LECTURE V. THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. JOHNSON, ROUSSEAU, BURNS.
[May 19, 1840.]
Hero-Gods, Prophets,
Poets, Priests are forms of Heroism that belong to the old ages, make their
appearance in the remotest times; some of them have ceased to be possible long
since, and cannot any more show themselves in this world. The Hero as Man
of Letters, again, of which class we are to speak to-day, is altogether a
product of these new ages; and so long as the wondrous art ofWriting, or
of Ready-writing which we call Printing, subsists, he may be
expected to continue, as one of the main forms of Heroism for all future ages.
He is, in various respects, a very singular phenomenon.
He is new, I say; he has
hardly lasted above a century in the world yet. Never, till about a hundred
years ago, was there seen any figure of a Great Soul living apart in that
anomalous manner; endeavoring to speak forth the inspiration that was in him by
Printed Books, and find place and subsistence by what the world would please to
give him for doing that. Much had been sold and bought, and left to make its
own bargain in the market-place; but the inspired wisdom of a Heroic Soul never
till then, in that naked manner. He, with his copy-rights and copy-wrongs, in
his squalid garret, in his rusty coat; ruling (for this is what he does), from
his grave, after death, whole nations and generations who would, or would not,
give him bread while living,—is a rather curious spectacle! Few shapes of
Heroism can be more unexpected.
Alas, the Hero from of old
has had to cramp himself into strange shapes: the world knows not well at any
time what to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world! It seemed
absurd to us, that men, in their rude admiration, should take some wise great
Odin for a god, and worship him as such; some wise great Mahomet for one
god-inspired, and religiously follow his Law for twelve centuries: but that a
wise great Johnson, a Burns, a Rousseau, should be taken for some idle
nondescript, extant in the world to amuse idleness, and have a few coins and
applauses thrown him, that he might live thereby; this perhaps,
as before hinted, will one day seem a still absurder phasis of
things!—Meanwhile, since it is the spiritual always that determines the
material, this same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important
modern person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all. What he teaches, the
whole world will do and make. The world's manner of dealing with him is the
most significant feature of the world's general position. Looking well at his
life, we may get a glance, as deep as is readily possible for us, into the life
of those singular centuries which have produced him, in which we ourselves live
and work.
There are genuine Men of
Letters, and not genuine; as in every kind there is a genuine and a spurious.
If hero be taken to mean genuine, then I say the Hero as Man
of Letters will be found discharging a function for us which is ever honorable,
ever the highest; and was once well known to be the highest. He is uttering forth,
in such way as he has, the inspired soul of him; all that a man, in any case,
can do. I say inspired; for what we call "originality,"
"sincerity," "genius," the heroic quality we have no good
name for, signifies that. The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of
things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists always, unseen to most,
under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in that; he declares that abroad, by
act or speech as it may be in declaring himself abroad. His life, as we said
before, is a piece of the everlasting heart of Nature herself: all men's life
is,—but the weak many know not the fact, and are untrue to it, in most times;
the strong few are strong, heroic, perennial, because it cannot be hidden from
them. The Man of Letters, like every Hero, is there to proclaim this in such
sort as he can. Intrinsically it is the same function which the old generations
named a man Prophet, Priest, Divinity for doing; which all manner of Heroes, by
speech or by act, are sent into the world to do.
Fichte the German
Philosopher delivered, some forty years ago at Erlangen, a highly remarkable
Course of Lectures on this subject: "Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten,
On the Nature of the Literary Man." Fichte, in conformity with the
Transcendental Philosophy, of which he was a distinguished teacher, declares
first: That all things which we see or work with in this Earth, especially we
ourselves and all persons, are as a kind of vesture or sensuous Appearance:
that under all there lies, as the essence of them, what he calls the
"Divine Idea of the World;" this is the Reality which "lies at
the bottom of all Appearance." To the mass of men no such Divine Idea is
recognizable in the world; they live merely, says Fichte, among the superficialities,
practicalities and shows of the world, not dreaming that there is anything
divine under them. But the Man of Letters is sent hither specially that he may
discern for himself, and make manifest to us, this same Divine Idea: in every
new generation it will manifest itself in a new dialect; and he is there for
the purpose of doing that. Such is Fichte's phraseology; with which we need not
quarrel. It is his way of naming what I here, by other words, am striving
imperfectly to name; what there is at present no name for: The unspeakable
Divine Significance, full of splendor, of wonder and terror, that lies in the
being of every man, of every thing,—the Presence of the God who made every man
and thing. Mahomet taught this in his dialect; Odin in his: it is the thing
which all thinking hearts, in one dialect or another, are here to teach.
Fichte calls the Man of
Letters, therefore, a Prophet, or as he prefers to phrase it, a Priest,
continually unfolding the Godlike to men: Men of Letters are a perpetual
Priesthood, from age to age, teaching all men that a God is still present in
their life, that all "Appearance," whatsoever we see in the world, is
but as a vesture for the "Divine Idea of the World," for "that
which lies at the bottom of Appearance." In the true Literary Man there is
thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of
the world; the world's Priest;—guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its
dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time. Fichte discriminates with sharp zeal
the true Literary Man, what we here call the Hero as
Man of Letters, from multitudes of false unheroic. Whoever lives not wholly in
this Divine Idea, or living partially in it, struggles not, as for the one
good, to live wholly in it,—he is, let him live where else he like, in what
pomps and prosperities he like, no Literary Man; he is, says Fichte, a
"Bungler, Stumper." Or at best, if he belong to the
prosaic provinces, he may be a "Hodman;" Fichte even calls him
elsewhere a "Nonentity," and has in short no mercy for him, no wish
thathe should continue happy among us! This is Fichte's notion of
the Man of Letters. It means, in its own form, precisely what we here mean.
In this point of view, I
consider that, for the last hundred years, by far the notablest of all Literary
Men is Fichte's countryman, Goethe. To that man too, in a strange way, there
was given what we may call a life in the Divine Idea of the World; vision of
the inward divine mystery: and strangely, out of his Books, the world rises
imaged once more as godlike, the workmanship and temple of a God. Illuminated
all, not in fierce impure fire-splendor as of Mahomet, but in mild celestial
radiance;—really a Prophecy in these most unprophetic times; to my mind, by far
the greatest, though one of the quietest, among all the great things that have
come to pass in them. Our chosen specimen of the Hero as Literary Man would be
this Goethe. And it were a very pleasant plan for me here to discourse of his
heroism: for I consider him to be a true Hero; heroic in what he said and did,
and perhaps still more in what he did not say and did not do; to me a noble
spectacle: a great heroic ancient man, speaking and keeping silence as an
ancient Hero, in the guise of a most modern, high-bred, high-cultivated Man of
Letters! We have had no such spectacle; no man capable of affording such, for
the last hundred and fifty years.
But at present, such is
the general state of knowledge about Goethe, it were worse than useless to
attempt speaking of him in this case. Speak as I might, Goethe, to the great
majority of you, would remain problematic, vague; no impression but a false one
could be realized. Him we must leave to future times. Johnson, Burns, Rousseau,
three great figures from a prior time, from a far inferior state of circumstances,
will suit us better here. Three men of the Eighteenth Century; the conditions
of their life far more resemble what those of ours still are in England, than
what Goethe's in Germany were. Alas, these men did not conquer like him; they
fought bravely, and fell. They were not heroic bringers of the light, but
heroic seekers of it. They lived under galling conditions; struggling as under
mountains of impediment, and could not unfold themselves into clearness, or
victorious interpretation of that "Divine Idea." It is rather
the Tombs of three Literary Heroes that I have to show you.
There are the monumental heaps, under which three spiritual giants lie buried.
Very mournful, but also great and full of interest for us. We will linger by
them for a while.
Complaint is often made,
in these times, of what we call the disorganized condition of society: how ill
many forces of society fulfil their work; how many powerful are seen working in
a wasteful, chaotic, altogether unarranged manner. It is too just a complaint,
as we all know. But perhaps if we look at this of Books and the Writers of
Books, we shall find here, as it were, the summary of all other
disorganizations;—a sort of heart, from which, and to which all
other confusion circulates in the world! Considering what Book writers do in
the world, and what the world does with Book writers, I should say, It is the
most anomalous thing the world at present has to show.—We should get into a sea
far beyond sounding, did we attempt to give account of this: but we must glance
at it for the sake of our subject. The worst element in the life of these three
Literary Heroes was, that they found their business and position such a chaos.
On the beaten road there is tolerable travelling; but it is sore work, and many
have to perish, fashioning a path through the impassable!
