Character and characteristic men

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Contents

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I. Character . 1

II. Eccentric Character .... 35

Preface

some of the opinions expressed in them look antiquated as seen in the light of recent events. This is particularly true of the discourse on the American Mind, which is only now reprinted because it contains some remarks on national character that could not well be omitted.

Boston, July, 1866.

I

CHARACTER.

T is impossible to cast the most superficial glance over the community, without being impresaed by the predominance of associated over individual action, and of people over persons. Few dare to announce unwelcome truth, or even to defend enthusiastic error, without being backed by some sect, party, association, or clique ; and, thus sustained, the effort is in danger of subsiding from a duty into a pleasure or passion. It might be supposed that this companionable thinking, — this moral or religious power owned in joint stock, — would at least operate against egotism and the vices of capricious individualism ; but, practically, it is apt to result in self-admiration through mutual admiration ; to pamper personal pride without always developing a personality to be proud of ; and to raise the market price of mediocrity by making genius and heroism small and cheap. Formerly, to attack a community intrenched in laws, customs, institutions, and beliefs, required dauntless courage; a soul sublimed by an idea l

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above the region of vanity and conceit; a character resolutely facing responsibilities it clearly realized ; and especially a penetrating vision into the spirit and heart of the objects assailed. This last characteristic is insisted upon by all the authorities. " There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight," says Goethe. " I would open every one of Argus's hundred eyes before I used one of Briareus's hundred hands," says Lord Bacon. " Look before you leap," says John Smith, all over the world. But it is too much the mistake of many hopeful people of our day to consider organized institutions, which had their origin in the vices or necessities of human nature, to possess no authority over the understanding if they happen to contradict certain abstract truisms, and a still greater mistake to suppose that these institutions will yield to a proclamation of opinions or a bombardment of words.

It being then evident that institutions can be successfully attacked only by forces kindred in nature to those by which they were originally organized, the question arises, What is it that really forms and reforms institutions, communicates life and movement to society, and embodies thoughts in substantial facts? The answer is, in one word, Character ; and this conducts us at once beneath the sphere of associated and merely mechanical contrivances into the region of personal and

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vital forces. It is character which gives authority to opinions, puts virile meaning into words, and burns its way through impediments insurmountable to the large in brain who are weak in heart ; for character indicates the degree in which a man possesses creative spiritual energy ; is the exact measure of his real ability ; is, in short, the expression, and the only expression, of the man, — the person. His understanding and sensibility may play with thoughts and coquet with sentiments, and his conscience flirt with beautiful ideals of goodness, and this amateur trifling he may call by some fine name or other; but it is the centre and heart of his being, the source whence spring living ideas and living deeds, which ever determines his place when we estimate him as a power. The great danger of the conservative is his temptation to surrender character and trust in habits ; the great danger of the radical is his temptation to discard habits without forming character. One is liable to mental apathy, the other to mental anarchy ; and apathy and anarchy are equally destitute of causative force and essential individuality.

As character is thus the expression of no particular quality or faculty, but of a whole nature, it reveals, of course, a man's imperfections in revealing his greatness. He is nothing unless he acts ; and, as in every vital thought and deed character appears, his acts must par

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take of his infirmities, and the mental and moral life communicated in them be more or less diseased. As he never acts from opinions or propositions, his nature cannot be hidden behind such thin disguises, the fatal evidence against him being in the deed itself. If there be sensuality, or malignity, or misanthropy in him, it will come out in his actions, though his tongue drop purity and philanthropy in every word. Probably more hatred, licentiousness, and essential impiety are thus communicated through the phraseology and contortions of 'their opposites, than in those of vice itself. Moral life is no creation of moral phrases. The words that are truly vital powers for good or evil are only those which, as Pindar says, " the tongue draws up from the deep heart."

Now, as men necessarily communicate themselves when they produce from their vital activity, it follows that their productions will never square with the abstract opinions of the understanding, but present a concrete, organic whole, compounded of truth and error, evil and good, exactly answering to the natures whence they proceed. This actual process of creation we are prone to ignore or overlook, and to criticise institutions as Pymer and Dennis criticised poems, that is, as though they were the manufactures of mental and moral machines, working on abstract principles ; where*

