Confidence, Lack Of Confidence, Pride, And Vanity

Johann Georg Zimmermann, Essay on National Pride, to Which are added Memoirs of the Author's Life and Writings, tr. Samuel Hull Wilcocke (London, 1797), ch. XVII., pp. 221-24:

This confidence in one's own resources begets that aspiring sentiment of superiority, without which a man cannot attempt any noble deed; deprived of this confidence, the bravest man sinks into a state of dulness and inactivity, by which his soul is fettered and debased as in a narrow prison, where it should seem to be endowed with power only to endure, where the heavy load of calamity wholly presses down the heart, where every duty is a burden, the least labour dreaded, and every future prospect gloomy and cheerless. Every path to fame and honour is inaccessible to him, and his spirit lies motionless and dejected, like the hardy polar navigator, who finds himself hemmed in and surrounded on every side by a vast continent of ice. He arrives at nothing, for he aspires to nothing; and he aspires not, because he is diffident of his faculties. For this reason, we often see people of much lower merit, the foremost in the road to fortune, only because their character is more enterprising and undaunted.

It is from this same degrading and too low opinion of ourselves, that one man becomes the slave of another. I see, with heartfelt sorrow, men of merit fall into the extremest self-contempt, with regard to great men, on whom, perhaps, sometimes their fortune depends; but who do not even require this abasement.

[...] From this same too humiliating opinion of themselves, men become the slaves of their passions and unfaithful to the purposes of their creation. More confidence in their own powers would prove to them, that it is possible to be virtuous amidsl temptation, and that they may rise from the fascinating couch of luxury and pleasure triumphant over both. Were the Ascetics endowed with this confidence, they need not use such exertions to destroy the match at which love takes fire.

We become unfaithful to the purposes of our creation when we do not possess those solid principles which hardens us against suffering. Every man of understanding is of no use to society, if, in a joyless retirement of the world, he has not learned to bear with all that can wound the finer sentiments, dissipate or oppose the softness of humanity, and pierce the tenderness of heart arising from it. He ceases to exert his faculties, when he daily sees people around him, who do not know that their understanding and taste may be improved and sharpened, by a thousand things whose names they are even ignorant of; and, who of coursc heartily hate the commanding influence of understanding and taste. He snatches at momentary joys, and unnerves all the powers of his soul, to be admitted into their society. He opposes the opinions of no man, let them be ever so absurd. He pretends not to correct any prejudice or error, determined, as Tristram Shandy very justly says to his mule, «never to argue a point with any one of that family as long as he lives.»

P. 227:

. . . Confidence in one's self produces the power even of resisting time; an emulation of one's self, to surpass, by new deeds, our former ones, and to eclipse, by greater merits, those which are already acknowledged to belong to us; persevering in our career of fortune, till we overtake the fickle goddess. But the greatest minds are those who, convinced of the vicissitude of human affairs, are never over-bearing in prosperity, nor cast down in adverfity.

Hence it appears, that a noble self-esteem actually gives us the power to exalt ourselves above the weakness of human nature, to exert our talents in praise-worthy enterprises, never to yield to the spirit of slavery, never to be slaves of vice, to obey the dictates of our conscience, to smile under misfortune, and to rely upon seeing better days.

P. 229:

I heard my son once, in his fifth year, ask his mother, who pressed him to her maternal bosom, while she explained to him Plutarch's lives, «Will my life, too, be written?» Every child, nobly born, however poor his parents may be, will desire to be great; when his heart is completely touched with the genius or virtues of great men, the same virtues will germinate in his young mind, and he will burn with impatience to fill, with regard to posterity, the same post of honour which those eminent men have filled before him with such distinguished splendour. This desire of emulation will frequently burst into tears, which every father ought to reward by the fondest embraces.

Pp. 249-50:

The defects of great minds flow from their pride, when this degenerates into vanity. Dazzled by the flattery of their admirers, these demi-gods shut their ears as much to truth as the weakest princes; intoxicated with the sense of their real advantages, they do not comprehend that these are not every where current for them. Whoever always seeks applause, will always be liable to meet with mortification in the extreme, and, in fact, will seldom escape it. He will, at last, nearly look upon himself as the only being of consequence in the world, and all its other inhabitants either as his admirers or his enviers; but one of the ancients says exceedingly well: «If thou wilt not be just and righteous without the ostentation of thy justice and righteousness, thou wilt often be so with shame and derision.» The secret of the most subtle vanity is, on the other hand, nothing else than the art of making one's self prized, without either appearing to be vain or self-conceited. Cicero1 was ignorant of this art, or he would not have attracted the hatred of the Romans as he did, by the ever-recurring praise of himself and his actions; it was the text of all his orations, and never failed to offend his hearers, because he seemed to esteem his services every thing, and those of other men as nothing.

