, and 
marks the influx of idealism into England. 
Where that goes, is poetry, health, and 
progress. The rules of its genesis or its 
diffusion are not known. That knowledge, 
if we had it, would supersede all we call 
science of the mind. It seems an affair 
of race, or of meta-chemistry; the vital 
point being — how far the sense of unity, 
or instinct of seeking resemblances pre- 
dominated. For, wherever the mind takes 
a step, it is, to put itself at one with a 
larger class, discerned beyond the lesser 
class with which it has been conversant. 
Hence, all poetry, and all affirmative 
action comes. 

Bacon, in the structure of his mind, 
held of the analogists, of the idealists, or 
(as we popularly say, naming from the 
best example) Platonists. Whoever dis- 
credits analogy, and requires heaps of 
facts, before any theories can be at- 
tempted, has no poetic power, and nothing 
original or beautiful will be produced by 
him. Locke is as surely the influx of de- 
composition and of prose, as Bacon and 
the Platonists, of growth. The Platonic is 
the poetic tendency : the so-called scien- 1 
tific is the negative and poisonous. 'Tis 
quite certain, that Spenser, Burns, Byron, | 
and Wordsworth will be Platonists ; and , 
that the dull men will be Lockeists. Then I 
politics and commerce will absorb from 
the educated class men of talents without 
genius, precisely because such have no 
resistance. 

Bacon, capable of ideas, yet devoted to 
ends, required in his map of the mind, 
first of all, universality, or prima philoso- 
phia, the receptacle for all such profitable 
observations, and axioms as fall not 
within the compass of any of the special 
parts of philosophy , but are more common, 
and of a higher stage. He held this ele- 
ment essential ; it is never out of mind ; 
he never spares rebukes for such as 
neglect it ; believing that no perfect dis- 
covery can be made in a flat or level, but 
you must ascend to a higher science. If 
any man thinketh philosophy and univer- 
sality to be idle studies, he does not con- 
sider that all professions are from thence 
served and supplied, and this I take to be 
a great cause tliat has hindered the pro- 
gression of learning, because these funda- 
mental knowledges have been studied but 
in passage.” He explained himself by 
giving various quaint examples of the 
lummary or common laws of which each 


291 

science has its own illustration. He com- 
plains, that ” he finds this part of learning 
very deficient, the profounder sort of wits 
drawing a bucket now and then for their 
own use, but the spring-head unvisited. 
This was the dry Ught which did scorch 
and offend most men's watery natures.” 
Plato had signified the same sense, when 
he said: “All the great arts require a 
subtle and speculative research into the 
law of nature, since loftiness of thought 
and perfect mastery over every subject 
seem to be derived from some such source 
as this. This Pericles had, in addition to 
! a great natural genius. For, meeting with 
I Anaxagoras, who was a person of this 
kind, he attached himself to him, and 
[ nourished himself with sublime specula- 
j tions on the absolute intelligence : and 
I im*-^‘H*£^ thence into the oratorical art 
I whatever could be useful to it.” 

I ^ A few generalizations always circulate 
in the world, whose authors we do not 
rightly know, which astonish, and appear 
to be avenues to vast kingdoms of 
thought, and these are in the world 
comiayits, like the Copernican and New- 
tonian theories in physics. In England, 
these may be traced usually to Shake- 
speare, Bacon, Milton, or Hooker, even to 
Van Helmont and Behmen, and do all 
have a kind of filial retrospect to Plato 
and the Greeks. Of this kind is Lord 
Bacon’s sentence, that “nature is com- 
manded by obeying her ; " his doctrine of 
poetry, which “accommodates the shows 
of things to the desires of the mind ; ” or 
the Zoroastrian definition of poetry, mys- 
tical, yet exact, “ apparent pictures of un- 
apparent natures ; ” Spenser’s creed, that 
“ soul is form, and doth the body make ; ” 
the theory of Berkeley, and we have no 
certain assurance of the existence of 
matter ; Doctor Samuel Clarke’s argu- 
ment for theism from the nature of space 
and time ; Harrington’s political rule, 
that power must rest on land — a rule 
which requires to be liberally interpreted ; 
the theory of Swedenborg, so cosmically 
applied by him, that the man makes his 
heaven and hell ; Hegel’s study of civil 
history, as the conflict of ideas and the 
victory of the deeper thought ; the identity- 
philosophy of Schelling, couched in the 
statement that ” all difference is quanti- 
tative.” So the very announcement of 
the theory of gravitation, of Kepler’s 
three harmonic laws, and even of Dalton’s 
doctrine of definite proportions, finds a 
sudden response in the mind, which re- 
mains a superior evidenco to ompirical 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 


292 

demonstrations. I cite these generaliza- 
tions, some of which are more recent, 
merely to indicate a class. Not these 
particulars, but the mental plane or the 
atmosphere from what they emanate, 
was the home and element of the writers 
and readers in what we loosely call the 
Elizabethan age (say in literary history, 
the period from 1575 to 1625), yet a period 
almost short enough to justify Ben 
Jonson's remark on Lord Bacon : “ About 
his time, and within his view, were born 
all the wits that could honour a nation, or 
help study.” 

Such richness of genius had not existed 
more than once before. These heights 
could not be maintained. As we find 
stumps of vast trees in our exhausted soils, 
and have received traditions of their 
ancient fertility to tillage, sG^,^h’‘^tory 
reckons epochs in which the intefiecc of 
of famed races became effete. So it fared 
with English genius. These heights were 
followed by a meanness, and a descent of 
the mind into lower levels; the loss of 
wings; no high speculation. Locke, to 
whom the meaning of ideas was unknown, 
became the type of philosophy, and his 
“understanding” the measure, in all 
nations, of the English intellect. His 
countrymen forsook the lofty sides of Par- 
nassus, on which they had once walked 
with echoing steps, and disused the studies 
once so beloved ; the powers of thought 
fell into neglect. The later English want 
the faculty of Plato and Aristotle, of 
grouping men in natural classes by an in- 
sight of general laws, so deep, that the 
rule is deduced with equal precision from 
few subjects or from one, as from multi- 
tudes of lives. Shakespeare is supreme 
in that, as in all the great mental energies. 
The Germans generalize ; the English ciin- 
not interpret the German mind. German 
science comprehends the English. The 
absence of the faculty in England is shown 
by the timidity which accumulates moun- 
tains of facts, as a bad general wants my- 
riads of men and miles of redoubts, to 
compensate the inspirations of courage 
and conduct. 

The English shrink from a generaliza- 
tion. ” They do not look abroad into uni- 
versality, or they draw only a bucket-full 
at the fountain of the First Philosophy for 
their occasion, and do not go to the spring- 
head.” Bacon, who said this, is almost 
unique among his countrymen in that 
faculty, at least among the prose writers. 
Milton, who was the stair or high table- 
and to lot down the English genius from 


the summits of Shakespeare, used this 
privilege sometimes in poetry, more rarely 
in prose. For a long interval afterwards, 
it is not found. Burke was addicted to 
generalizing, but his was a shorter line ; 
as his thought4? have less depth, they have 
less compass. Hume’s abstractions ar4 
not deep or wise. He owes his fame to 
one keen observation, that no copula had 
been detected between any cause and 
effect, either in physics or in thought; 
that the term cause and effect was loosely 
or gratuitously applied to what we know 
only as consecutive, not at all as casual, 
Dr. Johnson’s written abstractions have 
little value : the tone of feeling in them 
makes their chief worth. 

^ Mr. Hallam, a learned and elegant 
scholar, has written the history of Euro- 
pean literature for three centuries— a per- 
formance of great ambition, inasmuch as 
a judgment was to be attempted on every 
book. But his eye does not reach to tho 
ideal standards ; the verdicts are all dated 
! from London : all new thought must be 
cast into the old moulds. The expansive 
element which creates literature is steadily 
denied. Plato is resisted, and his school. 
Hallam is uniformly polite, but with defi- 
cient sympathy ; writes with resolute 
generosity, but is unconscious of the deep 
worth which lies in the mystics, and which 
I often outvalues as a seed of power and a 
source of revolution all the correct writers 
! and shining reputations of their day. He 
passes in silence, or dismisses with a kind 
of contempt, the profounder masters : a 
lover of ideas is not only uncongenial, but 
unintelligible, Hallam inspires respect 
by his knowledge and fidelity, by his 
manifest love of good books, and ho lifts 
himself to own better than almost any the 
greatness of Shakespeare, and better than 
Johnson he appreciates Milton. But in 
Hallam, or in the firmer intellectual nerve 
of Mackintosh, one still finds the same 
type of English genius. It is wise and 
rich, but it lives on its capital. It is retro- 
spective. How can it discern and hail 
the new forms that are looming up on tho 
horizon — new and gigantic thoughts 
which cannot dress themselves out of any 
old wardrobe of the past ? 

The e ssays, the fiction, and the poetry 
of the day have the like municipal limits. 
Dickens, with preternatural apprehension 
of the language of manners, and the 
varieties of street life, with pathos and 
laughter, with patiiotic and still enlarging 
generosity, writes London tracts. He is a 
painter of English details, like Hogarth ,* 



LITERATURE. 


/ocal and iemjH^rary in his tints and style, 
and local in his aims. Bulwer, an indus- 
trious writer, with occasional ability, is 
distinguished for his reverence of intellect 
as a temporality, and appeals to the 
worldly ambition of the student. His 
romances tend to fan these low flames. 
Their novelists despair of the heart 
Thackeray I finds that God has made no 
allowance for the poor thing in his universe 
— more’s the pity, he thinks ; but it is not 
for us to be wiser; we must renounce 
ideals, and accept London. 

The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses 
the tone of the English governing classes 
of the day, explicitly teaches, that good 
means good to eat, good to wear, material 
commodity; that the glory of modern 
philosophy is its direction on “ fruit ” ; to 
yield economical inventions ; and that its 
merit is to avoid ideas, and avoid morals. 
He thinks it the distinctive merit of the 
Baconian philosophy, in its triumph over 
the old Platonic, its disentangling the 
intellect from theories of the all-Fair and 
all-Good, and pinning it down to the 
making a better sick-chair and a better 
wine-whey for an invalid — this not ironi- 
cally, but in good faith— that, ‘‘ solid 
advantage,” as he calls it, meaning always 
sensual benefit, is the only good. The 
eminent benefit of astronomy is the better 
navigation it creates to enable the fruit- 
ships to bring home their lemons and 
wine to the London grocer. It was a 
curious result, in which the civility and 
religion of England for a thousand years, 
ends in denying morals, and reducing the 
intellect to a sauce-pan. The critic hides 
his scepticism under the English cant of 
practical. To convince tlie reason, to 
touch the conscience, is romantic pre- 
tension. The fine arts fall to the ground. 
Beauty, except as .luxurious commodity, 
does not exist. It is very certain, I may 
say in passing, that if Lord Bacon had 
been only the sensualist his critic pre- 
tends, he would never have acquired the 
fame which now entitles him to this 
patronage. It is because he had imagina- 
tion, the leisures of the spirit, and basked 
in an element of contemplation out of all 
modern English atmospheric gauges, that 
he is impressive to the imaginations of 
men, and has become a potentate not to be 
ignored. Sir David Brewster sees the 
high place of Bacon, without finding 
jMewton indebted to him, and thinks it a 
fimistake. Bacon occupies it by specific 
gravity or levity, not by any feat he did, or 
jiy any tutoring more or km of Newton, 


293 

&c,t but an effect of the same cause which 
showed itself more pronounced afterwards 
in Hooke, Boyle, and Halley. 

Coleridge, acatholic mind, with a hunger 
for ideas, with eyes looking before and 
after to the highest bards and sages, and 
who wrote and spoke the only high criti- 
cism in his time, is one of those who save 
England from the reproach of no longer 
possessing the capacity to appreciate what 
rarest wit the island has yielded. Yet tha 
misfortune of his life, his vast attempts 
but most inadequate performings, failing 
to accomplish anyone masterpiece, seems 
to mark the closing of an era. Even in 
him, the traditional Englishman was too 
strong for the philosopher, and he fell 
\ into accommodations : and, as Burke had 
striven to idealize the English State, so 
Coleridge * narrowed his mind ’ in the 
attempt to reconcile the gothic rule and 
dogma of the Anglican Church, with 
eternal ideas. But for Coleridge, and a 
lurking taciturn minority, uttering itself 
in occasional criticism, oftener in private 
discourse, one would say, that in Germany 
and in America, is the best mind in 
England rightly respected. It is the surest 
sign of nation^ decay, when the Bramins 
can no longer read or understand tha 
Braminical philosophy, 

in the decomposition and asphyxia that 
followed all this materialism, Carlyle was 
driven by his disgust at the pettiness and 
the cant, into the preaching of Fate. In 
comparison with all this rottenness, any 
check, any cleansing, though by fire, 
seemed desirable and beautiful. He saw 
little difference in the gladiators, or the 
“causes” for which they combated; tha 
one comfort was, that they were all going 
speedily into the abyss together: And 
his imagination, finding no nutriment 
in any creation, avenged itself by cele- 
brating the majestic beauty of the laws of 
decay. The necessities of mental struc- 
ture force all minds into a few categories, 
and where impatience of the tricks of men 
makes Nemesis amiable, and builds altars 
to the negative Deity, the inevitable recoil 
is to heroism or the gallantry of the private 
heart, which decks its immolation with 
glory, in the unequal combat of will 
against fate. 

Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, 
the annotatorof Fourier, and the champion 
of Hahnemann, has brought to meta- 
physics and to physiology a native vigour, 
with a catholic perception of relations, 
equal to the highest attempts, and n 
rh^torig tike the armoury pf the invincible 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 


294 

knights of old. There ii in the action of 
his mind a long Atlantic roll not known 
except in deepest waters, and only lacking 
what ought to accompany such powers, a 
manifest centrality. If bis mind does not 
rest in immovable biases, perhaps the 
orbit is larger, and the return is not yet : 
but a master should inspire a confidence 
that he will adhere to his convictions, and 
give his present studies always the same 
high place. 

It would be easy to add exceptions to 
the limitary tone of English thought, and 
much more easy to adduce examples of 
excellence in particular veins; and if, 
going out of the region of dogma, we pass 
into that of general culture, there is no 
end to the graces and amenities, wit, 
sensibility, and erudition, of the learned 
class. But the artificial succour which 
marks all English performance, appears 
in letters also : much of their aesthetic 
production is antiquarian and manufac- 
tured, and literary reputations have been 
achieved by forcible men, whose relation 
to literature was purely accidental, but 
who were driven by tastes and modes they 
found in vogue into their several careers. 
So, at this moment, every ambitious young 
man studies geology; so members of 
Parliament are made, and churchmen. 

The bias of Englishmen to practftal 
skill has reacted on the national mind. 
They are incapable of an inutility, and 
respect the five mechanic powers even in 
their song. The voice of their modern 
muse has a slight hint of the steam-whistle, 
and the poem is created as an ornament 
and finish of their monarchy, and by no 
means as the bird of a new morning which 
forgets the past world in the full enjoy- 
ment of that which is forming. They are 
with difficulty ideal ; they are the most 
conditioned men, as if, having the best 
conditions, they could not bring themselves 
to forfeit them. Every one of them is a 
thousand years old, and lives by his 
memory; and when you say this, they 
accept it as praise. 

Nothing comes to the book-shops but 
politics, travels, statistics, tabulation, and 
engineering, and even what is called phil- 
osophy and letters is mechanical in its 
structure, as if inspiration had ceased, as 
if no vast hope, no religion, no song of 
joy, no wisdom, no analogy, existed any 
more. The tone of colleges and of scholars 
and of literary society has this mortal air. 
I seem to walk on a marble floor, where 
nothing will grow. They exert every 
fariety gf talent 00 a lower ground, and 


may be said to live and act in a sub mind. 
They have lost all commanding views in 
literature, philosophy, and science, A 
good Englishman shuts himself out of 
three-fourths of his mind, and confines 
himself to one fourth. He has learning, 
good sense, power of labour, and logic ; 
but a faith in the laws of the mind like 
that of Archimedes ; a belief like that of 
Euler and Kepler, that experience must 
follow and not lead the laws of the mind; 
a devotion to the theory of politics, like 
that of Hooker, and Milton, and Harring- 
ton, the modern English mind repudiates. 

I fear the same fault lies in their science, 
since they have known how to make it re- 
pulsive, and bereave nature of its charm ; 
though perhaps the complaint flics wider, 
and the vice attaches to many more than 
to British physicists. The eye of the 
naturalist must have a scope like nature 
itself, a susceptibility to all impressions, 
alive to the heart as well as to the logic of 
creation. But English science puts 
humanity to the door. It wants the con- 
nection which is the test of genius. The 
'science is false by not being poetic, It 
isolates the reptile or mollusk it assumes 
to explain ; whilst reptile or mollusk only 
exists in system, in relation. The poet 
only sees it as an inevitable step in the 
path of the Creator. But in England, one 
hermit finds this fact, and another finds 
that, and lives and dies ignorant of its 
value. There are great exceptions, of 
John Hunter, a man of ideas ; perhaps of 
Robert Brown, the botanist ; and of 
Richard Owen, who has imported into 
Britain the German homologies, and en- 
riched science with contributions of his 
own, adding sometimes the divination of 
the old masters to the unbroken power of 
labour in the English mind. But for the 
most part, the natural science in England 
is out of its loyal alliance with morals, and 
is as void of imagination and free play of 
thought, as conveyancing. It stands in 
strong contrast with the genius of the 
Germans, those semi-Greeks, who love 
analogy, and, by means of their height of 
view, preserve their enthusiasm, and think 
for Europe. 

No hope, no sublime augury, cheers tho 
student, no secure striding from experi- 
ment onward to a foreseen law, but only a 
casual dipping here and there, like diggers 
in California “prospecting for a placer” 
that will pay. A horizon of brass of tho 
diameter of his umbrella shuts down 
around his senses. Squalid contentment 
with CQavoQtionSi satire at tho names q( 



LITERATURE. 


philosophy and religion, parochial and 
shop-till politics, and idolatry of usage, 
6etray the ebb of life and spirit. As they 
trample on nationalities^ to reproduce 
London and Londoners in Europe and 
Asia, so they fear the hostility of ideas, of 
poetry, of religion, ghosts which they can- 
not lay ; and, having attempted to domes- 
ticate and dress the Blessed Soul itself in 
English broadcloth and gaiters, they are 
tormented with fear that herein lurks a 
force that will sweep their system away. 
The artists say, “ Nature puts us out; ” 
the scholars have become un-ideal. They 
parry earnest speech with banter and 
levity; they laugh you down, or they 
change the subject. “The fact is,” say 
they over their wine, “ all that about 
liberty and so forth, is gone by ; it won’t 
do any longer.” The practical and com- 
fortable oppress them with inexorable 
claims, and the smallest fraction of power 
remains for heroism and poetry. No poet 
dares murmur of beauty out of the pre- 
cinct of his rhymes. No priest dares hint 
at a Providence which does not respect 
English utility. The island is a roaring 
volcano of fate, of material values, of 
tariffs, and laws of repression, glutted 
markets and low prices. 

In the absence of the highest aims, of 
the pure love of knowledge, and the sur- 
render to nature, there is the suppression 
of the imagination, the priapism of the 
senses and the understanding; we have 
the factitious instead of the natural ; 
tasteless expense, arts of comfort, and 
the rewarding as an illustrious inventor 
whosoever will contrive one impediment 
more to interpose between the man and 
his objects. 

