Montaigne’s illustration of atmosphere was Julius Caesar.  When the great Roman was still a youth, he was captured by pirates and chained to the oars as a galley-slave; but Caesar told stories, sang songs, declaimed with endless good humor.  Chains bound Caesar to the oars, and his words bound the pirates to himself.  That night he supped with the captain.  The second day his knowledge of currents, coasts and the route of treasure-ships made him first mate; then he won the sailors over, put the captain in irons, and ruled the ship like a king; soon after, he sailed the ship as a prize into a Roman port.  If this incident is credible, a youth who in four days can talk the chains off his wrists, talk himself into the captaincy, talk a pirate ship into his own hands as booty, is not to be accounted for by his eloquent words.  His speech was but a tithe of his power, and wrought its spell only when personality had first created a sympathetic atmosphere.  Only a fraction of a great man’s character can manifest itself in speech; for the character is inexpressibly finer and larger than his words.  The narrative of Washington’s exploits is the smallest part of his work.  Sheer weight of personality alone can account for him.  Happy the man of moral energy all compact, whose mere presence, like that of Samuel, the seer, restrains others, softens and transforms them.  This is a thing to be written on a man’s tomb:  “His presence made bad men good.”

This mysterious bundle of forces called man, moving through society, exhaling blessings or blightings, gets its meaning from the capacity of others to receive its influences.  Man is not so wonderful in his power to mold other lives, as in his readiness to be molded.  Steel to hold, he is wax to take.  The Daguerrean plate and the Aeolian harp do but meagerly interpret his receptivity.  Therefore, some philosophers think character is but the sum total of those many-shaped influences called climate, food, friends, books, industries.  As a lump of clay is lifted to the wheel by the potter’s hand, and under gentle pressure takes on the lines of a beautiful cup or vase, so man sets forth a mere mass of mind; soon, under the gentle touch of love, hope, ambition, he stands forth in the aspect of a Cromwell, a Milton or a Lincoln.

Standing at the center of the universe, a thousand forces come rushing in to report themselves to the sensitive soul-center.  There is a nerve in man that runs out to every room and realm in the universe.  Only a tithe of the world’s truth and beauty finds access to the lion or lark; they look out as one in castle tower whose only window is a slit in the rock.  But man dwells in a glass dome; to him the world lies open on every side.  Every fact and force outside has a desk inside man where it makes up its reports.  The ear reports all sounds and songs; the eye all sights and scenes; the reason all arguments, judgment each “ought” and “ought not,” the religious faculty reports messages coming from a foreign clime.