Pride is always misplaced when it cannot command respect. . . .

Pp. 251-2:

Nothing upon earth is perfect; virtue even has its vulnerable points, the sun its spots, and a conscientious prude, who has passed the ordeal of grace, may fall. We must not always judge of men who are thought great, by their writings or their words; we must also view their every action; we must study them in their lives, in their families, and in their houses, if we would rightly know them. The old and rigid Cato had a concubine as well as the philosophical emperor Marcus Antoninus, and many a modern philosopher whom I know. The greatest men are always connected with the rest of mankind by some foible or other; and yet there are few of them who are so candid as Antigonus, who, on Hermodotus saluting him as a deity and the child of the sun, told him very judiciously «to ask the servant who emptied his close-stool his opinion upon this subject.» 

The greatest talents assume a hateful appearance, when they are accompanied by arrogance or break out in contempt of others. Contempt in an arrogant man consists in the affection with which he shews, without reserve, his sense of the real or imaginary inferiority of another. Contempt in a proud man consists in the sense of the real inferiority of another, which he exposes when it ought to be exposed, and conceals where it ought to be concealed. This sense is inseparable from the noblest minds, and is ever just in itself, for it is impossible that any one can mistake a cat for an elephant, or a gnat for a mountain, but it is exceedingly offensive when it discovers defects where they ought not to be observed.

1. Regarding this reproach towards Cicero, vide this previous post: Ignoring One's Own Instructions.

Nature, The Greeks' Spirit, Their Art, And What Sets Them Apart

John Addington Symonds, Studies on the Greek Poets, vol. II. (New York: 1880), ch. XXIII., The Genius of Greek Art, pp. 370-372:

Nature is thus the first, chief element by which we are enabled to conceive the spirit of the Greeks. The key to their mythology is here. Here is the secret of their sympathies, the well-spring of their deepest thoughts, the primitive potentiality of all they have achieved in art. What is Apollo but the magic of the sun whose soul is light? What is Aphrodite but the love-charm of the sea? What is Pan but the mystery of nature, the felt and hidden want pervading all? What, again, are those elder, dimly discovered deities, the Titans and the brood of Time, but forces of the world as yet beyond the touch and ken of human sensibilities? But nature alone cannot inform us what that spirit was. For though the Greeks grew up in scenes which we may visit, they gazed on them with Greek eyes, eyes different from ours, and dwelt upon them with Greek minds, minds how unlike our own! Unconsciously, in their long and unsophisticated infancy, the Greeks absorbed and assimilated to their own substance that loveliness which it is left for us only to admire. Between them and ourselves—even face to face with mountain, sky, and sea, unaltered by the lapse of years—flow the rivers of Death and Lethe and New Birth, and the mists of thirty centuries of human life are woven like a veil. To pierce that veil, to learn even after the most partial fashion how they transmuted the splendors of the world into æsthetic forms, is a work which involves the further interrogation of their sculpture and their literature.

The motives of that portion of Greek sculpture which bring us close to the incidents of Greek life are very simple. A young man binding a fillet round his head; a boy drawing a thorn from his foot; a girl who has been wounded in the breast raising her arm to show where the sword smote her; an athlete bending every sinew to discharge the quoit; a line of level-gazing youths on prancing horses, some faring forward with straight eyes, one turning, with bridle-hand held tightly, to encourage his companion, another with loose mantle in the act to mount, others thrown back to rein upon their haunches chafing steeds; a procession of draped maidens bearing urns; a maiden, draped from neck to ankle, holding in both hands a lustral vase—such are the sculptured signs by which we read the placid physical fulfilment of Greek life. That the serenity of satisfied existence is an end in itself, and that death in the plenitude of vigor is desirable, the reliefs of Pheidias and the Æginetan marbles teach us. In these simple but consummate works of art the beauty of pure health, physical enjoyment, temperance, mental vigor, and heroic daring mingle and create one splendor of a human being sensitive to all influences and vital in every faculty. Excess can nowhere be discovered. Compare with these forms for a moment the Genii painted by Michael Angelo upon the roof of the Sistine Chapel. Over them has passed the spirit with its throes: la maladie de la pensée is there. Of no Phœbus and no Pallas are they the servants; but ministers of prophets and sibyls, angels of God fulfilling his word, they incarnate the wrestlings and the judgments and the resurrections of the soul. Now take a banquet-scene from some Greek vase. Along the cushioned couch lie young men, naked, crowned with myrtles; in their laps are women, and at their sides broad jars of honeyed wine. A winged Eros hovers over them, and their lips are opened to sing a song of ancient love. Yet this is no forecast of Borgia revels in Rome, or of the French Regent's Parc aux Cerfs. When Autolycus entered the symposium of Xenophon, all tongues were stricken dumb; man gazed at man in wonder at his goodliness. When Charmides, heading the troop of wrestlers, joined Socrates in the palæstra, the soul of the philosopher was troubled; such beauty was for him a sacred, spirit-shaking thing. Simætha, in the Pharmaceutria of Theocritus, beheld the curls of youths on horseback like laburnum-flowers, and their bosoms whiter than the moon.

