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\title{Heroes and Hero Worship}

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\title{Heroes and Hero Worship}


\author{Thomas Carlyle}

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\noindent This public-domain text was scanned and proofed by Ron Burkey.
The Project Gutenberg edition ({}``heros10'') was subsequently converted
to \LaTeX{} using \textbf{GutenMark} software and then modified (principally
to correct formatting problems). The frontispiece, not included in
the Project Gutenberg edition, has also been restored. Report problems
to info@sandroid.org. Revision C1 differs from C0a in that {}``----''
has everywhere been replaced by {}``---''.

\noindent \begin{center}Revision: C1\\
Date: 01/29/2008\end{center}

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\chapter*{\raggedright {}{[}May 5, 1840.{]} LECTURE I.}

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{{[}May 5, 1840.{]} LECTURE I.}

\markboth{Heroes and Hero Worship}{The Hero as Divinity}


\subsection*{\textit{\emph{The}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{Hero}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{as}}
\emph{}\textit{\emph{Divinity}}\emph{.} \textit{\emph{Odin}}\emph{.}
\textit{\emph{Paganism}}\emph{:} \textit{\emph{Scandinavian}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{Mythology}}\emph{.}}

We have undertaken to discourse here for a little on Great Men, their
manner of appearance in our world's business, how they have shaped
themselves in the world's history, what ideas men formed of them,
what work they did;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]on Heroes, namely, and
on their reception and performance; what I call Hero-worship and the
Heroic in human affairs. Too evidently this is a large topic; deserving
quite other treatment than we can expect to give it at present. A
large topic; indeed, an illimitable one; wide as Universal History
itself. For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what
man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the
Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these
great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators,
of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain;
all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly
the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment,
of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul
of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, were the
history of these. Too clearly it is a topic we shall do no justice
to in this place!

One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable
company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without
gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it
is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which
has enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled
lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of
Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of native original insight,
of manhood and heroic nobleness;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]in whose radiance
all souls feel that it is well with them. On any terms whatsoever,
you will not grudge to wander in such neighborhood for a while. These
Six classes of Heroes, chosen out of widely distant countries and
epochs, and in mere external figure differing altogether, ought, if
we look faithfully at them, to illustrate several things for us. Could
we see them well, we should get some glimpses into the very marrow
of the world's history. How happy, could I but, in any measure, in
such times as these, make manifest to you the meanings of Heroism;
the divine relation (for I may well call it such) which in all times
unites a Great Man to other men; and thus, as it were, not exhaust
my subject, but so much as break ground on it! At all events, I must
make the attempt.

It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chief
fact with regard to him. A man's, or a nation of men's. By religion
I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles
of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not
this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds
of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness
under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this
profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion
from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative region of
him, if even so deep as that. But the thing a man does practically
believe (and this is often enough \textit{without} asserting it even
to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically
lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations
to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that
is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines
all the rest. That is his \textit{religion}; or, it may be, his mere
scepticism and \textit{no-religion}: the manner it is in which he
feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World;
and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great
extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. Of
a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion
they had? Was it Heathenism,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]plurality of gods,
mere sensuous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief
recognized element therein Physical Force? Was it Christianism; faith
in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; Time,
through every meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire
of Force displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it
Scepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen World,
any Mystery of Life except a mad one;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]doubt
as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial? Answering of
this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or nation.
The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their
feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual
in them that determined the outward and actual;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]their
religion, as I say, was the great fact about them. In these Discourses,
limited as we are, it will be good to direct our survey chiefly to
that religious phasis of the matter. That once known well, all is
known. We have chosen as the first Hero in our series Odin the central
figure of Scandinavian Paganism; an emblem to us of a most extensive
province of things. Let us look for a little at the Hero as Divinity,
the oldest primary form of Heroism.

Surely it seems a very strange-looking thing this Paganism; almost
inconceivable to us in these days. A bewildering, inextricable jungle
of delusions, confusions, falsehoods, and absurdities, covering the
whole field of Life! A thing that fills us with astonishment, almost,
if it were possible, with incredulity,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]for
truly it is not easy to understand that sane men could ever calmly,
with their eyes open, believe and live by such a set of doctrines.
That men should have worshipped their poor fellow-man as a God, and
not him only, but stocks and stones, and all manner of animate and
inanimate objects; and fashioned for themselves such a distracted
chaos of hallucinations by way of Theory of the Universe: all this
looks like an incredible fable. Nevertheless it is a clear fact that
they did it. Such hideous inextricable jungle of misworships, misbeliefs,
men, made as we are, did actually hold by, and live at home in. This
is strange. Yes, we may pause in sorrow and silence over the depths
of darkness that are in man; if we rejoice in the heights of purer
vision he has attained to. Such things were and are in man; in all
men; in us too.