Our pious Fathers,
feeling well what importance lay in the speaking of man to men, founded
churches, made endowments, regulations; everywhere in the civilized world there
is a Pulpit, environed with all manner of complex dignified appurtenances and
furtherances, that therefrom a man with the tongue may, to best advantage,
address his fellow-men. They felt that this was the most important thing; that
without this there was no good thing. It is a right pious work, that of theirs;
beautiful to behold! But now with the art of Writing, with the art of Printing,
a total change has come over that business. The Writer of a Book, is not he a
Preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or that, but to all
men in all times and places? Surely it is of the last importance that he do
his work right, whoever do it wrong;—that the eye report not
falsely, for then all the other members are astray! Well; how he may do his
work, whether he do it right or wrong, or do it at all, is a point which no man
in the world has taken the pains to think of. To a certain shopkeeper, trying
to get some money for his books, if lucky, he is of some importance; to no
other man of any. Whence he came, whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived,
by what he might be furthered on his course, no one asks. He is an accident in
society. He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is as the
spiritual light, either the guidance or the misguidance!
Certainly the Art of Writing
is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin's Runes were
the first form of the work of a Hero; Books written words, are
still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of
the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body
and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty
fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed,
many-engined,—they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the
many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined
fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There
Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives: can be called up again
into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that
Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation
in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.
Do not Books still
accomplish miracles, as Runes were fabled to do?
They persuade men. Not the wretchedest circulating-library novel, which foolish
girls thumb and con in remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual
practical weddings and households of those foolish girls. So "Celia"
felt, so "Clifford" acted: the foolish Theorem of Life, stamped into
those young brains, comes out as a solid Practice one day. Consider whether
any Rune in the wildest imagination of Mythologist ever did
such wonders as, on the actual firm Earth, some Books have done! What built St.
Paul's Cathedral? Look at the heart of the matter, it was that divine Hebrew
BOOK,—the word partly of the man Moses, an outlaw tending his Midianitish
herds, four thousand years ago, in the wildernesses of Sinai! It is the
strangest of things, yet nothing is truer. With the art of Writing, of which
Printing is a simple, an inevitable and comparatively insignificant corollary,
the true reign of miracles for mankind commenced. It related, with a wondrous
new contiguity and perpetual closeness, the Past and Distant with the Present
in time and place; all times and all places with this our actual Here and Now.
All things were altered for men; all modes of important work of men: teaching,
preaching, governing, and all else.
To look at Teaching, for
instance. Universities are a notable, respectable product of the modern ages.
Their existence too is modified, to the very basis of it, by the existence of
Books. Universities arose while there were yet no Books procurable; while a
man, for a single Book, had to give an estate of land. That, in those
circumstances, when a man had some knowledge to communicate, he should do it by
gathering the learners round him, face to face, was a necessity for him. If you
wanted to know what Abelard knew, you must go and listen to Abelard. Thousands,
as many as thirty thousand, went to hear Abelard and that metaphysical theology
of his. And now for any other teacher who had also something of his own to
teach, there was a great convenience opened: so many thousands eager to learn
were already assembled yonder; of all places the best place for him was that.
For any third teacher it was better still; and grew ever the better, the more
teachers there came. It only needed now that the King took notice of this new
phenomenon; combined or agglomerated the various schools into one school; gave
it edifices, privileges, encouragements, and named it Universitas,
or School of all Sciences: the University of Paris, in its essential
characters, was there. The model of all subsequent Universities; which down
even to these days, for six centuries now, have gone on to found themselves.
Such, I conceive, was the origin of Universities.
It is clear, however,
that with this simple circumstance, facility of getting Books, the whole
conditions of the business from top to bottom were changed. Once invent
Printing, you metamorphosed all Universities, or superseded them! The Teacher
needed not now to gather men personally round him, that he might speak to
them what he knew: print it in a Book, and all learners far and wide, for a
trifle, had it each at his own fireside, much more effectually to learn
it!—Doubtless there is still peculiar virtue in Speech; even writers of Books
may still, in some circumstances, find it convenient to speak also,—witness our
present meeting here! There is, one would say, and must ever remain while man
has a tongue, a distinct province for Speech as well as for Writing and
Printing. In regard to all things this must remain; to Universities among
others. But the limits of the two have nowhere yet been pointed out,
ascertained; much less put in practice: the University which would completely
take in that great new fact, of the existence of Printed Books, and stand on a
clear footing for the Nineteenth Century as the Paris one did for the
Thirteenth, has not yet come into existence. If we think of it, all that a
University, or final highest School can do for us, is still but what the first
School began doing,—teach us to read. We learn to read,
in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of
all manner of Books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even
theoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves! It depends on what we read, after
all manner of Professors have done their best for us. The true University of
these days is a Collection of Books.
But to the Church
itself, as I hinted already, all is changed, in its preaching, in its working,
by the introduction of Books. The Church is the working recognized Union of our
Priests or Prophets, of those who by wise teaching guide the souls of men.
While there was no Writing, even while there was no Easy-writing, or Printing,
the preaching of the voice was the natural sole method of performing this. But
now with Books!—He that can write a true Book, to persuade England, is not he
the Bishop and Archbishop, the Primate of England and of All England? I many a
time say, the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these are the
real working effective Church of a modern country. Nay not only our preaching,
but even our worship, is not it too accomplished by means of Printed Books? The
noble sentiment which a gifted soul has clothed for us in melodious words,
which brings melody into our hearts,—is not this essentially, if we will
understand it, of the nature of worship? There are many, in all countries, who,
in this confused time, have no other method of worship. He who, in any way,
shows us better than we knew before that a lily of the fields is beautiful,
does he not show it us as an effluence of the Fountain of all Beauty; as the handwriting,
made visible there, of the great Maker of the Universe? He has sung for us,
made us sing with him, a little verse of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How
much more he who sings, who says, or in any way brings home to our heart the
noble doings, feelings, darings and endurances of a brother man! He has verily
touched our hearts as with a live coal from the altar. Perhaps
there is no worship more authentic.
Literature, so far as it
is Literature, is an "apocalypse of Nature," a revealing of the
"open secret." It may well enough be named, in Fichte's style, a
"continuous revelation" of the Godlike in the Terrestrial and Common.
The Godlike does ever, in very truth, endure there; is brought out, now in this
dialect, now in that, with various degrees of clearness: all true gifted
Singers and Speakers are, consciously or unconsciously, doing so. The dark
stormful indignation of a Byron, so wayward and perverse, may have touches of
it; nay the withered mockery of a French sceptic,—his mockery of the False, a
love and worship of the True. How much more the sphere-harmony of a Shakspeare,
of a Goethe; the cathedral music of a Milton! They are something too, those
humble genuine lark-notes of a Burns,—skylark, starting from the humble furrow,
far overhead into the blue depths, and singing to us so genuinely there! For
all true singing is of the nature of worship; as indeed all true working may
be said to be,—whereof such singing is but the record, and fit
melodious representation, to us. Fragments of a real "Church Liturgy"
and "Body of Homilies," strangely disguised from the common eye, are
to be found weltering in that huge froth-ocean of Printed Speech we loosely
call Literature! Books are our Church too.
Or turning now to the
Government of men. Witenagemote, old Parliament, was a great thing. The affairs
of the nation were there deliberated and decided; what we were to do as
a nation. But does not, though the name Parliament subsists, the parliamentary
debate go on now, everywhere and at all times, in a far more comprehensive
way, out of Parliament altogether? Burke said there were Three
Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth
Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech,
or a witty saying; it is a literal fact,—very momentous to us in these times.
Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of
Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is
inevitable. Writing brings Printing; brings universal everyday extempore
Printing, as we see at present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole
nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in
law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what
revenues or garnitures. the requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which
others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite. The nation is
governed by all that has tongue in the nation: Democracy is virtually there.
Add only, that whatsoever power exists will have itself, by and by, organized;
working secretly under bandages, obscurations, obstructions, it will never rest
till it get to work free, unencumbered, visible to all. Democracy virtually
extant will insist on becoming palpably extant.—
On all sides, are we not
driven to the conclusion that, of the things which man can do or make here
below, by far the most momentous, wonderful and worthy are the things we call
Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on them;—from the Daily Newspaper
to the sacred Hebrew BOOK, what have they not done, what are they not
doing!—For indeed, whatever be the outward form of the thing (bits of paper, as
we say, and black ink), is it not verily, at bottom, the highest act of man's
faculty that produces a Book? It is the Thought of man; the
true thaumaturgic virtue; by which man works all things whatsoever. All that he
does, and brings to pass, is the vesture of a Thought. This London City, with
all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable
traffic and tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made
into One;—a huge immeasurable Spirit of a THOUGHT, embodied in brick, in iron,
smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the
rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of
the making of that brick.—The thing we called "bits of paper with traces
of black ink," is the purest embodiment a Thought of man
can have. No wonder it is, in all ways, the activest and noblest.
