Plutarch is perhaps the most eminent example of how strong a hold simple good humor and good sense lay upon the affections of mankind. Not a man of genius or heroism himself, his many points of sympathy with both make him an admirable conductor of them in that less condensed form which is more wholesome and acceptable to the average mind. Of no man can it be more truly said that, if not a rose himself, he had lived all his days in the rose's neighborhood. Such is the delightful equableness of his temperament and his singular talent for reminiscence, so far is he always from undue heat while still susceptible of so much enthusiasm as shall not disturb digestion, that he might seem to have been born middle-aged. Few men have so amicably combined the love of a good dinner and of the higher morality. He seems to have comfortably solved the problem of having your cake and eating it, at which the ascetic interpreters of Christianity teach us to despair. He serves us up his worldly wisdom in a sauce of Plato, and gives a kind of sensuous relish to the disembodied satisfactions of immortality. He is a better Christian than many an orthodox divine. If he do not, like Sir Thomas Browne, love to lose himself in an O, altitudo! yet the sky-piercing peaks and snowy solitudes of ethical speculation loom always on the horizon about the sheltered dwelling of his mind, and he continually gets up from his books to rest and refresh his eyes upon them. He seldom invites us to alpine-climbing, and when he does, it is to some warm nook like the Jardin on Mont Blanc, a parenthesis of homely summer nestled amid the sublime nakedness of snow. If he glance upward at becoming intervals to the "primal duties," he turns back with a settled predilection to the "sympathies that are nestled at the feet like flowers." But it is within his villa that we love to be admitted to him and to enjoy that garrulity which we forgive more readily in the mother of the muses than in any of her daughters, unless it be Clio, who is most like her. If we are in the library, he is reminded of this or that passage in a favorite author, and, going to the shelves, takes down the volume to read it aloud with decorous emphasis. If we are in the atrium (where we like him best) he has an anecdote to tell of all the great Greeks and Romans whose busts or statues are ranged about us, and who for the first time soften from their marble alienation and become human. It is this that makes him so amiable a moralist and brings his lessons home to us. He does not preach up any remote and inaccessible virtue, but makes all his lessons of magnanimity, self-devotion, patriotism seem neighborly and practicable to us by an example which associates them with our common humanity. His higher teaching is theosophy with no taint of theology. He is a pagan Tillotson disencumbered of the archiepiscopal robes, a practical Christian unbewildered with doctrinal punctilios. This is evidently what commended him as a philosopher to Montaigne, as may be inferred from some hints which follow immediately upon the comparison between Seneca and Plutarch in the essay on "Physiognomy." After speaking of some "escripts encores plus révérez," he asks, in his idiomatic way, "à, quoy faire nous allons nous gendarmant par ces efforts de la science?" More than this, however, Montaigne liked him because he was good talk, as it is called, a better companion than writer. Yet he is not without passages which are noble in point of mere style. Landor remarks this in the conversation between Johnson and Tooke, where he makes Tooke say: "Although his style is not valued by the critics, I could inform them that there are in Plutarch many passages of exquisite beauty, in regard to style, derived perhaps from authors much more ancient." But if they are borrowed, they have none of the discordant effect of the purpureus pannus, for the warm sympathy of his nature assimilates them thoroughly and makes them his own. Oddly enough, it is through his memory that Plutarch is truly original. Who ever remembered so much and yet so well? It is this selectness (without being overfastidious) that gauges the natural elevation of his mind. He is a gossip, but he has supped with Plato or sat with Alexander in his tent to bring away only memorable things. We are speaking of him, of course, at his best. Many of his essays are trivial, but there is hardly one whose sands do not glitter here and there with the proof that the stream of his thought and experience has flowed down through auriferous soil. "We sail on his memory into the ports of every nation," says Mr. Emerson admirably in his Introduction to Goodwin's Plutarch's "Morals." No doubt we are becalmed pretty often, and yet our old skipper almost reconciles us with our dreary isolation, so well can he beguile the time, when he chooses, with anecdote and quotation.