Nature And Man And The Soul

Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling, On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature (1807), tr. J. Elliot Cabot, (The German Classics: Masterpieces of German Literature, vol. V., 1913, p. 110 & 123-4):

Nature meets us everywhere, at first with reserve, and in form more or less severe. She is like that quiet and serious beauty, that excites not attention by noisy advertisement, nor attracts the vulgar gaze. [...]

But the beauty of the Soul in itself, joined to sensuous Grace, is the highest apotheosis of Nature. 

The spirit of Nature is only in appearance opposed to the Soul; essentially, it is the instrument of its revelation; it brings about indeed the antagonism that exists in all things, but only that the one essence may come forth, as the utmost benignity, and the reconciliation of all the forces. 

All other creatures are driven by the mere force of Nature, and through it maintain their individuality; in Man alone, as the central point, arises the soul, without which the world would be like the natural universe without the sun. 

The Soul in Man, therefore, is not the principle of individuality, but that whereby he raises himself above all egoism, whereby he becomes capable of self-sacrifice, of disinterested love, and (which is the highest) of the contemplation and knowledge of the Essence of things, and thus of Art. 

In him it is no longer concerned about Matter nor has it immediate concern with it, but with the spirit only as the life of things. Even while appearing in the body, it is yet free from the body, the consciousness of which hovers in the soul in the most beauteous shapes only as a light, undisturbing dream. It is no quality, no faculty, nor any-thing special of the sort; it knows not, but is Science; it is not good, but Goodness ; it is not beautiful, as body even may be, but Beauty itself. 

Hours Of Youth, Of beauty, And Of Magic

Malwida von Meysenbug, Memories of an Idealist, tr. Monte B. Gardiner (1999; A thesis submitted to the faculty of Brigham Young University), ch. 15, The Return, p. 60:

All around us, high, snow-covered Alp summits arose . . . A piercing, ice-cold air forced us to cover ourselves in cloaks and move quickly. The boys ran and jumped over large stones and clumps of ice; the tutor remained aloof, he had been angry with me for a long time, since I had moved about in circles from which he had been excluded because of his ignorance of the French language. So I walked alone, lost in observations and memories. I thought about everything I had just left with nostalgia. I compared the magical evenings of a week ago with this journey through the icy wasteland of barren nature. I glanced up to the white summits which shone brilliantly in the rays of a cold sun, and it seemed to me that I was seeing my own destiny sketched upon the ice with diamond-like writing. «The hours of youth, of beauty, of magic are only given to those who live for the ideal in order to bolster their courage and refresh their heart. But for the most part, their life is a struggle without end, a path that leads through desolate deserts, like the road you are traveling. Do you want to accept the challenge and not shun the sacrifice that it requires? Are you willing to repeatedly crucify your heart, which contains the eternally burning thirst for beauty?» 

In that moment, as I imagined reading this writing in an unmistakable hand, the boys hurried over and brought me a bouquet of violets which they had picked from the sparse green growing amidst the ice. Then they leapt away to look for more. The sight of these flowers which characterized my thoughts so perfectly moved me deeply, and I involuntarily knelt on the rocks and cried: «Yes, I accept the challenge; I will walk the solitary path without wavering which those who seek the truth pursue, and I will be thankful for the few flowers which I find along the way.»

Meysenbug was a dear friend of Nietzsche's. He lived with her and Paul Rée in Sorrento, where they all read Voltaire together (alongside some others, like Mainländer and Diderot), and where Nietzsche started his Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Meysenbug's Memoiren einer Idealistin was of three volumes, published anonymously. Nietzsche acquired the book in early 1876 and perused it thoroughly, and probably reread it in later years of his life (until 1888), and recommended it to his friends, like Rohde and Gersdorff. The above translation is the only available one in English, as far as I am concerned, and it claimes that it is a full translation. I came across Meysenbug only once before that I didn't even remember her; it was in William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience [1917], p. 395, under an excerpt taken from Amiel's Journal Intime. The excerpt of Meysenbug's reads thus:

I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating and reconciling; and now again, as once before in distant days in the Alps of Dauphiné, I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable. Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world-encircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all the great who had ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and it appeared as if I heard their greeting: ‘Thou too belongest to the company of those who overcome.’