Thus poetry is degraded, and made 
ornamental. Pope and his school wrote 
poetry fit to put round frosted cake. What 
did Walter Scott write without stint? a 
rhymed traveller’s guide to Scotland. 
And the libraries of verses they print have 
this Birmingham character. How many 
volumes of well-bred metre we must jingle 
through, before we can be filled, taught, 
renewed 1 We want the miraculous : the 
beauty which we can manufacture at no 
mi^l — can give no account of; the beauty 
of which Chaucer and Chapman had the 
secret. The poetry of course is low and 
prosaic ; only now and then, as in Words- 
worth, conscientious; or in Byron, pas- 
sional ; or in Tennyson, factitious. But 
if I should count the poets who have con- 
tributed to the Bible of existing England 
of guid^u^^ aad oonsolatioa 


295 

which are still glowing and effective— 
how few ! Shall I find my heavenly bread 
in the reigning poets ? Where is great 
design in modern English poetry? The 
English have lost sight of the fact that 
poetry exists to speak the spiritual law, 
and that no wealth of description or of 
fancy is yet essentially new, and out of 
the limits of prose, until this condition is 
reached. Therefore the grave old poets, 
like the Greek artists, heeded their de- 
signs, and less considered the finish. It 
was their office to lead to the divine 
sources, out of which all this, and much 
more, readily springs ; and, if this religion 
is in the poetry, it raises us to some pur- 
pose, and we can well afford some staid- 
r es or hardness, or want of popular tune 
in the verses. 

The exceptional fact of the period is 
the genius of Wordsworth. He had no 
master but nature and solitude. “ He 
wrote a poem,” says Landor, “ without 
the aid of war.” Ilis verse is the voic» 
of sanity in a worldly and ambitious age. 
One regrets that his temperament was 
not more liquid and musical. He has 
written longer than he was inspired. But 
for the rest, he has no competitor. 

Tennyson is endowed precisely in points 
where Wordsworth wanted. There is no 
finer ear than Tennyson’s, nor more 
command of the keys of language. Colour, 
like the dawn, Hows over the horizon from 
his pencil, in waves so rich that we do 
not miss the central form. Through all 
his refinements, too, he has reached the 
public — a certificate of good sense and 
general power, since he who aspires to be 
the English poet must be as large as 
London, not in the same kind as London, 
biit^ in his own kind. But he wants a 
subject, and climbs no mount of vision to 
bring its secrets to the people. He con- 
tents himself with describing the English- 
man as he is, and proposes no better. 
There are all degrees in poetry, and we 
must be thankful for every beautiful 
talent. But it is only a first success, 
when the ear is gained. The best office 
of the best poets has been to show how 
low and uninspired was their general style, 
and that only once or twice they have 
struck the high chord. 

That expansiveness which is the essence 
of the poetic element, they have not. It 
was no Oxonian, but Hafiz, who said : 
“ Let us be crowned with roses, let u 
drink wine, and break up the tiresome 
old roof of heaven into new forms.” A 
stanza ^ fLe song of nature the Oxonian 
U 



ENGLISH TRAITS, 


296 


has no ear for, and he does not value the 
salient and curative influence of intel- 
lectual action, studious of truth, without 
a by-end. 

By the law of contraries, I look for an 
irresistible taste for Orientalism in Britain. 
For a self-conceited modish life, made up 
of trifles, clinging to a corporeal civiliza- 
tion, hating ideas, there is no remedy like 
the Oriental largeness. That astonishes 
and disconcerts English decorum. For 
once there is thunder it never heard, light 
it never saw, and power which trifles with 
time and space. I am not suprised, then, 
to find an Englishman like Warren Hast- 
ings, who had been struck with the grand 
style of thinking in the Indian writings, 
deprecating the prejudices of his country- 
men, while offering them a translation of 
the Bhagvat. “Might I,“ he says, “an 
unlettered man, venture to prescribe 
bounds to the latitude of criticism, I 
should exclude, in estimating the merit 
of such a production, all rules drawn from 
the ancient or modern literature of Europe, 
all references to such sentiments or man- 
ners as are become the standards of pro- 
priety for opinion and action in our own 
modes, and, equally, all appeals to our 
revealed tenets, of religion and moraj 
duty."* He goes on to bespeak indul- 
gence to “ ornaments of fancy unsuited 
to our taste, and passages elevated to a 
tract of sublimity into which our habits of 
judgment will find it difficult to pursue 
them.” 

Meantime, I know that a retrieving 
power lies in the English race, which 
seems to make any recoil possible; in 
other words, there is at all times a minority 
of profound minds existing in the nation, 
capable of appreciating every soaring of 
intellect and every hint of tendency. 
While the constructive talent seems 
dwarfed and superficial, the criticism is 
often in the noblest tone, and suggests 
the presence of the invisible gods. I can 
well believe what I have often heard, that 
there are two nations in England ; but it 
is not the Poor and the Rich ; nor is it 
the Normans and Saxons ; nor the Celt 
and the Goth, These are each always 
becoming the otlier ; for Robert Owen 
does not exaggerate the power of circum- 
stance, But the two complexions, or two 
styles of mind — the perceptive class, and 
the practical finality class — are ever in 
counterpoise, interacting mutually; one 

* Preface to Wilkins’s Translation of the 
ffbagvat Gseta# 


in hopeless minorities ; tne other, In hugn 
masses ; one studious, contemplative, ex- 
perimenting; the other, the ungrateful 
pupil, scornful of the source, whilst avail- 
ing itself of the knowledge for gain ; these 
two nations, of genius and of animal force, 
though the first consist of only a dozen 
souls, and the second of twenty millions, 
for ever by their discord and their accord 
yield the power of the English Statei 


THE ” TIMES.’’ 

The power of the newspaper is famlfiar 
in America, and in accordance with our 
political system. In England it stands 
in antagonism with the feudal institutions, 
and it is all the more beneficent succour 
against the secretive tendencies of a mon^ 
archy. The celebrated Lord Somers 
“ knew of no good law proposed and 
passed in his time, to which the public 
papers had not directed his attention. ” 
There is no corner and no night. A re- 
lentless inquisition drags every secret to 
the day, turns the glare of this solar mi- 
croscope on every malfaisance, so as to 
make the public a more terrible spy than 
any foreigner; and no weakness can bo 
taken advantage of by an enemy, since the 
whole people are already forewarned. 
Thus England rids herself of those incrus- 
tations which have been the ruin of old 
states. Of course, this inspection is feared. 
Noantique privilege, no comfortable mono- 
poly, but sees surely that its days are 
counted ; the people are familiarized with 
the reason of reform, and one by one, 
take away every argument of the obstruc- 
tives. “ So your Grace likes the comfort 
of reading the newspapers,” aaid Lord 
Mansfield to the Duke of Northumber- 
land ; “ mark my words ; you and I shall 
not live to see it, but this young gentleman 
(Lord Eldon) may, or it may be a little 
later ; but a little sooner or later, these 
newspapers will most assuredly write the 
dukes of Northumberland out of their 
titles and possessions, and the countryout 
of its king.” The tendency in England 
towards social and political institutions like 
like those of America, is inevitable, and 
the ability of its journals is the driving 
force. 

England is full of manly, clever, well- 
bred men who possess the talent of 
writing off-hand pungent paragraphs, ex- 
pressing with clearness and courage their 

opsoioo on any person or performanetk 



THE *• times:' 


297 


Valuable or not, it ia a skill that is rarely 
found, out of the English journals. The 
English do this, as they write poetry, as 
they ride and box, by being educated to it. 
Hundreds of clever Praeds, and Freres, 
and Froudes, and Hoods, and Hooks, and 
Maginns, and Mills, and Macaulays, nxake 
poems or short essays for a journal, as they 
make speeches in Parliament and on the 
hustings, or, as they shoot and ride. It is a 
quite accidental and arbitrary direction 
of their general ability. Rude health and 
spirits, an Oxford education, and the 
habits of society are implied, but not a 
ray of genius. It comes of the crowded 
state of the professions, the violent inter- 
est which all men take in politics, the fa- 
cility of experimenting in the journals, and 
high pay. 

The most conspicuous result of this 
talent is the “ Times " newspaper. No 
power in England is more felt, more 
feared, or more obeyed. What you read 
in the morning in that journal, you shall 
hear.in the evening in all society. It has ears 
everywhere, and its information is earliest, 
completest, and surest. It has risen, year 
by year, and victory by victory, to its pre- 
sent authority. I asked one of its old con- 
tributors, whether it had once been abler 
than it is now ? “ Never,” he said ; ” these 
are its palmiest days.” It has shown 
those qualities which are dear to English- 
men, unflinching adherence to its objects, 
orodigal intellectual ability, and a towering 
ttssurance, backed by the perfect organi- 
zation in its printing-house, and its world- 
wide network of correspondence and re- 
ports. It has its own history and famous 
trophies. In 1820, it adopted the cause of 
Queen Caroline, and carried if against the 
king. It adopted a poor-law system, and 
almost alone lifted it through. When 
Lord Brougham was in power, it decided 
against him, and pulled him down. It 
declared war against Ireland, and con- 
quered it. It adopted the League against 
the Corn Laws, and, when Cobden had be- 
gun to despair, it announced his triumph. 
It denounced and discredited the French 
Republic of 1848, and checked every sym- 
pathy with it in England, until it had en- 
rolled 200,000 special constables to watch 
the Chartists, and make them ridiculous 
on the loth April, It first denounced and 
then adopted the new French Empire, 
and urged the French Alliance and its 
results. It has entered into each muni- 
cipal, literary, and social question, almost 
with a controlling voice. It has done bold 
imd seasonable service in exposing frauds 


which threatened the commercial tom* 
munify. Meantime, it attacks its rivals 
by perfecting its printing machinery, and 
will drive them out of circulation ; for the 
only limit to the circulation of the 
“Times” the impossibility of printing 
copies fast enough ; since a daily paper 
can only be new and seasonable for a few 
hours. It will kill all but that p^er 
which is diametrically in opposition ; 
since many papers, first and last, have 
lived by their attacks on the leading 
journal. 

The late Mr. Walter was printer of the 
“ Times,” and had gradually arranged the 
whole materiel of it in perfect system. It 
is told, that when he demanded a small 
share in the proprietary, and was refused, 
he said, “ As you please, gentlemen ; and 
you may take away the ‘ Times ’ from 
this office when you will : I shall publish 
the ‘ New Times ' next Monday morning.” 
The proprietors, who had already com- 
plained that his charges for printing were 
excessive, found that they were in his 
power, and gave him whatever he wished. 

I went one day with a good friend to 
the “ Times ” office, which was entered 
through a pretty garden-yard in Printing- 
House Square. We walked with soma 
circumspection, as if were entering a 
powder-mill ; but the door was opened by 
a mild old woman, and by a dint of soma 
transmission of cards, we were at last 
conducted into the parlour of Mr. Morris, 
a very gentle person, with no hostile 
appearances. The statistics are now quite 
out of date, but I remember he told us 
that the daily printing was then 35,000 
copies ; that on the ist March, 1848, tho 
greatest number ever printed — 54,000 
were issued ; that, since February, the 
daily circulation had increased by &000 
copies. The old press they were then 
using printed five or six thousand sheets 
per hour; the new machine, for which 
they were then building an engine, would 
print twelve thousand per hour. Our 
entertainer confided us to a courteous 
assistant to show us the establishment, in 
which, I think, they employed a hundred 
and twenty men. I remember, I saw tho 
reporters’ room, in which they redact their 
hasty steno^aphs, but the editor’s room, 
and who is in it, I did not see, though 1 
shared the curiosity of mankind respect* 
ing it 

The staff of the *' Times ” has always 
been made up of able men. Old Walter, 
Sterling, Bacon, Barnes, Alsiger. Horanco 
Twisst Jones Lloyd, John Oxenford, Mr, 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 


V 


298 

Mosely, Mr. Bailey, have contributed to 
Its renown in their special departments. 
But it has never wanted the first pens for 
occasional assistance. Its private infor- 
mation is inexplicable, and recalls the 
stories of Fouchfe’s police, whose omnis- 
cience made it believed that the Empress 
Josephine must be in his pay. It has 
mercantile and political correspondents 
in every foreign city ; and its expresses 
outrun the despatches of the government. 
One hears anecdotes of the rise of its 
Bervants, as of the functionaries of the 
India House. I was told of the dexterity 
of one of its reporters, who, finding him- 
self, on one occasion, where the magis- 
trates had strictly forbidden reporters, 
put his hands into his coat-pocket, and 
with pencil in one hand, and tablet in the 
other, did his work. 

The influence of this journal is a recog- 
nized power in Europe, and, of course, 
none is more conscious of it than its con- 
ductors. The tone of its articles has often 
been the occasion of comment from the 
official organs of the continental courts, 
and sometimes the ground of diplomatic 
ccMuplaint. What would the “Times” 
say ? is a terror in Paris, in Berlin, in 
Vienna, in Copenhagen, and in Nepaul. 
Its consummate discretion and success 
exhibit the English skill of combination. 
The daily paper is the work of many 
hands, chiefly, it is said, of young men 
recently from the University, and perhaps 
reading law in chambers in London. 
Hence the academic elegance, and classic 
allusion, which adorn its columns. Hence, 
too, the heat and gallantry of its onset. 
But the steadiness of the aim suggests 
the belief that this fire is directed and fed 
by older engineers ; as if persons of 
exact information, and with settled views 
of policy, supplied the writers with the 
basis of fact, and the object to be attained, 
and availed themselves of their younger 
energy and eloquence to plead the cause. 
Both the council and the executive de- 
partments gain by this division. Of two 
men of equal ability, the one who does 
not writer but keeps his eye on the course 
of public affairs, will have the higher 
judicial wisdom. But the parts are kept 
in concert ; all the articles appear to pro- 
ceed from a single will. The ” Times ” 
never disapproves of what itself has said, 
or cripples itself by apology for the ab- 
sence of the editor, or the indiscretion of 
him who held the pen. It speaks out 
bluff and bold, and sticks to what it says. 
It draws from Any number of le^rnod and 


skilful contributors ; but a more learned 
and skilful person supervises, corrects, and 
co-ordinates. Of this closet, the secret 
does not transpire. No writer is suffered 
to claim the authorship of any paper ; 
everything good, from whatever quar er, 
comes out editorially ; and thus, by 
making the paper everything, and those 
who write it nothing, the character and 
the awe of the journal gain. 

The English like it for its complete in- 
formation. A statement of fact in the 
“ Times ” is as reliable as a citation from 
Hansard. Then, they like its indepen- 
dence ; they do not know, when they taka 
it up, what their paper is going to say : 
but, above all, from the nationality and 
confidence of its tone. It thinks for thent 
all ;it is their understanding and day’s 
ideal daguerreotyped. When I see therp 
reading its columns, they seem to mo be- 
coming every moment more British. It 
has the national courage, not rash and 
I petulant, but considerate and determined. 

I No dignity or wealth is a shield from its 
assaults. It attacks a duke as readily as a 
policeman, and with the most provoking 
airs of condescension. It makes rude work 
with the Board of Admiralty. The Bench 
of Bishops is still less safe. One bishop 
fares badly for his rapacity, and another 
for his bigotry, and a third for his court- 
liness. It addresses occasionally a hint 
to majesty itself, and sometimes a hint 
which is taken. There is an air of freedom 
even in their advertising columns, which 
speaks well for England to a foreigner. 
On the days when I arrived in London in 
1847, I read among the daily announce- 
ments, one. offering a reward of fifty 
pounds to any person who would put a 
nobleman, described by name and title, 
late a member of Parliament, into any 
county jail in England, he having been 
I convicted of obtaining money under false 
pretences. 

Was never such arrogancy as the tone 
of this paper. Every slip of an Oxonian 
or Cantabrigian who writes his first 
leader assumes that we subdued the earth 
before we sat down to write this particu- 
lar ” Times.” One would think the world 
was on its knees to the ” Times ” Office, 
for its uaily breakfast. But this arrogance 
is calculated. Who would care for it, if it 
” surmised,” or ” dared to confess,” or, 
** ventured to predict,” &c. No ; it is $o^ 
and so it shall be. 

The morality and patriotism of the 
” Times ” claims only to be representative! 
and by no means ideal. It gives the argn ' 



STONEHENGE, 


ment, not of the majority, but of the com- 
manding class. Its editors know better 
than to defend Russia, or Austria, or 
English vested rights, on abstract grounds. 
But they give a voice to the class who, at 
the moment, take the lead ; and they have 
an instinct for finding where the power 
now lies, which is eternally shifting its 
banks. Sympathizing with, and speaking 
for the class that rules the hour, yet, be- 
ing apprised of every ground*swell, every 
Chartist resolution, every Church squab- 
ble, every strike in the mills, they detect 
the first tremblings of change. They 
watch the hard and bitter struggles of the 
authors of each liberal movement, year 
by year — watching them only to taunt 
and obstruct them— until, at last, when 
they see that these have established their 
fact, that power is on the point of passing 
to them, they strike in, with the voice of 
a monarch, astonish those whom they suc- 
cour, as much as those whom they desert, 
and make victory sure. Of course, the 
aspirants see that the “ Times " is one of 
the goods of fortune, not to be won but 
by winning their cause. 

“Punch” is equally an expression of 
English good sense, as the “ London 
Times,” It is the comic version of the 
same sense. Many of its caricatures are 
equal to the best pamphlets, and will con- 
vey to the eye in an instant the popular 
view which was taken of each turn of pub- 
lic affairs. Its sketches are usually made ! 
by masterly hands, and sometimes with 
genius ; the delight of every class, | 
because uniformly guided by that taste 
which is tyrannical in England. It is 
a new trait of the nineteenth century, that 
thew it and humor of England, as is Punch, 
so in the humorists, Jerrold, Dickens, 
Thackeray, Hood, have taken the dir^- 
tion of humanity and freedom. 

The “ Times,” like every important 
institution, shows the way to a better. It 
is a living index of the colossal British 
power. Its existence honours the people 
who dare to print all they know, dare to 
know all the facts, and do not wish to be 
flattered by hiding the extent of the 
public disaster. There is always safety 
in valour. I wish I could add, that this 
journal aspired to deserve the power it 
wields, by guidance of the public senti- 
ment to the right. It is usually pretended, 
in Parliament and elsewhere, that the 
English press has a high tone — which it 
has not. It has an imperial tone, as of a 
powerful and independent nation. But as 
with other empires. iU tone is prone to be 


899 

official, and even officinal. The ‘‘ Times ** 
shares all the limitations of the governing 
classes, and wishes never to be in a 
minority. If only it dared to cleave to 
the right, to show the right to be the only 
expedient, and feed its batteries from the 
central heart of humanity, it might not 
have so many men of rank among its con- 
tributors, but genius would be its cordial 
and invincible ally; it might now and 
then bear the brunt of formidable com- 
binations, but no journal is ruined by wise 
courage. It would be the natural leader 
of British reform ; its proud function, that 
of be.ng the voice of Europe, the defender 
of the exile and patriot against despots, 
would be more efectually discharged ; it 
would have the authority which is claimed 
for that dream of good men not yet come 
to pass, an International Congress; and 
the least of its victories would be to give 
to England a new millennium of benefi- 
cent power. 


STONEHENGE. 