All this, of the
importance and supreme importance of the Man of Letters in modern Society, and
how the Press is to such a degree superseding the Pulpit, the Senate, the Senatus
Academicus and much else, has been admitted for a good while; and
recognized often enough, in late times, with a sort of sentimental triumph and
wonderment. It seems to me, the Sentimental by and by will have to give place
to the Practical. If Men of Letters are so incalculably
influential, actually performing such work for us from age to age, and even
from day to day, then I think we may conclude that Men of Letters will not
always wander like unrecognized unregulated Ishmaelites among us! Whatsoever
thing, as I said above, has virtual unnoticed power will cast off its
wrappages, bandages, and step forth one day with palpably articulated,
universally visible power. That one man wear the clothes, and take the wages,
of a function which is done by quite another: there can be no profit in this;
this is not right, it is wrong. And yet, alas, the making of
it right,—what a business, for long times to come! Sure enough, this that we
call Organization of the Literary Guild is still a great way off, encumbered
with all manner of complexities. If you asked me what were the best possible
organization for the Men of Letters in modern society; the arrangement of
furtherance and regulation, grounded the most accurately on the actual facts of
their position and of the world's position,—I should beg to say that the
problem far exceeded my faculty! It is not one man's faculty; it is that of
many successive men turned earnestly upon it, that will bring out even an
approximate solution. What the best arrangement were, none of us could say. But
if you ask, Which is the worst? I answer: This which we now have, that Chaos
should sit umpire in it; this is the worst. To the best, or any good one, there
is yet a long way.
One remark I must not
omit, That royal or parliamentary grants of money are by no means the chief
thing wanted! To give our Men of Letters stipends, endowments and all
furtherance of cash, will do little towards the business. On the whole, one is
weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a
genuine man, it is no evil to be poor; that there ought to be Literary Men
poor,—to show whether they are genuine or not! Mendicant Orders, bodies of good
men doomed to beg, were instituted in the Christian Church; a most natural and
even necessary development of the spirit of Christianity. It was itself founded
on Poverty, on Sorrow, Contradiction, Crucifixion, every species of worldly
Distress and Degradation. We may say, that he who has not known those things,
and learned from them the priceless lessons they have to teach, has missed a
good opportunity of schooling. To beg, and go barefoot, in coarse woollen cloak
with a rope round your loins, and be despised of all the world, was no beautiful
business;—nor an honorable one in any eye, till the nobleness of those who did
so had made it honored of some!
Begging is not in our
course at the present time: but for the rest of it, who will say that a Johnson
is not perhaps the better for being poor? It is needful for him, at all rates,
to know that outward profit, that success of any kind is not the
goal he has to aim at. Pride, vanity, ill-conditioned egoism of all sorts, are
bred in his heart, as in every heart; need, above all, to be cast out of his
heart,—to be, with whatever pangs, torn out of it, cast forth from it, as a
thing worthless. Byron, born rich and noble, made out even less than Burns,
poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in that same "best possible
organization" as yet far off, Poverty may still enter as an important
element? What if our Men of Letters, men setting up to be Spiritual Heroes,
were still then, as they now are, a kind of "involuntary
monastic order;" bound still to this same ugly Poverty,—till they had
tried what was in it too, till they had learned to make it too do for them!
Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province
of it, and confine it there; and even spurn it back, when it wishes to get
farther.
Besides, were the
money-furtherances, the proper season for them, the fit assigner of them, all
settled,—how is the Burns to be recognized that merits these? He must pass
through the ordeal, and prove himself. This ordeal; this wild
welter of a chaos which is called Literary Life: this too is a kind of ordeal!
There is clear truth in the idea that a struggle from the lower classes of
society, towards the upper regions and rewards of society, must ever continue.
Strong men are born there, who ought to stand elsewhere than there. The manifold,
inextricably complex, universal struggle of these constitutes, and must
constitute, what is called the progress of society. For Men of Letters, as for
all other sorts of men. How to regulate that struggle? There is the whole
question. To leave it as it is, at the mercy of blind Chance; a whirl of
distracted atoms, one cancelling the other; one of the thousand arriving saved,
nine hundred and ninety-nine lost by the way; your royal Johnson languishing
inactive in garrets, or harnessed to the yoke of Printer Cave; your Burns dying
broken-hearted as a Gauger; your Rousseau driven into mad exasperation,
kindling French Revolutions by his paradoxes: this, as we said, is clearly
enough the worst regulation. The best, alas, is
far from us!
And yet there can be no
doubt but it is coming; advancing on us, as yet hidden in the bosom of
centuries: this is a prophecy one can risk. For so soon as men get to discern
the importance of a thing, they do infallibly set about arranging it,
facilitating, forwarding it; and rest not till, in some approximate degree,
they have accomplished that. I say, of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies,
Governing Classes at present extant in the world, there is no class comparable
for importance to that Priesthood of the Writers of Books. This is a fact which
he who runs may read,—and draw inferences from. "Literature will take care
of itself," answered Mr. Pitt, when applied to for some help for Burns.
"Yes," adds Mr. Southey, "it will take care of itself; and
of you too, if you do not look to it!"
The result to individual
Men of Letters is not the momentous one; they are but individuals, an
infinitesimal fraction of the great body; they can struggle on, and live or
else die, as they have been wont. But it deeply concerns the whole society,
whether it will set its light on high places, to walk thereby;
or trample it under foot, and scatter it in all ways of wild waste (not without
conflagration), as heretofore! Light is the one thing wanted for the world. Put
wisdom in the head of the world, the world will fight its battle victoriously,
and be the best world man can make it. I called this anomaly of a disorganic
Literary Class the heart of all other anomalies, at once product and parent;
some good arrangement for that would be as the punctum saliens of
a new vitality and just arrangement for all. Already, in some European
countries, in France, in Prussia, one traces some beginnings of an arrangement
for the Literary Class; indicating the gradual possibility of such. I believe
that it is possible; that it will have to be possible.
By far the most
interesting fact I hear about the Chinese is one on which we cannot arrive at
clearness, but which excites endless curiosity even in the dim state: this
namely, that they do attempt to make their Men of Letters their Governors! It
would be rash to say, one understood how this was done, or with what degree of
success it was done. All such things must be very unsuccessful; yet a small
degree of success is precious; the very attempt how precious! There does seem to
be, all over China, a more or less active search everywhere to discover the men
of talent that grow up in the young generation. Schools there are for every
one: a foolish sort of training, yet still a sort. The youths who distinguish
themselves in the lower school are promoted into favorable stations in the
higher, that they may still more distinguish themselves,—forward and forward:
it appears to be out of these that the Official Persons, and incipient
Governors, are taken. These are they whom they try first,
whether they can govern or not. And surely with the best hope: for they are the
men that have already shown intellect. Try them: they have not governed or
administered as yet; perhaps they cannot; but there is no doubt they have some
Understanding,—without which no man can! Neither is Understanding a tool,
as we are too apt to figure; "it is a hand which can
handle any tool." Try these men: they are of all others the best worth
trying.—Surely there is no kind of government, constitution, revolution, social
apparatus or arrangement, that I know of in this world, so promising to one's
scientific curiosity as this. The man of intellect at the top of affairs: this
is the aim of all constitutions and revolutions, if they have any aim. For the
man of true intellect, as I assert and believe always, is the noble-hearted man
withal, the true, just, humane and valiant man. Get him for governor, all is
got; fail to get him, though you had Constitutions plentiful as blackberries,
and a Parliament in every village, there is nothing yet got—!
These things look
strange, truly; and are not such as we commonly speculate upon. But we are
fallen into strange times; these things will require to be speculated upon; to
be rendered practicable, to be in some way put in practice. These, and many
others. On all hands of us, there is the announcement, audible enough, that the
old Empire of Routine has ended; that to say a thing has long been, is no
reason for its continuing to be. The things which have been are fallen into
decay, are fallen into incompetence; large masses of mankind, in every society
of our Europe, are no longer capable of living at all by the things which have
been. When millions of men can no longer by their utmost exertion gain food for
themselves, and "the third man for thirty-six weeks each year is short of
third-rate potatoes," the things which have been must decidedly prepare to
alter themselves!—I will now quit this of the organization of Men of Letters.