The Saddest Fate

Anonymous, The Saddest Fate:

To touch a broken lute,To strike a jangled string,To strive with tones forever muteThe dear old tunes to sing—What sadder fate could any heart befall?
Alas! dear child, never to sing at all.

To sigh for pleasures flown.To weep for withered flowers,To count the blessings we have known,Lost with the vanished hours—What sadder fate could any heart befall?
Alas! dear child, ne'er to have known them all.

To dream of love and rest,To know the dream has past,To bear within an aching breastOnly a void at last—What sadder fate could any heart befall?
Alas! dear child, ne'er to have loved at all.

To trust an unknown good,To hope, but all in vain,Over a far-off bliss to brood,Only to find it pain—What sadder fate could any soul befall?
Alas! dear child, never to hope at all.

Lover Bismarck

Otto von Bismarck, Love Letters, Schönhausen, October 10, 1850 (Masterpieces of German Literature, vol. x., pp. 70-71):

It is still impossible for me to acquiesce in the notion that we are to be separated all winter, and I am sick at heart whenever I think of it; only now do I truly feel how very, very much you and the babies are part of myself, and how you fill my being. That probably explains why it is that I appear cold to all except you, even to mother; if God should impose on me the terrible affliction of losing you, I feel, so far as my feelings can at this moment grasp and realize such a wilderness of desolation, that I would then cling so to your parents that mother would have to complain of being persecuted with love. But away with all imaginary misery; there is enough in reality. Let us now earnestly thank the Lord that we are all together, even though separated by three hundred and fifty miles, and let us experience the sweetness of knowing that we love each other very much, and can tell each other so. To me it is always like ingratitude to God that we choose to live apart so long, and are not together while He makes it possible for us . . .

Between Age And Youth

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorisms, 1892, tr. Mrs. Annis Lee Wister (Masterpieces of German Literature, vol. 13, p. 434):

In youth we learn; in age we understand.

The Dogmatic And The One With Open Vistas

Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments (Spring 1885-Spring 1886), tr. Adrian Del Caro (Stanford University Press, 2020), §34[25], p. 6:

Such dogmatic people as Dante and Plato are the most distant and perhaps for that reason the most alluring: who live in a house of knowledge that is carpentered and held together by faith. The first in his own, the other in the Christian-patristic. 

There is an entirely different strength and mobility to maintaining oneself in an incomplete system, with free, open vistas, than in a dogmatic world. Leonardo da Vinci stands higher than Michelangelo, Michelangelo higher than Raphael. 

To Live In Obscurity (Especially In An Age Of Spectacles)

Abraham Cowley, Essays, Of Obscurity:

Bene qui latuit, bene vixit, He has lived well, who has lain well hidden. Which, if it be a truth, the world, I’ll swear, is sufficiently deceived. For my part, I think it is, and that the pleasantest condition of life, is in incognito. What a brave privilege is it to be free from all contentions, from all envying or being envied, from receiving and from paying all kind of ceremonies? It is in my mind a very delightful pastime, for two good and agreeable friends to travel up and down together in places where they are by nobody known, nor know anybody. It was the case of Æneas and his Achates, when they walked invisibly about the fields and streets of Carthage, Venus herself

        A veil of thickened air around them cast,  
        That none might know, or see them as they passed.

. . . If we engage into a large acquaintance and various familiarities, we set open our gates to the invaders of most of our time: we expose our life to a Quotidian Ague of frigid impertinences, which would make a wise man tremble to think of. . . . Upon the whole matter, I account a person who has a moderate mind and fortune, and lives in the conversation of two or three agreeable friends, with little commerce in the world besides; who is esteemed well enough by his few neighbours that know him, and is truly irreproachable by anybody; and so after a healthful quiet life, before the great inconveniences of old age, goes more silently out of it than he came in (for I would not have him so much as cry in the exit); this innocent deceiver of the word, as Horace calls him, this Muta Persona, I take to have been more happy in his part, than the greatest actors that fill the stage with show and noise, nay, even than Augustus himself, who asked with his last breath, whether he had not played his farce very well.

Lente Sed Attente

George Wither, A Collection of Emblems, Ancient and Modern, Illvstr. XIX., Bk. 1:

Experience proves, that Men who trust upon

Their Nat'rall parts, too much, oft lose the Day,

And, faile in that which els they might have done,

By vainely trifling pretious Time away.

It also shewes, that many Men have sought

With so much Rashnesse, those things they desir'd,

That they have brought most likely Hopes to nought;

And, in the middle of their Courses, tir'd.