It had been agreed between my friend 
Mr. C. and me, that before I left England 
we should make an excursion together to 
Stonehenge, which neither of us had seen ; 
and the project pleased my fancy with the 
double attraction of the monument and 
the companion. It seemed a bringing 
together of extreme points, to visit the 
oldest religious monument in Britain, in 
company with her latest thinker, and one 
whose influence may be traced in every 
contemporary book. I was glad to sum 
up a little my experiences, and to ex- 
change a few reasonable words on the 
aspects of England, with a man on whose 
genius I set a very high value, and who 
had as much penetration, and as severe a 
theory of duty as any person in it. On 
Friday, yth J uly , we took the South Western 
Railway through Hampshire to Salisbury, 
where we found a carriage to convey us to 
Amesbury. The fine weather and my 
friend’s local knowledge of Hampshire, in 
which he is wont to spend a part of every 
summer, made the way short. There was 
much to say, too, of the travelling Ameri- 
cans and their usual objects in London. 
I thought it natural, that they should give 
some time to works of art collected here, 
which they cannot find at home, and a 
little to scientific clubs and museums, 
which, at this moment, make London very 
attractive. But my philosopher wai^ not 



300 ENGLISH TRAirS. 


contented. Art and *high art' is a 
favourite target for his wit. “ Yes Kunst 
is a great delusion, and Goethe and 
Schiller wasted a great deal of good time 
on it ** : and he thinks he discovers that 
old Goethe found this out, and, in his 
later writings, changed his tone. As soon 
as men begin to talk of art, architecture, 
and antiquities, nothing good comes of it. 
He wishes to go through the British 
Museum in silence, and thinks a sincere 
man will see something, and say nothing. 
In these days, he thought, it would 
become an architect to consult only the 
grim necessity, and say, ‘ I can build you 
a coffin for such dead persons as you are, 
and for such dead purposes as you have, 
but you shall have no ornament.’ For the 
science, he had, if possible, even less 
tolerance, and compared the savans of 
Somerset House to the boy who asked 
Confucius “ how many stars in the sky ? ” 
Confucius replied, “ he minded things 
near him ” ; then said the boy, “ how 
many hairs are there in your eyebrows ? ” 
Confucius said, “he didn’t know and 
didn’t care.” 

Still speaking of the Americans, C. 
complained that they dislike the coldness 
and exclusiveness of the English, and run 
away to France, and go with their coun- 
trymen, and are amused, instead of 
manfully staying in London, and con- 
fronting Englishmen, and acquiring their 
culture, who really have much to teach 
them. 

I told C. that I was easily dazzled, and 
was accustomed to concede readily all 
that an Englishman would ask; I saw 
3verywhere in the country proofs of sense 
and spirit, and success of every sort : I 
like the people : they are as good as they I 
are handsome ; they have everything, and 
can do everything : but meantime, I 
surely know, that, as soon as I return to 
Massachusetts, I shall lapse at once into 
the feeling, which the geography of 
America inevitably inspires, that wo pkty 
the game with immense advantage ; that 
there and not here is the seat and centre | 
of the British race ; and that no skill or 
activity can long compete with the pro- 
digious natural advantages of that country, 
in the hands of the same race ; and that 
England, an old and exhausted island, 
must one day be contented, like other 
parents, to be strong only in her children. 
But this was a proposition which no 
Englishman of whatever condition can 
easily entertain.  

We left the train at Salisbury> and took I 


a carriage to Amesbury, passing by Old 
Sarum, a bare, treeless hill, once contain- 
ing the town which sent two members to 
Parliament — now, not a hut : and, arriving 
at Amesbury, stopped at the George Inn. 
After dinner, we walked to Salisbury 
Plain. On the broad downs, under the 
gray sky, not a house was visible, nothing 
but Stonehenge, which looked like a 
group of brown dwarfs in the wide ex- 
panse — Stonehenge and the barrows — 
which rose like green bosses about the 
plain, and a few hayricks. On the top of 
a mountain, the old temple would not be 
more impressive. Far and wide a few 
shepherds with their flocks sprinkled the 
plain, and a bagman drove along the road. 
It looked as if the wide margin given in 
this crowded isle to this primeval temple 
were accorded by the veneration of tho 
British race to the old egg out of which 
all their ecclesiastical structures and his- 
tory had proceeded. Stonehenge is a 
circular colonnade with a diameter of a 
hundred feet, and enclosing a second and 
a third colonnade within. We walked 
round the stones, and clambered over 
them, to wont ourselves with their strange 
aspect and groupings, and found a nook 
sheltered from the wind among them, 
where C. lighted his cigar. It was plea- 
sant to see, that, just this simplest of all 
simple structures — two upright stones and 
a lintel laid across — had long outstood all 
later churches, and all history, and were 
like what is most permanent on the face 
of the planet: these, and the barrows — 
mere mounds (of which there are a hun- 
dred and sixty within a circle of three 
miles about Stonehenge), like the same 
mound on the plain of Troy, which still 
makes good to the passing mariner on 
Hellespont, the vaunt of Homer and tho 
fame of Achilles. Within the enclosure 
grow buttercups, nettles, and all around, 
wild thyme, daisy, meadow-sweet, golden- 
rod, thistle, and the carpeting grass. 
Over us, larks were soaring and singing — 
as my friend said : ” the larks which were 
hatched last year, and the wind which 
was hatched many thousand years ago.” 
We counted and measured by paces the 
biggest stones, and soon knew as much as 
any man can suddenly know of the in- 
scrutable temple. There are ninety-four 
stones, and there were once probably one 
hundred and sixty. The temple is cir- 
cular, and uncovered, and the situation 
fixed astronomically — the grand entrances, 
here, and at Abury, being placed exactly 
northeast, ” aa all the gatos of the old 



STOMEHEmB. 


temples are/* How came the 
stones here ? for these sarsens or Druidical 
sandstones, are not found in this neigh- 
bourhood, The sacrificial stondt as it 
is called, is the only one in all these 
blocks, that can resist the action of 
fire, and as I read in the books, must 
have been brought one hundred and fifty 
miles. 

On almost every stone we found the 
marks of the mineralogist’s hammer and 
chisel. The nineteen smaller stones of 
the inner circle are of granite. I, who 
had just come from Professor Sed^vick’s 
Cambridge Museum of megatheria and 
mastodons, was ready to maintain that 
some cleverer elephants or mylodonta 
had borne off and laid these rocks one on 
another. Only the good beasts must have 
known how to cut a well-wrought tenon 
and mortise, and to smooth the surface of 
some of the stones. The chief mystery 
is, that any mystery should have been 
allowed to settle on so remarkable a 
monument, in a country on which all the 
muses have kept their eyes now for 
eighteen hundred years. VVe are not yet 
too late to learn much more than is known 
of this structure. Some diligent Fellowes 
or Layard will arrive, stone by stone, at 
the whole history, by that exhaustive 
British sense and perseverance, so whim- 
sical in its choice of objects, which leaves 
its own Stonehenge or Choir Gaur to the 
rabbits, whilst it opens pyramids, and 
uncovers Nineveh. Stonehenge, in virtue 
of the simplicity of its plan, and its good 
preservation, is as if new and recent; 
and, a thousand years hence, men will 
thank this age for the accurate history it 
will yet eliminate. We walked in and 
out, and took again and again a fresh i 
look at the uncanny stones, The old 
sphinx put our petty differences of nation- 
ality out of sight. To these conscious 
stones we two pilgrims were alike known 
and near. We could equally well revere 
their old British meaning. My philoso- 
pher was subdued and gentle. In this 
quiet house of destiny, he happened to 
say, “ I plant cypresses wherever I go, 
and if I am in search of pain, I cannot go 
wrong.” The spot, the gray blocks, and 
their rude order, which refuses to be dis- 
posed of, suggested to him the flight of 
ages, and the succession of religions. 
The old times of England impress C. 
much: he reads little, he says, in these 
last years, but '* Acta Sanctorum,'* the 
fifty-three volumes of which are in the 
** London Library.'* fie finds all English 


301 

history therein. He can see, as he reads, 
the old saint of Iona sitting there, and 
writing, a man to men. The Acta Sane* 
torum show plainly that the men of those 
times believed in God, and in the immor- 
tality of the soul, as their abbeys and 
cathedrals testify : now, even the Puri- 
tanism is all gone. London is pagan. 
He fancied that greater men had lived in 
England than any of her writers ; and, in 
fact, about the time when those writers 
appeared, the last of these were already 
gone. 

We left the mound in the twilight, with 
the design to return the next morning, and 
coming back two miles to our inn, we 
were met by little showers, and late as it 
was, men and women were out attempting 
to protect their spread wind-rows. The 
grass grows rank and dark in the showery 
England. At the inn, there was only 
milk for one cup of tea. When we called 
for more, the girl brought us three drops. 
My friend was annoyed who stood for the 
credit of an English inn, and still more, 
the next morning, by the dog-cart, sola 
procurable vehicle, in which we were to bo 
sent to Wilton. I engaged the local an- 
tiquary, Mr. Brown, to go with us to 
Stonehenge, on our way, and show us 
what he knew of the ” astronomical” 
and ” sacrificial ” stones. I stood on the 
last, and he pointed to the upright, or 
rather, inclined stone, called the ” astro- 
nomical,” and bade me notice that its top 
ranged with the sky-line. ” Yes.” Very 
well. Now, at the summer solstice, the 
sun rises exactly over the top of that 
stone, and, at the Druidical temple at 
Abury, there is also an astronomical stone, 
in the same relative positions. 

In the silence of tradition, tliis one re- 
lation to science becomes an important 
clew ; but we were content to leave the 
problem, with the rocks. Was this the 
” Giant’s Dance ” which Merlin brought 
from Killaraus, in Ireland, to be Other 
Pendragon’s monument to the British 
nobles whom Hengist slaughtered here, as 
Geoffrey of Monmouth relates ? or was it 
a Roman work, as Inigo Jones explained 
to King James ; or identical in design and 
style with the East Indian temples of the 
sun ; as Davies in the Celtic Researches 
maintains ? Of all the writers, Stukeley 
is the best. The heroic antiquary, charmed 
with the geometric perfections of his ruin, 
connects it with the oldest monuments and 
religion of the world, and, with the courage 
of his tribe, does not stick to say, ” the 
Deity who made the world by the scheme 



ENGLISH TRAITS, 


50a 

of Stonehen^^e/’ He finds that the cursus* 
on Salisbury Plain stretches across the 
downs, like a line of latitude upon the 
globe, and the meridian line of Stonehenge 
passes exactly through the middle of this 
cursiis. But here is the high point of the 
theory : the Druids had the magnet ,* laid 
their courses by it ; their cardinal points 
in Stonehenge, Ambresbury, and else- 
where, which vary a little from true east 
and west, followed the variations of the 
compass. The Druids were Phoenicians. 
The name of the magnet is lapis Heracleus, 
and Hercules was the god of the 
Phoenicians. Hercules, in the legend, 
drew his bow at the sun, and the sun-god 
gave him a golden cup, with which he 
sailed over the ocean. What was this, 
but a compass-box ? This cup or little 
boat, in which the magnet was made to 
float on water, and so show the north, was 
probably its first form, before it was sus- 
pended on a pin. But science was an 
arcanum and as Britain was a Phoenician 
secret, so they kept their compass a 
secret, and it was lost with the Tyrian 
commerce, The golden fleece, again, of 
Jason, was the compass — a bit of load- 
stone, easily supposed to be the only one 
in the world, and therefore naturally 
awakening the cupidity and ambition of 
the young heroes of a maritime nation to 
join in an expedition to obtain possession 
of this wise stone. Hence the fable that 
the ship Argo was loquacious and oracular. 
There is also some curious coincidence in 
the names. Apollodorus makes Magnes 
the son of jEoIus, who married Nais, On 
hints like these, Stukeley builds again the 
grand colonnade into historic harmony, 
and computing backward by the known 
variations of the compass, bravely assigns 
the year 406 before Christ for the date of 
the temple. 

For the difficulty of handling and carry- 
ing stones of this size, the like is done in 
all cities, every day, with no other aid 
than horse-power. I chanced to see a 
a year ago men at work on the substruc- 
ture of a house in Bowdoin Square, in 
Boston, swinging a block of granite of the 

♦ Connected with Stonehenge are an avenue 
and a cursus. The avenue is a narrow road of 
raised earth, extending 594 yards in a straight 
line from the grand entrance, then dividing 
into two branches, which lead, severally, to a 
row of barrows j and to the cursus— an arti- 
ficially fornaed flat tract of ground. This is 
half a mile northeast from Stonehenge, bounded 
by banks and ditches, 3036 yards long, by zio 
broad. 


size of the largest of the Stenehenge 

columns with an ordinary derrick. The 
men were common masons, with paddies 
to help, nor did they think they were doing 
anything remarkable. I suppose there 
were as good men a thousand years ago. 
And we wonder hew Stonehenge was 
built and forgotten. After spending half 
an hour on the spot, we set forth in our 
dog-cart over the downs for Wilton, C. 
not suppressing some threats and evil 
omens on the proprietors, for keeping 
these broad plains a wretched sheep- 
walk when so many thousands of English- 
men were hungry and wanted labour. 
But I heard afterwards that it is not an 
economy to cultivate this land, which 
only yields one crop on being broken up, 
and is then spoiled. 

We came to Wilton and to Wilton Hall 
— the renowned seat of the Earls of Pem- 
broke, a house known to Shakespeare 
and Massinger, the frequent home of Sir 
Philip Sidney, where he wrote the Arcadia ; 
where he conversed with Lord Brooke, a 
man of deep thought, and a poet, who 
caused to be engraved on his tombstone. 
“Here lies Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 
the friend of Sir Philip Sidney.” It is 
now the property of the Earl of Pembroke, 
and the residence of his brother, Sidney 
Herbert, Esq., and is esteemed a noble 
specimen of the English manor-hall. My 
friend had a letter from Mr. Herbert to 
his housekeeper, and the house was 
shown. The state drawing-room is a 
double cube, thirty feet high, by thirty 
wide, by sixty feet long: the adjoining 
room is a single cube, of thirty feet every 
way. Although these apartments and 
the long library were full of good family 
portraits, Vandykes and others ; and 
though there were some good pictures, 
and a quadrangle cloister full of antique 
and modern statuary — to which C., cata- 
logue in hand, did all too much justice— 
yet the eye was still drawn to the windows, 
to a magnificent lawn, on which grew the 
finest cedars in England. I had not seen 
more charming grounds. We went out, 
and walked over the estate. We crossed 
a bridge built by Inigo Jones over a 
stream, of N\iiich the gardener did not 
know the name (Qu. Alph ?) watched the 
deer; climbed to the lonely sculptured 
summer-house, on a hill backed by a 
wood ; came down into the Italian garden, 
and into a French pavilion, garnished with 
French busts ; and so, again to the house, 
where we found a table laid for us with 
bread, meats, peaches, grapes, and wine 



STONEHENGE. 


On leaving Wilton House, we took the 
coach for Salisbury. The Cathedral which 
was finished six hundred years ago has 
even a spruce and modern air, and its 
spire is the highest in England. I know 
not why, but I had been more struck with 
one of no fame at Coventry, which rises 
three hundred feet from the ground, with 
the lightness of a mullein-plant, and not 
at all implicated with the church. Salis- 
bury is now esteemed the culmination of 
the Gothic art in England, as the buttres- 
ses are fully unmasked, and honestly 
detailed from the sides of the pile. The 
interior of the cathedral is obstructed by 
the organ in the middle, acting like a 
screen. I know not why in real architec- 
ture the hunger of the eye for length of 
line is so rarely gratified. The rule of 
art is that a colonnade is more beau- 
tiful the longer it is, and that ad infinitum. 
And the nave of a church is seldom so long 
that it need be divided by a screen. 

We loitered in the church, outside the 
choir, whilst service was said. Whilst we 
listened to the organ, my friend remarked, 
tke music is good and yet not quite reli- 
gious, but somewhat as if a monk were 
panting to some fine Queen of Heaven. 
C. was unwilling, and we did not ask to 
have the choir shown us, but returned to 
our inn, after seeing another old church 
of the place. W’e passed in the train 
Clarendon Park, but could see little but 
the edge of a wood, though C. had wished 
to pay closer attention to the birthplace 
of the Decrees of Clarendon. At Bisfeop- 
stoke we stopped, and found Mr. H., who 
received us in his carriage, and took us to 
his house at Bishops Waltham. 

On Sunday, we had much discourse on 
a very rainy day. My friends ask, whether 
there were any Americans ?— any with an 
American idea— any theory of the right 
future of that country ? Thus challenged, 
I bethought myself neither of caucuses 
nor congress, neither of presidents nor of 
cabinet-ministers, nor of such as would 
make of America another Europe. I 
thought only of the simplest and purest 
minds ; I said, “ Certainly yes ; but those 
who hold it are fanatics of a dream which 
I should hardly care to relate to your 
English ears, to v/hich it might be only 
ridiculous,— and yet it is the only true.” 
So I opened the dogma of no government 
and non-resistance, and anticipated the 
objections and the fun, and procured a 
kind of hearing for it. I said, it is true 
that I have never seen in any country a 
man of sufficient valour to stand for this 


303 

truth, and yet it is plain to me that no less 
valour than this can command my re- 
spect. I can easily see the bankruptcy 
of the vulgar musket-w'orship — though 
great men be musket-worshippers ; and 
'tis certain, as God liveth, the gun that 
does not need another gun, the law of 
love and justice alone, can effect a clean 
revolution. I fancied that one or two of 
my anecdotes made some impression on 
C., and I insisted that the manifest absurd- 
ity of the view to English feasibility could 
make no difference to a gentleman ; that 
as to our secure tenure of our mutton- 
chop and spinage in London or in Boston, 
the soul might quote Talleyrand, “ Mow- 
sieur,je n'en vois pas la ndeessitd." * As 
I had thus taken in the conversation the 
saint’s part, when dinner was announced, 
C. refused to go out before me — “ he was 
altogether too wicked.” I planted my 
back against the wall, and our host wittily 
rescued us from the dilemma, by saying, 
he was the wickedest, and would walk out 
first, then C. followed, and I went last. 

On the way to Winchester, whither our 
host accompanied us in the afternoon 
rny friends asked many questions respect- 
ing American landscape, forests, houses — 
my house, for example. It is not easy to 
answer these queries well. There I 
thought, in America, lies nature sleeping, 
overgrowing, almost conscious, too much 
by half for man in the picture, and so 
giving a certain tristesse, like the rank 
vegetation of swamps and forests seen at 
night, steeped in dews and rains, which it 
loves ; and on it man seems not able to 
make much impression. There in that 
great sloven continent, in high Alleghany 
pastures, in the sea-wide, sky-skirted 
prairie, still sleeps and murmurs and hides 
the great mother, long since driven away 
from the trim hedge-rows and over-culti- 
vated garden of England. And in Eng- 
land, I am quite too sensible of this. 
Every one is on his good behaviour, and 
must be dressed for dinner at six. So 1 
put off my friends with very inadequate 
details, as best I could. 

Just before entering Winchester, W6 
stopped at the Church of Saint Cross, and, 
after looking through the quaint antiquity, 
we demanded a piece of bread and a 
draught of beer, which the founder, Henry 
de Blois, in 1136, commanded should 
be given to every one who should ask it 
at the gate. We had both, from the old 
couple who take care of the churcli, 

•* MaiSf Monseignfur, il fa^ qurftxUh • 



ENGLISH t St A its. 


