 | ON GREATNESS. The beauties of Washington Irving, author of "The sketch-book," "Knickerbocker," "Crayon miscellany," &c. |  |
ON GREATNESS.
We have more than once, in the course of our work,
been most jocosely familiar with great personages; and,
in truth, treated them with as little ceremony, respect,
and consideration, as if they had been our most particular
friends. Now, we would not suffer the mortification
of having our readers even suspect us of an intimacy of the
kind; assuring them we are extremely choice in our intimates,
and uncommonly circumspect in avoiding connections
with all doubtful characters; particularly pimps, bailiffs,
lottery-brokers, chevaliers of industry, and great men.
The world in general is pretty well aware of what is to be
understood by the former classes of delinquents: but as
the latter has never, I believe been specifically defined, and
as we are determined to instruct our readers to the extent
of our abilities, and their limited comprehension, it may
not be amiss here to let them know what we understand by
a great man.
First, therefore, let us (editors and kings are always plural)
premise, that there are two kinds of greatness;—one
conferred by heaven—the exalted nobility of the soul;—
the other, a spurious distinction, engendered by the mob,
and lavished upon its favourites. The former of these distinctions
we have already contemplated with reverence;
the latter we will take this opportunity to strip naked before
our unenlightened readers; so that if by chance any of
them are held in ignominious thraldom by this base circulation
of false coin, they may forthwith emancipate themselves
from such inglorious delusion.
It is a fictitious value given to individuals by public
caprice, as bankers give an impression to a worthless slip
of paper, thereby giving it a currency for infinitely more
coin, and peculiar great men; neither of which will, for
the most part, pass current out of the country where they
are stamped. Your true mob-created great man is like
a note of one of the little New-England banks, and his
value depreciates in proportion to the distance from home.
In England, a great man is he who has most ribands and
gew-gaws on his coat, most horses in his carriage, most
slaves in his retinue, or most toad-eaters at his table; in
France, he who can most dexterously flourish his heels
above his head—Duport is most incontestibly the greatest
man in France!—when the Emperor is absent. The
greatest man in China is he who can trace his ancestry
up to the moon; and in this country our great men may
generally hunt down their pedigree until it burrows in
the dirt like a rabbit. To be concise; our great men are
those who are most expert at crawling on all-fours, and
have the happiest facility in dragging and winding themselves
along in the dirt like very reptiles. This may seem
a paradox to many of my readers, who with great good
nature be it hinted, are too stupid to look beyond the mere
surface of our invaluable writings; and often pass over
the knowing allusion, and poignant meaning, that is slyly
couching beneath. It is for the benefit of such helpless
ignorants, who have no other creed but the opinion of the
mob, that I shall trace, as far as it is possible to follow him
in his ascent from insignificance,—the rise, progress, and
completion of a little great man.
In a logocracy, to use the sage Mustapha's phrase, it
is not absolutely necessary to the formation of a great
man that he should be either wise or valiant, upright or
honourable. On the contrary, daily experience shows
that these qualities rather impede his preferment, inasmuch
as they are prone to render him too inflexibly erect,
and are directly at variance with that willowy suppleness
which enables a man to wind, and twist, through all the
nooks and turns and dark winding passages that lead to
greatness. The grand requisite for climbing the rugged
hill of popularity,—the summit of which is the seat of
power,—is to be useful. And here once more, for the
sake of our readers, who are of course not so wise as ourselves,
I must explain what we understand by usefulness.
The horse, in his native state, is wild, swift, impetuous,
full of majesty, and of a most generous spirit. It is then
the animal is noble, exalted and useless. But entrap him,
the curb into his mouth, the load upon his back, and reduce
him into servile obedience to the bridle and the lash, and
it is then he becomes useful. Your jackass is one of the
most useful animals in existence. If my readers do not
now understand what I mean by usefulness, I give them
all up for most absolute nincoms.