Some speculators have a short way of accounting for the Pagan religion:
mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say they; no sane man ever
did believe it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]merely contrived to persuade
other men, not worthy of the name of sane, to believe it! It will
be often our duty to protest against this sort of hypothesis about
men's doings and history; and I here, on the very threshold, protest
against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other \textit{isms}
by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this
world. They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken
them up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in
the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully
abounded: but quackery was never the originating influence in such
things; it was not the health and life of such things, but their disease,
the sure precursor of their being about to die! Let us never forget
this. It seems to me a most mournful hypothesis, that of quackery
giving birth to any faith even in savage men. Quackery gives birth
to nothing; gives death to all things. We shall not see into the true
heart of anything, if we look merely at the quackeries of it; if we
do not reject the quackeries altogether; as mere diseases, corruptions,
with which our and all men's sole duty is to have done with them,
to sweep them out of our thoughts as out of our practice. Man everywhere
is the born enemy of lies. I find Grand Lamaism itself to have a kind
of truth in it. Read the candid, clear-sighted, rather sceptical Mr.\ Turner's
\textit{Account of his Embassy} to that country, and see. They have
their belief, these poor Thibet people, that Providence sends down
always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom
some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, belief that
there is a \textit{Greatest} Man; that \textit{he} is discoverable;
that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which
knows no bounds! This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the {}``discoverability''
is the only error here. The Thibet priests have methods of their own
of discovering what Man is Greatest, fit to be supreme over them.
Bad methods: but are they so much worse than our methods,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]of
understanding him to be always the eldest-born of a certain genealogy?
Alas, it is a difficult thing to find good methods for!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]We
shall begin to have a chance of understanding Paganism, when we first
admit that to its followers it was, at one time, earnestly true. Let
us consider it very certain that men did believe in Paganism; men
with open eyes, sound senses, men made altogether like ourselves;
that we, had we been there, should have believed in it. Ask now, What
Paganism could have been?

Another theory, somewhat more respectable, attributes such things
to Allegory. It was a play of poetic minds, say these theorists; a
shadowing forth, in allegorical fable, in personification and visual
form, of what such poetic minds had known and felt of this Universe.
Which agrees, add they, with a primary law of human nature, still
everywhere observably at work, though in less important things, That
what a man feels intensely, he struggles to speak out of him, to see
represented before him in visual shape, and as if with a kind of life
and historical reality in it. Now doubtless there is such a law, and
it is one of the deepest in human nature; neither need we doubt that
it did operate fundamentally in this business. The hypothesis which
ascribes Paganism wholly or mostly to this agency, I call a little
more respectable; but I cannot yet call it the true hypothesis. Think,
would \textit{we} believe, and take with us as our life-guidance,
an allegory, a poetic sport? Not sport but earnest is what we should
require. It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to
die is not sport for a man. Man's life never was a sport to him; it
was a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!

I find, therefore, that though these Allegory theorists are on the
way towards truth in this matter, they have not reached it either.
Pagan Religion is indeed an Allegory, a Symbol of what men felt and
knew about the Universe; and all Religions are symbols of that, altering
always as that alters: but it seems to me a radical perversion, and
even inversion, of the business, to put that forward as the origin
and moving cause, when it was rather the result and termination. To
get beautiful allegories, a perfect poetic symbol, was not the want
of men; but to know what they were to believe about this Universe,
what course they were to steer in it; what, in this mysterious Life
of theirs, they had to hope and to fear, to do and to forbear doing.
The \textit{Pilgrim's Progress} is an Allegory, and a beautiful, just
and serious one: but consider whether Bunyan's Allegory could have
\textit{preceded} the Faith it symbolizes! The Faith had to be already
there, standing believed by everybody;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]of which
the Allegory could \textit{then} become a shadow; and, with all its
seriousness, we may say a \textit{sportful} shadow, a mere play of
the Fancy, in comparison with that awful Fact and scientific certainty
which it poetically strives to emblem. The Allegory is the product
of the certainty, not the producer of it; not in Bunyan's nor in any
other case. For Paganism, therefore, we have still to inquire, Whence
came that scientific certainty, the parent of such a bewildered heap
of allegories, errors and confusions? How was it, what was it?

Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend {}``explaining,'' in
this place, or in any place, such a phenomenon as that far-distant
distracted cloudy imbroglio of Paganism,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]more
like a cloud-field than a distant continent of firm land and facts!
It is no longer a reality, yet it was one. We ought to understand
that this seeming cloud-field was once a reality; that not poetic
allegory, least of all that dupery and deception was the origin of
it. Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's
life on allegories: men in all times, especially in early earnest
times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks.
Let us try if, leaving out both the quack theory and the allegory
one, and listening with affectionate attention to that far-off confused
rumor of the Pagan ages, we cannot ascertain so much as this at least,
That there was a kind of fact at the heart of them; that they too
were not mendacious and distracted, but in their own poor way true
and sane!