And, not a few, are found who so much wrong

Gods Gratiousnesse, as if their thinkings were,

That (seeing he deferres his Iudgements long)

His Vengeance, he, for ever, would forbeare:

But, such as these may see wherein they faile,

And, what would fitter be for them to doe,

If they would contemplate the slow-pac'd Snaile;

Or, this our Hieroglyphicke looke into:

For, thence we learne, that Perseverance brings

Large Workes to end, though slowly they creepe on;

And, that Continuance perfects many things,

Which seeme, at first, unlikely to be done.

It warnes, likewise, that some Affaires require

More Heed then Haste: And that the Course we take,

Should suite as well our Strength, as our Desire;

Else (as our Proverbe saith) Haste, Waste may make.

And, in a Mysticke-sense, it seemes to preach

Repentance and Amendment, unto those

Who live, as if they liv'd beyond Gods reach;

Because, he long deferres deserved Blowes:

For, though Iust-Vengeance moveth like a Snaile,

And slowly comes; her comming will not faile.

 

The emblem is originally by Gabriel Rollenhagen (1583-1619), whose emblem books are gems to forever cherish. 

The Laughing And Weeping Animal

William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers, Lecture I.:

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. We weep at what thwarts or exceeds our desires in serious matters: we laugh at what only disappoints our expectations in trifles. We shed tears from sympathy with real and necessary distress; as we burst into laughter from want of sympathy with that which is unreasonable and unnecessary, the absurdity of which provokes our spleen or mirth, rather than any serious reflections on it.

To explain the nature of laughter and tears, is to account for the condition of human life; for it is in a manner compounded of these two! It is a tragedy or a comedy—sad or merry, as it happens. The crimes and misfortunes that are inseparable from it, shock and wound the mind when they once seize upon it, and when the pressure can no longer be borne, seek relief in tears: the follies and absurdities that men commit, or the odd accidents that befal them, afford us amusement from the very rejection of these false claims upon our sympathy, and end in laughter. If every thing that went wrong, if every vanity or weakness in another gave us a sensible pang, it would be hard indeed: but as long as the disagreeableness of the consequences of a sudden disaster is kept out of sight by the immediate oddity of the circumstances, and the absurdity or unaccountableness of a foolish action is the most striking thing in it, the ludicrous prevails over the pathetic, and we receive pleasure instead of pain from the farce of life which is played before us, and which discomposes our gravity as often as it fails to move our anger or our pity!

The Poetic Life

Giovanni della Casa, Giovanni della Casa's Poem Book, tr. John Van Sickle (1999), III., The Healthy Style of Poetic Life, pp. 45-47:  

        If you delight in wisdom's watchful care, 
        and keen ability gives strength, enjoy
        henceforth the gods' bright gift: thus you will live
        more rightly, much more fully, far more fitly 
        whatever time your friendly fates spin out.
        Nor how the commons view you need you give
        great weight, unruffled: much that stupid crowd
        weighs basely. Pay no heed, avoid
        retreating from the field where you're engaged:
        No sane man puts the people's view ahead
        of better men's applause, which you will get by right,
        since, Bembo, you already far outrun
        all others on this course: believe a straight
        and canny referee. Yet, meanwhile, we
        get charged with sloth by folks, lest you suppose
        they prize this simple life. No, they would have
        us give up trifling verse for real affairs,
        to sunny day from shade and darkness move:
        they blame inaction actively, they whine
        that we with wheedling love corrupt the pure
        in heart; like sour-faced relatives they scold. [...]

Between Thought And Feeling, And Amiel And Clough

Richard Holt Hutton, Chriticism on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers (MacMillan, 1894), vol. I., ch. XXI., Amiel and Clough, pp. 212-3:

Thought undoubtedly does correct, and correct with most salutary inexorability, the illusions of feeling. And, again, feeling does correct, and correct with equally salutary inexorability, the day-dreams of thought. The man who habitually distrusts his feelings is just as certain to live in a world of illusion as the man who habitually distrusts his thoughts. But undoubtedly Amiel, who allowed the illusion of his career much more absolutely than Clough ever allowed his faith in «the massy strengths of abstraction» to govern his career, made the greater mistake of the two. Had Amiel not been so sedulous to ward off the pressure of responsibilities to which he did not feel fully equal, he might doubtless have made mistakes, and entered into relations which he would have found painful to him and a shock to his ideal. But the truth is that those relations which are not all that we desire them to be in human life, which are not ideal relations, are of the very essence of the discipline of the will and of the affections, and no man ever yet escaped them, without escaping one of the most useful experiences of life. Amiel, like Clough, was far too much afraid of hampering the free play of his intellect. No man ever yet did a great work for the world, without hampering the free play of his intellect. And yet it is no paradox to say that no man ever yet had the highest command of his intellect who had not times without number hampered its free play, in order that he might enter the more deeply into the deeper relations of the human heart.