Alas, the evil that
pressed heaviest on those Literary Heroes of ours was not the want of
organization for Men of Letters, but a far deeper one; out of which, indeed,
this and so many other evils for the Literary Man, and for all men, had, as
from their fountain, taken rise. That our Hero as Man of Letters had to travel
without highway, companionless, through an inorganic chaos,—and to leave his
own life and faculty lying there, as a partial contribution towards pushing some
highway through it: this, had not his faculty itself been so perverted and
paralyzed, he might have put up with, might have considered to be but the
common lot of Heroes. His fatal misery was the spiritual paralysis,
so we may name it, of the Age in which his life lay; whereby his life too, do
what he might, was half paralyzed! The Eighteenth was a Sceptical Century;
in which little word there is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries. Scepticism
means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of infidelity,
insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, in few centuries that one could
specify since the world began, was a life of Heroism more difficult for a man.
That was not an age of Faith,—an age of Heroes! The very possibility of Heroism
had been, as it were, formally abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone
forever; Triviality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. The "age
of miracles" had been, or perhaps had not been; but it was not any longer.
An effete world; wherein Wonder, Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell;—in one
word, a godless world!
How mean, dwarfish are
their ways of thinking, in this time,—compared not with the Christian
Shakspeares and Miltons, but with the old Pagan Skalds, with any species of
believing men! The living TREE Igdrasil, with the melodious prophetic waving of
its world-wide boughs, deep-rooted as Hela, has died out into the clanking of a
World-MACHINE. "Tree" and "Machine:" contrast these two
things. I, for my share, declare the world to be no machine! I say that it
does not go by wheel-and-pinion "motives"
self-interests, checks, balances; that there is something far other in it than
the clank of spinning-jennies, and parliamentary majorities; and, on the whole,
that it is not a machine at all!—The old Norse Heathen had a truer motion of
God's-world than these poor Machine-Sceptics: the old Heathen Norse were sincere men.
But for these poor Sceptics there was no sincerity, no truth. Half-truth and
hearsay was called truth. Truth, for most men, meant plausibility; to be
measured by the number of votes you could get. They had lost any notion that
sincerity was possible, or of what sincerity was. How many Plausibilities
asking, with unaffected surprise and the air of offended virtue, What! am not I
sincere? Spiritual Paralysis, I say, nothing left but a Mechanical life, was
the characteristic of that century. For the common man, unless happily he
stood below his century and belonged to another prior one, it
was impossible to be a Believer, a Hero; he lay buried, unconscious, under
these baleful influences. To the strongest man, only with infinite struggle and
confusion was it possible to work himself half loose; and lead as it were, in
an enchanted, most tragical way, a spiritual death-in-life, and be a Half-Hero!
Scepticism is the name
we give to all this; as the chief symptom, as the chief origin of all this.
Concerning which so much were to be said! It would take many Discourses, not a
small fraction of one Discourse, to state what one feels about that Eighteenth
Century and its ways. As indeed this, and the like of this, which we now call Scepticism,
is precisely the black malady and life-foe, against which all teaching and
discoursing since man's life began has directed itself: the battle of Belief
against Unbelief is the never-ending battle! Neither is it in the way of
crimination that one would wish to speak. Scepticism, for that century, we must
consider as the decay of old ways of believing, the preparation afar off for
new better and wider ways,—an inevitable thing. We will not blame men for it;
we will lament their hard fate. We will understand that destruction of
old forms is not destruction of everlasting substances;
that Scepticism, as sorrowful and hateful as we see it, is not an end but a
beginning.
The other day speaking,
without prior purpose that way, of Bentham's theory of man and man's life, I
chanced to call it a more beggarly one than Mahomet's. I am bound to say, now
when it is once uttered, that such is my deliberate opinion. Not that one would
mean offence against the man Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe him.
Bentham himself, and even the creed of Bentham, seems to me comparatively
worthy of praise. It is a determinate being what all the
world, in a cowardly half-and-half manner, was tending to be. Let us have the
crisis; we shall either have death or the cure. I call this gross, steam-engine
Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith. It was a laying-down of cant; a
saying to oneself: "Well then, this world is a dead iron machine, the god
of it Gravitation and selfish Hunger; let us see what, by checking and
balancing, and good adjustment of tooth and pinion, can be made of it!"
Benthamism has something complete, manful, in such fearless committal of itself
to what it finds true; you may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its eyes put
out! It is the culminating point, and fearless ultimatum, of what lay in the
half-and-half state, pervading man's whole existence in that Eighteenth
Century. It seems to me, all deniers of Godhood, and all lip-believers of it,
are bound to be Benthamites, if they have courage and honesty. Benthamism is
an eyeless Heroism: the Human Species, like a hapless blinded
Samson grinding in the Philistine Mill, clasps convulsively the pillars of its
Mill; brings huge ruin down, but ultimately deliverance withal. Of Bentham I
meant to say no harm.
But this I do say, and
would wish all men to know and lay to heart, that he who discerns nothing but
Mechanism in the Universe has in the fatalest way missed the secret of the
Universe altogether. That all Godhood should vanish out of men's conception of
this Universe seems to me precisely the most brutal error,—I will not disparage
Heathenism by calling it a Heathen error,—that men could fall into. It is not
true; it is false at the very heart of it. A man who thinks so will think wrong about
all things in the world; this original sin will vitiate all other conclusions
he can form. One might call it the most lamentable of Delusions,—not forgetting
Witchcraft itself! Witchcraft worshipped at least a living Devil; but this
worships a dead iron Devil; no God, not even a Devil! Whatsoever is noble,
divine, inspired, drops thereby out of life. There remains everywhere in life a
despicable caput-mortuum; the mechanical hull, all soul fled out of
it. How can a man act heroically? The "Doctrine of Motives" will
teach him that it is, under more or less disguise, nothing but a wretched love
of Pleasure, fear of Pain; that Hunger, of applause, of cash, of whatsoever
victual it may be, is the ultimate fact of man's life. Atheism, in brief;—which
does indeed frightfully punish itself. The man, I say, is become spiritually a
paralytic man; this godlike Universe a dead mechanical steam-engine, all
working by motives, checks, balances, and I know not what; wherein, as in the
detestable belly of some Phalaris'-Bull of his own contriving, he the poor
Phalaris sits miserably dying!
Belief I define to be
the healthy act of a man's mind. It is a mysterious indescribable process, that
of getting to believe;—indescribable, as all vital acts are. We have our mind
given us, not that it may cavil and argue, but that it may see into something,
give us clear belief and understanding about something, whereon we are then to
proceed to act. Doubt, truly, is not itself a crime. Certainly we do not rush
out, clutch up the first thing we find, and straightway believe that! All
manner of doubt, inquiry, [Gr.] skepsis as it is named, about
all manner of objects, dwells in every reasonable mind. It is the mystic
working of the mind, on the object it is getting to know and
believe. Belief comes out of all this, above ground, like the tree from its
hidden roots. But now if, even on common things, we require that a
man keep his doubts silent, and not babble of them till they in
some measure become affirmations or denials; how much more in regard to the
highest things, impossible to speak of in words at all! That a man parade his
doubt, and get to imagine that debating and logic (which means at best only the
manner of telling us your thought, your belief or disbelief,
about a thing) is the triumph and true work of what intellect he has: alas,
this is as if you should overturn the tree, and instead of
green boughs, leaves and fruits, show us ugly taloned roots turned up into the
air,—and no growth, only death and misery going on!
For the Scepticism, as I
said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease
of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and
arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to
believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other
organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get. We call those ages in
which he gets so low the mournfulest, sickest and meanest of all ages. The
world's heart is palsied, sick: how can any limb of it be whole? Genuine Acting
ceases in all departments of the world's work; dexterous Similitude of Acting
begins. The world's wages are pocketed, the world's work is not done. Heroes
have gone out; Quacks have come in. Accordingly, what Century, since the end of
the Roman world, which also was a time of scepticism, simulacra and universal
decadence, so abounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth? Consider them, with their
tumid sentimental vaporing about virtue, benevolence,—the wretched Quack-squadron,
Cagliostro at the head of them! Few men were without quackery; they had got to
consider it a necessary ingredient and amalgam for truth. Chatham, our brave
Chatham himself, comes down to the House, all wrapt and bandaged; he "has
crawled out in great bodily suffering," and so on;—forgets, says
Walpole, that he is acting the sick man; in the fire of debate, snatches his
arm from the sling, and oratorically swings and brandishes it! Chatham himself
lives the strangest mimetic life, half-hero, half-quack, all along. For indeed
the world is full of dupes; and you have to gain the world's suffrage!
