Representative Men | Page 7

the bruise, and the sufferer goes
joyfully through life, ignorant of the ruin, and incapable of seeing it, though all the world
point their finger at it every day. The worthless and offensive members of society, whose
existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and
never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their
contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not only in heroes and archangels,
but in gossips and nurses. Is it not a rare contrivance that lodged the due inertia in every

creature, the conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or changed?
Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each, is the pride of opinion, the
security that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame, not a mowing idiot, but uses what
spark of perception and faculty is left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over
the absurdities of all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of absurdity. Not one
has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright thought that made things cohere with
this bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the midst of this chuckle of self-gratulation,
some figure goes by, which Thersites too can love and admire. This is he that should
marshal us the way we were going. There is no end to his aid. Without Plato, we should
almost lose our faith in the possibility of a reasonable book. We seem to want but one,
but we want one. We love to associate with heroic persons, since our receptivity is
unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners easily become great. We are all
wise in capacity, though so few in energy. There needs but one wise man in a company,
and all are wise, so rapid is the contagion.
Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism, and enable us to see other
people and their works. But there are vices and follies incident to whole populations and
ages. Men resemble their contemporaries, even more than their progenitors. It is observed
in old couples, or in persons who have been housemates for a course of years, that they
grow alike; and, if they should live long enough, we should not be able to know them
apart. Nature abhors these complaisances, which threaten to melt the world into a lump,
and hastens to break up such maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes on
between men of one town, of one sect, of one political party; and the ideas of the time are
in the air, and infect all who breathe it. Viewed from any high point, the city of New
York, yonder city of London, the western civilization, would seem a bundle of insanities.
We keep each other in countenance, and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of the time.
The shield against the stingings of conscience, is the universal practice, or our
contemporaries. Again; it is very easy to be as wise and good as your companions. We
learn of our contemporaries, what they know, without effort, and almost through the
pores of the skin. We catch it by sympathy, or, as a wife arrives at the intellectual and
moral elevations of her husband. But we stop where they stop. Very hardly can we take
another step. The great, or such as hold of nature, and transcend fashions, by their fidelity
to universal ideas, are saviors from these federal errors, and defend us from our
contemporaries. They are the exceptions which we want, where all grows alike. A foreign
greatness is the antidote for cabalism.
Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much conversation with our
mates, and exult in the depth of nature in that direction in which he leads us. What
indemnification is one great man for populations of pigmies! Every mother wishes one
son a genius, though all the rest should be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the
excess of influence of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have
become underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our help:--other
great men, new qualities, counterweights and checks on each other. We cloy of the honey
of each peculiar greatness. Every hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not
bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus, even, "I pray you, let me never hear that man's
name again." They cry up the virtues of George Washington,--"Damn George
Washington!" is the poor Jacobin's whole speech and confutation. But it is human
nature's indispensable defense. The centripetence augments the centrifugence. We

balance one man with his opposite, and the health of the state depends on the see-saw.
There is, however, a speedy limit to the use