You remember that fancy of Plato's, of a man who had grown to maturity
in some dark distance, and was brought on a sudden into the upper
air to see the sun rise. What would his wonder be, his rapt astonishment
at the sight we daily witness with indifference! With the free open
sense of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole heart
would be kindled by that sight, he would discern it well to be Godlike,
his soul would fall down in worship before it. Now, just such a childlike
greatness was in the primitive nations. The first Pagan Thinker among
rude men, the first man that began to think, was precisely this child-man
of Plato's. Simple, open as a child, yet with the depth and strength
of a man. Nature had as yet no name to him; he had not yet united
under a name the infinite variety of sights, sounds, shapes and motions,
which we now collectively name Universe, Nature, or the like,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
so with a name dismiss it from us. To the wild deep-hearted man all
was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas; it stood naked, flashing
in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was to this
man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is, preternatural.
This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers,
many-sounding seas;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]that great deep sea of
azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black
cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and
rain; what \textit{is} it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know;
we can never know at all. It is not by our superior insight that we
escape the difficulty; it is by our superior levity, our inattention,
our \textit{want} of insight. It is by \textit{not} thinking that
we cease to wonder at it. Hardened round us, encasing wholly every
notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere \textit{words}.
We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud {}``electricity,''
and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass
and silk: but \textit{what} is it? What made it? Whence comes it?
Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science
that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience,
whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere
superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences,
is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, \textit{magical} and more,
to whosoever will \textit{think} of it.

That great mystery of \textit{time}, were there no other; the illimitable,
silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift,
silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the
Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then
are \textit{not}: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing
to strike us dumb,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]for we have no word to speak
about it. This Universe, ah me\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]what could the
wild man know of it; what can we yet know? That it is a Force, and
thousand-fold Complexity of Forces; a Force which is \textit{not}
we. That is all; it is not we, it is altogether different from us.
Force, Force, everywhere Force; we ourselves a mysterious Force in
the centre of that. {}``There is not a leaf rotting on the highway
but has Force in it; how else could it rot?'' Nay surely, to the
Atheistic Thinker, if such a one were possible, it must be a miracle
too, this huge illimitable whirlwind of Force, which envelops us here;
never-resting whirlwind, high as Immensity, old as Eternity. What
is it? God's Creation, the religious people answer; it is the Almighty
God's! Atheistic science babbles poorly of it, with scientific nomenclatures,
experiments and what not, as if it were a poor dead thing, to be bottled
up in Leyden jars and sold over counters: but the natural sense of
man, in all times, if he will honestly apply his sense, proclaims
it to be a living thing,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]ah, an unspeakable,
godlike thing; towards which the best attitude for us, after never
so much science, is awe, devout prostration and humility of soul;
worship if not in words, then in silence.

But now I remark farther: What in such a time as ours it requires
a Prophet or Poet to teach us, namely, the stripping-off of those
poor undevout wrappages, nomenclatures and scientific hearsays,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]this,
the ancient earnest soul, as yet unencumbered with these things, did
for itself. The world, which is now divine only to the gifted, was
then divine to whosoever would turn his eye upon it. He stood bare
before it face to face. {}``All was Godlike or God:''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Jean
Paul still finds it so; the giant Jean Paul, who has power to escape
out of hearsays: but there then were no hearsays. Canopus shining
down over the desert, with its blue diamond brightness (that wild
blue spirit-like brightness, far brighter than we ever witness here),
would pierce into the heart of the wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it
was guiding through the solitary waste there. To his wild heart, with
all feelings in it, with no \textit{speech} for any feeling, it might
seem a little eye, that Canopus, glancing out on him from the great
deep Eternity; revealing the inner Splendor to him. Cannot we understand
how these men \textit{worshipped} Canopus; became what we call Sabeans,
worshipping the stars? Such is to me the secret of all forms of Paganism.
Worship is transcendent wonder; wonder for which there is now no limit
or measure; that is worship. To these primeval men, all things and
everything they saw exist beside them were an emblem of the Godlike,
of some God.

And look what perennial fibre of truth was in that. To us also, through
every star, through every blade of grass, is not a God made visible,
if we will open our minds and eyes? We do not worship in that way
now: but is it not reckoned still a merit, proof of what we call a
{}``poetic nature,'' that we recognize how every object has a divine
beauty in it; how every object still verily is {}``a window through
which we may look into Infinitude itself''? He that can discern the
loveliness of things, we call him Poet! Painter, Man of Genius, gifted,
lovable. These poor Sabeans did even what he does,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]in
their own fashion. That they did it, in what fashion soever, was a
merit: better than what the entirely stupid man did, what the horse
and camel did,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]namely, nothing!

But now if all things whatsoever that we look upon are emblems to
us of the Highest God, I add that more so than any of them is man
such an emblem. You have heard of St.\ Chrysostom's celebrated saying
in reference to the Shekinah, or Ark of Testimony, visible Revelation
of God, among the Hebrews: {}``The true Shekinah is Man!'' Yes,
it is even so: this is no vain phrase; it is veritably so. The essence
of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself {}``I,''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]ah,
what words have we for such things?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]is a breath
of Heaven; the Highest Being reveals himself in man. This body, these
faculties, this life of ours, is it not all as a vesture for that
Unnamed? {}``There is but one Temple in the Universe,'' says the
devout Novalis, {}``and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier
shall that high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this
Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven when we lay our hand on a
human body!'' This sounds much like a mere flourish of rhetoric;
but it is not so. If well meditated, it will turn out to be a scientific
fact; the expression, in such words as can be had, of the actual truth
of the thing. We are the miracle of miracles,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
great inscrutable mystery of God. We cannot understand it, we know
not how to speak of it; but we may feel and know, if we like, that
it is verily so.

