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any greater or more powerful. Let us suck the sweetness of those affections and consuetudes that grow near These old shoes are easy to the feet. Undoubtedly, we can easily pick faults in our company, can easily whisper names prouder, and that tickle the fancy more. Every man's imagination hath its friends; and life would be dearer with such companions. But, if you cannot have them on good mutual terms, you cannot have them. If not the Deity, but our ambition, hews and shapes the new relations, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their flavour in garden beds.

Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility, and all the virtues, range themselves on the side of prudence, or the art of securing a present well-being. I do not know if all matter will be found to be made of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world of manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and, begin where we will, we are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our ten commandments.

VIII

HEROISM

Paradise is under the shadow of swords.

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.

Mahomet.

IN the elder English dramatists, and mainly in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, there is a constant rec nition of gentility, as if a noble behaviour were as easily marked in the society of their age, as colour 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 'tis 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 'twill 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 favourites 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 valour 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 Í 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 behaviour.

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

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