PLUTARCH’S MORALS[1]

[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.