304 

Some twenty people, everyday, they said, 
make the same demand. This hospitality 
of seven hundred years’ standing did not 
hinder C. from pronouncing a malediction 
on the priest who receives £2000 a year 
that were meant for the poor, and spends 
a pittance on this small beer and crumbs. 

In the Cathedral, I was gratified, at 
least by the ample dimensions. The 
length of line exceeds that of any other 
English Church ; being 556 feet by 250 in 
breadth of transept. I think I prefer this 
church to all I have seen, except West- 
minster and York. Here was Canute 
buried, and here Alfred the Great was 
crowned and buried, and here the Saxon 
kings: and, later, in his own church, Wil- 
liam of Wykeham. It is very old : part 
of the crypt into which we went down and 
saw the Saxon and Norman arches of the 
old church on which the present stands, | 
was built fourteen or fifteen hundred years 
ago. Sharon Turner says : “ Alfred was 
buried at Winchester, in the Abbey he 
had founded there, but his remains were 
removed by Henry I. to the new Abbey in 
the meadows at Hyde, on the northern 
quarter of the city, and laid under the high 
altar. The building was destroyed at the 
Reformation, and what is left of Alfred’s 
body now lies covered by modern build- 
ings, or buried in the ruins of the old.” * 
William of Wykeham’s shrine tomb was 
unlocked for us, and C. took old of the 
recumbent statue’s marble hands, and pat- 
ted them affectionately, for he rightly 
values the brave man who built Windsor, 
and this Cathedral, and the School here, 
and College at Oxford. But it was 
growing late in the afternoon. Slowly 
we left the old house, and parting with our 
host, we took the train for London, 


PERSONAL. 

In these comments on an old journey now 
revised after seven busy years have much 
changed men and things in England, I 
have abstained from reference to persons, 
except in the last chapter, and in one or 
two cases where the fame of the parties 
seemed to have given the public a pro- 
perty in all that concerned them. I must 
further allow myself a few notices, if only 
as an acknowledgment of debts that 
cannot be paid. My journeys were cheered 
by so much kindness from new friends, 
that my impression of the island is bright 
with agreeable memories both of public 

* History of the Anglo-Saxons, 1 , 599 * 


societies and of households; and, what Ifl 
nowhere better found than in England, a 
cultivated person fitly surrounded by 9 
happy home,” with honour, love, obedience, 
troops of friends,” is of all institutions the 
best. At the landing in Liverpool, I found 
my Manchester correspondent awaiting 
me, a gentleman whose kind reception was 
followed by a train of friendly and effective 
attentions which never rested whilst I re- 
mained in the country. A man of sense 
and of letters, the editor of a powerful local 
journal, he added to solid virtues an in- 
finite sweetness and bonhomie. There 
seemed a pool of honey about his heart 
which lubricated all his speech and action 
with fine jets of mead. An equal good- 
fortune attended many later accidents of 
my journey, until the sincerity of English 
kindness ceased to surprise. My visit 
fell in the fortunate days when Mr. 
Bancroft was the American Minister 
in London, and at his house, or 
through his good offices, I had easy access 
to excellent persons and to privileged 
places. At the house of Mr. Carlyle, I 
met persons eminent in society and in 
letters. The privileges of the Athenmum 
and of the Reform clubs were hospitably 
opened to me, and I found much advan- 
tage in the circles of the ” Geologic,” the 
” Antiquarian,” and the ” Royal Societies.” 
Every day in London gave me new oppor- 
tunites of meeting men and women who 
give splendour to society. I saw Rogers, 
Hallam, Macaulay, Milnes, Milman, 
Barry Cornwall, Dickens, Thackeray, 
Tennyson, Leigh Hunt, D’Israeli, Helps, 
Wilkinson, Bailey, Kenyon, and Forster : 
the younger poets, Clough, Arnold, and 
Patmore ; and, among the men of science, 
Robert Brown, Owen, Sedgwick, Faraday, 
Buckland, Lyell, De la Beche, Hooker, 
Carpenter, Babbage, and Edward Forbes. 
It was my privilege also to converse 
with Miss Baillie, with Lady Morgan, 
with Mrs. Jameson, and Mrs. Somer- 
ville. A finer hospitality made many 
private houses not less known and 
dear. It is not in distinguished circles 
that wisdom and elevated characters are 
usually found, or, if found, not confined 
thereto ; and my recollections of the best 
hours go back to private conversations in 
different parts of the kingdom, with per- 
sons little known. Nor am I insensible 
to the courtesy which frankly opened to 
me some noble mansions, if I do not 
adorn my page with their names. Among 
the privileges of London, I recall with 
pleasure two or three signal days^ one at 



PERSONAL 


305 


Kew, where Sir William Hooker showed 
me all the riches of the vast botanic gar- 
den; one at the Museum, where Sir 
Charles P'ellowes explained in detail the 
history of his Ionic trophy-monument; 
and still another, on which Mr. Owen 
accompanied my countryman Mr. H. and 
myself through the Hunterian Museum. 

The like frank hospitality, bent on real 
service, I found among the great and the 
humble, wherever I went; in Birmingham, 
in Oxford, in Leicester, in Nottingham, 
in Sheffield, in Manchester, in Liverpool. 
At Edinburgh, through the kindness of 
Dr. Samuel Brown, I made the acquaint- 
ance of DeQuincey, of Lord Jeffrey, of 
Wilson, of Mrs. Crowe, of the Messrs. 
Chambers, and of a man of high character 
and genius, the short-lived painter David 
Scott. 

At Ambleside, in March, 1848, I was for 
a couple of days the guest of Miss Mar- 
tineau, then newly returned from her 
Egyptian tour. On Sunday afternoon, I 
accompanied her to Rydal Mount. And 
as I have recorded a visit to Wordsworth, 
many years before, I must not forget this 
second interview. We found Mr. Words- 
worth asleep on the sofa. He was at first 
silent and indisposed, as an old man, 
suddenly waked, before he had ended his 
nap ,* but soon became full of talk on the 
French news, He was nationally bitter on 
the French: bitter on Scotchmen, too. 
No Scotchman, he said, can write English. 
He detailed the two models, on one or the 
other of which all the sentences of the 
historian Robertson are framed. Nor 
could Jeffrey, nor the Edinburgh Reviewers 
write English, nor can .... who is a pest 
to the English tongue. Incidentally he 
added. Gibbon cannot write English. The 
Edinburgh Review wrote what would tell 
and what would sell. It had however 
changed the tone of its literary criticism 
from the time when a certain letter was 
written to the editor by Coleridge. Mrs. 
W. had the Editor’s answer in her posses- 
sion. Tennyson he thinks a right poetic 
genius, though with some affectation. He 
had thought an elder brother of Tennyson 
^t first the better poet, but must now 

reckon Alfred the true one In 

speaking of I know not what style, he 
said, “ To be sure it was the manner, but 
then you know the matter always comes 
out of the manner.” .... He thought 
Rio Janeiro the best place in the world for 

B great capital city We talked of 

English national character, I told him it 
was not creditable that no one in all the 


country knew anything of Thomas Taylor, 
the Platonist, whilst in every American 
library his translations are found. I said, 
if Plato’s Republic were published in 
England as a new book to-day, do you 
think it would find any readers ? — he con- 
fessed, it would not: ” And yet,” he added, 
after a pause, with that complacency 
which never deserts a true-born English- 
man — ” and yet we have embodied it all.” 

His opinions of French, English, Irish, 
and Scotch seemed rashly formalized from 
little anecdotes of what had befallen him- 
self and members of his family, in a dili- 
gence or stage-coach. His face sometimes 
lighted up, but his conversation was not 
marked by special force or elevation. Yet 
perhaps it is a high compliment to the 
cultivation of the English generally, when 
we find such a man not distinguished. Ha 
had a healthy look, with a weather-beaten 
face, his face corrugated, especially the 
large nose. 

Miss Martineau, who lived near him, 
praised him to me, not for his poetry, but 
for thrift and economy ; for having afforded 
to his country neighbours an example of 
a modest household, where comfort and 
culture were secured without any display. 
She said, that, in his early housekeeping 
at the cottage where he first lived, he was 
accustomed to offer his friends bread and 
plainest fare ; if they wanted anything 
more, they must pay him for their board. 
It was the rule of the house. I replied, 
that it evinced English pluck more than 
any anecdote I knew. A gentleman in 
the neighbourhood told the story of Walter 
Scott’s once staying a week with Words- 
worth, and slipping out every day under 
pretence of a walk, to the Swan Inn, for a 
cold cut and porter; and one day passing 
with Wordsworth the inn, he was be- 
trayed by the landlord’s asking him if ho 
had come for his porter. Of course, this 
trait would have another look in London, 
and there you will hear from different 
literary men, that Wordsworth had no 
personal friend, that he was not amiable, 
that he was parsimonious, &c. Landor, 
always generous, says that he never 
praised anybody. A gentleman in Lon- 
don showed me a watch that once be- 
longed to Milton, whose initials are 
engraved on its face. He said, he once 
showed this to Wordsworth, who took it 
in one hand, then drew out his own watch, 
and held it up with the other, before the 
company, but no one making the expected 
remark, he put back his own in silence,. 
I do not attach much importance, to the 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 


306 

disparagement of Wordsworth among 
London scholars. Who reads him well 
will know, that in following the strong 
bent of his genius, he was careless of the 
many, careless also of the few, self-assured 
that he should “create the taste by which 
he is to be enjoyed.” He lived long 
enough to witness the revolution he had 
wrought, and “to see what he foresaw.” 
There are torpid places in his mind, there 
is something hard and sterile in his poetry, 
want of grace and variety, want of due 
catholicity and cosmopolitan scope: he 
had conformities to English politics and 
traditions ; he had egotistic puerilities in 
the choice and treatment of his subjects; 
but let us say of him, that, alone in his 
time, he treated the human mind well, 
and with an absolute trust. His adherence 
to his poetic creed rested on real inspira- 
tions. The Ode on Immortality is the 
high-water mark which the intellect has 
reached in this age. New means were 
employed, and new realms added to the 
empire of the muse, by his courage, 


RESULT, 

England is the best of actual nations. 
It is no ideal framework, it is an old pile 
built in different ages, with repairs, addi- 
tions, and makeshifts ; but you see the 
poor best you have got. London is the 
epitome of our times, and the Rome of 
to-day. Broad-fronted broad-bottomed 
Teutons, they stand in solid phalanx 
four-square to the points of compass ; 
they constitute the modern world, they 
have earned their vantage-ground, and 
held it through ages of adverse possession. 
They are well marked and differing from 
other leading races. England is tender- 
hearted. Rome was not. England is not 
so public in its bias ; private life is its 
place of honour. Truth in private life, 
untruth in public, marks these home-loving 
men. Their political conduct is not de- 
cided by general views, but by internal 
intrigues and personal and family interest. I 
They cannot readily see beyond England. 
The history of Rome and Greece, when 
written by their scholars, degenerates 
into English party pamphlets. They can- 
not see beyond England, nor in England 
can they transcend the interests of the 
governing classes. “ English principles ” 
mean a primary regard to the interests of 1 
property. England, Scotland, and Ireland 
combine to check the Colonies. England 
and Scotland combine to check Irish manu- 


factures and trade. England failles at home 
to check Scotland. In England, the strong 
classes check the weaker. In the home 
population of near thirty millions, there are 
[ but one million voters. The Church pun- 
ishes dissent, punishes education. Down 
to a late day, marriages performed by dis- 
senters were illegal. A bitter class-legis- 
lation gives power to those who are rich 
enough to buy a law. The game laws are 
a proverb of oppression. Pauperism 
incrupts and clogs the state, and in hard 
times becomes hideous. In bad seasons, 
the porridge was diluted. Multitudes 
lived miserably by shell-fish and sea-ware. 
In cities, the children are trained to beg, 
until they shall be old enough to rob. Men 
and women were convicted of poisoning 
scores of children for burial fees. In 
Irish districts men deteriorated in size 
and shape. The nose sunk, the gums 
were exposed, with diminished brain and 
brutal form. During the Australian emi- 
gration, multitudes were rejected by the 
commissioners as being too emaciated for 
useful colonists. During the Russian war, 
few of those that offered as recruits were 
found up to the medical standard, though 
it had been reduced. 

The foreign policy of England, though 
ambitious and lavish of money, has not 
often been generous or just. It has a 
principal regard to the interest of trade, 
checked however by the artistocratic bias 
of the ambassador, which usually puts 
him in sympathy with the continental 
Courts. It sanctioned the partition of 
Poland, it betrayed Genoa, Sicily, Parma, 
Greece, Turkey, Rome, and Hungary. 

Some public regards they have. They 
have abolished slavery in the West 
Indies, and put an end to human sacrifices 
in the East, At home they have a certain 
statute hospitality. England keeps open 
doors, as a trading country must, to all 
nations. It is one of their fixed ideas, and 
wrathfully supported by their laws in un- 
broken sequence for a thousand years. In 
Magna Charta it was ordained, that all 
“ merchants shall have safe and secure 
conduct to go out and come into England, 
and to stay there, and to pass as well by 
land as by water, to buy and sell by the 
ancient allowed customs, without any evil 
toll, except in time of war, or when they 
shall be of any nation at war with us.” 
It is a statute and obliged hospitality, and 
peremptorily maintained. But this shop- 
rule had one magnificent effect. It ex- 
tends its cold unalterable courtesy to 
political exiles of every opinion, and is « 



RESULT. 


307 


fact which might give additional light to 
that portion of the planet seen from the 
farthest star. But this perfunctory hos- 
pitality puts no sweetness into their 
unaccommodating manners, no check on 
that puissant nationality which makes 
their existence incompatible with all that 
is not English. 

What we must say about a nation is a 
superficial dealing with symptoms. We 
cannot go deep enough into the b^graphy 
of the spirit who never throws himself 
entire into one hero, but delegates his 
energy in parts or spasms to vicious and 
defective individuals. But the wealth of 
the source is seen in the plentitude of 
English nature. What variety of power 
and talent ; what facility and plenteous- 
ness of knighthood, lordship, ladyship, 
royalty, loyalty ; what a proud chivalry is 
indicated in “ Collins's Peerage,” through 
eight hundred years ! What dignity rest- 
ing on what reality and stoutness 1 What 
courage in war, what sinew in labour, 
what cunning workmen, what inventors 
and engineers, what seamen and pilots, 
what clerks and scholars ! No one man 
and no few men can represent them. It 
is a people of myriad personalities. Their 
many-headedness is owing to the advan- 
tageous position of the middle class, who 
^re always the source of letters and 
science. Hence the vast plenty of their 
(Esthetic production. As they are many- 
headed, so they are many nationed : their 
colonization annexes archipelagoes and 
continents, and their speech seems des- 
tined to be the universal language of men. 
I have noted the reserve of power in the 
English temperament. In the island, they 
never let out all the length of all the 
reins, there is no Berserkir rage, no aban- 
donment or ecstasy of will or intellect, 
like that of the Arabs in the time of 
Mahomet, or like that which intoxicated 
France in 1789. But who would see the 
flncoiling of that tremendous spring, the 
explosion of their well-husbanded forces, 
must follow the swarms which, pouring 
now for two hundred years from the 
British islands, have sailed, and rode, and 
traded, and planted, through all climates, 
mainly following the belt of emp'.re, the 
temperate zones, carrying the Saxon seed, 
with its instinct for liberty and law, for 
arts and for thought — acquiring under 
some skies a more electric energy than 
the native air allows— to the conquest of 
the globe. Their colonial policy, obeying 
the necessities of a vast empire, has be- 
goiP9 Ub^r^t Canada and Australia Uav^ 


been contented with substantial independ* 
ence. They are expiating the v/rcngs of 
India, by benefits : first, in works for the 
irrigation of the peninsula, and roads and 
telegraphs ; and secondly, in the instruc- 
tion of the people, to qualify them for 
self-government, when the British power 
shall be finally called home 

Their « ind is in a state of arrested 
development — a divine cripple like 
Vulcan ; a blind savant like Huber 
and Sanderson. They do not occupy 
themselves on matters of general and 
lasting import, but on a corporeal civiliza- 
tion, on goods that per feh in the using. 
But they read with good intent, and what 
they learn they incarnate. The English 
mind turns every abstraction it can re 
ceive into a portable utensil, or a working 
institution. Such is their tenacity, and such 
their practical turn, that they hold all they 
gain. Hence we say, that only the 
English race can be trusted with freedom- 
freedom which is double-edged and dan- 
gerous to any but the wise and robust. 
The English designate the kingdoms 
emulous of free institutions as the senti- 
mental nations. Their own culture is not 
an outside varnish, but is thorough and 
secular in families and the race. They 
are oppressive with their temperament, 
and all the more that they are refined. I 
have sometimes seen them walk with my 
countrymen when I was forced to allow 
them every advantage, and their com- 
panions seemed bags of bones. 

There is cramp limitation in their habit 
of thought, sleepy routine, and a tortoise’s 
instinct to hold hard to the ground with 
his claws, lest he should be thrown on his 
back. There is a drag of inertia which 
resists reform in every shape ; law-reform, 
army-reform, extension of suffrage, Jewish 
franchise. Catholic emancipation — the 
abolition of slavery, of impressment, 
penal code, and entails. They praise this 
drag, under the formula, that it is the 
excellence of the British constitution, 
that no law can anticipate the public 
opinion. These poor tortoises must hold 
hard, for they feel no wings sprouting at 
their shoulders. Yet somewhat divine 
warms at their heart, and waits a happier 
hour. It hides in their sturdy will. 
” Will,” said the old philosophy, ” is the 
measure of power,” and personality is the 
token of this race. Quid vuli valde vult. 
What they do they do with a will. You 
cannot account for their success by their 
Christianity, commerce, charter, common 
laW) Farliameat. or 'liters, but by tbo 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 


308 

contumacious sharp-tongued energy of 
English naturel, with a poise impossible 
to disturb, which makes all these its in- 
struments. They are slow and reticent, 
and are like a dull good horse which lets 
every nag pass him, but with whip and 
spur will run down every racer in the 
field. They are right in their feeling, 
though wrong in their speculation. 

The feudal system survives in the steep 
inequality ot property and privilege, in 
the limited franchise, in the social bar- 
riers which confine patronage and promo- 
tion to a caste, and still more in the sub- 
missive ideas pervading these people. 
The fagging of the schools is repeated in 
the social classes. An Englishman shows 
no mercy to those below him in the social 
scale, as he looks for none from those 
above him ; any forbearance from his 
superiors surprises him, and they suffer 
in his good opinion. But the feudal 
system can be seen with less pain on 
large historical grounds. It was pleaded 
in mitigation of the rotten borough, that 
it worked well, that substantial justice 
was done. Fox, Burke, Pitt, Erskine, 
Wilberforce, Sheridan, Romilly, or what- 
ever national man, were by this means 
sent to Parliament, when their return by 
large constituencies would have been 
doubtful. So now we say, that the right 
measures of England are the men it bred ; 
that it has yielded more able men in five 
hundred years than any other nation ; 
and, though we must not play Providence, 
and balance the chances of producing ten 
great men against the comfort of ten 
thousand mean men, yet retrospectively 
we may strike the balance, and prefer one 
Alfred, one Shakespeare, one Milton, one 
Sidney, one Raleigh, one Wellington, to 
a million foolish democrats. 