How the duties of the world will be done in that case, what quantities of
error, which means failure, which means sorrow and misery, to some and to many,
will gradually accumulate in all provinces of the world's business, we need not
compute.
It seems to me, you lay
your finger here on the heart of the world's maladies, when you call it a
Sceptical World. An insincere world; a godless untruth of a world! It is out of
this, as I consider, that the whole tribe of social pestilences, French
Revolutions, Chartisms, and what not, have derived their being,—their chief
necessity to be. This must alter. Till this alter, nothing can beneficially
alter. My one hope of the world, my inexpugnable consolation in looking at the
miseries of the world, is that this is altering. Here and there one does now
find a man who knows, as of old, that this world is a Truth, and no
Plausibility and Falsity; that he himself is alive, not dead or paralytic; and
that the world is alive, instinct with Godhood, beautiful and awful, even as in
the beginning of days! One man once knowing this, many men, all men, must by
and by come to know it. It lies there clear, for whosoever will take the spectacles off
his eyes and honestly look, to know! For such a man the Unbelieving Century,
with its unblessed Products, is already past; a new century is already come.
The old unblessed Products and Performances, as solid as they look, are
Phantasms, preparing speedily to vanish. To this and the other noisy, very
great-looking Simulacrum with the whole world huzzaing at its heels, he can
say, composedly stepping aside: Thou art not true; thou art not
extant, only semblant; go thy way!—Yes, hollow Formulism, gross Benthamism, and
other unheroic atheistic Insincerity is visibly and even rapidly declining. An
unbelieving Eighteenth Century is but an exception,—such as now and then
occurs. I prophesy that the world will once more become sincere; a
believing world; with many Heroes in it, a heroic world! It
will then be a victorious world; never till then.
Or indeed what of the
world and its victories? Men speak too much about the world. Each one of us
here, let the world go how it will, and be victorious or not victorious, has he
not a Life of his own to lead? One Life; a little gleam of Time between two
Eternities; no second chance to us forevermore! It were well for us to live not
as fools and simulacra, but as wise and realities. The world's being saved will
not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. We should look to
ourselves: there is great merit here in the "duty of staying at
home"! And, on the whole, to say truth, I never heard of
"world's" being "saved" in any other way. That mania of
saving worlds is itself a piece of the Eighteenth Century with its windy
sentimentalism. Let us not follow it too far. For the saving of the world I
will trust confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a little to my own
saving, which I am more competent to!—In brief, for the world's sake, and for
our own, we will rejoice greatly that Scepticism, Insincerity, Mechanical
Atheism, with all their poison-dews, are going, and as good as gone.—
Now it was under such
conditions, in those times of Johnson, that our Men of Letters had to live.
Times in which there was properly no truth in life. Old truths had fallen nigh
dumb; the new lay yet hidden, not trying to speak. That Man's Life here below
was a Sincerity and Fact, and would forever continue such, no new intimation,
in that dusk of the world, had yet dawned. No intimation; not even any French
Revolution,—which we define to be a Truth once more, though a Truth clad in
hell-fire! How different was the Luther's pilgrimage, with its assured goal,
from the Johnson's, girt with mere traditions, suppositions, grown now
incredible, unintelligible! Mahomet's Formulas were of "wood waxed and
oiled," and could be burnt out of one's way: poor Johnson's were far more
difficult to burn.—The strong man will ever find work, which means
difficulty, pain, to the full measure of his strength. But to make out a
victory, in those circumstances of our poor Hero as Man of Letters, was perhaps
more difficult than in any. Not obstruction, disorganization, Bookseller
Osborne and Fourpence-halfpenny a day; not this alone; but the light of his own
soul was taken from him. No landmark on the Earth; and, alas, what is that to
having no loadstar in the Heaven! We need not wonder that none of those Three
men rose to victory. That they fought truly is the highest praise. With a
mournful sympathy we will contemplate, if not three living victorious Heroes,
as I said, the Tombs of three fallen Heroes! They fell for us too; making a way
for us. There are the mountains which they hurled abroad in their confused War of
the Giants; under which, their strength and life spent, they now lie buried.
I have already written
of these three Literary Heroes, expressly or incidentally; what I suppose is
known to most of you; what need not be spoken or written a second time. They
concern us here as the singular Prophets of that singular age;
for such they virtually were; and the aspect they and their world exhibit,
under this point of view, might lead us into reflections enough! I call them,
all three, Genuine Men more or less; faithfully, for most part unconsciously,
struggling to be genuine, and plant themselves on the everlasting truth of
things. This to a degree that eminently distinguishes them from the poor
artificial mass of their contemporaries; and renders them worthy to be
considered as Speakers, in some measure, of the everlasting truth, as Prophets
in that age of theirs. By Nature herself a noble necessity was laid on them to
be so. They were men of such magnitude that they could not live on
unrealities,—clouds, froth and all inanity gave way under them: there was no
footing for them but on firm earth; no rest or regular motion for them, if they
got not footing there. To a certain extent, they were Sons of Nature once more
in an age of Artifice; once more, Original Men.
As for Johnson, I have
always considered him to be, by nature, one of our great English souls. A
strong and noble man; so much left undeveloped in him to the last: in a
kindlier element what might he not have been,—Poet, Priest, sovereign Ruler! On
the whole, a man must not complain of his "element," of his
"time," or the like; it is thriftless work doing so. His time is bad:
well then, he is there to make it better!—Johnson's youth was poor, isolated,
hopeless, very miserable. Indeed, it does not seem possible that, in any the
favorablest outward circumstances, Johnson's life could have been other than a
painful one. The world might have had more of profitable work out
of him, or less; but his effort against the world's work could
never have been a light one. Nature, in return for his nobleness, had said to
him, Live in an element of diseased sorrow. Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the
nobleness were intimately and even inseparably connected with each other. At
all events, poor Johnson had to go about girt with continual hypochondria,
physical and spiritual pain. Like a Hercules with the burning Nessus'-shirt on
him, which shoots in on him dull incurable misery: the Nessus'-shirt not to be
stript off, which is his own natural skin! In this manner he had
to live. Figure him there, with his scrofulous diseases, with his great greedy
heart, and unspeakable chaos of thoughts; stalking mournful as a stranger in
this Earth; eagerly devouring what spiritual thing he could come at:
school-languages and other merely grammatical stuff, if there were nothing
better! The largest soul that was in all England; and provision made for it of
"fourpence-halfpenny a day." Yet a giant invincible soul; a true
man's. One remembers always that story of the shoes at Oxford: the rough, seamy-faced,
rawboned College Servitor stalking about, in winter-season, with his shoes worn
out; how the charitable Gentleman Commoner secretly places a new pair at his
door; and the rawboned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with his
dim eyes, with what thoughts,—pitches them out of window! Wet feet, mud, frost,
hunger or what you will; but not beggary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude
stubborn self-help here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery
and want, yet of nobleness and manfulness withal. It is a type of the man's
life, this pitching away of the shoes. An original man;—not a second-hand,
borrowing or begging man. Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such
shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on
that;—on the reality and substance which Nature gives us, not on
the semblance, on the thing she has given another than us—!
And yet with all this
rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there ever soul more tenderly
affectionate, loyally submissive to what was really higher than he? Great souls
are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them; only small mean
souls are otherwise. I could not find a better proof of what I said the other
day, That the sincere man was by nature the obedient man; that only in a World
of Heroes was there loyal Obedience to the Heroic. The essence of originality is
not that it be new: Johnson believed altogether in the old; he
found the old opinions credible for him, fit for him; and in a right heroic manner
lived under them. He is well worth study in regard to that. For we are to say
that Johnson was far other than a mere man of words and formulas; he was a man
of truths and facts. He stood by the old formulas; the happier was it for him
that he could so stand: but in all formulas that he could
stand by, there needed to be a most genuine substance. Very curious how, in
that poor Paper-age, so barren, artificial, thick-quilted with Pedantries,
Hearsays, the great Fact of this Universe glared in, forever wonderful,
indubitable, unspeakable, divine-infernal, upon this man too! How he harmonized
his Formulas with it, how he managed at all under such circumstances: that is a
thing worth seeing. A thing "to be looked at with reverence, with pity,
with awe." That Church of St. Clement Danes, where Johnson still worshipped in
the era of Voltaire, is to me a venerable place.
It was in virtue of
his sincerity, of his speaking still in some sort from the heart of
Nature, though in the current artificial dialect, that Johnson was a Prophet.
