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_ HEROISM
"Paradise is under the shadow of swords."
Mahomet.
RUBY wine is drunk by knaves,
Sugar spends to fatten slaves,
Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons;
Thunderclouds are Jove's festoons,
Drooping oft in wreaths of dread
Lightning-knotted round his head;
The hero is not fed on sweets,
Daily his own heart he eats;
Chambers of the great are jails,
And head-winds right for royal sails.
VIII. HEROISM
In the elder English dramatists, and mainly in the plays
Of Beaumont and Fletcher, there is a constant recognition
of gentility, as if a noble behavior were as easily marked
in the society of their age as color is in our American
population. When any Rodrigo, Pedro or Valerio enters,
though he be a stranger, the duke or governor exclaims,
'This is a gentleman,--and proffers civilities without
end; but all the rest are slag and refuse. In harmony
with this delight in personal advantages there is in
their plays a certain heroic cast of character and dialogue,
--as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the Double
Marriage,--wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial
and on such deep grounds of character, that the dialogue,
on the slightest additional incident in the plot, rises
naturally into poetry. Among many texts take the following.
The Roman Martius has conquered Athens,--all but the
invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of Athens, and
Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the latter inflames
Martius, and he seeks to save her husband; but Sophocles
will not ask his life, although assured that a word will
save him, and the execution of both proceeds:--
Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell.
Soph_. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen,
Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown,
My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.
Dor. Stay, Sophocles,--with this tie up my sight;
Let not soft nature so transformed be,
And lose her gentler sexed humanity,
To make me see my lord bleed. So, 'tis well;
Never one object underneath the sun
Will I behold before my Sophocles:
Farewell; now teach the Romans how to die.
Mar. Dost know what 't is to die?
Soph. Thou dost not, Martius,
And, therefore, not what 'tis to live; to die
Is to begin to live. It is to end
An old, stale, weary work, and to commence
A newer and a better. 'Tis to leave
Deceitful knaves for the society
Of gods and goodness. Thou thyself must part
At last from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs,
And prove thy fortitude what then 't will do.
Val. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus?
Soph. Why should I grieve or vex for being sent
To them I ever loved best? Now I'll kneel,
But with my back toward thee; 'tis the last duty
This trunk can do the gods.
Mar. Strike, strike, Valerius,
Or Martius' heart will leap out at his mouth.
This is a man, a woman. Kiss thy lord,
And live with all the freedom you were wont.
O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me
With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn,
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.
Val. What ails my brother?
Soph. Martius, O Martius,
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.
Dor. O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak
Fit words to follow such a deed as this?
Mar. This admirable duke, Valerius,
With his disdain of fortune and of death,
Captived himself, has captivated me,
And though my arm hath ta'en his body here,
His soul hath subjugated Martius' soul.
By Romulus, he is all soul, I think;
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved;
Then we have vanquished nothing; he is free,
And Martius walks now in captivity."
I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel,
or oration that our press vents in the last few years,
which goes to the same tune. We have a great many flutes
and flageolets, but not often the sound of any fife. Yet,
Wordsworth's "Laodamia," and the ode of "Dion," and some
sonnets, have a certain noble music; and Scott will
sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord Evandale
given by Balfour of Burley. Thomas Carlyle, with his natural
taste for what is manly and daring in character, has suffered
no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his biographical
and historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns has given us
a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies there is an
account of the battle of Lutzen which deserves to be read.
And Simon Ockley's History of the Saracens recounts the
prodigies of individual valor, with admiration all the more
evident on the part of the narrator that he seems to think
that his place in Christian Oxford requires of him some
proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we explore the
literature of Heroism we shall quickly come to Plutarch,
who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the Brasidas,
the Dion, the Epaminondas, the Scipio of old, and I must
think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all the
ancient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation to the
despondency and cowardice of our religious and political
theorists. A wild courage, a Stoicism not of the schools
but of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and has given
that book its immense fame.