The American system is more demo- 
cratic, more humane ; yet the American 
people do not yield better or more able 
men, or more inventions or books or 
benefits, than the English. Congress is 
not wiser or better than Parliament, 
France has abolished its suffocating old 
regime, but is not recently marked by any 
more wisdom or virtue. 

The power of performance has not 
been exceeded — the creation of value. 
The English have given importance to 
individuals, a principal end and fruit of 
every society. Every man is allowed and 
encouraged to be what he is, and is 
guarded in the indulgence of his whim. 
“Magna Charta," said Rushworth, “is 
iuch a fellow that be will have no sove- 


reign.” By this general activity, and by 
this sacredness of individuals, they have 
in seven hundred years evolved the prin- 
ciples of freedom. It is the land of 
patriots, martyrs, sages, and bards, and 
if the ocean out of which it emerged 
should wash it away, it will be remem- 
bered as an island famous for immortal 
laws, for the announcements of original 
right which make the stone tables of 
liberty. 


SPEECH AT MANCHESTER. 

A FEW days after my arrival at Manchea- 
ter, in November, 1847, the Manchester 
Athenaeum gave its annual Banquet in 
the Free-Trade Hall. With other guests, 
I was invited to be present, and to ad- 
dress the company. In looking over re* 
cently a newspaper report of my remarks. 
I incline to reprint it, as fitly expressing 
the feeling with which I entered England, 
and which agrees well enough with the 
more deliberate results of better acquaint- 
ance recorded in the foregoing pages. 
Sir Archibald Alison, the historian, pre- 
sided, and opened the meeting with 9 
speech. He was followed by Mr. Cobden, 
Lord Brackley, and others, among whom 
was Mr. Cruikshank, one of the contribu- 
tors to “ Punch.” Mr. Dickens’s letter of 
apology for his absence was read. Mr. 
Jerrold, who had been announced, did not 
appear. On being introduced to the 
meeting I said ; — 

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen : It is 
ple.asant to me to meet this great and 
brilliant company, and doubly pleasant to 
see the faces of so many distinguished 
persons on this platform. But I have 
known all these persons already. When 
I was at home, they were as near to me 
I as they are to you. The arguments of 
the League and its leader are known to 
all the friends of free trade. The gaie- 
ties and genius, the political, the social, 
the parietal wit of “ Punch ” go duly every 
fortnight to every boy and girl in Boston 
and New York. Sir, when I came to sea, 
I found the “ History of Europe ” ♦ on 
I the ship's cabin table, the property of the 
captain ; a sort of programme or play-bill 
to tell the seafaring New-Englander what 
he shall find on his landing here. And as 
for Dombey, sir, there is no land where 
paper exists to print on, where it is ti^ll 

* By Sir A. Alison 



SPEECH AT MANCHESTER. 


found : no man who can read, that does 
not read it, and, if he cannot, he finds 
some charitable pair of eyes that can, and 
bears it. 

But these things are not for me to say ; 
these compliments, though true, would 
better come from one who felt and under- 
stood these merits more. I am not here 
to exchange civilities with you, but rather 
to speak of that which I am sure interests 
these gentlemen more than their own 
praises ; of that which is good in holidays 
and working-days, the same in one cen- 
tury and in another century. That which 
lures a solitary American in the woods 
with the wish to see England, is the moral 
peculiarity of the Saxon race~its com- 
manding sense of right and wrong — the 
love and devotion to that, this is the im- 
perial trait, which arms them with the 
sceptre of the globe. It is this which lies 
at the foundation of that aristocratic char- 
acter, which certainly wanders into strange 
vagaries, so that its origin is often lost 
sight of, but which, if it should lose this, 
would find itself paralyzed ; and in trade, 
and in the mechanic’s shop, gives that 
honesty in performance, that thoroughness 
and solidity of work, which is a national 
characteristic. This conscience is one 
element, and the other is that loyal ad- 
hesion, that habit of friendship, that hom- 
age of man to man, running through all 
classes — the electing of worthy persons to 
a certain fraternity, to acts of kindness 
and warm and staunch support, from year 
to year, from youth to age — which is alike 
lovely and honourable to those who ren- 
der and those who receive it ; which 
stands in strong contrast with the super- 
ficial attachments of other races, their 
excessive courtesy and short-lived con- 
nection. 

You will think me very pedantic, gentle- 
men, but holiday though it be, I have not 
the smallest interest in any holiday, ex- 
cept as it celebrates real and not pre- 
tended joys ; and 1 think it just, in this 
time of gloom and commercial disaster, 
of affliction and beggary in these districts, 
that on these very accounts 1 speak of, 
you should not fail to keep your literary 
anniversary. I seem to hear you say, 
that, for all that is come and gone yet, we 
will not reduce by one chaplet or one 
oak-leaf the braveries of our annual feast* 
For I must tell you, I was given to under- 
stand in my childhood, that the British 
Wsad from which my ferofsthers csmsi 


309 

was no lotus-garden, no paradise of serene 
sky and roses and music and merriment 
all the year round, no, but a cold, foggy, 
mournful country, where nothing grew 
well in the open air, but robust men and 
virtuous women, and these of a wonderfiil 
fibre and endurance ; that their best 
parts were slowly revealed ; their virtues 
did not come out until they quarrelled: 
they did not strike twelve the first 
time ; good lovers, good haters, and 
you could know little about them 
till you had seen them long, and little 
good of them till you had seen them 
in action; that in prosperity they were 
moody and dumpish, but in adversity they 
were grand. Is it not true, sir, that the 
wise ancients did not praise the ship part- 
ing with flying colours from the port, but 
only that brave sailer which came back 
with tom sheets and battered sides, stript 
of her banners, but having ridden out the 
storm ? And so, gentlemen, I feel in re- 
gard to this aged England, with the pos- 
sessions, honours and trophies, and also 
with the infirmities of a thousand years 
gathering around her, irretrievably conv 
mitted as she now is to many old cus- 
toms which cannot be suddenly changed ; 
pressed upon by the transitions of trade, 
and new and all incalculable modes, 
fabrics, arts, machines, and competing 
populations — I see her not dispirited, not 
weak, but well remembering that she has 
seen dark days before; indeed, with a 
kind of instinct that she sees a little better 
in a cloudy day, and that in storm of battle 
and cadamity, she has a secret vigour and 
a pulse like a cannon. I see her in her 
old age, not decrepit, but young, and still 
daring to believe in her power of endur- 
ance and expansion. Seeing this, I say, 
All hail I mother of nations, mother of 
heroes, with strength still equal to the 
time ; still wise to entertain and swift to 
execute the policy which the mind and 
heart of mankind requires in the present 
hour, and thus only hospitable to the 
foreigner, aud truly a home to the thought- 
ful and generous who are born in the soil. 
So be it I so let it be 1 If it be not so, if 
the courage of England goes with the 
chances of a commercial crisis, 1 will go 
back to the capes of Massachusetts, and 
my own Indian stream, and say to my 
countrymen, the old race are all gone, 
and the elasticity and hope of mankind 
must henceforth remain go thg AUeghaay 
ranges, or oowberoi 



MISCELLANIES 


NATURE. 


INTRODUCTION, 

A lubtle chain of countless rings 
The next unto the farthest brings ; 

The eye roads omens where it goes, 

And speaks all languages the rose ; 

And, striving to be man, the worm 
Mounts through all the spires of form, 

Our age is retrospective. It builds the 
sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biogra- 
phies, histories and criticism. The fore- 
going generations beheld God and nature 
face to face ; we, through their eyes. Why 
should not we also enjoy an original rela- 
tion to the universe ? Why should not we 
have a poetry and philosophy of insight 
and not of tradition, and a religion by 
revelation to us, and not the history of 
theirs ? Embosomed for a season in na- 
ture, whose floods of life stream around 
and through us, and invite us by the 
powers they supply, to action proportioned 
to nature, why should we grope among 
the dry bones of the past, or put the 
living generation into masquerade out of 
its faded wardrobe ? The sun shines to- 
day also. There is more wool and flax in 
the fields. There are new lands, new men, 
new thoughts. Let us demand our own 
works and laws and worship. 

Undoubtedly we have no questions to 
ask whish are unanswerable. We must 
trust the perfection of the creation so far, 
as to believe that whatever curiosity the 
order of things has awakened in our minds, 
the order of things can satisfy. Every 
man’s condition is a solution in hierogly- 
phic to those inquiries he would put, Ife 


acts it as life, before he apprehends It as 
truth. In like manner, nature is already, 
in its forms and tendencies, describing its 
own design. Let us interrogate the great 
apparition, that shines so peacefully 
around us. Let us inquire to what end ig 
nature ? 

All science has one aim, namely, to find 
a theory of nature. We have theories of 
races and of functions, but scarcely yet a 
remote approach to an idea of creation. 
We are now so far from the road to truth 
that religious teachers dispute and hate 
each other, and speculative men are es- 
teemed unsound and frivolous. But to a 
sound judgment, the most abstract truth 
is the most practical. Whenever a true 
theory appears, it will be its own evidence, 
Its test is that it will explain all phe- 
nomena. Now many are thought not only 
unexplained, but inexplicable; as Ian* 
guage, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, se x 
Philosophically considered, the universe 
is composed of Nature and the Soul. 
Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is 
separate from us, all which Philosophy 
distinguishes as the not me, that is, both 
nature and art, all other men and my own 
body, must be ranked under this name 
Nature. In enumerating the values of 
nature, and casting up their sum, I shall 
use the word in both senses — in its com- 
mon and in its philosophical import. In 
inquiries so general as our present one, 
the inaccuracy is not material; no con- 
fusion of thought will occur. Nature, in 
the common sense, refers to essences un- 
changed by man ; space, the air, the river, 
tbe leaf. Art is applied to Uie Qii;tiir9 0( 



NATURE. 


3U 


his will with the same things, as in a 
house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But 
his operations taken together are so in- 
significant, a little chipping, baking, patch- 
ing, and washing, that in an impression 
BO grand as that of the world on the 
human mind, they do not vary the result. 


CHAPTER T. 

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire 
as much from his chamber as from 
society. I am not solitary v/hilst I read 
and write, though nobody is with me. 
But if a man would be alone, let him look 
at the stars. The rays that come from 
those heavenly worlds will separate be- 
tween him and what he touches. One 
might think the atmosphere was made 
transparent with this design, to give man, 
in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual 
presence of the sublime. Seen in the 
streets of cities, how great they are I If 
the stars should appear one night in a 
thousand years, how would men believe 
and adore ; and preserve for many genera- 
tions the remembrance of the city of God 
which had been shown ; But every night 
come out these envoys of beauty, and 
Mght the universe with their admonishing 
smile. 

The stars awaken a certain reverence, 
because though always present, they are 
inaccessible; but all natural objects make 
a kindred impression, when the mind is 
open to their influence. Nature never j 
wears a mean appearance. Neither does 
the wisest man extort her secret, and lose 
his curiosity by finding out all her perfec- 
tion. Nature never became a toy to a 
wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the 
mountains, reflected the wisdom of his 
best hour, as much as they had delighted 
the simplicity of his childhood. 

When we speak of nature in this man- 
ner, w^e have a distinct but most poetical 
sense in the mind. We mean the integ- 
rity of impression made by manifold 
natural objects. It is this which distin- 
guishes the stick of timber of the wood- 
cutter from the tree of the poet. The 
charming landscape which I saw this 
morning is indubitably made up of some 
twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this 
field, Locke that, and Manning the wood- 
land beyond. But none of them owns the 
landscape. There is a property in the 
horizon which no man has but he whose ^ 
eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the \ 


poet. This is the best part cf these men’s 
farms, yet to this their warranty- deeds 
give no title. 

To speak truly, few adult persona can 
see nature. Most persons do not see the 
sun. At least they have a very superficial 
seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye 
of the man, but shines into tie eye and 
the heart of the child. The lover of nature 
is he whose inward and outward senses 
are still truly adjusted to each other: who 
has retained the spirit of infancy even into 
the era of manhood. His intercourse with 
heaven and earth, becomes part of his 
daily food. In the presence of nature, a 
wild delight runs through the man, in 
spite of real sorrows. Nature says, he is 
my creature, and maugre all his imrerti- 
nent griefs, ho shall be glad with me. Not 
the sun or the summer alone, but every 
hour and season yields its tribute of de- 
light ; for every hour and change corres- 
ponds to and authorizes a different state 
of the mind, from breathless noon to grim- 
mest midnight. Nature is a setting that 
fits equally well a comic or a mourning 
piece. In good health, the air is a cordiaj 
of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare 
common, in snow puddles, at twilight, 
under a clouded sky, without having in 
my thoughts any occurrence of special 
good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect ex- 
hilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear, 
In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, 
as the snake his slough, and at what period 
soever of life, is always a child. In the 
woods, is perpetual youth. Within these 
plantations of God, a decorum and sanc- 
tity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, 
and the guest sees not how he should tire 
of them in a thousand years. In the 
woods, we return to reason and faith. 
There I feel that nothing can befall me in 
life — no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me 
my eyes), which nature cannot repair. 
Standing on the bare ground — my head 
bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into 
infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes. 
I become a transparent eyeball; I am 
nothing; I see all; the currents of the 
Universal Being circulate through me ; I 
am part or particle of God. The name of 
the nearest friend sounds then foreign and 
accidental : to be brothers, to be acquaint- 
ances— master or servant, is then a trifla 
and a disturbance. I am the lover of un- 
contained and immortal beauty. In the 
wilderness, I find something more dear 
and connate than in streets or villages. 
In the tranquil landscape, and especially 
in the distant line of the horizon, man 
X 



MISCELLANIES. 


31a 


beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own 
nature. 

The greatest delight which the fields 
and woods minster, is the suggestion of 
an occult relation between man and the 
Tegetable. 1 am not alone and unac- 
knowledged. They nod to me, and I to 
them. The waving of the boughs in the 
storm is new to me and old. It takes me 
by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its 
effect is like that of a higher thought or a 
better emotion coming over me, when I 
deemed I was thinking justly or doing 

I7ght. 

Yet it is certain that the power to pro- 
duce this delight does not reside in nature, 
but in man, or in a harmony with both. 
It is necessary to use these pleasures with 
great temperance. For nature is not 
always tricked in holiday attire, but the 
same scene which yesterday breathed 
perfume and glittered as for the frolic of 
the nymphs, is overspread with melan- 
choly to-day. Nature always wears the 
colours of the spirit. To a man labouring 
under calamity, the heat of his own fire 
hath sadness in it, Then, there is a kind 
of contempt of the landscape felt by him 
who had just lost by death a dear friend. 
The sky is less grand as it shuts down 
over less worth in the population, 


CHAPTER II, 

COMMODITY, 

Whoever considers the final cause of the 
world, will discern a multitude of uses 
'xhat enter as parts into that result. They 
all admit of being thrown into one of the 
following classes : Commodity ; Beauty ; 
Language; and Discipline. 

Under the general name of Commodity, 
I rank all those advantages which our 
senses owe to nature. This, of course, is 
a benefit which is temporary and mediate, 
not ultimate, like its service to the soul. 
Yet although low, it is perfect in its kind, 
and is the only use of nature which all 
men apprehend. The misery of man 
appears like childish petulance, when we 
explore the steady and prodigal provision 
that has been made for his support and 
delight on this green ball which floats him 
through the heavens. What angels in- 
vented these splendid ornaments, these 
rich conveniences this ocean of air above, 
this ocean of water beneath, this firma- 
ment of eaitb between? this spodiao ol 


I lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this 
striped coat of climates, this fourfold year? 

I Beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn serve 
him. The field is at once his floor, his 
workyard, his playground, his garden, and 
his bed. 

“ More gervants wait on man 
Than he*ll take notice of." 

Nature, in its ministry to man, is not 
only the material, but is also the process 
and the result. All the parts incessantly 
work into each other’s hands for the profit 
of man. The wind sows the seed ; the 
sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows 
the vapour to the field : the ice, on the 
other side of the planet, condenses rain 
on this ; the rain feeds the plant ; the 
plant feeds the animal ; and thus the 
endless circulations of the divine charity 
nourish man. 

The useful arts are reproductions or 
new combinations by the wit of man, of 
of the same natural benefactors. He no 
longer waits for favouring gales, but by 
means of steam, he realizes the fable of 
Aiolus’s bag, and carries the two-and- 
thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To 
diminish friction, he paves the road with 
iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a 
ship-load of men, animals, and merchan- 
dise behind him, he darts through tha 
country from town to tewn, like an eagle 
or a swallow through the air. By the 
aggregate of these aids, how is the face 
of the world changed, from the era of 
Noah to that of Napoleon ! The private 
poor man hath cities, ships, canals, 
bridges, built for him. He goes to the 
post-office, and the human race run on 
his errands ; to the book-shop, and the 
human race read and write of all that 
happens for him ; to the court-house, and 
nations repair his wrongs. He sets his 
house upon the road , and the human race 
go forth every morning, and shovel out 
the snow, and cut a path for him. 

But there is no need of specifying par- 
ticulars in this class of uses. The cata- 
logue is endless, and the exaniples so 
obvious, that I shall leave them to the 
reader's reflection, with the general re- 
mark, that this mercenary benefit is on« 
which has respect to a further good. A 
man is fed, not that b© may be fed( but 
that he may work, 



NATURE. 


CHAPTER 111. 

BEAUTV. 

A NOBLER want of man is served by 
nature, namely, the love of Beauty. 

The ancient Greeks called the world 
Moa-fio^, beauty. Such is the constitution 
of all things, or such the plastic power of 
the human eye, that the primary forms, 
as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the 
animal, give us a delight in and for thenu 
selves; a pleasure arising from outline, 
colour, motion, and grouping. This 
seems partly owing to the eye itself. The 
eye is the best of artists. By the mutual 
action of its structure and of the laws of 
light, perspective is produced, which in- 
tegrates every mass of objects, of what 
character soever, into a well-coloured and 
shaded globe, so that v/here tlie particular 
objects are mean and unaffecting, the 
landscape which they compose is round 
and symmetrical. And as the eye is the 
best composer, so light is the first of 
painters. There is no object so foul that 
intense light will not make beautiful. And 
the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a 
sort of infinitude which it hath, like 
space and time, make all matter gay. 
Even the corpse has its own beauty. But 
besides this general grace diffused over 
nature, almost all the individual forms 
are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by 
our endless imitations of some of them, 
as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the 
wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms 
of most birds, the lion’s claw, the serpent, 
the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, 
buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, 
as the palm. 

For better consideration, we may dis- 
tribute the aspects of Beauty in a three- 
fold manner. 

I. First, the simple perception of 
natural forms is a delight. The influence 
of the forms and actions in nature is so 
needful to man, that, in its lowest func- 
tions, it seems to lie on the confines of 
commodity and beauty. To the body and 
mind which have been cramped by 
noxious work or company, nature is 
medicinal and restores their tone; The 
tradesman, the attorney comes out of the 
din and craft of the street, and sees the 
sky and the woods, and is a man again. 
In tlieir eternal calm, he finds himself. 
The health of the eye seems to demand a 
horizon. We are never tired, so long as 
we can see far enough. 

