EXTRA-LEAF.
Concerning Lofty Men, and Evidence that the Passions belong to the Next Life, and Stoicism to this.
I call certain men lofty or festal-day-men, and to this class belong, in my history, Ottomar, Gustavus, the Genius and the Doctor, and none beside.
By a lofty man I do not mean the man of strict honesty and rectitude, who, like a body of a solar system, pursues his path without other than apparent aberrations; nor do I mean the fine soul which, with prophetic feeling, smooths all down, spares every one, satisfies every one, and sacrifices itself, but does not throw itself away; nor the man of honor, whose word is a rock, and in whose breast, heated and moved by the central Sun of Honor, there are no thoughts and purposes other than the deeds outside of it; nor, finally, either the cold, virtuous man of principle, or the man of feeling, whose feelers wind about all beings, and quiver in another's wound, and who embraces Virtue and a Beauty with equal ardor; nor do I mean by the lofty man the mere great man of genius, and indeed the very metaphor indicates in the one case horizontal, and in the other vertical extension.
But I mean him who, to a greater or lesser degree of all these distinctions, adds something more, which earth so seldom possesses--elevation above the earth, the feeling of the pettiness of all earthly doings, and the disproportion between our heart and our place; a countenance lifted[[64]] above the confusing jungle and the disgusting filth of our floor--the wish for death and the glance beyond the clouds. If an angel should place himself above our atmosphere and look down through this darkened sea, turbid with cloud-scum and floating verdure, to the bottom on which we lie and to which we cleave; were he to see the thousand eyes and hands which stare and clutch horizontally at the contents of the air, at mere tinsel; should he see the worse ones which are bent sheer downward toward the prey and yellow mica on the muddy bottom, and finally the worst, which supinely drag the noble human face[[65]] through the mire;--if this angel however, should behold among the sea-animals some lofty men walking upright and looking upward to himself, and should perceive how they, weighed down by the watery column above their heads, entangled in the snarl and slime of the ground beneath them, pressed through the waves and panted for a breath of the vast ether above them, how they loved more than they were loved, endured life rather than enjoyed it, equally far from the stationary upward gaze of astonishment and the race of business-life, left their hands and feet to the mercy of the bottom, and gave only the upward yearning heart and head to the ether beyond the sea, and looked at nothing but the hand which separates the weight of the body from the bottom to which the diver is held down by it, and lets him soar into his proper element-- ... Oh, well might this angel count such men as submerged angels, and pity their low condition and their tears in the sea.... Could one gather together the graves of a Pythagoras (that noblest soul among the ancients), of Plato, Socrates, Antoninus (not so much, of Cato the great or Epictetus), Shakespeare's (if his life was like his writing), J. J. Rousseau's, and the like, into one churchyard, then would one have the true princely bench of the high nobility of mankind, the consecrated earth of our globe, God's flower-garden in the low North. But why do I take my white paper and picture it and strew it with coal-dust or ink-powder, in order to dust-in the image of a lofty man, while from heaven hangs down the great, never-fading picture of the virtuous man which Plato in his Republic has transferred out of his own heart to the canvas?
The greatest villains are the least acquainted with each other; lofty men know each other after the first hour. Authors who belong to this class are the most censured and the least read; for example, the departed Hamann. Englishmen and Orientals have this fixed star on the breast oftener than any other people.
Ottomar led me to the subject of the passions: I know that he, once at least, hated nothing so much as heads and hearts which were covered with the stony rind of Stoicism--that he longed for cataracts in his veins and in his lungs tempests--that he said, a man without passion was a still greater egotist than one of the intensest; that one whom the near fire of the sensuous world did not kindle would be still inflamed by the distant fixed-starlight of the intellectual; that the Stoic differed from the worn-out courtier only in this, that the cooling off of the former proceeded from within outward, that of the other from without inward.... I know not whether with the inwardly burning, outwardly freezing, slippery court-man it is so; but so it is with glass: when it receives from without too much chilling around the glowing nucleus, it becomes porous and frangible;[[66]] the process must be reversed.
All passions deceive themselves, not in respect to the kind, or the degree, but in respect to the object of the feeling; namely thus:
Our passions err, not in this respect, that they hate or love some person or other:--for then there would be an end of all moral beauty and ugliness:--nor yet in this, that they wail or exult over anything--for in that case, not the smallest tear of joy or sorrow over weal or woe would be allowable, and we should not be permitted any longer to wish or even will anything, not even virtue. Nor do the passions err as to the degree of this inclination or disinclination, this rejoicing and bewailing; for supposing the sense and the fancy invest the object in their eyes with thousandfold greater moral or physical charms than they wear to others: nevertheless the loving and hating must increase in proportion to the outward occasion; and provided any external attraction gratifies the least degree of love or hatred, then must even the exaggerated attraction justify an aggravated degree of the passions. Most of the arguments against anger only prove that the imputed moral ugliness of the enemy does not exist, not that it does exist and he is still to be loved--most of the arguments against our love only prove that our love mistakes not so much the degree as the object, etc. Not merely a moderate, but the highest degree of the passions would be allowable, provided only their object were presented to them, e. g., the highest love toward the highest of good beings, the highest hatred toward the highest of bad ones. Now as no earthly objects have the quality that can justly excite in us such tempests of the soul; as therefore the greatest objects which can attract or repel us must be found, in other worlds: we see that the greatest emotions of our inner being perhaps find only outside of the body their permitted and more ample field of activity.
On the whole, passion is subjective and relative: the same movement of the will is in the stronger soul and amidst greater billows only a volition, and in the weaker one and on the smoother surface an internal storm. A perpetual stream of volition flows through us, and the passions are only the water-falls and spring-floods of this river; but are we justified in damming them up merely because of their rarity?--Is not that a flood to the brooklet which is only a wave to the river?--And if we, when on fire, censure our coldness, and when cold our heat, where do we get the right? And does the duration of our censure give it?