[Footnote 1: A review of the English translation edited by William W.
Goodwin with an Introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson.]
Plutarch is perhaps the most eminent example of how strong a hold simple good humor and good sense lay upon the affections of mankind. Not a man of genius or heroism himself, his many points of sympathy with both make him an admirable conductor of them in that less condensed form which is more wholesome and acceptable to the average mind. Of no man can it be more truly said that, if not a rose himself, he had lived all his days in the rose’s neighborhood. Such is the delightful equableness of his temperament and his singular talent for reminiscence, so far is he always from undue heat while still susceptible of so much enthusiasm as shall not disturb digestion, that he might seem to have been born middle-aged. Few men have so amicably combined the love of a good dinner and of the higher morality. He seems to have comfortably solved the problem of having your cake and eating it, at which the ascetic interpreters of Christianity teach us to despair. He serves us up his worldly wisdom in a sauce of Plato, and gives a kind of sensuous relish to the disembodied satisfactions of immortality. He is a better Christian than many an orthodox divine. If he do not, like Sir Thomas Browne, love to lose himself in an O, altitudo! yet the sky-piercing peaks and snowy solitudes of ethical speculation loom always on the horizon about the sheltered dwelling of his mind, and he continually gets up from his books to rest and refresh his eyes upon them. He seldom invites us to alpine-climbing, and when he does, it is to some warm nook like the Jardin on Mont Blanc, a parenthesis of homely summer nestled amid the sublime nakedness of snow. If he glance upward at becoming intervals to the “primal duties,” he turns back with a settled predilection to the “sympathies that are nestled at the feet like flowers.” But it is within his villa that we love to be admitted to him and to enjoy that garrulity which we forgive more readily in the mother of the muses than in any of her daughters, unless it be Clio, who is most like her. If we are in the library, he is reminded of this or that passage in a favorite author, and, going to the shelves, takes down the volume to read it aloud with decorous emphasis. If we are in the atrium (where we like him best) he has an anecdote to tell of all the great Greeks and Romans whose busts or statues are ranged about us, and who for the first time soften from their marble alienation and become human. It is this that makes him so amiable a moralist and brings his lessons home to us. He does not preach up any remote and inaccessible virtue, but makes all his lessons of magnanimity, self-devotion, patriotism seem neighborly and practicable to us by an example which associates them with our common humanity. His higher teaching is theosophy with no taint of theology. He is a pagan Tillotson disencumbered of the archiepiscopal robes, a practical Christian unbewildered with doctrinal punctilios. This is evidently what commended him as a philosopher to Montaigne, as may be inferred from some hints which follow immediately upon the comparison between Seneca and Plutarch in the essay on “Physiognomy.” After speaking of some “escripts encores plus révérez,” he asks, in his idiomatic way, “à, quoy faire nous allons nous gendarmant par ces efforts de la science?” More than this, however, Montaigne liked him because he was good talk, as it is called, a better companion than writer. Yet he is not without passages which are noble in point of mere style. Landor remarks this in the conversation between Johnson and Tooke, where he makes Tooke say: “Although his style is not valued by the critics, I could inform them that there are in Plutarch many passages of exquisite beauty, in regard to style, derived perhaps from authors much more ancient.” But if they are borrowed, they have none of the discordant effect of the purpureus pannus, for the warm sympathy of his nature assimilates them thoroughly and makes them his own. Oddly enough, it is through his memory that Plutarch is truly original. Who ever remembered so much and yet so well? It is this selectness (without being overfastidious) that gauges the natural elevation of his mind. He is a gossip, but he has supped with Plato or sat with Alexander in his tent to bring away only memorable things. We are speaking of him, of course, at his best. Many of his essays are trivial, but there is hardly one whose sands do not glitter here and there with the proof that the stream of his thought and experience has flowed down through auriferous soil. “We sail on his memory into the ports of every nation,” says Mr. Emerson admirably in his Introduction to Goodwin’s Plutarch’s “Morals.” No doubt we are becalmed pretty often, and yet our old skipper almost reconciles us with our dreary isolation, so well can he beguile the time, when he chooses, with anecdote and quotation.
It would hardly be extravagant to say that this delightful old proser, in whom his native Boeotia is only too apparent at times, and whose mind, in some respects, was strictly provincial, had been more operative (if we take the “Lives” and the “Morals” together) in the thought and action of men than any other single author, ancient or modern. And on the whole it must be allowed that his influence has been altogether good, has insensibly enlarged and humanized his readers, winning them over to benevolence, moderation, and magnanimity. And so wide was his own curiosity that they must be few who shall not find somewhat to their purpose in his discursive pages. For he was equally at home among men and ideas, open-eared to the one and open-minded to the other. His influence, too, it must be remembered, begins earlier than that of any other ancient author except Aesop. To boys he has always been the Robinson Crusoe of classic antiquity, making what had hitherto seemed a remote island sequestered from them by a trackless flood of years, living and real. Those obscure solitudes which their imagination had peopled with spectral equestrian statues, are rescued by the sound of his cheery voice as part of the familiar and daylight world. We suspect that Agesilaus on his hobby-horse first humanized antiquity for most of us. Here was the human footprint which persuaded us that the past was inhabited by creatures like ourselves.