The Geniuses Without Learning

Joseph Addison, Essays and Tales (London Cassell, 1888), Genius, pp. 157-9:

Among great geniuses those few draw the admiration of all the world upon them, and stand up as the prodigies of mankind, who, by the mere strength of natural parts, and without any assistance of art or learning, have produced works that were the delight of their own times and the wonder of posterity.  There appears something nobly wild and extravagant in these great natural geniuses, that is infinitely more beautiful than all turn and polishing of what the French call a bel esprit, by which they would express a genius refined by conversation, reflection, and the reading of the most polite authors.  The greatest genius which runs through the arts and sciences takes a kind of tincture from them and falls unavoidably into imitation.

Many of these great natural geniuses, that were never disciplined and broken by rules of art, are to be found among the ancients, and in particular among those of the more Eastern parts of the world.  Homer has innumerable flights that Virgil was not able to reach, and in the Old Testament we find several passages more elevated and sublime than any in Homer.  At the same time that we allow a greater and more daring genius to the ancients, we must own that the greatest of them very much failed in, or, if you will, that they were much above the nicety and correctness of the moderns.  In their similitudes and allusions, provided there was a likeness, they did not much trouble themselves about the decency of the comparison: thus Solomon resembles the nose of his beloved to the tower of Lebanon which looketh towards Damascus, as the coming of a thief in the night is a similitude of the same kind in the New Testament.  It would be endless to make collections of this nature.  Homer illustrates one of his heroes encompassed with the enemy, by an ass in a field of corn that has his sides belaboured by all the boys of the village without stirring a foot for it; and another of them tossing to and fro in his bed, and burning with resentment, to a piece of flesh broiled on the coals.  This particular failure in the ancients opens a large field of raillery to the little wits, who can laugh at an indecency, but not relish the sublime in these sorts of writings.  The present Emperor of Persia, conformable to this Eastern way of thinking, amidst a great many pompous titles, denominates himself “the sun of glory” and “the nutmeg of delight.”  In short, to cut off all cavilling against the ancients, and particularly those of the warmer climates, who had most heat and life in their imaginations, we are to consider that the rule of observing what the French call the bienseance in an allusion has been found out of later years, and in the colder regions of the world, where we could make some amends for our want of force and spirit by a scrupulous nicety and exactness in our compositions.  Our countryman Shakespeare was a remarkable instance of this first kind of great geniuses.

The Wife's Lament

Old English Poems, tr. Cosette Faust & Stith Thompson (1918), 1. Pagan Poetry, 2. Gnomic Group, The Wife's Lament, pp. 73-74:

[...]                                        Here bitterly I have suffered

The faring of my lord afar. Friends there are on earth

Living in love,             in lasting bliss,

While, wakeful at dawn,     I wander alone

Under the oak-tree         the earth-cave near.

Sadly I sit there         the summer-long day,

Wearily weeping         my woeful exile,

My many miseries.        Hence I may not ever

Cease my sorrowing,     my sad bewailing,

Nor all the longings         of my life of woe. 

Always may the young man be mournful of spirit,

Unhappy of heart,         and have as his portion

Many sorrows of soul, unceasing breast-cares,

Though now blithe of behavior. Unbearable likewise

Be his joys in the world.    Wide be his exile

To far-away folk-lands     where my friend sits alone,

A stranger under stone-cliffs, by storm made hoary,

A weary-souled wanderer, by waters encompassed,

In his lonely lodging.         My lover endures

Unmeasured mind-care: he remembers too oft

A happier home.         To him is fate cruel

Who lingers and longs for the loved one’s return!

A Realisation

Otto von Bismarck, quoted in: Emil Ludwig, Bismarck; The Story of a Fighter (Blue Ribbon Books, 1927, reprinted 1934), tr. Eden and Cedar Paul, p. 304:

«People are much stupider than I had imagined!» was his generalisation after the first few months of his premiership.

The Feature Of Roman Corruption

William Edward Lecky, History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. I. (New York: 3rd edt., 1897), ch. 2, The Pagan Empire, p. 262:

The aristocracy may revel in every excess of ostentatious vice, but the great mass of the people, at the loom, the counter, or the plough, continue unaffected by their example, and the habits of life into which they are forced by the condition of their trades preserve them from gross depravity. It was the most frightful feature of the corruption of ancient Rome that it extended through every class of the community.