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as creation on such a method is impossible, and we are compelled to choose between imperfect organisms and nothing. That this imperfection is not confined to jurists and legislators is sufficiently manifest when the vehement and opinionated social critic undertakes the work of demolition and reconstruction, and all the vices peculiar to his own nature, such as his intolerance of facts and disregard of the rights and feelings of others, have an opportunity of displaying themselves. His talk is fine, and his theories do him honor ; but when he comes to act as a man, when he comes to exhibit what he is as well as what he thinks, it is too commonly found that four months of the rule of so-called philosophers and philanthropists are enough to make common men sigh for their old Bourbons and Bo napartes. Robespierre, anarchist and philanthropist, Frederick of Prussia, despot and philosopher, were both bitter and vitriolic natures, yet both, in their youth, exceeded Exeter Hall itself in their professions of universal beneficence, and evinced, in their rants, not hypocrisy, but self-delusion. Frederick indeed wrote early in life a treatise called " The Anti-Machiavel, which was," says his biographer, "an edifying homily against rapacity, perfidy, arbitrary government, unjust war ; in short, against almost everything for wkicli its author is now remembered among men,"

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Thus to the pride of reason and vanity of opinion character interposes its iron limitations, declaring war against all forms and modes of pretension, and affording the right measure of the wisdom and folly, the righteousness and the wickedness, substantially existing in persons and in communities of persons. Let us now consider this power in some of the varieties of its manifestation, observing the law of its growth and influence and the conditions of its success. Our purpose will rather be to indicate its radical nature than to treat of those superficial peculiarities which many deem to be its essential elements.

The question has been often raised, whether character be the creation of circumstances, or circumstances the creation of character. Now, to assert that circumstances create character is to eliminate from character that vital causative energy which is its essential characteristic ; and to assert that circumstances are the creation of character, is to endow character with the power not only to create, but to furnish the materials of creation. The result of both processes would not be character, but caricature. The truth seems to be, that circumstances are the nutriment of character, the food which it converts into blood ; and this process of assimilation presupposes individual power to act upon circumstances. Goethe says, in reference to his own

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mental growth and productiveness, " Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand different things. The learned and the ignorant, the wise and the foolish, infancy and age, have come in turn — generally without the least suspicion of it — to bring me the offering of their thoughts, their faculties, their experience. Often they have sowed the harvest I have reaped. My work is that of an aggregate of beings taken from the whole of nature ; it bears the name of Goethe." Yes, it bears the name of Goethe, because Goethe assimilated all this knowledge and all this aggregate of beings into Goethe, — broadening, enriching, and deepening his individuality, but not annihilating it ; so that his character became as comprehensive as his experience.

Indeed, in all the departments of life, meditative and practical, success thus depends on a thorough knowledge, proceeding from a complete assimilation, of all the circumstances connected with each department, — the man standing for the thing, having mastered and, as it were, consumed it, so that all its forces are iri himself as personal power and personal intelligence. The true merchant, the true statesman, the true military commander, the true artist, becomes a man of character only when he " puts on," and identifies himself with, his particular profession or art. Balzac

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thought he could not describe a landscape until he had turned himself for the moment into trees, and grass, and fountains, and stars, and effects of sunlight, and thus entered into the heart and life of the objects he ached to reproduce. Nelson realized with such intensity the inmost secrets of his profession, that experience and study had in him been converted into intuition, so that he could meet unexpected contingencies with instinctive expedients. If he failed, through lack of means, to snatch all the possible results of victory, his unrealized conception tortured him more than a sabre cut or a shattered limb. At the Battle of the Nile many French ships escaped because he had no frigates to pursue them. In his despatches he writes : " Should I die this moment, 6 want of frigates ' would be found written on my heart ! "

With this view of character as the embodiment of things in persons, it is obviously limited in its sphere to the facts and laws it has made its own, and out of that sphere is comparatively feeble. Thus, many able lawyers and generals have been blunderers as statesmen ; and one always shudders for the health of the community when the name of a statesman or clergyman — properly authoritative in his special department — is employed to recommend some universal panacea, or some aqueous establishment for washing away the

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diseases of the world. Character speaks with authority only of those matters it has realized, and in respect to them its dogmatisms are reasons and its opinions are judgments. When Mr. Webster, in attacking a legal proposition of an opponent at the bar, was reminded that he was assailing a dictum of Lord Camden, he turned to the Court, and after paying a tribute to Camden's greatness as a jurist, simply added, " But, may it please your Honor, / differ from Lord Camden." It is evident that such self-assertion would have been ridiculous had not the character of the man relieved it from all essential pretension ; but if the case had been one of surgery or theology, and Mr. Webster had emphasized his " ego 99 in a difference with Sir Astley Cooper or Hooker, the intrusion of his " I " would have been an impertinence which his reputation as a statesman or lawyer could not have shielded from contempt. Indeed, injustice is often done to the real merits of eminent men when they get enticed out of their strongholds of character, and venture into unaccustomed fields of exertion, where their incapacity is soon detected. Macaulay has vividly shown how Hastings, the most vigorous and skilful of English statesmen in India, blundered the moment he applied the experience he had acquired in Bengal to English politics ; and that perfection in one profession does not imply even com- 1*

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mon judgment outside of it, was painfully demonstrated a few years ago, in the case of an accomplished American general, among whose splendid talents writing English does not appear to be one. When, therefore, not content to leave his prodigies of strategy and tactics to speak for themselves, he invaded the domain of rhetoric, and crossed pens with Secretary Marcy, people began to imagine, as verbs went shrieking about after nouns, and relative pronouns could find no relations, that the great general had no character at all.