Are not all dialects "artificial"? Artificial things are not all
false;—nay every true Product of Nature will infallibly shape itself;
we may say all artificial things are, at the starting of them, true.
What we call "Formulas" are not in their origin bad; they are
indispensably good. Formula is method, habitude; found wherever man
is found. Formulas fashion themselves as Paths do, as beaten Highways, leading
toward some sacred or high object, whither many men are bent. Consider it. One
man, full of heartfelt earnest impulse, finds out a way of doing somewhat,—were
it of uttering his soul's reverence for the Highest, were it but of fitly
saluting his fellow-man. An inventor was needed to do that, a poet;
he has articulated the dim-struggling thought that dwelt in his own and many
hearts. This is his way of doing that; these are his footsteps, the beginning
of a "Path." And now see: the second men travels naturally in the
footsteps of his foregoer, it is the easiest method. In the
footsteps of his foregoer; yet with improvements, with changes where such seem
good; at all events with enlargements, the Path ever widening itself
as more travel it;—till at last there is a broad Highway whereon the whole
world may travel and drive. While there remains a City or Shrine, or any
Reality to drive to, at the farther end, the Highway shall be right welcome!
When the City is gone, we will forsake the Highway. In this manner all
Institutions, Practices, Regulated Things in the world have come into existence,
and gone out of existence. Formulas all begin by being full of
substance; you may call them the skin, the articulation into shape,
into limbs and skin, of a substance that is already there: they had
not been there otherwise. Idols, as we said, are not idolatrous till they
become doubtful, empty for the worshipper's heart. Much as we talk against
Formulas, I hope no one of us is ignorant withal of the high significance
of true Formulas; that they were, and will ever be, the
indispensablest furniture of our habitation in this world.—
Mark, too, how little
Johnson boasts of his "sincerity." He has no suspicion of his being
particularly sincere,—of his being particularly anything! A hard-struggling,
weary-hearted man, or "scholar" as he calls himself, trying hard to
get some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live—without
stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in him. He does not "engrave Truth on
his watch-seal;" no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and lives
by it. Thus it ever is. Think of it once more. The man whom Nature has
appointed to do great things is, first of all, furnished with that openness to
Nature which renders him incapable of being insincere! To his
large, open, deep-feeling heart Nature is a Fact: all hearsay is hearsay; the
unspeakable greatness of this Mystery of Life, let him acknowledge it or not,
nay even though he seem to forget it or deny it, is ever present to him,—fearful
and wonderful, on this hand and on that. He has a basis of sincerity;
unrecognized, because never questioned or capable of question. Mirabeau,
Mahomet, Cromwell, Napoleon: all the Great Men I ever heard of have this as the
primary material of them. Innumerable commonplace men are debating, are talking
everywhere their commonplace doctrines, which they have learned by logic, by
rote, at second-hand: to that kind of man all this is still nothing. He must
have truth; truth which he feels to be true. How shall he
stand otherwise? His whole soul, at all moments, in all ways, tells him that there
is no standing. He is under the noble necessity of being true. Johnson's way of
thinking about this world is not mine, any more than Mahomet's was: but I
recognize the everlasting element of heart-sincerity in both;
and see with pleasure how neither of them remains ineffectual. Neither of them
is as chaff sown; in both of them is something which the
seedfield will grow.
Johnson was a Prophet to
his people; preached a Gospel to them,—as all like him always do. The highest
Gospel he preached we may describe as a kind of Moral Prudence: "in a
world where much is to be done, and little is to be known," see how you
will do it! A thing well worth preaching. "A world where
much is to be done, and little is to be known:" do not sink yourselves in
boundless bottomless abysses of Doubt, of wretched god-forgetting Unbelief;—you
were miserable then, powerless, mad: how could you do or work
at all? Such Gospel Johnson preached and taught;—coupled, theoretically and
practically, with this other great Gospel, "Clear your mind of Cant!"
Have no trade with Cant: stand on the cold mud in the frosty weather, but let
it be in your own real torn shoes: "that will be better
for you," as Mahomet says! I call this, I call these two things joined
together, a great Gospel, the greatest perhaps that was possible at that
time.
Johnson's Writings,
which once had such currency and celebrity, are now as it were disowned by the
young generation. It is not wonderful; Johnson's opinions are fast becoming
obsolete: but his style of thinking and of living, we may hope, will never
become obsolete. I find in Johnson's Books the indisputablest traces of a great
intellect and great heart;—ever welcome, under what obstructions and
perversions soever. They are sincere words, those of his; he
means things by them. A wondrous buckram style,—the best he could get to then;
a measured grandiloquence, stepping or rather stalking along in a very solemn
way, grown obsolete now; sometimes a tumid size of phraseology
not in proportion to the contents of it: all this you will put up with. For the
phraseology, tumid or not, has alwayssomething within it. So many
beautiful styles and books, with nothing in them;—a man is a
malefactor to the world who writes such! They are the
avoidable kind!—Had Johnson left nothing but hisDictionary, one might
have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. Looking to its clearness of
definition, its general solidity, honesty, insight and successful method, it
may be called the best of all Dictionaries. There is in it a kind of
architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great solid square-built
edifice, finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a true Builder did
it.
One word, in spite of
our haste, must be granted to poor Bozzy. He passes for a mean, inflated,
gluttonous creature; and was so in many senses. Yet the fact of his reverence
for Johnson will ever remain noteworthy. The foolish conceited Scotch Laird,
the most conceited man of his time, approaching in such awe-struck attitude the
great dusty irascible Pedagogue in his mean garret there: it is a genuine
reverence for Excellence; a worship for Heroes, at a time when
neither Heroes nor worship were surmised to exist. Heroes, it would seem, exist
always, and a certain worship of them! We will also take the liberty to deny
altogether that of the witty Frenchman, that no man is a Hero to his
valet-de-chambre. Or if so, it is not the Hero's blame, but the Valet's: that
his soul, namely, is a meanvalet-soul! He expects his Hero to advance in
royal stage-trappings, with measured step, trains borne behind him, trumpets
sounding before him. It should stand rather, No man can be a Grand-Monarque to
his valet-de-chambre. Strip your Louis Quatorze of his king-gear, and
there is left nothing but a poor forked radish with a head
fantastically carved;—admirable to no valet. The Valet does not know a Hero
when he sees him! Alas, no: it requires a kind of Hero to do
that;—and one of the world's wants, in this as in other
senses, is for most part want of such.
On the whole, shall we
not say, that Boswell's admiration was well bestowed; that he could have found
no soul in all England so worthy of bending down before? Shall we not say, of
this great mournful Johnson too, that he guided his difficult confused
existence wisely; led it well, like a right valiant man? That waste
chaos of Authorship by trade; that waste chaos of Scepticism in religion and
politics, in life-theory and life-practice; in his poverty, in his dust and
dimness, with the sick body and the rusty coat: he made it do for him, like a
brave man. Not wholly without a loadstar in the Eternal; he had still a
loadstar, as the brave all need to have: with his eye set on that, he would
change his course for nothing in these confused vortices of the lower sea of
Time. "To the Spirit of Lies, bearing death and hunger, he would in nowise
strike his flag." Brave old Samuel: ultimus Romanorum!
Of Rousseau and his
Heroism I cannot say so much. He is not what I call a strong man. A morbid,
excitable, spasmodic man; at best, intense rather than strong. He had not
"the talent of Silence," an invaluable talent; which few Frenchmen,
or indeed men of any sort in these times, excel in! The suffering man ought
really "to consume his own smoke;" there is no good in emitting smoke till
you have made it into fire,—which, in the metaphorical sense too,
all smoke is capable of becoming! Rousseau has not depth or width, not calm
force for difficulty; the first characteristic of true greatness. A fundamental
mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who takes
convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under
the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man. We need forever,
especially in these loud-shrieking days, to remind ourselves of that. A man who
cannot hold his peace, till the time come for speaking and acting,
is no right man.
Poor Rousseau's face is
to me expressive of him. A high but narrow contracted intensity in it: bony
brows; deep, strait-set eyes, in which there is something
bewildered-looking,—bewildered, peering with lynx-eagerness. A face full of
misery, even ignoble misery, and also of the antagonism against that; something
mean, plebeian there, redeemed only by intensity: the face of what
is called a Fanatic,—a sadly contracted Hero! We name him here
because, with all his drawbacks, and they are many, he has the first and chief
characteristic of a Hero: he is heartily in earnest. In earnest, if
ever man was; as none of these French Philosophers were. Nay, one would say, of
an earnestness too great for his otherwise sensitive, rather feeble nature; and
which indeed in the end drove him into the strangest incoherences, almost
delirations. There had come, at last, to be a kind of madness in him: his
Ideas possessed him like demons; hurried him so about, drove
him over steep places—!