We need books of this tart cathartic virtue more than
books of political science or of private economy. Life
is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and
chimney-side of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous
front. The violations of the laws of nature by our
predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us
also. The disease and deformity around us certify the
infraction of natural, intellectual, and moral laws, and
often violation on violation to breed such compound
misery. A lock-jaw that bends a man's head back to his
heels; hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and
babes; insanity that makes him eat grass; war, plague,
cholera, famine, indicate a certain ferocity in nature,
which, as it had its inlet by human crime, must have its
outlet by human suffering. Unhappily no man exists who
has not in his own person become to some amount a stockholder
in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the
expiation.
Our culture therefore must not omit the arming of the
man. Let him hear in season that he is born into the
state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own
well-being require that he should not go dancing in
the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected and
neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take
both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect
urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute
truth of his speech and the rectitude of his behavior.
Towards all this external evil the man within the breast
assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to
cope single-handed with the infinite army of enemies. To
this military attitude of the soul we give the name of
Heroism. Its rudest form is the contempt for safety and
ease, which makes the attractiveness of war. It is a
self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in
the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms
it may suffer. The hero is a mind of such balance that no
disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly and as it
were merrily he advances to his own music, alike in
frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal
dissoluteness. There is somewhat not philosophical in
heroism; there is somewhat not holy in it; it seems not
to know that other souls are of one texture with it; it
has pride; it is the extreme of individual nature.
Nevertheless we must profoundly revere it. There is
somewhat in great actions which does not allow us to
go behind them. Heroism feels and never reasons, and
therefore is always right; and although a different
breeding, different religion and greater intellectual
activity would have modified or even reversed the
particular action, yet for the hero that thing he does
is the highest deed, and is not open to the censure of
philosophers or divines. It is the avowal of the unschooled
man that he finds a quality in him that is negligent of
expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of
reproach, and knows that his will is higher and more
excellent than all actual and all possible antagonists.
Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind
and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the
great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret
impulse of an individual's character. Now to no other
man can its wisdom appear as it does to him, for every
man must be supposed to see a little farther on his own
proper path than any one else. Therefore just and wise
men take umbrage at his act, until after some little
time be past: then they see it to be in unison with their
acts. All prudent men see that the action is clean
contrary to a sensual prosperity; for every heroic act
measures itself by its contempt of some external good.
But it finds its own success at last, and then the
prudent also extol.
Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state
of the soul at war, and its ultimate objects are the
last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the power to
bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. It speaks
the truth and it is just, generous, hospitable, temperate,
scornful of petty calculations and scornful of being
scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness and
of a fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the
littleness of common life. That false prudence which
dotes on health and wealth is the butt and merriment of
heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its
body. What shall it say then to the sugar-plums and
cats'-cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards
and custard, which rack the wit of all society? What joys
has kind nature provided for us dear creatures! There
seems to be no interval between greatness and meanness.
When the spirit is not master of the world, then it is
its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great hoax so
innocently, works in it so headlong and believing, is
born red, and dies gray, arranging his toilet, attending
on his own health, laying traps for sweet food and strong
wine, setting his heart on a horse or a rifle, made happy
with a little gossip or a little praise, that the great
soul cannot choose but laugh at such earnest nonsense.
"Indeed, these humble considerations make me out of love
with greatness. What a disgrace is it to me to take note
how many pairs of silk stockings thou hast, namely, these
and those that were the peach-colored ones; or to bear the
inventory of thy shirts, as one for superfluity, and one
other for use!"
Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic,
consider the inconvenience of receiving strangers at
their fireside, reckon narrowly the loss of time and
the unusual display; the soul of a better quality
thrusts back the unseasonable economy into the vaults
of life, and says, I will obey the God, and the
sacrifice and the fire he will provide. Ibn Hankal,
the Arabian geographer, describes a heroic extreme in
the hospitality of Sogd, in Bukharia. "When I was in
Sogd I saw a great building, like a palace, the gates
of which were open and fixed back to the wall with
large nails. I asked the reason, and was told that the
house had not been shut, night or day, for a hundred
years. Strangers may present themselves at any hour
and in whatever number; the master has amply provided
for the reception of the men and their animals, and is
never happier than when they tarry for some time.
Nothing of the kind have I seen in any other country."