Lucid Love

Émile Verhaeren, The Love Poems of Émile Verhaeren, tr. F. S. Flint, 1916, xv.:

I dedicate to your tears, to your smile, my gentlest thoughts, those I tell you, those also that remain undefined and too deep to tell.

I dedicate to your tears, to your smile, to your whole soul, my soul, with its tears and its smiles and its kiss.

See, the dawn whitens the ground that is the colour of lees of wine; shadowy bonds seem to slip and glide away with melancholy; the water of the ponds grows bright and sifts its noise; the grass glitters and the flowers open, and the golden woods free themselves from the night.

Oh! what if we could one day enter thus into the full light; oh, what if we could one day, with conquering cries and lofty prayers, with no more veils upon us and no more remorse in us, oh! what if we could one day enter together into lucid love.

A Characterisation Of Carlyle By The Tainean Hand

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, History of English Literature (Philadelphia: H. Altemus, 1908), vol. 4, Modern Authors, ch. IV., Philosophy and History: Carlyle, pp. 311-12:

Many will find Carlyle presumptuous, coarse; they will suspect from his theories, and also from his way of speaking, that he looks upon himself as a great man, neglected, of the race of heroes; that, in his opinion, the human race ought to put themselves in his hands, and trust him with their business. Certainly he lectures us, and with contempt. He despises his epoch; he has a sulky, sour tone; he keeps purposely on stilts. He disdains objections. In his eyes, opponents are not up to his form. He abuses his predecessors: when he speaks of Cromwell's biographers, he takes the tone of a man of genius astray amongst pedants. He has the superior smile, the resigned condescension of a hero who feels himself a martyr, and he only quits it, to shout at the top of his voice, like an ill-bred plebeian.

All this is redeemed, and more, by rare merits. He speaks truly: minds like his are the most fertile. They are almost the only ones which make discoveries. Pure classifiers do not invent; they are too dry. «To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathise with it.» «Fantasy is the organ of the Godlike, the understanding is indeed thy window; too clear thou canst not make it; but fantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving retina, healthy or diseased.» In more simple language, this means that every object, animate or inanimate, is gifted with powers which constitute its nature and produce its development; that, in order to know it, we must recreate it in ourselves, with the train of its potentialities, and that we only know it entirely by inwardly perceiving all its tendencies, and inwardly seeing all its effects. And verily this process, which is the imitation of nature, is the only one by which we can penetrate nature; Shakspeare had it as an instinct, and Goethe as a method. There is none so powerful or delicate, so fitted to the complexity of things and to the structure of our mind. There is none more proper to renew our ideas, to withdraw us from formulas, to deliver us from the prejudices, with which education involves us, to overthrow the barriers in which our surroundings enclose us. It is by this that Carlyle escaped from conventional English ideas, penetrated into the philosophy and science of Germany, to think out again in his own manner the Germanic discoveries, and to give an original theory of man and of the universe.

Abides With None

Saʿdī Shīrāzī, The Gulistān; Or, Rose Garden, tr. Edward B. Eastwick (London: 1880, 2nd edt.), ch. 1, p. 24:

        The world, my brother! will abide with none,
        By the world's Maker let thy heart be won.
        Rely not, nor repose on this world's gain,
        For many a son like thee she has reared and slain.
        What matters, when the spirit seeks to fly,
        If on a throne or on bare earth we die?

Life Is Found In The Inattention To Life

Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay, tr. Richard Howard, ch. 6, Abdications, In The Secret of Moralists:

. . . acting, we do not meditate upon action; if I study my “neighbor” it is because he has ceased to be my neighbor, and I am no longer “myself” if I analyze myself: I become an object along with all the rest. The believer who weighs his faith ends by putting God in the scales, and safeguards his fervor only out of fear of losing it. Placed at the antipodes of naïvete, of integral and authentic existence, the moralist exhausts himself in a vis-á-vis with himself and with others: comedian, microcosm of second thoughts, he does not endure the artifice which men, in order to live, spontaneously accept and incorporate in their nature. Everything seems convention: he divulges the motives of feelings and actions, he unmasks the simulacra of civilization, because he suffers at having glimpsed and gone beyond them; for these simulacra give life, they are life, whereas his existence, in contemplating them, strays into the search for a “nature” which does not exist and which, if it did, would be as alien to him as the artifices which have been added to it. All psychological complexity reduced to its elements, explained and dissected, involves an operation much deadlier to the operator than to the victim. We liquidate our feelings by pursuing their detours, and our impulses if we ambush their trajectory; and when we detail the movements of others, it is not they who lose their way. . . . Everything we do not participate in seems unreasonable; but those who move cannot fail to advance, whereas the observer, whichever way he turns, registers their futile triumph only to excuse his own defeat. This is because there is life only in the inattention to life.