It would hardly be extravagant to say that this delightful old proser, in whom his native Boeotia is only too apparent at times, and whose mind, in some respects, was strictly provincial, had been more operative (if we take the "Lives" and the "Morals" together) in the thought and action of men than any other single author, ancient or modern. And on the whole it must be allowed that his influence has been altogether good, has insensibly enlarged and humanized his readers, winning them over to benevolence, moderation, and magnanimity. And so wide was his own curiosity that they must be few who shall not find somewhat to their purpose in his discursive pages. For he was equally at home among men and ideas, open-eared to the one and open-minded to the other. His influence, too, it must be remembered, begins earlier than that of any other ancient author except Aesop. To boys he has always been the Robinson Crusoe of classic antiquity, making what had hitherto seemed a remote island sequestered from them by a trackless flood of years, living and real. Those obscure solitudes which their imagination had peopled with spectral equestrian statues, are rescued by the sound of his cheery voice as part of the familiar and daylight world. We suspect that Agesilaus on his hobby-horse first humanized antiquity for most of us. Here was the human footprint which persuaded us that the past was inhabited by creatures like ourselves.
A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
I must beg allowance to use the first person singular. I cannot, like old Weller, spell myself with a We. Ours is, I believe, the only language that has shown so much sense of the worth of the individual (to himself) as to erect the first personal pronoun into a kind of votive column to the dignity of human nature. Other tongues have, or pretend, a greater modesty.
I
What a noble letter it is! In it every reader sees himself as in a glass. As for me, without my I's, I should be as poorly off as the great mole of Hadrian, which, being the biggest, must be also, by parity of reason, the blindest in the world. When I was in college, I confess I always liked those passages best in the choruses of the Greek drama which were well sprinkled with ai ai, they were so grandly simple. The force of great men is generally to be found in their intense individuality,—in other words, it is all in their I. The merit of this essay will be similar.
What I was going to say is this.
My mind has been much exercised of late on the subject of two epidemics, which, showing themselves formerly in a few sporadic cases, have begun to set in with the violence of the cattle-disease: I mean Eloquence and Statuary. They threaten to render the country unfit for human habitation, except by the Deaf and Blind. We had hitherto got on very well in Chesumpscot, having caught a trick of silence, perhaps from the fish which we cured, more medicorum, by laying them out. But this summer some misguided young men among us got up a lecture-association. Of course it led to a general quarrel; for every pastor in the town wished to have the censorship of the list of lecturers. A certain number of the original projectors, however, took the matter wholly into their own hands, raised a subscription to pay expenses, and resolved to call their lectures "The Universal Brotherhood Course,"—for no other reason, that I can divine, but that they had set the whole village by the ears. They invited that distinguished young apostle of Reform, Mr. Philip Vandal, to deliver the opening lecture. He has just done so, and, from what I have heard about his discourse, it would have been fitter as the introductory to a nunnery of Kilkenny cats than to anything like universal brotherhood. He opened our lyceum as if it had been an oyster, without any regard for the feelings of those inside. He pitched into the world in general, and all his neighbors past and present in particular. Even the babe unborn did not escape some unsavory epithets in the way of vaticination. I sat down, meaning to write you an essay on "The Right of Private Judgment as distinguished from the Right of Public Vituperation"; but I forbear. It may be that I do not understand the nature of philanthropy.
Why, here is Philip Vandal, for example. He loves his kind so much that he has not a word softer than a brickbat for a single mother's son of them. He goes about to save them by proving that not one of them is worth damning. And he does it all from the point of view of an early (a knurly) Christian. Let me illustrate. I was sauntering along Broadway once, and was attracted by a bird-fancier's shop. I like dealers in out-of-the-way things,—traders in bigotry and virtue are too common,—and so I went in. The gem of the collection was a terrier,—a perfect beauty, uglier than philanthropy itself, and hairier, as a Cockney would say, than the 'ole British hairystocracy. "A'n't he a stunner?" said my disrespectable friend, the master of the shop. "Ah, you should see him worry a rat! He does it like a puffic Christian!" Since then, the world has been divided for me into Christians and perfect Christians; and I find so many of the latter species in proportion to the former, that I begin to pity the rats. They (the rats) have at least one virtue,—they are not eloquent.