The magnanimous know very well that they who give time,
or money, or shelter, to the stranger,--so it be done
for love and not for ostentation,--do, as it were, put
God under obligation to them, so perfect are the
compensations of the universe. In some way the time
they seem to lose is redeemed and the pains they seem
to take remunerate themselves. These men fan the flame
of human love and raise the standard of civil virtue
among mankind. But hospitality must be for service and
not for show, or it pulls down the host. The brave soul
rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor
of its table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and
all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better grace
to bannocks and fair water than belong to city feasts.
The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish
to do no dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he
loves it for its elegancy, not for its austerity. It
seems not worth his while to be solemn and denounce with
bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of
tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man
scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without
railing or precision his living is natural and poetic.
John Eliot, the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of
wine,--"It is a noble, generous liquor and we should be
humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was
made before it." Better still is the temperance of King
David, who poured out on the ground unto the Lord the water
which three of his warriors had brought him to drink, at
the peril of their lives.
It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword
after the battle of Philippi, he quoted a line of
Euripides,--"O Virtue! I have followed thee through
life, and I find thee at last but a shade." I doubt
not the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic
soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It
does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The
essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is
enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need
plenty, and can very well abide its loss.
But that which takes my fancy most in the heroic class,
is the good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a
height to which common duty can very well attain, to
suffer and to dare with solemnity. But these rare souls
set opinion, success, and life at so cheap a rate that
they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the
show of sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness.
Scipio, charged with peculation, refuses to do himself
so great a disgrace as to wait for justification, though
he had the scroll of his accounts in his hands, but tears
it to pieces before the tribunes. Socrates's condemnation
of himself to be maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum,
during his life, and Sir Thomas More's playfulness at the
scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont and Fletcher's
"Sea Voyage," Juletta tells the stout captain and his
company,--
Jul. Why, slaves, 'tis in our power to hang ye.
Master. Very likely,
'Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.
These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom
and glow of a perfect health. The great will not
condescend to take any thing seriously; all must be as
gay as the song of a canary, though it were the building
of cities or the eradication of old and foolish churches
and nations which have cumbered the earth long thousands
of years. Simple hearts put all the history and customs
of this world behind them, and play their own game in
innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws of the world; and such
would appear, could we see the human race assembled in
vision, like little children frolicking together, though
to the eyes of mankind at large they wear a stately and
solemn garb of works and influences.
The interest these fine stories have for us, the power
of a romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden book
under his bench at school, our delight in the hero, is
the main fact to our purpose. All these great and
transcendent properties are ours. If we dilate in
beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that
we are already domesticating the same sentiment. Let us
find room for this great guest in our small houses. The
first step of worthiness will be to disabuse us of our
superstitious associations with places and times, with
number and size. Why should these words, Athenian, Roman,
Asia and England, so tingle in the ear? Where the heart
is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in
any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River
and Boston Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves
names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are;
and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn that
here is best. See to it only that thyself is here, and art
and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the Supreme
Being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou
sittest. Epaminondas, brave and affectionate, does not
seem to us to need Olympus to die upon, nor the Syrian
sunshine. He lies very well where he is. The Jerseys were
handsome ground enough for Washington to tread, and London
streets for the feet of Milton. A great man makes his
climate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the
beloved element of all delicate spirits. That country is
the fairest which is inhabited by the noblest minds. The
pictures which fill the imagination in reading the actions
of Pericles, Xenophon, Columbus, Bayard, Sidney, Hampden,
teach us how needlessly mean our life is; that we, by the
depth of our living, should deck it with more than regal
or national splendor, and act on principles that should
interest man and nature in the length of our days.
We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men
who never ripened, or whose performance in actual life
was not extraordinary. When we see their air and mien,
when we hear them speak of society, of books, of religion,
we admire their superiority; they seem to throw contempt
on our entire polity and social state; theirs is the tone
of a youthful giant who is sent to work revolutions. But
they enter an active profession and the forming Colossus
shrinks to the common size of man. The magic they used
was the ideal tendencies, which always make the Actual
ridiculous; but the tough world had its revenge the
moment they put their horses of the sun to plough in its
furrow. They found no example and no companion, and their
heart fainted. What then? The lesson they gave in their
first aspirations is yet true; and a better valor and a
purer truth shall one day organize their belief. Or why
should a woman liken herself to any historical woman,
and think, because Sappho, or Sevigne, or De Stael, or
the cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation
do not satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis,
none can,--certainly not she? Why not? She has a new and
unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of the
happiest nature that ever bloomed. Let the maiden, with
erect soul, walk serenely on her way, accept the hint of
each new experience, search in turn all the objects that
solicit her eye, that she may learn the power and the
charm of her new-born being, which is the kindling of a
new dawn in the recesses of space. The fair girl who
repels interference by a decided and proud choice of
influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and lofty,
inspires every beholder with somewhat of her own nobleness.