The fault and misery of
Rousseau was what we easily name by a single word, Egoism; which is
indeed the source and summary of all faults and miseries whatsoever. He had not
perfected himself into victory over mere Desire; a mean Hunger, in many sorts,
was still the motive principle of him. I am afraid he was a very vain man;
hungry for the praises of men. You remember Genlis's experience of him. She
took Jean Jacques to the Theatre; he bargaining for a strict
incognito,—"He would not be seen there for the world!" The curtain
did happen nevertheless to be drawn aside: the Pit recognized Jean Jacques, but
took no great notice of him! He expressed the bitterest indignation; gloomed
all evening, spake no other than surly words. The glib Countess remained
entirely convinced that his anger was not at being seen, but at not being
applauded when seen. How the whole nature of the man is poisoned; nothing but
suspicion, self-isolation, fierce moody ways! He could not live with anybody. A
man of some rank from the country, who visited him often, and used to sit with
him, expressing all reverence and affection for him, comes one day; finds Jean
Jacques full of the sourest unintelligible humor. "Monsieur," said
Jean Jacques, with flaming eyes, "I know why you come here. You come to
see what a poor life I lead; how little is in my poor pot that is boiling
there. Well, look into the pot! There is half a pound of meat, one carrot and
three onions; that is all: go and tell the whole world that, if you like,
Monsieur!"—A man of this sort was far gone. The whole world got itself
supplied with anecdotes, for light laughter, for a certain theatrical interest,
from these perversions and contortions of poor Jean Jacques. Alas, to him they
were not laughing or theatrical; too real to him! The contortions of a dying
gladiator: the crowded amphitheatre looks on with entertainment; but the
gladiator is in agonies and dying.
And yet this Rousseau,
as we say, with his passionate appeals to Mothers, with his contrat-social,
with his celebrations of Nature, even of savage life in Nature, did once more
touch upon Reality, struggle towards Reality; was doing the function of a
Prophet to his Time. As he could, and as the Time could! Strangely through all
that defacement, degradation and almost madness, there is in the inmost heart
of poor Rousseau a spark of real heavenly fire. Once more, out of the element
of that withered mocking Philosophism, Scepticism and Persiflage, there has
arisen in this man the ineradicable feeling and knowledge that this Life of
ours is true: not a Scepticism, Theorem, or Persiflage, but a Fact, an awful
Reality. Nature had made that revelation to him; had ordered him to speak it
out. He got it spoken out; if not well and clearly, then ill and dimly,—as
clearly as he could. Nay what are all errors and perversities of his, even
those stealings of ribbons, aimless confused miseries and vagabondisms, if we
will interpret them kindly, but the blinkard dazzlement and staggerings to and
fro of a man sent on an errand he is too weak for, by a path he cannot yet
find? Men are led by strange ways. One should have tolerance for a man, hope of
him; leave him to try yet what he will do. While life lasts, hope lasts for
every man.
Of Rousseau's literary
talents, greatly celebrated still among his countrymen, I do not say much. His
Books, like himself, are what I call unhealthy; not the good sort of Books.
There is a sensuality in Rousseau. Combined with such an intellectual gift as
his, it makes pictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness: but they are not
genuinely poetical. Not white sunlight: something operatic; a kind
of rose-pink, artificial bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it is
universal, among the French since his time. Madame de Stael has something of
it; St. Pierre; and down onwards to the present astonishing convulsionary
"Literature of Desperation," it is everywhere abundant. That
same rose-pink is not the right hue. Look at a Shakspeare, at
a Goethe, even at a Walter Scott! He who has once seen into this, has seen the
difference of the True from the Sham-True, and will discriminate them ever
afterwards.
We had to observe in
Johnson how much good a Prophet, under all disadvantages and disorganizations,
can accomplish for the world. In Rousseau we are called to look rather at the
fearful amount of evil which, under such disorganization, may accompany the
good. Historically it is a most pregnant spectacle, that of Rousseau. Banished
into Paris garrets, in the gloomy company of his own Thoughts and Necessities
there; driven from post to pillar; fretted, exasperated till the heart of him
went mad, he had grown to feel deeply that the world was not his friend nor the
world's law. It was expedient, if any way possible, that such a man
should not have been set in flat hostility with the world. He
could be cooped into garrets, laughed at as a maniac, left to starve like a
wild beast in his cage;—but he could not be hindered from setting the world on
fire. The French Revolution found its Evangelist in Rousseau. His
semi-delirious speculations on the miseries of civilized life, the
preferability of the savage to the civilized, and such like, helped well to
produce a whole delirium in France generally. True, you may well ask, What
could the world, the governors of the world, do with such a man? Difficult to
say what the governors of the world could do with him! What he could do with
them is unhappily clear enough,—guillotine a great many of them!
Enough now of Rousseau.
It was a curious
phenomenon, in the withered, unbelieving second-hand Eighteenth Century, that
of a Hero starting up, among the artificial pasteboard figures and productions,
in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like a little well in the rocky desert places,—like
a sudden splendor of Heaven in the artificial Vauxhall! People knew not what to
make of it. They took it for a piece of the Vauxhall fire-work; alas, it let itself
be so taken, though struggling half-blindly, as in bitterness of death, against
that! Perhaps no man had such a false reception from his fellow-men. Once more
a very wasteful life-drama was enacted under the sun.
The tragedy of Burns's
life is known to all of you. Surely we may say, if discrepancy between place
held and place merited constitute perverseness of lot for a man, no lot could
be more perverse then Burns's. Among those second-hand acting-figures, mimes for
most part, of the Eighteenth Century, once more a giant Original Man; one of
those men who reach down to the perennial Deeps, who take rank with the Heroic
among men: and he was born in a poor Ayrshire hut. The largest soul of all the
British lands came among us in the shape of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant.
His Father, a poor
toiling man, tried various things; did not succeed in any; was involved in
continual difficulties. The Steward, Factor as the Scotch call him, used to
send letters and threatenings, Burns says, "which threw us all into
tears." The brave, hard-toiling, hard-suffering Father, his brave heroine
of a wife; and those children, of whom Robert was one! In this Earth, so wide
otherwise, no shelter for them. The letters "threw us all into
tears:" figure it. The brave Father, I say always;—a silent Hero
and Poet; without whom the son had never been a speaking one! Burns's
Schoolmaster came afterwards to London, learnt what good society was; but
declares that in no meeting of men did he ever enjoy better discourse than at
the hearth of this peasant. And his poor "seven acres of
nursery-ground,"—not that, nor the miserable patch of clay-farm, nor
anything he tried to get a living by, would prosper with him; he had a sore
unequal battle all his days. But he stood to it valiantly; a wise, faithful,
unconquerable man;—swallowing down how many sore sufferings daily into silence;
fighting like an unseen Hero,—nobody publishing newspaper paragraphs about his
nobleness; voting pieces of plate to him! However, he was not lost; nothing is
lost. Robert is there the outcome of him,—and indeed of many generations of
such as him.
This Burns appeared
under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor, born only to hard manual toil;
and writing, when it came to that, in a rustic special dialect, known only to a
small province of the country he lived in. Had he written, even what he did
write, in the general language of England, I doubt not he had already become
universally recognized as being, or capable to be, one of our greatest men.
That he should have tempted so many to penetrate through the rough husk of that
dialect of his, is proof that there lay something far from common within it. He
has gained a certain recognition, and is continuing to do so over all quarters
of our wide Saxon world: wheresoever a Saxon dialect is spoken, it begins to be
understood, by personal inspection of this and the other, that one of the most
considerable Saxon men of the Eighteenth Century was an Ayrshire Peasant named
Robert Burns. Yes, I will say, here too was a piece of the right Saxon stuff:
strong as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world;—rock, yet with
wells of living softness in it! A wild impetuous whirlwind of passion and
faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly melody dwelling
in the heart of it. A noble rough genuineness; homely, rustic, honest; true
simplicity of strength; with its lightning-fire, with its soft dewy pity;—like
the old Norse Thor, the Peasant-god!