Well; these truths were once more readily felt than now. The young
generations of the world, who had in them the freshness of young children,
and yet the depth of earnest men, who did not think that they had
finished off all things in Heaven and Earth by merely giving them
scientific names, but had to gaze direct at them there, with awe and
wonder: they felt better what of divinity is in man and Nature; they,
without being mad, could \textit{worship} Nature, and man more than
anything else in Nature. Worship, that is, as I said above, admire
without limit: this, in the full use of their faculties, with all
sincerity of heart, they could do. I consider Hero-worship to be the
grand modifying element in that ancient system of thought. What I
called the perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may say, out of
many roots: every admiration, adoration of a star or natural object,
was a root or fibre of a root; but Hero-worship is the deepest root
of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were
nourished and grown.

And now if worship even of a star had some meaning in it, how much
more might that of a Hero! Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration
of a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I say there is,
at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of
admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man.
It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's
life. Religion I find stand upon it; not Paganism only, but far higher
and truer religions,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]all religion hitherto
known. Hero-worship, heartfelt prostrate admiration, submission, burning,
boundless, for a noblest godlike Form of Man,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]is
not that the germ of Christianity itself? The greatest of all Heroes
is One\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]whom we do not name here! Let sacred
silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find it the ultimate
perfection of a principle extant throughout man's whole history on
earth.

Or coming into lower, less unspeakable provinces, is not all Loyalty
akin to religious Faith also? Faith is loyalty to some inspired Teacher,
some spiritual Hero. And what therefore is loyalty proper, the life-breath
of all society, but an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive admiration
for the truly great? Society is founded on Hero-worship. All dignities
of rank, on which human association rests, are what we may call a
\textit{Hero}archy (Government of Heroes),\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]or
a Hierarchy, for it is {}``sacred'' enough withal! The Duke means
\textit{Dux}, Leader; King is \textit{Kon-ning}, \textit{Kan-ning},
Man that \textit{knows} or \textit{cans}. Society everywhere is some
representation, not insupportably inaccurate, of a graduated Worship
of Heroes\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]reverence and obedience done to men
really great and wise. Not insupportably inaccurate, I say! They are
all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries, all representing gold;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
several of them, alas, always are \textit{forged} notes. We can do
with some forged false notes; with a good many even; but not with
all, or the most of them forged! No: there have to come revolutions
then; cries of Democracy, Liberty and Equality, and I know not what:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
notes being all false, and no gold to be had for \textit{them}, people
take to crying in their despair that there is no gold, that there
never was any! {}``Gold,'' Hero-worship, \textit{is} nevertheless,
as it was always and everywhere, and cannot cease till man himself
ceases.

I am well aware that in these days Hero-worship, the thing I call
Hero-worship, professes to have gone out, and finally ceased. This,
for reasons which it will be worth while some time to inquire into,
is an age that as it were denies the existence of great men; denies
the desirableness of great men. Show our critics a great man, a Luther
for example, they begin to what they call {}``account'' for him;
not to worship him, but take the dimensions of him,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
bring him out to be a little kind of man! He was the {}``creature
of the Time,'' they say; the Time called him forth, the Time did
everything, he nothing\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]but what we the little
critic could have done too! This seems to me but melancholy work.
The Time call forth? Alas, we have known Times \textit{call} loudly
enough for their great man; but not find him when they called! He
was not there; Providence had not sent him; the Time, \textit{calling}
its loudest, had to go down to confusion and wreck because he would
not come when called.

For if we will think of it, no Time need have gone to ruin, could
it have \textit{found} a man great enough, a man wise and good enough:
wisdom to discern truly what the Time wanted, valor to lead it on
the right road thither; these are the salvation of any Time. But I
liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity,
with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances,
impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]all
this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven
that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out
of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing
word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has
once struck on it, into fire like his own. The dry mouldering sticks
are thought to have called him forth. They did want him greatly; but
as to calling him forth\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]! Those are critics
of small vision, I think, who cry: {}``See, is it not the sticks
that made the fire?'' No sadder proof can be given by a man of his
own littleness than disbelief in great men. There is no sadder symptom
of a generation than such general blindness to the spiritual lightning,
with faith only in the heap of barren dead fuel. It is the last consummation
of unbelief. In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find the
Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his epoch;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt. The History
of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men.