Out io other hours, Nature satisfies 


3*1 

by its loveliness, and without any mixture 
of corporeal benefit. I see the spectacle 
of morning from the hill-top over against 
my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with 
emotions which an angel might share. 
The long slender bars cf cloud float lik(? 
fishes in the sea of crimson light. FroiL 
the earth, as a shore, I look out into that 
silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid 
transformations : the active enchantment 
reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire 
wi^ the morning wind. How does Nature 
deify us with a few and cheap elements \ 
Give me health and a day, and I will make 
the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The 
dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and 
moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable 
realms of faerie ; broad noon shall be m j 
England of the senses and the under- 
standing ; the night shall be my Germany 
of m 3 ^stic philosophy and dreams. 

Not less excellent, except for our less 
susceptibility in the afternoon, was the 
charm, last evening, of a January sunset. 
The western clouds divided and sub- 
divided themselves into pink flakes, 
modulated with tints of unspeakable sofb 
ness ; and the air had so much life and 
sweetness, that it was a pain to coma 
within doors. What was it that nature 
would say ? Was there no meaning in the 
live repose of the valley behind the mill, 
and which Homer or Shakespeare could 
not re-form for me in words ? The leafless 
trees become spires of flame in the sun- 
set, with the blue east for their back- 
ground, and the stars of the dead calices 
of flowers, and every withered stem and 
stubble rimed with frost, contribute 
something to the mute music. 

The inhabitants of cities suppose that 
tlie country landscape is pleasant only 
half the year. I please myself with the 
graces of the winter scenery, and 1 believe 
that v/e are as much touched by it as by 
the genial influences of summer. To the 
attentive eye, each moment of the year 
has its own beauty, and in the same field 
I it beholds, every hour, a picture which 
was never seen before, and which shall 
never be seen again. The heavens change 
every moment, and reflect their glory or 
I gloom on the plains beneath. The state 
I of the crop in the sui rounding farms 
! alters the expression of the earth from 
I week to week. The succession of native 
plants in the pastures and roadsides, 
which makes the silent clock by which 
time tells the summer hours, will make 
even the divisions of the day sensible to a 
keen observer, The tribes of birds 



MISCELLANIES. 


3M 

insects, like the plants punctual to their 
time, follow each other, and the year has 
room for all. By water-courses, the 
variety is greater. In July, the blue pon- 
tederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large 
beds in the shallow parts of our pleasant 
river, and swarms with yellow butterflies 
in continual motion. Art cannot rival 
this pomp of purple and gold. Indeed 
the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts 
each month a new ornament. 

But this beauty of Nature which is seen | 
and felt as beauty, is the least part, The i 
shows of day, the dewy morning, the i 
rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, 
stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, 
and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become 
shows merely, and mock us with their 
unreality. Go out of the house to see the 
moon, and it is mere tinsel; it will not 
please as when its light shines upon your 
necessary journey. The beauty that shim- 
mers in the yellow afternoons of October, 
who ever could clutch it ? Go forth to find 
it, and it is gone: ’tis only a mirage as 
you look from the windows of diligence. 

2. The presence of a higher, namely, of 
the spiritual element is essential to its 
perfection. The high and divine beauty 
which can be loved without effeminacy, is 
that which is found in combination with 
the human will. Beauty is the mark God 
sets upon virtue. Every natural action 
is graceful. Every heroic act is also 
decent, and causes the place and the 
bystanders to shine. We are taught by 
great actions that the universe is the 
property of every individual in it. Every 
rational creature has all nature for his 
dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He 
may divest himself of it ; he may creep 
into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, 
as most men do, but he is entitled to the 
world by his constitution. In proportion 
to the energy of his thought and will, he 
takes up the world into himself, “All 
those things for which men plough, build, 
or sail, obey virtue,” said Sallust. “ The 
winds and waves,” said Gibbon, “ are 
always on the side of the ablest naviga- 
tors.” So are the sun and moon and all 
the stars of heaven. When a noble act 
is done, — perchance in a scene of great 
natural beauty ; when Leonidas and his 
three hundred martyrs consume one day 
in dying, and the sun and moon come 
each and look at them once in the steep 
defile of Thermopylae ; when Arnold 
Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the 
shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his 
tide a sheaf of Austrian spears to break 


the line for his comrades; tLte not 
these heroes entitled to add the beauty 
of the scene to the beauty of the 
deed? When the bark of Columbus 
nears the shore of America ; — before it, 
the beach lined with savages, fleeing out 
of all their huts of cane ; the sea behind ; 
and the purple mountains of the Indian 
Archipelago around, can we separate the 
man from the living picture ? Does not 
the New World clothe his form with her 
palm-groves and savannahs as fit drapery? 
Ever does natural beauty steal in like air, 
and envelope great actions. When Sir 
Harry Vane was dragged up the Tower- 
hill, sitting on a sled to suffer death, as 
the champion of the English laws, one of 
the multitude cried out to him, “ You 
never sat on so glorious a seat.” Charles 
II., to intimidate the citizens of London, 
caused the patriot Lord Russell to bo 
drawn in an open coach, through the 
principle streets of the city, on his way to 
the scaffold. ” But,” his biographer says, 
“ the multitude imagined they saw liberty 
and virtue sitting by his side.” In private 
places, among sordid objects, an act of 
truth or heroism seems at once to draw 
to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as 
its candle. Nature stretcheth out her 
arms to embrace man, only let his 
thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly 
does she follow his steps with the rose 
and the violet, and bend her lines of 
I grandeur and grace to the decoration of 
I her darling child. Only let his thoughts 
, be of equal scope, and the frame will suit 
the picture. A virtuous man is in unison 
with her works, and makes the central 
figure of the visible sphere. Homer, 
Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate 
themselves fitly in our memory with the 
geography and climate of Greece. The 
visible heavens and earth sympathize with 
Tesus. And in common life, whosoever 
has seen a person of powerful character 
and happy genius will have remarked how 
easily he took all things along with him,— 
the persons, the opinions, and the day, 
and nature became ancillary to a man. 

3. There is still another aspect under 
which the beauty of the world may be 
viewed, namely, as it becomes an object 
of the intellect. Beside the relation of 
things to ,virtue, they have a relation to 
thought. The intellect searches out the 
absolute order of things as they stand in 
the mind of God, and without the colours 
of affection. The intellectual and the 
active powers seem to succeed each 
other, aad the exclusife activity of the 



^AtVkB. 


one generates the exclusive activity of 
the other. There is something unfriendly 
in each to the other, but they are like the 
alternate periods of feeding and working 
in animals; each prepares and will be 
followed by the other. Therefore does 
beauty, which, in relation to actions, as 
we have seen, comes unsought, and comes 
because it is unsought, remain for the 
apprehension and pursuit of the intellect ; 
and then again in its turn, of the active 
power. Nothing divine dies. All good 
is eternally reproductive. The beauty of 
nature reforms itself in the mind, and not 
for barren contemplation, but for new 
creation. 

All men are in some degree impressed 
by the face of the world ; some men even 
to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. 
Others have the same love in such excess, 
that, not content with admiring, they seek 
to embody it in new forms. The creation 
of beauty is Art. 

The production of a work of art throws 
a light upon the mystery of humanity. A 
work of art is an abstract or epitome of 
the world. It is the result or expression 
of nature, in miniature. For, although 
the works of nature are innumerable and 
all different, the result or the expression 
of them all is similar and single. Nature 
is a sea of forms, radically alike and even 
unique. A leaf, a sunbeam, a landscape, 
the ocean, make an analogous impression 
on the mind. What is common to them 
all— that perfectness and harmony, is 
beauty. The standard of beauty is the 
entire circuit of natural forms — the totality 
of nature ; which the Italians expressed 
by defining beauty " il piu nell’ uno,” 
Nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing 
but is beautiful in the whole. A single 
object is only so far beautiful as it sug- 
gests this universal grace. The poet, th-e 
painter, the sculptor, the musician, the 
architect, seek each to concentrate this 
radiance of the world on one point, and 
each in his several work to satisfy the love 
of beauty which stimulates him to pro- 
duce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through 
the alembic of man. Thus in Art, does 
nature work through the will of a man 
filled with the beauty of her first works. 

The world thus exists to the soul to 
satisfy the desire of beauty. This element 
1 call an ultimate end. No reason can bo 
asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. 
Beauty, in its largest and profoundest 
sense, is one expression for the universe, 
God is the all-fair. Truth and goodness 
and beauty are but different faces of the 


31J 

same All. But beauty in nature s not ul- 
timate. It is the herald of inward and in- 
ternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and 
satisfactory good. It must stand as a part, 
and not as yet the last or highest expres- 
sion of the final cause of Nature. 


CHAPTER lY, 

LANGUAGE, 

Language is a third use v/hich Nature 
subserves to man. Nature is the vehicle 
of thought, and in a simple, double, and 
threefold degree. 

1. Words are signs of natural fao^s. 

2. Particular natural facts are symbols 
of particular spiritual facts. 

3. Nature is the symbol of spirit. 

1. Words are signs of natural facts. 
The use of natural history is to give us aid 
in supernatural history : the use of tha 
outer creation, to give us language for the 
beings and changes of the inward creation. 
Every word which is used to express a 
moral or intellectual fact, if traced to itd 
root, is found to be borrowed from some 

I material appearance. Right means 
straight; wrong means twisted, Spirit 
primarily means wind ; transgression, the 
crossing of aline; supercilious, the rais^ 
ing of the eyebrow. We say the heart to 
express emotion, the head to denote 
thought ; and thought and emotion are 
words borrowed from sensible things, and 
now appropriated to spiritual nature. 
Most of the process by which this trans- 
formation is made is hidden from us in 
the remote time when language was 
framed ; but the same tendency may be 
daily observed in children. Children and 
savages use only nouns or names of things 
which they convert into verbs, and apply 
to analogous mental acts. 

2. But this origin of all words that con- 
vey a spiritual import — so conspicuous a 
fact in the history of language — is our 
least debt to nature. It is not words only 
that are emblematic; it is things which 
are emblematic. Every natural fact is a 
symbol of some spiritual fact. Every 
appearance in nature corresponds to soma 
state of the mind, and that state of tha 
mind can only be described by presenting 
that natural appearance as its picture. 
An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man 
is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned 
man is a torch. A lamb is innocence ; a 
snako is subtle spite ; flowers express to 



MISCELLANIES, 


|i6 

US the delicate affections. Light and 
darkness are our familiar expression for 
knowledge and ignorance; and heat for 
love. Visible distance behind and before 
us is respectively our image of memory 
and hope, ! 

Who looks upon a river in a medita- 
tive hour, and is not reminded of the 
flux of all things ? Throw a stone into | 
the stream, and the circles that propagate 
themselves are the beautiful type of all 
influence. Man is conscious of a univer- 
sal soul within or behind his individual 
life, wherein, as in a Armament, the natures 
of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and i 
shine. This universal soul, ho calls ! 
Reason ; it is not mine or thine, or his, 
but U’e are its ; we are its property and 
men. And the blue sky in which the pri- 
vate earth is buried, the sky v/ith its eter- 
nal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is 
the type of Reason. That which, intellec- 
tually considered, we call Reason, con- 
sidered in relation to nature, wa call 
Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath 
life in itself. And man in all ages and 
countries embodies it in his language as 
the Father. 

It is easily seen that there is nothing 
lucky or capricious in these analogies, but 
that they are constant, and pervade nature. 
These are not the dreams of a few poets, 
here and there, but man is an analogist, 
and studies relations in all objects. He 
is placed in the centre of beings, and a 
ray of relation passes from every other 
being to him. And neither can man be 
understood without these objects, nor 
these objects without man. All the facts 
in natural history taken by themselves 
have no value, but are barren like a single 
sex. But marry it to human history, and 
it is full of life. Whole Floras, all Lin- 
nseus’s and Buffon’s volumes, are dry 
catalogues of facts ; but the most trivial 
of these facts, the habit of a plant, the 
organs, or work, or noise of an insect, ap- 
plied to the illustration of a fact in intel- 
lectual philosophy, or, in any way, associ- 
ated to human nature, affects us in the 
most lively and agreeable manner. The 
seed of a plant — to what affecting analogies 
in the nature of man is that little fruit 
made use of, in all discourse, up to the 
voice of Paul, who calls the human corpse 
a seed — “ It is sown a natural body; it is 
raised a spiritual body.’* The motion of 
the earth round its axis, and round the 
sun, makes the day and the year. These 
are certain amounts ofj brute light and 
beat, But is there no intent of an analogy 


between man’s life and the seasons ? And 
do the seasons gain no grandeur or pathos 
from that analog ? The instincts of the 
ant are very unimportant, considered as 
the ant’s, but the moment a ray of relation 
is seen to extend from it to man, and the 
little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a 
little body with a mighty heart, then all its 
habits, even that said to be recently ob- 
served, that it never sleeps, become sub- 
lime. 

Because of this radical correspondence 
between visible things and human 
thoughts, savages, who have only what is 
necessary, converse in figures. As we go 
back in history, language becomes more 
picturesque, until its infancy, when it is 
all poetry; or all spiritual facts are repre- 
sented by natural symbols. The same 
symbols are found to make the original 
elements of all languages. It has more- 
over been observed, that the idioms of all 
languages approach each other in passages 
of the greatest eloquence and power. And 
as this is the first language, so it is the 
last. This immediate dependence of lan- 
guage upon nature, this conversion of an 
outward phenomenon into a type of some- 
what in human life, never loses its power 
to affect us. It is this which gives that 
piquancy to the conversation of a strong- 
natured farmer or backwoodsman, which 
all men relish. 

A man’s power to connect his thought 
with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, 
depends on the simplicity of his character, 
that is, upon his love of truth, and his de- 
sire to communicate it without loss. The 
corruption of man is followed by the cor- 
ruption of language. When simplicity of 
character and the sovereignty of ideas is 
broken up by the prevalence of secondary 
desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, 
of power, and of praise, and duplicity and 
falsehood take place of simplicity and 
truth, the power over nature as an inter- 
preter of the will is in a degree lost ; new 
imagery ceases to be created, and old 
words are perverted to stand for things 
which are not ; a paper currency is em- 
ployed, when there is no bullion in the 
vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, 
and words lose all power to stimulate the 
understanding or the affections. Hun- 
dreds of writers may be found in every 
long-civilized nation, who for a short time 
believe, and make others believe, that 
they see and utter truths, who do not of 
themselves clothe one thought in its natu- 
ral garment, but who feed unconsciously 
on the language created by the pri^viary 



NATURE. 


writers of the country, those, namely, who 
hold primarily on nature. 

But wise men pierce this rotten diction 
and fasten words again to visible things ; 
so that picturesque language is at once a 
commanding certificate that he who em- 
ploys it is a man in alliance with truth and 
God. The moment our discourse rises 
above the ground line of familiar facts, 
and is inflamed with passion or exalted 
by thought, it clothes itself in images. A 
man conversing in earnest, if he watch his 
intellectual processes, will find that a ma- 
terial image, more or less luminous, arises 
In his mind, contemporaneous with every 
thought which furnishes the vestment of 
the thought. Hence, good writing and 
brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. 
This imagery is spontaneous. It is the 
blending of experience with the present 
action of the mind. It is proper creation. 
It is the working of the Original Cause 
through the instruments he has already 
made. 

These facts may suggest the advantage 
which the country life possesses for a 
powerful mind, over the artificial and cur- 
tailed life of cities. We know more from 
nature than we can at will communicate. 
Its light flows into the mind evermore, 
and we forget its presence. The poet, 
the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses 
have been nourished by their fair and ap- 
peasing changes, year after year, without 
design and without heed, shall not lose 
their lesson altogether, in the roar of 
cities or the broil of politics. Long here 
after, amidst agitation and terror in na- 
tional councils — in the hour of revolu- 
tion— these solid images shall reappear 
in their morning lustre, as fit symbols 
and words of the thoughts which the pass- 
ing events shall awaken. At the call of a 
noble sentiment, again the woods wave, 
the pines murmur, the river rolls and 
shines, and the cattle low upon the moun- 
tains, as he saw and heard them in his 
infancy. And with these forms, the spells 
of persuasion, the keys of power are put 
into his hands. 

3. We are thus assisted by natural ob- 
jects in the expression of particular mean- 
ings. But how great a language to convey 
such pepper-corn informations! Did it 
need such noble races of creatures, this 
profusion of forms, this host of orbs in 
heaven, to furnish man with the dictionary 
and grammar of his municipal speech ? 
Whilst we use this grand cipher to expe- 
dite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we 
feel that we have not yet put it to its use, 


neither are able. We are like travellers 
using the cinders of a volcano to roast 
their eggs. Whilst we see that it always 
stands ready to clothe what we would say, 
we cannot avoid the question, whether the 
characters are not significant of them- 
selves. Have mountains, and waves, and 
skies no significance but what we con- 
sciously give them, when we employ them 
as emblems of our thoughts ? The word 
is emblematic. Parts of speech are meta- 
phors, because the whole of nature is a 
metaphor of the human mind. The laws 
of moral nature answer to those of matter 
as face to face in a glass. “ The visible 
world and the relation of its parts, is the 
dial-plate of the invisible.” The axioms 
of physics translate the laws of ethics. 
Thus : ” The whole is greater than its part ” 
“Reaction is equal to action”; “The 
smallest weight may be made to lift the 
greatest, the difference of weight being 
compensated by time”: and many the 
like propositions, which have an ethical 
as well as physical sense. These propo- 
sitions have a much more extensive and 
universal sense when applied to human 
life, than when confined to technical use. 

In like manner, the memorable words of 
history, and the proverbs of nations, con- 
sist usually of a natural fact, selected as 
a picture or parable of a moral truth. Thus : 
“ A rolling stone gathers no moss ” ; “A 
bird in the hand is worth two in the bush ” ; 
” A cripple in the right way will beat a 
racer in the wrong”; “ Make hay while 
the sun shines ” ; ” 'Tis hard to carry a full 
cup even ” ; ” Vinegar is the son of wine ” ; 
*' The last ounce broke the camel’s back ” ; 
** Long-lived trees make roots first” ; and 
the like. In their primary sense these 
are trivial facts, but we repeat them for 
the value of their analogical import. What 
is true of proverbs is true of all fables, 
parables, and allegories. 

This relation between the mind and 
matter is not fancied by some poet, but 
stands in the will of God, and so is free to 
bo known by all men. It appears to men, 
or it does not appear. When in fortunate 
hours we ponder this miracle, the wise 
man doubts, if, at all other times, he is 
not blind and deaf ; 

'* Can these things be, 

And overcome us like a summer’s cloud, 
Without our special wonder ? " 

for the universe becomes transparent, and 
the light of higher laws than its own shines 
through it. It is the standing problem 



MISCELLANIES, 


iii 

whidh has exercised the wonder and the 
study of every fine genius since the world 
began ; from the era of the Egyptians and 
the Brahmins, to that of Pythagoras, of 
Plato, of Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Sweden- 
borg, There sits the Sphinx at the road- 
side, and from age to age, as each prophet 
comes by, he tries his fortune at reading 
her riddle. There seems to be a necessity 
in spirit to manifest itself in material 
forms ; and day and night, river and storm, 
beast and bird, acid and alkali, pre-exist i 
in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, 
and are what they are by virtue of pre- 1 
ceding affections, in the world of spirit. 
A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. 
The visible creation is the terminus or 
the circumference of the invisible world. 
“ Material objects,” said a French philo- 
sopher, ” are necessarily kinds of scoria 
of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, 
which must always preserve an exact re- 
lation to their first origin ; in other words, 
visible nature must have a spiritual and 
moral side.” 