But confine a characteristic man to the matters he has really mastered, and there is in him no blundering, no indecision, no uncertainty, but a straightforward, decisive activity, sure as insight and rapid as instinct. You cannot impose upon him by nonsense of any kind, however prettily you may bedizen it in inapplicable eloquence. Thus Jeremiah Mason — a man who was not so much a lawyer as he was law embodied — was once engaged to defend a clergyman accused of a capital crime, and was repeatedly bothered by the attempts of the brethren to make him substitute theological for legal evidence. As he was making out his brief, one of these sympathizers with the prisoner rushed joyously into the room, with the remark that

Brother A was certainly innocent, for an angel

from heaven had appeared to him the night before, and

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had given him direct assurance of the fact. u That is very important evidence, indeed," was the gruff reply of Mason ; " but can you subpoena that angel ? " The anecdote we mention because it is representative ; for the philosophy which prompted such a demand annually saves thousands of merchants, manufacturers, and farmers from rushing into ruinous speculations, and preserves society itself from dissolving into a mere anarchy of fanaticisms. The resistance doubtless comes, in many cases, from stupidity ; but then stupidity is a great conservative power, especially in those periods of moral flippancy and benevolent persiflage when it rains invitations to square the circle, to undertake voyages to the moon, and to peril the existence of solid realities on the hope of establishing a millennium on their ruins.

As the perfection of character depends on a man's embodying the facts and laws of his profession to such a degree of intensity that power and intelligence are combined in his activity, it is evident that mere unassimilated knowledge — knowledge that does not form part of the mind, but is attached to it — will often blunder as badly as ignorance itself. Thus Marshal Berthier enjoyed for some time the reputation of planning Napoleon's battles, and of being a better general than his master, — an impression which his own conceit

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doubtless readily indorsed ; but the illusion was dispelled in the campaign of 1809, when Napoleon sent him on in advance to assume the command. It took him but a marvellously short time to bring the army to the brink of destruction, and his incompetency was so glaring that some of the marshals mistook it for treachery. Instead of concentrating the forces, he dispersed them over a field of operations forty leagues in extent, and exposed them to the danger of being destroyed in detail, thinking all the while that he was exhibiting singular depth of military genius ; when, in fact, it was only the opportune arrival of Napoleon, and his fierce, swift orders for immediate concentration, that saved the army from disgraceful dispersion and defeat, — an army which, under Napoleon, soon occupied Vienna, and eventually brought the campaign to a victorious conclusion at Wagram.

It is, however, the misfortune of nations that such men as Berthier are not always tested by events, and the limitations of their capacity plainly revealed. Besides, it must be admitted that, in practical politics, circumstances sometimes lift into power small-minded natures, who are exactly level to the prejudices of their time, and thus make themselves indispensable to it. Mr. Addington, by the grace of intolerance made for a short period Prime Minister of England, — a man of

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great force of self-consequence, and great variety of demerit, — was one of these fortunate echoes of character ; and as his littleness answered admirably to all that was little in the nation, he was, during his whole life, an important element of party power. Canning used despairingly to say of him, that " he was like the small-pox, — every administration had to take him oncer No party ever succeeded that did not thus represent the public nonsense as well as the public sense; and happy is that body of politicians where one of the members relieves his associates of all fear for their safety, not by his vigor or sagacity in administration, but by his being one in whom the public nonsense knows it can confide. Indeed, Sydney Smith declares that every statesman who is troubled by a rush of ideas to the head should have his foolometer ever by his side, to warn him against offending or outstriding public opinion. This foolometer is as necessary to despotic as to liberal governments ; for one great secret of the art of politics all over the world is, never to push evil or beneficent measures to that point where resistance commences on the part of the governed.