Such small critics do what they can to promote unbelief and universal
spiritual paralysis: but happily they cannot always completely succeed.
In all times it is possible for a man to arise great enough to feel
that they and their doctrines are chimeras and cobwebs. And what is
notable, in no time whatever can they entirely eradicate out of living
men's hearts a certain altogether peculiar reverence for Great Men;
genuine admiration, loyalty, adoration, however dim and perverted
it may be. Hero-worship endures forever while man endures. Boswell
venerates his Johnson, right truly even in the Eighteenth century.
The unbelieving French believe in their Voltaire; and burst out round
him into very curious Hero-worship, in that last act of his life when
they {}``stifle him under roses.'' It has always seemed to me extremely
curious this of Voltaire. Truly, if Christianity be the highest instance
of Hero-worship, then we may find here in Voltaireism one of the lowest!
He whose life was that of a kind of Antichrist, does again on this
side exhibit a curious contrast. No people ever were so little prone
to admire at all as those French of Voltaire. \textit{Persiflage}
was the character of their whole mind; adoration had nowhere a place
in it. Yet see! The old man of Ferney comes up to Paris; an old, tottering,
infirm man of eighty-four years. They feel that he too is a kind of
Hero; that he has spent his life in opposing error and injustice,
delivering Calases, unmasking hypocrites in high places;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]in
short that \textit{he} too, though in a strange way, has fought like
a valiant man. They feel withal that, if \textit{persiflage} be the
great thing, there never was such a \textit{persifleur}. He is the
realized ideal of every one of them; the thing they are all wanting
to be; of all Frenchmen the most French. He is properly their god,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]such
god as they are fit for. Accordingly all persons, from the Queen Antoinette
to the Douanier at the Porte St.\ Denis, do they not worship him?
People of quality disguise themselves as tavern-waiters. The Maitre
de Poste, with a broad oath, orders his Postilion, {}``\textit{Va
bon train}; thou art driving M.\ de Voltaire.'' At Paris his carriage
is {}``the nucleus of a comet, whose train fills whole streets.''
The ladies pluck a hair or two from his fur, to keep it as a sacred
relic. There was nothing highest, beautifulest, noblest in all France,
that did not feel this man to be higher, beautifuler, nobler.

Yes, from Norse Odin to English Samuel Johnson, from the divine Founder
of Christianity to the withered Pontiff of Encyclopedism, in all times
and places, the Hero has been worshipped. It will ever be so. We all
love great men; love, venerate and bow down submissive before great
men: nay can we honestly bow down to anything else? Ah, does not every
true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to
what is really above him? No nobler or more blessed feeling dwells
in man's heart. And to me it is very cheering to consider that no
sceptical logic, or general triviality, insincerity and aridity of
any Time and its influences can destroy this noble inborn loyalty
and worship that is in man. In times of unbelief, which soon have
to become times of revolution, much down-rushing, sorrowful decay
and ruin is visible to everybody. For myself in these days, I seem
to see in this indestructibility of Hero-worship the everlasting adamant
lower than which the confused wreck of revolutionary things cannot
fall. The confused wreck of things crumbling and even crashing and
tumbling all round us in these revolutionary ages, will get down so
far; \textit{no} farther. It is an eternal corner-stone, from which
they can begin to build themselves up again. That man, in some sense
or other, worships Heroes; that we all of us reverence and must ever
reverence Great Men: this is, to me, the living rock amid all rushings-down
whatsoever;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the one fixed point in modern revolutionary
history, otherwise as if bottomless and shoreless.

So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the
spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations.
Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God; the
Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms,
is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set
forth. I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting
than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in
these regions of Europe till the eleventh century: eight hundred years
ago the Norwegians were still worshippers of Odin. It is interesting
also as the creed of our fathers; the men whose blood still runs in
our veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways. Strange:
they did believe that, while we believe so differently. Let us look
a little at this poor Norse creed, for many reasons. We have tolerable
means to do it; for there is another point of interest in these Scandinavian
mythologies: that they have been preserved so well.

In that strange island Iceland,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]burst up, the
geologists say, by fire from the bottom of the sea; a wild land of
barrenness and lava; swallowed many months of every year in black
tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in summertime; towering
up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean with its snow jokuls,
roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid volcanic chasms, like the
waste chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]where
of all places we least looked for Literature or written memorials,
the record of these things was written down. On the seabord of this
wild land is a rim of grassy country, where cattle can subsist, and
men by means of them and of what the sea yields; and it seems they
were poetic men these, men who had deep thoughts in them, and uttered
musically their thoughts. Much would be lost, had Iceland not been
burst up from the sea, not been discovered by the Northmen! The old
Norse Poets were many of them natives of Iceland.

Saemund, one of the early Christian Priests there, who perhaps had
a lingering fondness for Paganism, collected certain of their old
Pagan songs, just about becoming obsolete then,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Poems
or Chants of a mythic, prophetic, mostly all of a religious character:
that is what Norse critics call the \textit{Elder} or Poetic \textit{Edda}.\ 
\textit{Edda}, a word of uncertain etymology, is thought to signify
\textit{Ancestress}. Snorro Sturleson, an Iceland gentleman, an extremely
notable personage, educated by this Saemund's grandson, took in hand
next, near a century afterwards, to put together, among several other
books he wrote, a kind of Prose Synopsis of the whole Mythology; elucidated
by new fragments of traditionary verse. A work constructed really
with great ingenuity, native talent, what one might call unconscious
art; altogether a perspicuous clear work, pleasant reading still:
this is the \textit{Younger} or Prose \textit{Edda}. By these and
the numerous other \textit{Sagas}, mostly Icelandic, with the commentaries,
Icelandic or not, which go on zealously in the North to this day,
it is possible to gain some direct insight even yet; and see that
old Norse system of Belief, as it were, face to face. Let us forget
that it is erroneous Religion; let us look at it as old Thought, and
try if we cannot sympathize with it somewhat.