To rise in this country a man must first descend. The
aspiring politician may be compared to that indefatigable
insect called the tumbler, pronounced by a distinguished
personage to be the only industrious animal in Virginia;
which buries itself in filth, and works ignobly in the dirt,
until it forms a little ball of dirt, which it rolls laboriously
along, like Diogenes in his tub; sometimes head,
sometimes tail foremost, pilfering from every rat and mud
hole, and encreasing its ball of greatness by the contributions
of the kennel. Just so the candidate for greatness:
—he plunges into that mass of obscenity, the mob; labours
in dirt and oblivion, and makes unto himself the rudiments
of a popular name from the admiration and praises
of rogues, ignoramuses, and blackguards. His name
once started, onward he goes struggling and puffing, and
pushing it before him; collecting new tributes from the
dregs and offals of the land as he proceeds, until having
gathered together a mighty mass of popularity, he mounts
it in triumph, is hoisted into office, and becomes a great
man, and a ruler in the land.—All this will be clearly
illustrated by a sketch of a worthy of the kind, who
sprung up under my eye, and was hatched from pollution
by the broad rays of popularity, which, like the sun, can
“breed maggots in a dead dog.”
Timothy Dabble was a young man of very promising
talents; for he wrote a fair hand, and had thrice won
the silver medal at a country academy; he was also
an orator, for he talked with emphatic volubility, and
could argue a full hour without taking either side, or
advancing a single opinion; he had still farther requisites
for eloquence; for he made very handsome gestures,
had dimples in his cheeks when he smiled, and enunciated
most harmoniously through his nose. In short, nature
had certainly marked him out for a great man; for
though he was not tall, yet he added at least half an
inch to his stature by elevating his head, and assumed an
amazing expression of dignity by turning up his nose and
curling his nostrils in a style of conscious superiority.
friends, in full caucus, one and all declared that he was
undoubtedly born to be a great man, and it would be his
own fault if he were not one. Dabble was tickled with
an opinion which coincided so happily with his own,—
for vanity, in a confidential whisper, had given him the
like intimation; and he reverenced the judgment of his
friends because they thought so highly of himself;—accordingly
he set out with a determination to become a
great man, and to start in the scrub-race for honour and
renown. How to attain the desired prizes was however
the question. He knew, by a kind of instinctive feeling,
which seems peculiar to grovelling minds, that honour,
and its better part—profit, would never seek him out;
that they would never knock at his door and crave admittance;
but must be courted, and toiled after, and
earned. He therefore strutted forth in the highways,
the market-places, and the assemblies of the people;
ranted like a true cockerel orator about virtue, and patriotism,
and liberty, and equality, and himself. Full
many a political windmill did he battle with; and full
many a time did he talk himself out of breath, and his
hearers out of their patience. But Dabble found to his
vast astonishment, that there was not a notorious political
pimp at a ward meeting but could out-talk him;—
and what was still more mortifying, there was not a notorious
political pimp but was more noticed and caressed
than himself. The reason was simple enough; while he
harangued about principles, the others ranted about men;
where he reprobated a political error, they blasted a
political character:—they were, consequently, the most
useful; for the great object of our political disputes is not
who shall have the honour of emancipating the community
from the leading-strings of delusion, but who shall
have the profit of holding the strings and leading the
community by the nose.
Dabble was likewise very loud in his professions of
integrity, incorruptibility, and disinterestedness; words,
which, from being filtered and refined through newspapers
and election hand-bills, have lost their original
signification; and in the political dictionary are synonymous
with empty pockets, itching palms, and interested
ambition. He, in addition to all this, declared
that he would support none but honest men; but unluckily
as but few of these offered themselves to be
pledged himself never to engage in party schemes, or
party politics, but to stand up solely for the broad interests
of his country;—so he stood alone and what is
the same thing, he stood still; for, in this country, he
who does not side with either party is like a body in a
vacuum between two planets, and must for ever remain
motionless.
Dabble was immeasurably surprised that a man so
honest, so disinterested, and so sagacious withal, and
one too who had the good of his country so much at
heart should thus remain unnoticed and unapplauded.
A little worldly advice, whispered in his ear by a
shrewd old politician, at once explained the whole mystery.
“He who would become great,” said he, “must
serve an apprenticeship to greatness; and rise by regular
gradation, like the master of a vessel, who commences by
being scrub and cabin-boy. He must fag in the train of
great men, echo all their sentiments, become their toad-eater
and parasite,—laugh at all their jokes; and, above
all, endeavour to make them laugh; if you only now
and then make a man laugh, your fortune is made. Look
but about you, youngster, and you will not see a single
little great man of the day but has his miserable herd of
retainers, who yelp at his heels, come at his whistle,
worry whoever he points his finger at, and think themselves
fully rewarded by sometimes snapping up a crumb
that falls from the great man's table. Talk of patriotism,
virtue and incorruptibility! tut, man! they are the
very qualities that scare munificence, and keep patronage
at a distance. You might as well attempt to entice crows
with red rags and gunpowder. Lay all these scarecrow
virtues aside, and let this be your maxim, that a candidate
for political eminence is like a dried herring; he
never becomes luminous until he is corrupt.”