Burns's Brother Gilbert,
a man of much sense and worth, has told me that Robert, in his young days, in
spite of their hardship, was usually the gayest of speech; a fellow of infinite
frolic, laughter, sense and heart; far pleasanter to hear there, stript cutting
peats in the bog, or such like, than he ever afterwards knew him. I can well
believe it. This basis of mirth ("fond gaillard," as old
Marquis Mirabeau calls it), a primal element of sunshine and joyfulness,
coupled with his other deep and earnest qualities, is one of the most
attractive characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope dwells in him; spite
of his tragical history, he is not a mourning man. He shakes his sorrows
gallantly aside; bounds forth victorious over them. It is as the lion shaking
"dew-drops from his mane;" as the swift-bounding horse, thatlaughs at
the shaking of the spear.—But indeed, Hope, Mirth, of the sort like Burns's,
are they not the outcome properly of warm generous affection,—such as is the
beginning of all to every man?
You would think it
strange if I called Burns the most gifted British soul we had in all that
century of his: and yet I believe the day is coming when there will be little
danger in saying so. His writings, all that he did under such
obstructions, are only a poor fragment of him. Professor Stewart remarked very
justly, what indeed is true of all Poets good for much, that his poetry was not
any particular faculty; but the general result of a naturally vigorous original
mind expressing itself in that way. Burns's gifts, expressed in conversation,
are the theme of all that ever heard him. All kinds of gifts: from the
gracefulest utterances of courtesy, to the highest fire of passionate speech;
loud floods of mirth, soft wailings of affection, laconic emphasis, clear
piercing insight; all was in him. Witty duchesses celebrate him as a man whose
speech "led them off their feet." This is beautiful: but still more
beautiful that which Mr. Lockhart has recorded, which I have more than once
alluded to, How the waiters and ostlers at inns would get out of bed, and come
crowding to hear this man speak! Waiters and ostlers:—they too were men, and
here was a man! I have heard much about his speech; but one of the best things
I ever heard of it was, last year, from a venerable gentleman long familiar
with him. That it was speech distinguished by always having something
in it. "He spoke rather little than much," this old man told me;
"sat rather silent in those early days, as in the company of persons above
him; and always when he did speak, it was to throw new light on the
matter." I know not why any one should ever speak otherwise!—But if we
look at his general force of soul, his healthy robustness every
way, the rugged downrightness, penetration, generous valor and manfulness that
was in him,—where shall we readily find a better-gifted man?
Among the great men of
the Eighteenth Century, I sometimes feel as if Burns might be found to resemble
Mirabeau more than any other. They differ widely in vesture; yet look at them
intrinsically. There is the same burly thick-necked strength of body as of
soul;—built, in both cases, on what the old Marquis calls a fond
gaillard. By nature, by course of breeding, indeed by nation, Mirabeau has
much more of bluster; a noisy, forward, unresting man. But the characteristic
of Mirabeau too is veracity and sense, power of true insight,
superiority of vision. The thing that he says is worth remembering. It is a
flash of insight into some object or other: so do both these men speak. The
same raging passions; capable too in both of manifesting themselves as the
tenderest noble affections. Wit; wild laughter, energy, directness, sincerity:
these were in both. The types of the two men are not dissimilar. Burns too
could have governed, debated in National Assemblies; politicized, as few could.
Alas, the courage which had to exhibit itself in capture of smuggling schooners
in the Solway Frith; in keeping silence over so much, where no
good speech, but only inarticulate rage was possible: this might have bellowed
forth Ushers de Breze and the like; and made itself visible to all men, in
managing of kingdoms, in ruling of great ever-memorable epochs! But they said
to him reprovingly, his Official Superiors said, and wrote: "You are to
work, not think." Of your thinking-faculty, the greatest in
this land, we have no need; you are to gauge beer there; for that only are you
wanted. Very notable;—and worth mentioning, though we know what is to be said
and answered! As if Thought, Power of Thinking, were not, at all times, in all
places and situations of the world, precisely the thing that was wanted. The
fatal man, is he not always the unthinking man, the man who cannot think
and see; but only grope, and hallucinate, and missee
the nature of the thing he works with? He mis-sees it, mistakesit as we
say; takes it for one thing, and it is another thing,—and
leaves him standing like a Futility there! He is the fatal man; unutterably
fatal, put in the high places of men.—"Why complain of this?" say
some: "Strength is mournfully denied its arena; that was true from of
old." Doubtless; and the worse for the arena, answer I! Complaining profits
little; stating of the truth may profit. That a Europe, with its French
Revolution just breaking out, finds no need of a Burns except for gauging
beer,—is a thing I, for one, cannot rejoice at—!
Once more we have to say
here, that the chief quality of Burns is the sincerity of him.
So in his Poetry, so in his Life. The song he sings is not of fantasticalities;
it is of a thing felt, really there; the prime merit of this, as of all in him,
and of his Life generally, is truth. The Life of Burns is what we may call a
great tragic sincerity. A sort of savage sincerity,—not cruel, far from that;
but wild, wrestling naked with the truth of things. In that sense, there is
something of the savage in all great men.
Hero-worship,—Odin,
Burns? Well; these Men of Letters too were not without a kind of Hero-worship:
but what a strange condition has that got into now! The waiters and ostlers of
Scotch inns, prying about the door, eager to catch any word that fell from
Burns, were doing unconscious reverence to the Heroic. Johnson had his Boswell
for worshipper. Rousseau had worshippers enough; princes calling on him in his
mean garret; the great, the beautiful doing reverence to the poor moon-struck
man. For himself a most portentous contradiction; the two ends of his life not
to be brought into harmony. He sits at the tables of grandees; and has to copy
music for his own living. He cannot even get his music copied: "By dint of
dining out," says he, "I run the risk of dying by starvation at
home." For his worshippers too a most questionable thing! If doing
Hero-worship well or badly be the test of vital well-being or ill-being to a
generation, can we say that these generations are very
first-rate?—And yet our heroic Men of Letters do teach, govern, are kings,
priests, or what you like to call them; intrinsically there is no preventing it
by any means whatever. The world has to obey him who thinks and sees in the
world. The world can alter the manner of that; can either have it as blessed
continuous summer sunshine, or as unblessed black thunder and tornado,—with
unspeakable difference of profit for the world! The manner of it is very
alterable; the matter and fact of it is not alterable by any power under the
sky. Light; or, failing that, lightning: the world can take its choice. Not
whether we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, or what we call him; but whether
we believe the word he tells us: there it all lies. If it be a true word, we
shall have to believe it; believing it, we shall have to do it. Whatname or
welcome we give him or it, is a point that concerns ourselves mainly. It,
the new Truth, new deeper revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verily
of the nature of a message from on high; and must and will have itself obeyed.—
My last remark is on
that notablest phasis of Burns's history,—his visit to Edinburgh. Often it
seems to me as if his demeanor there were the highest proof he gave of what a
fund of worth and genuine manhood was in him. If we think of it, few heavier
burdens could be laid on the strength of a man. So sudden; all common Lionism.
which ruins innumerable men, was as nothing to this. It is as if Napoleon had
been made a King of, not gradually, but at once from the Artillery Lieutenancy
in the Regiment La Fere. Burns, still only in his twenty-seventh year, is no
longer even a ploughman; he is flying to the West Indies to escape disgrace and
a jail. This month he is a ruined peasant, his wages seven pounds a year, and
these gone from him: next month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing
down jewelled Duchesses to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes! Adversity is
sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are
a hundred that will stand adversity. I admire much the way in which Burns met
all this. Perhaps no man one could point out, was ever so sorely tried, and so
little forgot himself. Tranquil, unastonished; not abashed, not inflated,
neither awkwardness nor affectation: he feels that he there is
the man Robert Burns; that the "rank is but the guinea-stamp;" that
the celebrity is but the candle-light, which will show what man,
not in the least make him a better or other man! Alas, it may readily, unless
he look to it, make him a worse man; a wretched inflated
wind-bag,—inflated till he burst, and become a dead lion;
for whom, as some one has said, "there is no resurrection of the
body;" worse than a living dog!—Burns is admirable here.
And yet, alas, as I have
observed elsewhere, these Lion-hunters were the ruin and death of Burns. It was
they that rendered it impossible for him to live! They gathered round him in
his Farm; hindered his industry; no place was remote enough from them. He could
not get his Lionism forgotten, honestly as he was disposed to do so. He falls
into discontents, into miseries, faults; the world getting ever more desolate
for him; health, character, peace of mind, all gone;—solitary enough now. It is
tragical to think of! These men came but to see him; it was
out of no sympathy with him, nor no hatred to him. They came to get a little
amusement; they got their amusement;—and the Hero's life went for it!
Richter says, in the
Island of Sumatra there is a kind of "Light-chafers," large
Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits, and illuminate the ways with at
night. Persons of condition can thus travel with a pleasant radiance, which
they much admire. Great honor to the Fire-flies! But—!