The primary characteristic of this old Northland Mythology I find
to be Impersonation of the visible workings of Nature. Earnest simple
recognition of the workings of Physical Nature, as a thing wholly
miraculous, stupendous and divine. What we now lecture of as Science,
they wondered at, and fell down in awe before, as Religion The dark
hostile Powers of Nature they figure to themselves as {}``\textit{Jotuns},''
Giants, huge shaggy beings of a demonic character. Frost, Fire, Sea-tempest;
these are Jotuns. The friendly Powers again, as Summer-heat, the Sun,
are Gods. The empire of this Universe is divided between these two;
they dwell apart, in perennial internecine feud. The Gods dwell above
in Asgard, the Garden of the Asen, or Divinities; Jotunheim, a distant
dark chaotic land, is the home of the Jotuns.

Curious all this; and not idle or inane, if we will look at the foundation
of it! The power of \textit{Fire}, or \textit{Flame}, for instance,
which we designate by some trivial chemical name, thereby hiding from
ourselves the essential character of wonder that dwells in it as in
all things, is with these old Northmen, Loke, a most swift subtle
\textit{Demon}, of the brood of the Jotuns. The savages of the Ladrones
Islands too (say some Spanish voyagers) thought Fire, which they never
had seen before, was a devil or god, that bit you sharply when you
touched it, and that lived upon dry wood. From us too no Chemistry,
if it had not Stupidity to help it, would hide that Flame is a wonder.
What \textit{is} Flame?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]\textit{Frost} the
old Norse Seer discerns to be a monstrous hoary Jotun, the Giant \textit{Thrym},
\textit{Hrym}; or \textit{Rime}, the old word now nearly obsolete
here, but still used in Scotland to signify hoar-frost. \textit{Rime}
was not then as now a dead chemical thing, but a living Jotun or Devil;
the monstrous Jotun \textit{Rime} drove home his Horses at night,
sat {}``combing their manes,''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]which Horses
were \textit{Hail-Clouds}, or fleet \textit{Frost-Winds}. His Cows\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]No,
not his, but a kinsman's, the Giant Hymir's Cows are \textit{Icebergs}:
this Hymir {}``looks at the rocks'' with his devil-eye, and they
\textit{split} in the glance of it.

Thunder was not then mere Electricity, vitreous or resinous; it was
the God Donner (Thunder) or Thor,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]God also
of beneficent Summer-heat. The thunder was his wrath: the gathering
of the black clouds is the drawing down of Thor's angry brows; the
fire-bolt bursting out of Heaven is the all-rending Hammer flung from
the hand of Thor: he urges his loud chariot over the mountain-tops,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]that
is the peal; wrathful he {}``blows in his red beard,''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]that
is the rustling storm-blast before the thunder begins. Balder again,
the White God, the beautiful, the just and benignant (whom the early
Christian Missionaries found to resemble Christ), is the Sun, beautifullest
of visible things; wondrous too, and divine still, after all our Astronomies
and Almanacs! But perhaps the notablest god we hear tell of is one
of whom Grimm the German Etymologist finds trace: the God \textit{Wunsch},
or Wish. The God \textit{Wish}; who could give us all that we \textit{wished}!
Is not this the sincerest and yet rudest voice of the spirit of man?
The \textit{rudest} ideal that man ever formed; which still shows
itself in the latest forms of our spiritual culture. Higher considerations
have to teach us that the God \textit{Wish} is not the true God.

Of the other Gods or Jotuns I will mention only for etymology's sake,
that Sea-tempest is the Jotun \textit{Aegir}, a very dangerous Jotun;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
now to this day, on our river Trent, as I learn, the Nottingham bargemen,
when the River is in a certain flooded state (a kind of backwater,
or eddying swirl it has, very dangerous to them), call it Eager; they
cry out, {}``Have a care, there is the \textit{Eager} coming!''
Curious; that word surviving, like the peak of a submerged world!
The \textit{oldest} Nottingham bargemen had believed in the God Aegir.
Indeed our English blood too in good part is Danish, Norse; or rather,
at bottom, Danish and Norse and Saxon have no distinction, except
a superficial one,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as of Heathen and Christian,
or the like. But all over our Island we are mingled largely with Danes
proper,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]from the incessant invasions there
were: and this, of course, in a greater proportion along the east
coast; and greatest of all, as I find, in the North Country. From
the Humber upwards, all over Scotland, the Speech of the common people
is still in a singular degree Icelandic; its Germanism has still a
peculiar Norse tinge. They too are {}``Normans,'' Northmen,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]if
that be any great beauty!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