Dabble caught with hungry avidity these congenial
doctrines, and turned into his predestined channel of
action with the force and rapidity of a stream which
has for a while been restrained from its natural course.
He became what nature had fitted him to be;—his
tone softened down from arrogant self-sufficiency to the
whine of fawning solicitation. He mingled in the caucusses
of the sovereign people; adapted his dress to a
similitude of dirty raggedness; argued most logically
with those who were of his own opinion; and slandered,
whose orbit he despaired ever to approach:—just as
that scoundrel midnight thief, the owl, hoots at the
blessed light of the sun, whose glorious lustre he dares
never contemplate. He likewise applied himself to
discharging faithfully the honourable duties of a partizan;
he poached about for private slanders, and ribald
anecdotes; he folded hand-bills—he even wrote one or
two himself, which he carried about in his pocket and
read to every body; he became a secretary at ward-meetings,
set his hand to divers resolutions of patriotic
import, and even once went so far as to make a speech,
in which he proved that patriotism was a virtue;—
the reigning bashaw a great man;—that this was a free
country, and he himself an arrant and incontestable buzzard!
Dabble was now very frequent and devout in his visits
to those temples of politics, popularity, and smoke, the
ward porter-houses; those true dens of equality, where
all ranks, ages, and talents, are brought down to the
dead level of rude familiarity.—'Twas here his talents
expanded, and his genius swelled up to its proper size;
like the loathsome toad, which shrinking from balmy
airs, and jocund sunshine, funds his congenial home in
caves and dungeons, and there nourishes his venom, and
bloats his deformity. 'Twas here he revelled with the
swinish multitude in their debauches on patriotism and
porter; and it became an even chance whether Dabble
would turn out a great man or a great drunkard.—But
Dabble in all this kept steadily in his eye the only deity
he ever worshiped—his interest. Having by his familiarity
ingratiated himself with the mob, he became
wonderfully potent and industrious at elections: knew
all the dens and cellars of profligacy and intemperance;
brought more negroes to the polls, and knew to a greater
certainty where votes could be bought for beer, than any
of his contemporaries. His exertions in the cause, his
persevering industry, his degrading compliance, his unresisting
humility, his steadfast dependence, at length
caught the attention of one of the leaders of the party;
who was pleased to observe that Dabble was a very
useful fellow, who would go all lengths. From that
moment his fortune was made;—he was hand and glove
with orators and slang-whangers; basked in the sunshine
of great men's smiles, and had the honour, sundry
out of the same pot with them at a porter-house!!
I will not fatigue myself with tracing this caterpillar
in his slimy progress from worm to butterfly; suffice
it that Dabble bowed and bowed, and fawned, and
sneaked, and smirked, and libelled, until one would
have thought perseverance itself would have settled down
into despair. There was no knowing how long he might
have lingered at a distance from his hopes, had he not
luckily got tarred and feathered for some of his election
eering manœuvres—this was the making of him! Let
not my readers stare—tarring and feathering here is
equal to pillory and cropped ears in England; and either
of these kinds of martyrdom will ensure a patriot the
sympathy and suffrages of a faction. His partizans, for
even he had his partizans, took his case into consideration
—he had been kicked and cuffed, and disgraced, and dishonoured
in the cause—he had licked the dust at the feet
of the mob—he was a faithful drudge, slow to anger, of
invincible patience, of incessant assiduity—a thorough
going tool, who could be curbed, and spurred, and directed
at pleasure—in short he had all the important qualifications
for a little great man, and he was accordingly
ushered into office amid the acclamations of the party.
The leading men complimented his usefulness, the multitude
his republican simplicity, and the slang-whangers
vouched for his patriotism. Since his elevation he has
discovered indubitable signs of having been destined for a
great man. His nose has acquired an additional elevation
of several degrees, so that now he appears to have
bidden adieu to this world, and to have set his thoughts
altogether on things above; and he has swelled and inflated
himself to such a degree, that his friends are under
apprehensions that he will one day or other explode and
blow up like a torpedo.
| ON GREATNESS. The beauties of Washington Irving, author of "The sketch-book," "Knickerbocker," "Crayon miscellany," &c. | |