Character, in its intrinsic nature, being thus the embodiment of things in persons, the quality which most distinguishes men of character from men of passions and opinions is Persistency, tenacity of hold upon

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their work, and power to continue in it. This quality is the measure of the force inherent in character, and is the secret of the confidence men place in it, — soldiers in generals, parties in leaders, people in statesmen. Indeed, if we sharply scrutinize the lives of persons eminent in any department of action or meditation, we shall find that it is not so much brilliancy and fertility as constancy and continuousness of effort .which make a man great. This is as true of Kepler and Newton as of Hannibal and Caesar; of Shakespeare and Scott as of Howard and Clarkson. The heads of such men are not merely filled with ideas, purposes, and plans, but the primary characteristic of their natures and inmost secret of their success is this : that labor cannot weary, nor obstacles discourage, nor drudgery disgust them. The universal line of distinction between the strong and the weak is, that one persists ; the other hesitates, falters, trifles, and at last collapses or " caves in."

This principle obtains in every department of affairs and every province of thought. Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence more than talents and accomplishments. Lord Macaulay was the most brilliant, rapid, and victorious of talkers, — inexhaustible in words and in master, — so endless, indeed, that on those rare occasions when he allowed others to

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put in an occasional word, he was hit by Sydney Smith's immortal epigram, complimenting his " flashes of silence " ; but in character, and in the influence that radiates from character, he was probably inferior to his taciturn father, Zachary Macaulay, who, with an iron grasp of an unpopular cause, and a soul which was felt as inspiration in whatever company he Appeared, had still hardly a word to spare. The son conversed, but the mere presence of the father was conversation. The son excited admiration by what he said, the fatjier wielded power and enforced respect and became the object to which the conversation of the circle referred, in virtue of what he was, and of what everybody knew he would persist in being.

In politics, again, no mere largeness of comprehen sion or loftiness of principle will compensate for a lack of persistency to bear, with a mind ever fresh and a purpose ever fixed, all the toil, dulness, fret, and disappointment of the business ; and this is perhaps the reason that, in politics, the perseverance of the sinners makes us blush so often for the pusillanimity of the saints. So, in war, mere courage and military talent are not always sufficient to make a great military commander. Thus Peterborough is, in comparison with Marlborough, hardly known as a general ; yet Peterborough, by his skilful and splendid audacity,

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gained victories which Marlborough might have been proud to claim. The difficulty with Peterborough was, that he could not endure being bored; while Marlborough's endurance of bores was quite as marvellous as the military genius by which he won every battle he fought and took every place he besieged. If Peterborough was prevented by the caution of his government or his allies from seizing an occasion for a great exploit, he resigned his command in a pet ; but Marlborough patiently submitted to be robbed by the timidity of his allies of opportunities for victories greater even than those he achieved, and persisted, in spite of irritations which would have crazed a more sensitive spirit, until the object of the heterogeneous coalition which his genius welded together had been attained.

Again, in the conduct of social and moral reforms, persistency is the test by which we discriminate men of moral opinions from men in whom moral opinions have been deepened into moral ideas and consolidated in moral character. To be sure, a man may, without character, seem to persist in the work of reform, provided society will fly into a passion with him, and thus furnish continual stimulants to his pride and pugnacity ; but true persistency becomes indispensable when his ungracious task is to overcome that smiling

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indifference, that self-pleased ignorance, that half-pitying, irritating contempt with which a fat and contented community commonly receives the arguments and the invectives of innovation. It is the more important to insist on sinewy vigor and constancy in the champions of reform, because, in our day, the business attracts to it so many amateurs who mistake vague intellectual assent to possible improvements for the disposition and genius which make a reformer ; who substitute bustle for action, sauciness for audacity, the itch of disputation for the martyr-spirit ; and who arrive readily at prodigious results through a bland ignoring of all the gigantic obstacles in the path. Thus it would not be difficult, on any pleasant morning, to meet at any city restaurant some ingenious gentleman getting what he is pleased to call a living after the old Adamic method of competition, who will, over a cup of coffee, dispose of concrete America in about ten minutes ; slavery disappears after the first sip ; the Constitution goes in two or three draughts ; the Bible vanishes in a pause of deglutitional satisfaction; and. a new order of society springs up while, in obedience to the old, he draws forth a reluctant shilling to pay for the beverage. Now, there is no disgrace in lacking insight into practical life, and power to change it for tfre better; but certainly these amia-

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ble deficiencies are as gracefully exhibited in assenting to what is established as in playing at reform, attitudinizing martyrdom, and engaging in a scheme to overturn the whole world as a mere relaxation from the severer duties of life.