Of the chief god, Odin, we shall speak by and by. Mark at present
so much; what the essence of Scandinavian and indeed of all Paganism
is: a recognition of the forces of Nature as godlike, stupendous,
personal Agencies,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as Gods and Demons. Not
inconceivable to us. It is the infant Thought of man opening itself,
with awe and wonder, on this ever-stupendous Universe. To me there
is in the Norse system something very genuine, very great and manlike.
A broad simplicity, rusticity, so very different from the light gracefulness
of the old Greek Paganism, distinguishes this Scandinavian System.
It is Thought; the genuine Thought of deep, rude, earnest minds, fairly
opened to the things about them; a face-to-face and heart-to-heart
inspection of the things,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the first characteristic
of all good Thought in all times. Not graceful lightness, half-sport,
as in the Greek Paganism; a certain homely truthfulness and rustic
strength, a great rude sincerity, discloses itself here. It is strange,
after our beautiful Apollo statues and clear smiling mythuses, to
come down upon the Norse Gods {}``brewing ale'' to hold their feast
with Aegir, the Sea-Jotun; sending out Thor to get the caldron for
them in the Jotun country; Thor, after many adventures, clapping the
Pot on his head, like a huge hat, and walking off with it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]quite
lost in it, the ears of the Pot reaching down to his heels! A kind
of vacant hugeness, large awkward gianthood, characterizes that Norse
system; enormous force, as yet altogether untutored, stalking helpless
with large uncertain strides. Consider only their primary mythus of
the Creation. The Gods, having got the Giant Ymer slain, a Giant made
by {}``warm wind,'' and much confused work, out of the conflict
of Frost and Fire,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]determined on constructing
a world with him. His blood made the Sea; his flesh was the Land,
the Rocks his bones; of his eyebrows they formed Asgard their Gods'-dwelling;
his skull was the great blue vault of Immensity, and the brains of
it became the Clouds. What a Hyper-Brobdignagian business! Untamed
Thought, great, giantlike, enormous;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]to be
tamed in due time into the compact greatness, not giantlike, but godlike
and stronger than gianthood, of the Shakspeares, the Goethes!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Spiritually
as well as bodily these men are our progenitors.

I like, too, that representation they have of the tree Igdrasil. All
Life is figured by them as a Tree. Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of Existence,
has its roots deep down in the kingdoms of Hela or Death; its trunk
reaches up heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe:
it is the Tree of Existence. At the foot of it, in the Death-kingdom,
sit Three \textit{Nornas}, Fates,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the Past,
Present, Future; watering its roots from the Sacred Well. Its {}``boughs,''
with their buddings and disleafings?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]events,
things suffered, things done, catastrophes,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]stretch
through all lands and times. Is not every leaf of it a biography,
every fibre there an act or word? Its boughs are Histories of Nations.
The rustle of it is the noise of Human Existence, onwards from of
old. It grows there, the breath of Human Passion rustling through
it;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]or storm tost, the storm-wind howling through
it like the voice of all the gods. It is Igdrasil, the Tree of Existence.
It is the past, the present, and the future; what was done, what is
doing, what will be done; {}``the infinite conjugation of the verb
\textit{To do}.'' Considering how human things circulate, each inextricably
in communion with all,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]how the word I speak
to you to-day is borrowed, not from Ulfila the Moesogoth only, but
from all men since the first man began to speak,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I
find no similitude so true as this of a Tree. Beautiful; altogether
beautiful and great. The {}``\textit{Machine} of the Universe,''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]alas,
do but think of that in contrast!

Well, it is strange enough this old Norse view of Nature; different
enough from what we believe of Nature. Whence it specially came, one
would not like to be compelled to say very minutely! One thing we
may say: It came from the thoughts of Norse men;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]from
the thought, above all, of the \textit{first} Norse man who had an
original power of thinking. The First Norse {}``man of genius,''
as we should call him! Innumerable men had passed by, across this
Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals may feel;
or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men only
feel;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]till the great Thinker came, the \textit{original}
man, the Seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capability
of all into Thought. It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual
Hero. What he says, all men were not far from saying, were longing
to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep,
round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even so! Joyful to men as
the dawning of day from night;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]\textit{is}
it not, indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from
death into life? We still honor such a man; call him Poet, Genius,
and so forth: but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker
of miraculous unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Thought
once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System
of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]till
its full stature is reached, and \textit{such} System of Thought can
grow no farther; but must give place to another.

For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God,
we fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body;
a Hero, of worth immeasurable; admiration for whom, transcending the
known bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate
Thinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless
gratitude, would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for
them the sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assurance to them of
their own destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do
here, what to look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate,
melodious by him; he first has made Life alive!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]We
may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever
name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men. His
view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being
in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible
there. In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic
ink; at his word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch
of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the
arrival of a Thinker in the world!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