This doctrine is abstruse, and though 
the images of “garment,” “scoriae,*’ 
“ mirror,” &c., may stimulate the fancy, 
we must summon the aid of subtler and 
more vital expositors to make it plain. 
“ Every scripture is to be interpreted by 
the same spirit which gave it forth,” is 
the fundamental law of criticism. A life 
in harmony with nature, the love of truth 
and of virtue, will purge the eyes to , 
understand her text. By degrees we may 
come to know the primitive sense of the 
permanent objects of nature, so that the j 
world shall be to us an open book, and j 
every form significant of its hidden life i 
and final cause. 

A new interest surprises us, whilst, 
under the view now suggested, we con- 
template the fearful extent and multitude 
of objects: since “every object rightly 
seen unlocks a new faculty of the soul.” 
That which was unconscious truth be- 
comes, when interpreted and defined in 
an object, a part of the domain of know- j 
ledge- a new weapon in the magazine of 
power, j 


CHAPTER V. 

DISCIPUNB. 

In view of the significance of nature, we 
arrive at once at a new fact, that nature 
if a discipline. This use of the world 


includes the preceding uses, it parts of 
itself. 

Space, time, society, labour, climate, 
food, locomotion, the animals, the mecha- 
nical forces, give us sincerest lessons, 
day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. 
They educate both the Understanding 
and the Reason. Every property of 
matter is a school for the understanding 
— its solidity of resistance, its inertia, its 
extension, its figure, its divisibility. The 
understanding adds, divides, combines, 
measures, and finds nutriment and room 
! for its activity in this worthy scene. 

1 Meantime, Reason transfers all these 
lessons into its own worl4,of thought, by 
perceiving the analogy Ithat marries 
Matter and Mind. 

I. Nature is a discipline of the under- 
standing in intellectual truths, Our deal- 
ing with sensible objects is a constant 
exercise in the necessary lessons of 
difference, of likeness, of order, of being 
and seeming, of progressive arrangement ; 
of ascent from particular to general : of 
combination to one end of manifold forces. 
Proportioned to the importance of the 
organ to be formed, is the extreme care 
with which its tuition is provided— a care 
pretermitted in no single case. What 
tedious training, day after day, year after 
I year, never ending, to form the common 
[sense; what continual reproduction of 
! annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas ; 
what rejoicing over us of little men ; what 
disputing of prices, what reckonings of 
interest ; and all to form the Hand of the 
mind — to instruct us that “ good thoughts 
are no better than good dreams, unless 
they be executed 1 ” 

The same good office is performed by 
Property and its filial systems of debt and 
credit. Debt, grinding debt, whose iron 
face the widow, the orphan and the sons 
of genius fear and hate ; debt, which 
consumes so much time, which so cripples 
and disheartens a great spirit with cares 
that seem so base, is a preceptor whose 
lessons cannot bo foregone, and is needed 
most by those who suffer from it most. 
Moreover, property, which has been well 
compared to snow — “ if it fall level to- 
day, it will be blown into dritts to- 
morrow ” -is the surface action of 
internal machinery, like the index on the 
face of a clock. Whilst now it is the 
gymnastics of the understanding, it is 
having in the foresight of the spirit, ex- 
perience in profounder laws. 

The whole character and fortune of tha 
individual are affected by the least 



NATURE. 


3t9 

equalities in the culture of the under- 1 as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour 


standing; for example, in the perception 
of differences. Therefore is Space, and 
therefore Time, that man may know that 
things are not huddled and lumped, but 
sundered and individual. A bell and a 
plough have each their use, and neither 
can do the office of the other. Water is 
good to drink, coal to burn, wool to wear ; 
but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, 
nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his 
wisdom in separation, in gradation, and 
his scale of creatures and of merits is as 
wide as nature. The foolish have no 
range in their scale, but suppose every 
man is as every other man. What is not 
good they call the worst, and what is not 
hateful, they call the best. 

In like manner, what good heed. Nature 
forms in us. She pardons no mistakes. 
Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay. 

The first steps in Agriculture, Astro- 
nomy, Zoology (those first steps which the 
farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take), 
teach that Nature’s dice are always loaded : 
that in her heaps and rubbish are con- 
cealed sure and useful results. 

How calmly and genially the mind ap- 
prehends one after another the laws of 
physics ! What noble emotions dilate the 
mortal as he enters into the counsels of 
the creation, and feels by knowledge the 
privilege to Bk I His insight refines him. 
The beauty of nature shines in his own 
breast. Man is greater that he can see 
this, and the universe less, because Time 
and Space relations vanish as laws are 
known, 

Here again we are impressed and even 
daunted by the immense Universe to be 
explored, “ What we know, is a point to 
what we do not know.” Open any recent 
journal of science, and weigh the problems 
suggested concerning Light, Heat, Elec- 
tricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, 
and judge whether the interest of natural 
science is likely to be soon exhausted. 

Passing by many particulars of the dis- 
cipline of nature, we must not omit to 
specify two. 

The exercise of the Will or the lesson 
of power is taught in every event. From 
the child’s successive possession of his 
several senses up to the hour when he 
saith, “ Thy will be done! ” he is learning 
the secret, that he can reduce under his 
will, not only particular events, but great 
classes, nay the whole series of events, 
and so conform all facts to his character. 
Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made 
to servei It receives the dominion of man 


rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as 
the raw material which he may mould 
into what is useful. He is never weary of 
working it up. He forges the subtile and 
delicate air into wise and melodious words, 
and gives them wing as angels of persua- 
sion and command. One after another, 
his victorious thought comes up with and 
reduces all things, until the world becomes, 
at last, only a realized will — the double of 
the man. 

2. Sensible objects conform to the pre- 
monitions of Reason and reflect the con- 
science. All things are moral; and in 
their boundless changes have an unceasing 
reference to spiritual nature. Therefore 
is nature glorious with form, colour, and 
motion, that every globe in the remotest 
heaven ; every chemical change from the 
rudest crystal up to the laws of life ; every 
ch.ange of vegetation from the first prin- 
ciple of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the 
tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine ; 
every animal function from the sponge up 
to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man 
the laws of right and wrong, and echo the 
Ten Commandments. Therefore is nature 
ever the ally of Religion : lends all her 
pomp and riches to the religious senti- 
ment. Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, 
Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. 
This ethical character so penetrates the 
bone and marrow of nature, as to seem 
the end for which it was made. Whatever 
private purpose is answered by any mem- 
ber or part, this is its public and universal 
function, and is never omitted. Nothing 
in nature is exhausted in its first use. 
When a thing has served an end to the 
uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior 
service. In God, every end is converted 
into a new means. Thus the use of com- 
modity, regarded by itself, is mean and 
squalid. But it is to the mind an educa- 
tion in the doctrine of Use, namely, that 
I a thing is good only so far as it serves; 

I that a conspiring of parts and efforts to 
the production of an end, is essential to 
any being. The first and gross manifesta- 
tion of this truth is our inevitable and 
hated training in values and wants, in com 
and meat. 

It has already been illustrated, that 
every natural process is a version of a 
moral sentence. The moral law lies at 
the centre of nature and radiates to the 
circumference. It is the pith and marrow 
of every substance, every relation, and 
every process. All things with which we 
deal preacb to us. WiuU is a faroi but a 



MISCELLANIES. 


520 

mute gospel ? The chaff and the wheat, 
weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, 
sun — it is a sacred emblem from the first 
furrow of spring to the last stack which 
the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. 
But the sailor, the shepherd, the miner, 
the merchant, in their several resorts, 
have each an experience precisely paral- 
lel, and leading to the same conclusion : 
because all organizations are radically 
alike. Nor can it be doubted that this 
moral sentiment which thus scents the 
air, grows in the grain, and impregnates 
the waters of the world, is caught by man 
and sinks into his soul. The moral in- 
fluence of nature upon every individual is 
that amount of truth which it illustrates to 
him. Who can estimate this ? Who can 
guess how much firmness the sea-beaten 
rock has taught the fisherman ; how much 
tranquillity has been reflected to man 
from the azure sky, over whose unspot- 
ted deeps the winds for evermore drive 
flocks of stormy clouds, and leave no 
wrinkle or stain ? how much industry and 
providence and affection have we caught 
from the pantomime of brutes ? What 
a searching preacher of self-command is 
the varying phenomenon of Health ! 

Herein is especially apprehended the 
unity of Nature— the unity in variety — 
which meets us everywhere. All the end- 
less variety of things make an identical 
impression. Xenophanes complained in 
his old age, that, look where he would, 
all things hastened back to unity : he was 
weary of seeing the same entity in the 
tedious variety of forms. The fable of 
Proteus has a cordial truth, A leaf, a 
drop, a crystal, a moment of time is re- 
lated to the whole, and partakes of the | 
perfection of the whole. Each particle is 
a microcosm, and faithfully renders the 
likeness of the world. 

Not only resemblances exist in things 
whose analogy is obvious, as when we 
detect the type of the human hand in the 
flipper of the fossil saurus, but also in 
objects wherein there is great superficial 
unlikeness. Thus architecture is called 
“ frozen music,” by De Stael and Goethe. 
Vitruvius thought an architect should be 
a musician. “A Gothic church,” said 
Coleridge, *‘is a petrified religion.” 
Michael Angelo maintained, that, to an 
architect, a knowledge of anatomy is 
essential. In Haydn’s oratorios, the notes 
present to the imagination not only 
motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and 
the elephant, but colours also ; as the 
green grass. The law of harmonic sounds 


reappears in the harmonic colours. The 
granite is differenced in its laws only by 
the more or less of heat, from the river 
that wears it away. The river, as it flows, 
resembles the air that flows over it ; the 
air resembles the light which traverses it 
with more subtle currents ; the light 
resembles the heat which rides with it 
through Space. Each creature is only a 
modification of the other ; the likeness in 
them is more tlian the difference, and 
their radical law is one and the same. A 
rule of one art, or a law of one organisa- 
tion, holds true throughout nature. So 
intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily 
seen, it lies under the undermost garment 
of nature, and betrays its source in Uni- 
versal Spirit. For it pervades Thought 
also. Every universal truth which we 
express in words implies or supposes 
every other truth. Omne verttm vera 
consonat. It is like a great circle on a 
sphere, comprising all possible circles ; 
which, however, may be drawn, and com- 
prise it, in like manner. Every such 
truth is the absolute Ens seen from one 
side. But it has innumerable sides. 

The central Unity is still more con^ 
spicuous in actions. Words are finite 
organs of the infinite mind. They cannot 
cover the dimensions of what is in truth. 
They break, chop, and impoverish it. An 
action is the perfection and publication of 
thought. A right action seems to fill the 
eye, and to be related to all nature. ” The 
wise man, in doing one thing, does all ; 
or, in the one thing he does rightly, he 
sees the likeness of all which is done 
rightly.” 

Words and actions are not the attributes 
of brute nature. They introduce us to the 
human form, of which all other organiza- 
tions appear to be degradations. When 
this appears among so many that surround 
it, the spirit prefers it to all others. It 
says: ” From such as this have I drawn 
joy and knowledge ; in such as this have 
I found and beheld myself ; I will speak 
to it ; it can speak again ; it can yield me 
thought already formed and alive.” In 
fact, the eye — the mind -is always accom- 
panied by these forms, male and female ; 
and these are incomparably the richest 
informations of the power and order that 
lie at the heart of things. Unfortunately, 
every one of them bears the marks as of 
some injury; is marred and superficially 
defective. Nevertheless, far different 
from the deaf and dumb nature around 
them, these all rest like fountain-pipes on 
the unfathomed sea of thought and v/rtue 



NATURE. 


whereto they alone, of all organizations, 
are the entrances. 

It were a pleasant inquiry to follow into 
detail their ministry to our education, but 
where would it stop ? We are apociated 
in adolescent and adult life with some 
friends, who, like skies and waters, are 
coextensive with our idea ; who, answer- 
ing each to a certain affection of the soul, 
satisfy our desire on that side; whom we 
lack power to put at such focal distance 
from us, that we can mend or even analyse 
them. We cannot choose but love them. 
When much intercourse with a friend has 
supplied us with a standard of excellence, 
and has increased our respect for the 
resources of God who thus sends a real 
person to outgo our ideal ; when he has, 
moreover, become an object of thought, 
and, whilst his character retains all its 
unconscious effect, is converted in the 
mind into solid and sweet wisdom, it is 
a sign to us that his office is closing, and 
he is commonly withdrawn from our sight 
^ a short time. 


CHAPTER VI. 

IDEALISM, 

Thus is the unspeakable but intelligible 
and practicable meaning of the world con- 
veyed to man, the immortal pupil, in 
every object of sense. To this one end of 
Discipline, all parts of nature conspire. 

A noble doubt perpetually suggests it- 
self, whether this end be not the Final 
Cause of the Universe; and whether nature 
outwardly exists. It is a sufficient account 
of that Appearance we call the World, 
that God will teach a human mind, and 
so makes it the receiver of a certain num- 
ber of congruent sensations, which we 
call sun and moon, man and woman, 
house and trade. In my utter impotence 
to test the authenticity of the report of my 
senses, to know whether the impressions 
they make on me correspond with out- 
lying objects, what difference does it make, 
whether Orion is up there in heaven, or 
some god paints the image in the firma- 
ment of the soul ? The relations of parts 
and tlie end of the whole remaining the 
same, what is the difference, whether land 
and sea interact, and worlds revolve and 
intermingle without number or end — 
deep yawning under deep, and galaxy 
balancing galaxy, throughout absolute 
•pac« — or, whether, without relations of 


jai 

time and space, the same appearances 
are inscribed in the constant faith of man t 
Whether nature enjoy a substantial exist- 
ence without, or is only in the apocalypse 
of the mind, it is alike useful and ^ike 
venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is 
ideal to me, so long as I cannot try the 
accuracy of my senses. 

The frivolous make themselves merry 
with the Ideal theory, as if its consequences 
were burlesque ; as if it affected the sta- 
bility of nature. It surely does not. God 
never jests with us, and will not com- 
promise the end of nature, by permitting 
any inconsequence in its procession. Any 
distrust of the permanence of laws would 
paralyze the faculties of man. Their per- 
manence is sacredly respected, and his 
faith therein is perfect. The wheels and 
springs of man are all set to the hypothesis 
of the permanence of nature. We are 
not built like a ship to be tossed, but like 
a house to stand. It is a natural conse- 
quence of this structure, that, so long as 
the active powers predominate over the 
reflective, we resist with indignation any 
hint that nature is more short-lived or 
mutable than spirit. The broker, the 
wheelwright, the carpenter, the tollman, 
are much displeased at the intimation. 

But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the 
permanence of natural laws, the question 
of the absolute existence of nature still 
remains open. It is the uniform effect of 
culture on the human mind, not to shake 
our faith in the stability of particular 
phenomena, as of heat, water, azote : but 
to lead us to regard nature as a pheno- 
menon, not a substance; to attribute 
I necessary existence to spirit ; to esteem 
nature as an accident and an effect. 

To the senses and the unrenewed under- 
standing belongs a sort of instinctive be- 
lief in the absolute existence of nature. 
In their view, man and nature are indis- 
solubly joined. Things are ultimates, and 
they never look beyond their sphere. The 
presence of Reason mars this faith. The 
first effort of thought tends to relax 
this despotism of the senses, which binds 
us to nature as if we were a part of it, 
and shows us nature aloof, and. as it 
were, afloat. Until this higher agency 
intervened, the animal eye sees, with 
wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and 
coloured surfaces. When the eye of 
Reason opens, to outline and surface are 
at once added grace and expression. 
These proceed from imagination and af- 
fection, and abate somewhat of the angular 
distinctness of objects. If the Reason be 



MISCELLANIES. 


323 

Btimulated to more earnest vision, outlines 
and surfaces become transparent, and are 
no longer seen; causes and spirits are 
seen through them. The best moments 
of life are these delicious awakenings of 
the higher powers, and the reverential 
withdrawing of nature before its God. 

Let us proceed to indicate the effects of 
culture. I. Our first institution in the 
Ideal philosophy is a hint from Nature 
herself. 

Nature is made to conspire with spirit 
to emancipate us. Certain mechanical 
changes, a small alteration in our local 
position apprises us of a dualism. We 
are strangely affected by seeing the shore 
from a moving ship, from a balloon, or 
through the tints of an unusual sky. The 
least change in our point of view gives the 
whole world a pictorial air. A man who 
seldom rides needs only to get into a 
coach and traverse his own town, to turn 
the street into a puppet-show. The men, 
the women — talking, running, bartering, 
fighting ; the earnest mechanic, the loun- 
ger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are 
unrealized at once, or at least v/holly de- 
tached from all relation to the observer, 
and seen as apparent, not substantial 
beings. What new thoughts are suggested 
by seeing a face of country quite familiar, 
in the rapid movements of the railroad 
car 1 Nay, the most wonted objects (make 
a very slight change in the point of vision) 
please us most. In a camera obscura, 
the butcher’s cart and the figure of one of 
our own family amuse us. So a portrait 
of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn 
the eyes upside down, by looking at the 
landscape through your legs, and how 
agreeable is the picture, though you have 
seen it any time these twenty years 1 

In these cases, by mechanical means, 
is suggested the difference between the 
observer and the spectacle, between man 
and nature. Hence arises a pleasure 
mixed with awe ; I may say, a low degree 
of the sublime is felt from the fact, proba- 
bly, that man is hereby apprised, that, 
whilst the world is a spectacle, something 
in himself is stable. 

2 . In a higher manner, the poet commu- 
nicates the same pleasure. By a few 
strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, 
the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, 
the maiden, not different from what we 
know them, but only lifted from the 
ground and afloat before the eye. He un- 
fixes the land and the sea, makes them 
revolve around the axis of his primary 
thought, and disposes them anew. 


Possessed himself by a heroic passtoot 
uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual 
man conforms thoughts to things: the 
poet conforms things to his thoughts 
The one esteems nature as rooted and 
fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses 
his being thereon. To him, the refrac- 
tory world is ductile and flexible ; he in- 
vests dust and stones with humanity, and 
makes them the words of the Reason. 
The Imagination may be defined to be, 
the use which the Reason makes of the 
material world. Shakespeare possesses 
the power of subordinating nature for the 
purposes of expression, beyond all poets. 
His imperial muse tosses the creation 
like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses 
it to embody any caprice of thought that 
is uppermost in his mind. The remotest 
spaces of nature are visited, and the 
farthest sundered things are brought to- 
gether, by a subtle spiritual connection. 
We are made aware that magnitude of ma* 
terial things is relative, and all objects 
shrink and expand to serve the passion oi 
the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, the laya 
' of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, 
he finds to be the shadow of his beloved ’ 
time, which keeps her from him, is his 
chest ; the suspicion she has awakened is 
her ornament ; 

The ornament of beauty ia Suspect, 

A crow which flies in heaven’s sweetest air. 

His passion is not the fruit of chance ; it 
swells, as he speaks, to a city, or a state. 

No, it was builded far from accident ; 

It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls 

Under the brow of thralling discontent ; 

It fears not policy, that heretic 

That works on leases of short numbered 
hours. 

But all alone stands hugely politic. 

In the strength of his constancy, the Py- 
ramids seem to him recent and transitory. 
The freshness of youth and love dazzles 
him with its resemblance to morning. 

Take those lips away 
Which so sweetly were forsworn ; 

And those eyes — the break of day— 
Lights that do mislead the morn. 

The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may 
say, in passing, it would not be easy to 
match in literature. 