The silent heart encourages her; O friend, never strike
sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God
the seas. Not in vain you live, for every passing eye is
cheered and refined by the vision.
The characteristic of heroism is its persistency. All
men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of
generosity. But when you have chosen your part, abide
by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself
with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor
the common the heroic. Yet we have the weakness to
expect the sympathy of people in those actions whose
excellence is that they outrun sympathy and appeal to
a tardy justice. If you would serve your brother,
because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take
back your words when you find that prudent people do
not commend you. Adhere to your own act, and congratulate
yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant
and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high
counsel that I once heard given to a young person,--"Always
do what you are afraid to do." A simple manly character
need never make an apology, but should regard its past
action with the calmness of Phocion, when he admitted that
the event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his
dissuasion from the battle.
There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot
find consolation in the thought--this is a part of my
constitution, part of my relation and office to my
fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted with me that I
should never appear to disadvantage, never make a
ridiculous figure? Let us be generous of our dignity
as well as of our money. Greatness once and for ever
has done with opinion. We tell our charities, not
because we wish to be praised for them, not because we
think they have great merit, but for our justification.
It is a capital blunder; as you discover when another
man recites his charities.
To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live
with some rigor of temperance, or some extremes of
generosity, seems to be an asceticism which common
good-nature would appoint to those who are at ease and
in plenty, in sign that they feel a brotherhood with
the great multitude of suffering men. And not only need
we breathe and exercise the soul by assuming the penalties
of abstinence, of debt, of solitude, of unpopularity,--but
it behooves the wise man to look with a bold eye into
those rarer dangers which sometimes invade men, and to
familiarize himself with disgusting forms of disease, with
sounds of execration, and the vision of violent death.
Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the
day never shines in which this element may not work. The
circumstances of man, we say, are historically somewhat
better in this country and at this hour than perhaps ever
before. More freedom exists for culture. It will not now
run against an axe at the first step out of the beaten
track of opinion. But whoso is heroic will always find
crises to try his edge. Human virtue demands her champions
and martyrs, and the trial of persecution always proceeds.
It is but the other day that the brave Lovejoy gave his
breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free
speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to
live.
I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk,
but after the counsel of his own bosom. Let him quit too
much association, let him go home much, and stablish
himself in those courses he approves. The unremitting
retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure duties
is hardening the character to that temper which will work
with honor, if need be in the tumult, or on the scaffold.
Whatever outrages have happened to men may befall a man
again; and very easily in a republic, if there appear any
signs of a decay of religion. Coarse slander, fire, tar
and feathers and the gibbet, the youth may freely bring
home to his mind and with what sweetness of temper he can,
and inquire how fast he can fix his sense of duty, braving
such penalties, whenever it may please the next newspaper
and a sufficient number of his neighbors to pronounce his
opinions incendiary.
It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most
susceptible heart to see how quick a bound Nature has
set to the utmost infliction of malice. We rapidly
approach a brink over which no enemy can follow us:--
"Let them rave:
Thou art quiet in thy grave."
In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the
hour when we are deaf to the higher voices, who does
not envy those who have seen safely to an end their
manful endeavor? Who that sees the meanness of our
politics but inly congratulates Washington that he is
long already wrapped in his shroud, and for ever safe;
that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of humanity
not yet subjugated in him? Who does not sometimes envy
the good and brave who are no more to suffer from the
tumults of the natural world, and await with curious
complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with
finite nature? And yet the love that will be annihilated
sooner than treacherous has already made death impossible,
and affirms itself no mortal but a native of the deeps of
absolute and inextinguishable being. _
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