Between Seneca And Plutarch Again, And The Judgment Of Quintilian

Arthur Murphy, The Works of Cornelius Tacitus, vol. VIII. (London, 1805), Notes on the Dialogue Concerning Oratory, pp. 285-288:

Menage says, if all the books in the world were in the fire, there is not one, whom he would so eagerly snatch from the flames as Plutarch. That author never tires him; he reads him often, and always finds new beauties. He cannot say the same of Seneca; not but there are admirable passages in his works, but when brought to the test, they lose their apparent beauty by a close examination. Seneca serves to be quoted in the warmth of conversation, but is not of equal value in the closet. Whatever be the subject, he wishes to shine, and, by consequence, his thoughts are too refined, and often false.

. . . Quintilian was his [Seneca's] contemporary; he saw, and heard the man, and, in less than twenty years after his death, pronounced judgment against him. In the conclusion of the first chapter of his tenth book, after having given an account of the Greek and Roman authors, he says, he reserved Seneca for the last place, because, having always endeavoured to counteract the influence of a bad taste, he was supposed to be influenced by motives of personal enmity. But the case was otherwise. He saw that Seneca was the favourite of the times, and, to check the torrent that threatened the ruin of all true eloquence, he exerted his best efforts to diffuse a sounder judgment. He did not wish that Seneca should be laid aside: but he could not, in silence, see him preferred to the writers of the Augustan age, whom that writer endeavoured to depreciate, conscious, that, having chosen a different style, he could not hope to please the taste of those, who were charmed with the authors of a former day. But Seneca was still in fashion; his partisans continued to admire, though it cannot be said that they imitated him. He fell short of the ancients, and they were still more beneath their model. Since they were content to copy, it were to be wished that they had been able to vie with him. He pleased by his defects, and the herd of imitators chose the worst. They acquired a vicious manner, and flattered themselves that they resembled their master. But the truth is, they disgraced him. Seneca, it must be allowed, had many great and excellent qualities; a lively imagination; vast erudition, and extensive knowledge. He frequently employed others to make researches for him, and was often deceived. He embraced all subjects; in his philosophy, not always profound, but a keen censor of the manners, and on moraa subjects truly admirable. He has brilliant passages, and beautiful sentiments; but the expression is in a false taste, the more dangerous, as he abounds with delightful vices. You would have wished that he had written with his own imagination, and the judgment of others. To sum up his character: had he known how to rate little things; had he been above the petty ambition of always shining; had he not been fond of himself; had he not weakened his force by minute and dazzling sentences; he would have gained, not the admiration of boys, but the suffrage of the judicious. At present he may be read with safety by those, who have made acquaintance with better models. His works afford the fairest opportunity of distinguishing the beauties of fine writing from their opposite vices. He has much to be approved, and even admired: but a just selection is necessary, and it is to be regretted that he did not choose for himself. Such was the judgment of Quintilian . . .

See also: Between Seneca And Plutarch

Between Seneca And Plutarch

William Edward Lecky, History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. I. (New York: 3rd edt., 1897), ch. 2, The Pagan Empire, p. 243-4:

Plutarch, whose fame as a biographer has, I think, unduly eclipsed his reputation as a moralist, may be justly regarded as the leader of this movement, and his moral writings may be profitably compared with those of Seneca, the most ample exponent of the sterner school. Seneca is not unfrequently self-conscious, theatrical, and overstrained. His precepts have something of the affected ring of a popular preacher. The imperfect fusion of his short sentences gives his style a disjointed and, so to speak, granulated character, which the Emperor Caligula happily expressed when he compared it to sand without cement; yet he often rises to a majesty of eloquence, a grandeur both of thought and of expression, that few moralists have ever rivalled. Plutarch, though far less sublime, is more sustained, equable, and uniformly pleasing. The Montaigne of antiquity, his genius coruscates playfully and gracefully around his subject; he delights in illustrations which are often singularly vivid and original, but which, by their excessive multiplication, appear sometimes rather the texture than the ornament of his discourse. A gentle, tender spirit, and a judgment equally free from paradox, exaggeration, and excessive subtilty, are the characteristics of all he wrote. Plutarch excels most in collecting motives of consolation; Seneca in forming characters that need no consolation. There is something of the woman in Plutarch; Seneca is all a man. The writings of the first resemble the strains of the flute, to which the ancients attributed the power of calming the passions and charming away the clouds of sorrow, and drawing men by a gentle suasion into the paths of virtue; the writings of the other are like the trumpet-blast, which kindles the soul with an heroic courage. The first is most fitted to console a mother sorrowing over her dead child, the second to nerve a brave man, without flinching and without illusion, to grapple with an inevitable fate.