In passing from practical life to literature, we shall find that persistency is the quality separating first-rate genius from all the other rates, — proving, as it does, that the author mentally and morally lives in the region of thought and emotion about ^which he writes ; accepts the drudgery of composition as a path to the object he desires to master ; and is too much enraptured with the beautiful vision before his eyes to weary of labor in its realization. In the creations of such men there is neither languor nor strain, but a " familiar grasp of things Divine." They are easily to be distinguished from less bountifully endowed natures and less raised imaginations. Thus Tennyson, as a man, is evidently not on a level with his works. He is rather a writer of poems than, like Wordsworth, essentially a poet ; and, accordingly, he only occasionally rises into that region where Wordsworth permanently dwells ; the moment he ceases his intense scrutiny of his arrested mood, and aims to be easy and familiar, he but unbends into laborious flatness ; but we think a trained eye can detect, even in the seeming commonplaces of Wordsworth, a ray of that light, " that never was on sea or land." Still, Tennyson, in his exalted moods, has a clear vision of a poetical conception, persists in his advances to it, discards all vagrant thoughts, and subordinates all minor ones, to give it organic expression ; and, when he descends from his elevation, always brings a poem with him, and not a mere collection of poetical lines and images. Such a man, though his poetical character is — relatively to the greatest poets — imperfect, is still, of course, to be placed far above a mere mental roue, like the author of " Festus," who debauches in thoughts and sentiments ; pours forth memories and fancies with equal arrogance of originality ; and having no definite aim, except to be very fine and very saucy, produces little more than a collection of poetic materials, not fused, but confused. From such an anarchy of the faculties no great poem was ever born, for great poems are the creations of great individualities, — of that causative and presiding " Me " which contemptuously rejects the perilous impertinences it spontaneously engenders, and drives the uature of which it is the centre persi-tingly on to the object that gleams in the distance. Make a man of Milton's force and affluence of imagination half-intoxicated and half-crazy, and any enterprising booksel-

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ler might draw from the lees of his mind a " Festus " once a week, and each monstrosity would doubtless be hailed by some readers, w T ho think they have a taste for poetry, as a greater miracle of genius than " Paradise Lost."

Indeed, in all the departments of creative thought, fertility is a temptation to be resisted before inventions and discoveries are possible. The artist who dallies with his separate conceptions as they throng into his mind, produces no statue or picture, for that depends on austerely dismissing the most enticing images, provided they do not serve his particular purpose at the time. The same truth holds in the inventive arts and in science.

It is needless to say that the most common and most attractive manifestations of persistency of character proceed from those natures in which the affections are dominant. An amazing example, replete with that pathos which "lies too deep for tears," is found in the story, chronicled by John of Brompton, of the mother of Thomas-a-Becket. His father, Gilbert-a-Becket, w T as taken prisoner during one of the Crusades by a Syrian Emir, and held for a considerable period in a kind of honorable captivity. A daughter of the Emir saw him at her father's table, heard him converse, fell in love with him, and offered

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to arrange the means by which both might escape to Europe. The project only partly succeeded ; he escaped, but she was left behind. Soon afterward, however, she contrived to elude her attendants, and, after many marvellous adventures by sea and land, arrived in England, knowing but two English words, " London " and " Gilbert." By constantly repeating the first, she was directed to the city ; and there, followed by a mob, she walked for months from street to street, crying, as she went, " Gilbert ! Gilbert ! " She at last came to the street in which her lover lived. The mob and the name attracted the attention of a servant in the house ; Gilbert recognized her ; and they were married. We doubt if any poet, if even Chaucer, ever imaginatively conceived sentiment in a form so vital and primary as it is realized in this fact.

Character, whether it be small or great, evil or good, thus always represents a positive and persisting force, and can, therefore, like other forces, be calculated, and the issues of its action predicted. There i* nothing really capricious in character to a man gifted with the true piercing insight into it ; and Pope was right in bringing the charge of insanity against Curll, the bookseller, provided Curll did once speak politely to a customer, and did once refuse two-and-sixpence

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for Sir Richard Blackmore's Essays. There is nothing more mortifying to a reader of mankind than to be convicted of error in spelling out a character. We can all sympathize with the story of that person who was once requested, by a comparative stranger, to lend him ten dollars, to be returned the next day at ten o'clock. The request was complied with; but the lender felt perfectly certain that the borrower belonged to that large and constantly-increasing class * of our fellow-citizens who are commonly included in the genus "sponge," and he therefore bade his money, as it left his purse, that affectionate farewell which is only breathed in the moment of permanent separations. Much to his chagrin, however, the money was returned within a minute of the appointed time. A few days after, the same person requested a loan of thirty dollars, promising, as before, to return the sum at a specified hour. " No ! " was the response of insulted and indignant sagacity ; " you disappointed me once, sir, and I shall not give you an opportunity of doing it again." .