This transfiguration which all material 
objects undergo through the passion of 
the poet — this power which he exerts to 
dwarf the great, to magnify the small— 



NATURE, 


m 


might be illustrated by a thousand ex- 
amples from his Plays. I have before me 
the Tempest, and will cite only these few 
lines. 

Ariel. The strong based promontory 
Have I made shakci and by the spurs 
plucked up 
The pine and cedar. 

Prospero calls for music to soothe the 
frantic Alonzo, and his companions ; 

A solemn air, and the best comforter 
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains 
Now useless, boiled within thy skull. 

Again ; 

The charm dissolves apace, 

And, as the morning steals upon the night, 
Melting the darkness, so their rising 
senses 

Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that 
mantle 

Their clearer reason. 

Their understanding 

Begins to swell : and the approaching tide 
Will shortly fill the reasonable shores 
That now he foul and muddy, 

The perception of real affinities between 
events (that is to say, of ideal affinities, 
for those only are real) enables the Poet 
thus to make free v/ith the most imposing 
forms and phenomena of the world, and 
BO assert the predominance of the soul. 

3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature 
with his own thoughts, he differs from the 
philosopher only herein, that the one pro- 
poses Beauty as his main end ; the other 
Truth. But the philosopher, not less than 
the poet, postpones the apparent order 
and relations of things to the empire of 
thought. “The problem of philosophy,” 
according to Plato, “ is, for all that exists 
conditionally, to find a ground uncon- 
ditioned and absolute.” It proceeds on 
the faith that a law determines all phe- 
nomena, which being known, the phe- 
nomena can be predicted. That law, when 
in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty is in- 
finite. The true philosopher and the true 
poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, 
and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim 
of both. Is not the charm of one of 
Plato’s or Aristotle's definitions, strictly 
like that of the Antigone of Sophocles ? 
It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life 
has been imparted to nature; that the 
solid seeming block of matter has been 
pervaded and dissolved by a thought : 
that this feeble human being has pene- 
trated the vast masses of nature with an 
iofonnin^ sqhI, recogpiied Itself ip 


their harmony, that is, seised their law. 
In physics, when this is attained, the 
memory disburdens itself ol its cumbrous 
catalogues of particulars, and carries cen- 
turies of observation in a single formula. 

Thus even in physics, the material is 
degraded before the spiritual. The astro- 
nomer, the geometer, rely on their irre- 
fragable analysis, and disdain the results 
of observation. The sublime remark of 
Euler on his law of arches, “ This will be 
found contrary to all experience, yet is 
true,” had already transferred nature into 
the mind, and ;ieft matter like an outcast 
corpse. 

4. Intellectual science has been ob- 
served to beget invariably a doubt of the 
existence of matter. Turgot said, “ He 
that has never doubted the existence of 
matter may be assured he has no aptitude 
for metaphysical inquiries.” It fastens 
the attention upon immortal necessary 
uncreated natures, that is, upon Ideas ; 
and in their presence, we feel that the 
outward circumstance is a dream and a 
shade. Whilst we wait In this Olympus 
of gods, we think of nature as an appendix 
to the soul. We ascend into their region, 
and know that these are the thoughts of 
the Supreme Being. “ These are they 
who were set up from everlasting, from 
the beginning, or ever the earth was. 
When he prepared the heavens, they were 
there ; when he established the clouds 
above, when he strengthened the foun- 
tains of the deep. Then they were by 
him, as one brought up with him. Of 
them took he counsel,” 

Their influence is proportionate. As 
objects of science, they are accessible to 
few men. Yet all men are capable of 
being raised by Ipiety or by passion into 
their region. And no man touches these 
divine natures, without becoming, in soma 
degree, himself divine. Like a new soul, 
they renew the body. We become physi- 
cally nimble and lightsome ; we tread on 
air; life is no longer irksome, and wa 
think it will’ never be so. No man fears 
age or misfortune or death, in their serene 
company, for he is transported out of the 
district of change. Whilst we behold un- 
veiled ‘the nature of Justice and Truth, 
we learn the difference between the abso- 
lute and the conditional or relative. We 
apprehend the absolute. As it were, for 
the first time, we exist. We become im- 
mortal, for we learn that time and space 
are relations of ^matter ; that, with a per- 
ception of truth, or a virtuous will, they 
have no affinity, 



MISCELLANIES. 


534 


5. Finally, religion and ethics, which 
may be fitly called— the practice of ideas, 
or the introduction of ideas into life — have 
an analogous effect with all lower culture, 
in degrading nature and suggesting its 
dependence on spirit. Ethics and religion 
differ herein; that, the one is the system 
of human duties commencing from man ; 
the other, from God. Religion includes 
the personality of God ; Ethics does not. 
They are one to our present design. They 
both put nature under foot. The first and 
last lesson of religion is, “ The things 
that are seen, are temporal; the things 
that are unseen, are eternal.” It puts an 
affront upon nature. It does that for the 
unschooled, which philosophy does for 
Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform lan- 
guage that may be heard in the churches 
of the most ignorant sects, is, ” Contemn 
the unsubstantial shows of the world ; 
they are vanities, dreams, shadows, un- 
realities : seek the realities of religion. 
The devotee flouts nature. Some theoso- 
phists have arrived at a certain hostility 
and indignation towards matter, as the 
Manichean and Plotinus. They distrusted 
in themselves any looking back to these 
flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was ashamed 
of his body. In short, they might all say 
of matter, what Michael Angelo said of 
external beauty, “It is the frail and weary 
weed, in which God dresses the soul, 
which he has called into time.” 

It appears that motion, poetry, physical 
and intellectual science, and religion, aU 
tend to affect our convictions of the reality 
of the external world. But I own there 
is something ungrateful in expanding too 
curiously the particulars of the general 
proposition, that all culture tends to imbue 
us with idealism. I have no hostility to 
nature, but a child’s love to it. I expand 
and live in the warm day like corn and 
melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not 
wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, 
nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to 
indicate the true position of nature in 
regard to man, wherein to establish man, 
all right education tends : as the ground 
which to attain is the object of human 
life, that is, of man’s connection with 
nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views 
of nature, [and brings the mind to call 
that apparent, which it uses to call real, 
and that re^, which it uses to call 
visionary. Children, it is true, believe 
in the external world. The belief that it 
appears only, is an afterthought, but with 
culture, this faith will as surely arise on 
the mind as did the first. 


The advantage of the ideal theory over 
the popular faith is this, that it present* 
the world in precisely that view which is 
most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact 
the view which Reason, both speculative 
and practical, that is, philosophy and vir- 
tue, take. For, seen in the light of thought 
the world always is phenomenal ; and vir- 
tue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism 
sees the world in God. It beholds the 
whole circle of persons and things, of 
actions and events, of country and religion, 
not as painfully accumulated, atom after 
atom, act after act, in an aged creeping 
Past, but as one vast picture, which God 
paints on the instant eternity, for the con- 
templation of the soul. Therefore the 
soul holds itself off from a too trivial and 
microscopic study of the universal tablet. 
It respects the end too much, to immerse 
itself in the means. It sees something 
more important in Christianity than the 
scandals of ecclesiastical history, or the 
niceties of criticism : and very incurious 
concerning persons or miracles, ’’and not at 
all disturbed by chasms of historical 
evidence, it accepts from God the phenom- 
enon, as it finds it, as the pure and awful 
form of religion in the world. It is not 
hot and passionate at the appearance of 
what it calls its own good or bad fortune, 
at the union or opposition of other persons. 
No man is its enemy. It accepts whatso- 
ever befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a 
watcher more than a doer, and it is as a 
doer, only that it may the better watch. 


CHAPTER VII, 

SPIRIT, 

It is essential to a true theory of nature 
and of man, that it should contain some- 
what progressive. Uses that are exhausted 
or that may be, and facts that end in the 
statement, cannot be all that is true of 
this brave lodging wherein man is har- 
boured, and wherein all his faculties find 
appropriate and endless exercise. And 
all the uses of nature admit of being 
summed in one, which yields the activity 
of man an infinite scope. Through all 
its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts 
of things, it is faithful to the cause whence 
it had its origin. It always speaks of 
Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a 
perpetual effect. It is a great shadoof 
pointing alwaysjo tho swn behind u*, 



NATURE. 


The aspect o€ nature is devout. Like 
the figure of Jesus, she stands with 
bended head, and hands folded upon the 
breast. The happiest man is he who 
learns from nature the lesson of worship. 

Of that ineffable essence which we call 
Spirit, he that thinks most will say least. 
We can foresee God in the coarse, as it 
were, distant phenomena of matter : but 
when we try to define and describe him- 
self, both language and thought desert us, 
and we are as helpless as fools and 
savages. That essence refuses to be 
recorded in propositions, but when man 
has worshipped him intellectually, the 
noblest ministry of nature is to stand as 
the apparition of God. It is the organ 
through which the universal spirit speaks 
to the individual, and strives to lead back 
the individual to it. 

When we consider Spirit, we see that 
the views already presented do not include 
the whole circumference of man. We 
must add some related thoughts. 

Three problems are put by nature to 
the mind. What is matter ? Whence is 
it? and Whereto? The first of these 
questions only, the ideal theory answers. 
Idealism saith ; matter is a phenomenon, 
not a substance. Idealism acquaints us 
with the total disparity between the evi- 
dence of our own being, and the evidence 
of the world’s being. The one is perfect; 
the other, incapable of any assurance; 
the mind is a part of the nature of things ; 
the world is a divine dream, from which 
we may presently awake to the glories and 
certainties of day. Idealism is a hypothesis 
to account for nature by other principles 
than those of carpentry and chemistry. 
Yet, if it only deny the existence of 
matter, it does not satisfy tlie demands of 
the spirit. It leaves God out of me. It 
leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my 
perceptions, to wander without end. 
Then the heart resists it, because it balks 
the affections in denying substantive 
being to men and women. Nature is so 
pervaded with human life, that there is 
something of humanity in all, and in every 
particular. But this theory makes nature 
foreign to me, and does not account for 
that consanguinity which we acknowledge 
to it. 

Let it stand, then, in the present state 
of our knowledge, merely as a useful intro- 
ductory hypothesis, serving to apprise us 
of the eternal distinction between the soul 
and the world. 

But when, following the invisible steps 
of thought, we come to enquire. Whence is 


3»5 

matter ? and Whereto ? many truths 
arise to us out of the recesses of con- 
sciousness. We learn that the highest is 
present to the soul of man, that the dread 
universal essence, which is not wisdon, or 
love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, 
and each entirely, is that for which all 
things exist, and that by which they are ; 
that spirit creates; that behind nature, 
throughout nature, spirit is present ; one 
and not compound, it does not act upon 
us from \yithout, that is, in space and time, 
but spiritually, or through ourselves; 
therefore, that spirit, that is the Supreme 
Being, does not build up nature around ns, 
but puts it forth through us, as the life of 
the tree puts forth new branches and 
leaves through the pores of the old. As a 
plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon 
the bosom of God ; he is nourished by un- 
failing fountains, and draws, at his need, 
inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds 
to the possibilities of man ? Once inhale 
the upper air, being admitted to behold 
the absolute natures of justice and truth, 
and we learn that man has access to the 
entire mind of the^ Creator, is himself 
the creator in the finite. This view which 
admonishes me where the sources of wis- 
I dom and power lie, and points to virtue 
as to 

“ The golden key 

Which opes the palace of etcrnityi” 

carries upon its face the highestcertificato 
of truth, because it animates me to create 
my own world through the purification of 
my soul. 

The world proceeds from the same 
spirit as the body of man. It is a re- 
moter and inferior incarnation of God, a 
projection of God in the unconscious. 
But it differs from the body in one impor- 
tant respect. It is not, like that, now sub- 
jected to the human will. Its serene 
order is inviolable by us. It is, therefore, 
to us, the present expositor of the divine 
mind. It is a fixed point whereby wo 
may measure our departure. As we de- 
generate, the contrast between us and 
our house is more evident. We are as 
much strangers in nature, as we are aliens 
from God. We do not understand the 
notes of birds. The fox and the deer run 
away from us ; the bear and tiger rend us. 
We do not know the uses of more than a 
few plants, as com and the apple, the 
potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, 
every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, 
a face of him ? Yet this may show U9 
what discord is between roan and nature* 



MISCELLANIES. 


326 

for you cannot freely admire a noble 
landscape, if labourers are digging in the 
field hard by. The poet finds something 
ridiculous in his delight, unti 1 he is out of 
the sight of men. 


CHAPTER VIII, 

PROSPECTS, 

IM inquiries respecting the laws of the 
world and the frame of things, the highest 
reason is always the truest. That which 
seems faintly possible — it is so refined, is 
often faint and dim because it is deepest 
seated in the mind among the eternal 
verities. Empirical science is apt to cloud 
the sight, and, by the very knowledge of 
functions and processes, to bereave the 
student of the manly contemplation of the j 
whole. The savant bcomes unpoetic. I 
But the best read naturalist who lends an 
entire and devout attention to truth, will 
see that there remains much to learn of 
his relation to the world, and that it is not 
to be learned by any addition or subtrac- 
tion or other comparison of known quan- 
tities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies 
of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, 
and by entire humility. He will perceive 
that there are far more excellent qualities 
in the student than preciseness and infal- 
libility ; that a guess is often more fruitful 
than an indisputable affirmation, and that 
a dream may let us deeper into the secret 
of nature than a hundred concerted experi- 
ments. 

For, the problems to be solved are pre- 
cisely those which the physiologist and 
the naturalist omit to state. It is not so 
pertinent to man to know all the individ- 
uals of the animal kingdom, as it is to 
know whence and whereto is this tyrannis* 
ingunity in his constitution, |whichevermore 
separates and classifies things, endeavour- 
ing to reduce the most diverse to one 
form. When I behold a rich landscape, it 
is less to my purpose to recite correctly 
the order and superposition of the strata, 
than to know why all thought of multitude 
is lost in a tranquil sense of unity. I can- 
not greatly honour minuteness in details, i 
so long as there is no hint to explain the 
relation between things and thoughts; no 
ray upon the metaphysics of conchology, 
of botany, of the arts, to show the relation 
of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, 
architecture to the mind, and build 
science upon ideas. In a cabinet of 
natural history we become sensible of a 


certain occult recognition and sympathy 
in regard to the most unwieldy and 
eccentric forms of beast, fish and insect 
The American who has been confined, in 
his own country, to the sight of buildings 
designed after foreign models, is surprised 
on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at 
Rome, by the feeling that these structures 
are imitations also faint copies of an in- 
visible archetype. Nor has science sufficient 
humanity , so long as the naturalist overlooks 
that wonderful congruity which subsists be- 
tween man and the world ; of which he is 
lord, not because he is the most subtile 
inhabitant, but because he is its head and 
heart, and finds something of himself in 
every great and small thing, in every 
mountain stratum, in every new law of 
colour, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric 
influence which observation or analysis 
lay open. A perception of this mystery 
inspires the muse of George Herbert, the 
beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth cen- 
tury. The following lines are part of hiu 
little poem on Man. 

“ Man is all symmetry, 

Full of proportions, orio limb to another, 

And to all the world besides. 

Each part may call the farthest, brother 
For head with foot hath private amity, 

Ami both with moons and tides, 

^ Nothing hath got so far 
But man hath caught and kept it as bii 
prey ; 

His eyes dismount the highest star ; 

He is in little all the sphere. 

Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that 
they 

Find their acquaintance there. 

“ For us, the winds do blow, 

The earth doth rest, heaven move, and 
fountains flow ; 

Nothing we see but means our good, 

As our delight, or as our treasure ; 

The whole is either our cupboard of food. 

Or cabinet of pleasure. 

“ The stars have us to bed ; 

Night draws the curtain ; which the sun 
withdraws. 

Music and light attend onr head. 

All things unto our flesh are kind, 

In their descent and being ; to our mind, 

In their ascent and cause. 

More servants wait on man 
Than he’ll take notice of. In every path, 

He treads down that which doth befriend 
him 

When sickness makes him pale and wan, 
O mighty love I Man is one world and 
hath 

Another to attend him.” 



NATURE. 


The peiception of this cfass of truths 
makes the attraction which drav/s men to 
science, but the end is lost sight of in atten- 
tion to the means. In view of this half-sight 
of science, we accept the sentence of Plato, 
that “ poetry comes nearer to vital truth 
than history." Every surmise and vaticin- 
ation of the mind is entitled to a certain 
respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect 
theories, and sentences, which contain 
glimpses of truth, to digested systems 
which have no one valuable suggestion. 
A wise writer will feel that the ends of 
study and composition are best answered 
by announcing undiscovered regions of 
thought, and so communicating, through 
hope, new activity to the torpid spirit. 

I shall therefore conclude this essay 
with some traditions of man and nature 
which a certain poet sang to me: and 
which, as they have always been in the 
world, and perhaps reappear to every 
bard, may be botli history and prophecy. 

* The foundations of man are not in 

matter, but in spirit. But the element of 
spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the 
longest series of events, the oldest chron- 
ologies are young and recent. In the 
tycle of the universal man, from whom 
the known individuals proceed, centuries 
are points, and all history is but the epoch 
of one degradation. j 

* We distrust and deny inwardly our | 
sympathy with nature. We own and 
disown our relation to it, by turns. We 
are like Nebuchaclnez;'ar, dethroned, i 
bereft of reason, and eating grass like an 
cx. But who can set limits to the remedial 
force of spirit ? 

* A man is a god in ruins. When men 
are innocent, life shall be longer, and 
shall pass into the immortal, as gently as 
we awake from dreams. Now, the world 
would be insane and rabid, if these disor- 
ganizations should last for hundreds of 
years. It is kept in check by death and 
infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Mes- 
siah, which comes into the arms of fallen 
men, and pleads with them to return to 
paradise. 

‘ Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he 
was permeated and dissolved by Spirit. 
He filled nature with his overflowing cur- 
rents. Out from him sprang the sun and I 
moon ; from man, the sun ; from woman, 
the moon. The laws of his mind, the 
periods of his actions externized them- 
selves into day and night, into the year and 
the seasons. But, having made for him- 
Bolf this huge shell, his waters retired ; he 
flo longer fills the veins and veinlets ; he 


3*7 

is shrunk to a drop. He sees, that the 
structure still fits him, but fits him colos- 
sally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now 
it coiTe.sponds to him from far and on high. 
He adores timidly his own work. Now is 
! man the follower of the sun, anc woman 
the follower of the moon. Yet sometimes 
he starts in his slumber, and wonders at 
himself and his house, and muses strange- 
ly at the resemblance betwixt him and it. 
He perceives that if his law is still para- 
mount, if still he have elemental power, if 
his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not 
conscious power, it is not inferior but 
superior to his will. It is Instinct.’ Thus 
my Orphic poet sang. 

At present, man applies to nature but 
half his force. He works on the woild 
with his understanding alone. He lives 
in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom ; 
and he that works most in it, is but a half- 
man, and whilst his arms are strong and 
his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, 
and he is a selfish savage. His relation 
to nature, his power over it, is through the 
understanding ; as by manure ; the econo- 
mic use of fire, wind, water, and iho 
mariner’s needle; steam, coal, chemical 
agriculture; the repairs of the human 
body by the dentist and the surgeon. This 
is such a resumption of power, as if a 
banished king should buy his territories 
inch by inch, instead of vaulting at once 
into his throne.