One other thing we must not forget; it will explain, a little, the
confusion of these Norse Eddas. They are not one coherent System of
Thought; but properly the \textit{summation} of several successive
systems. All this of the old Norse Belief which is flung out for us,
in one level of distance in the Edda, like a picture painted on the
same canvas, does not at all stand so in the reality. It stands rather
at all manner of distances and depths, of successive generations since
the Belief first began. All Scandinavian thinkers, since the first
of them, contributed to that Scandinavian System of Thought; in ever-new
elaboration and addition, it is the combined work of them all. What
history it had, how it changed from shape to shape, by one thinker's
contribution after another, till it got to the full final shape we
see it under in the Edda, no man will now ever know: \textit{its}
Councils of Trebizond, Councils of Trent, Athanasiuses, Dantes, Luthers,
are sunk without echo in the dark night! Only that it had such a history
we can all know. Wheresover a thinker appeared, there in the thing
he thought of was a contribution, accession, a change or revolution
made. Alas, the grandest {}``revolution'' of all, the one made by
the man Odin himself, is not this too sunk for us like the rest! Of
Odin what history? Strange rather to reflect that he \textit{had}
a history! That this Odin, in his wild Norse vesture, with his wild
beard and eyes, his rude Norse speech and ways, was a man like us;
with our sorrows, joys, with our limbs, features;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]intrinsically
all one as we: and did such a work! But the work, much of it, has
perished; the worker, all to the name. {}``\textit{Wednesday},''
men will say to-morrow; Odin's day! Of Odin there exists no history;
no document of it; no guess about it worth repeating.

Snorro indeed, in the quietest manner, almost in a brief business
style, writes down, in his \textit{Heimskringla}, how Odin was a heroic
Prince, in the Black-Sea region, with Twelve Peers, and a great people
straitened for room. How he led these \textit{Asen} (Asiatics) of
his out of Asia; settled them in the North parts of Europe, by warlike
conquest; invented Letters, Poetry and so forth,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
came by and by to be worshipped as Chief God by these Scandinavians,
his Twelve Peers made into Twelve Sons of his own, Gods like himself:
Snorro has no doubt of this. Saxo Grammaticus, a very curious Northman
of that same century, is still more unhesitating; scruples not to
find out a historical fact in every individual mythus, and writes
it down as a terrestrial event in Denmark or elsewhere. Torfaeus,
learned and cautious, some centuries later, assigns by calculation
a \textit{date} for it: Odin, he says, came into Europe about the
Year 70 before Christ. Of all which, as grounded on mere uncertainties,
found to be untenable now, I need say nothing. Far, very far beyond
the Year 70! Odin's date, adventures, whole terrestrial history, figure
and environment are sunk from us forever into unknown thousands of
years.

Nay Grimm, the German Antiquary, goes so far as to deny that any man
Odin ever existed. He proves it by etymology. The word \textit{Wuotan},
which is the original form of \textit{Odin}, a word spread, as name
of their chief Divinity, over all the Teutonic Nations everywhere;
this word, which connects itself, according to Grimm, with the Latin
\textit{vadere}, with the English \textit{wade} and such like,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]means
primarily Movement, Source of Movement, Power; and is the fit name
of the highest god, not of any man. The word signifies Divinity, he
says, among the old Saxon, German and all Teutonic Nations; the adjectives
formed from it all signify divine, supreme, or something pertaining
to the chief god. Like enough! We must bow to Grimm in matters etymological.
Let us consider it fixed that \textit{Wuotan} means \textit{Wading},
force of \textit{Movement}. And now still, what hinders it from being
the name of a Heroic Man and \textit{Mover}, as well as of a god?
As for the adjectives, and words formed from it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]did
not the Spaniards in their universal admiration for Lope, get into
the habit of saying {}``a Lope flower,'' {}``a Lope \textit{dama},''
if the flower or woman were of surpassing beauty? Had this lasted,
\textit{Lope} would have grown, in Spain, to be an adjective signifying
\textit{godlike} also. Indeed, Adam Smith, in his Essay on Language,
surmises that all adjectives whatsoever were formed precisely in that
way: some very green thing, chiefly notable for its greenness, got
the appellative name \textit{Green}, and then the next thing remarkable
for that quality, a tree for instance, was named the \textit{green}
tree,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as we still say {}``the \textit{steam}
coach,'' {}``four-horse coach,'' or the like. All primary adjectives,
according to Smith, were formed in this way; were at first substantives
and things. We cannot annihilate a man for etymologies like that!
Surely there was a First Teacher and Captain; surely there must have
been an Odin, palpable to the sense at one time; no adjective, but
a real Hero of flesh and blood! The voice of all tradition, history
or echo of history, agrees with all that thought will teach one about
it, to assure us of this.

How the man Odin came to be considered a \textit{god}, the chief god?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]that
surely is a question which nobody would wish to dogmatize upon. I
have said, his people knew no \textit{limits} to their admiration
of him; they had as yet no scale to measure admiration by. Fancy your
own generous heart's-love of some greatest man expanding till it \textit{transcended}
all bounds, till it filled and overflowed the whole field of your
thought! Or what if this man Odin,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]since a
great deep soul, with the afflatus and mysterious tide of vision and
impulse rushing on him he knows not whence, is ever an enigma, a kind
of terror and wonder to himself,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]should have
felt that perhaps \textit{he} was divine; that \textit{he} was some
effluence of the {}``Wuotan,'' {}``\textit{Movement}'', Supreme
Power and Divinity, of whom to his rapt vision all Nature was the
awful Flame-image; that some effluence of Wuotan dwelt here in him!
He was not necessarily false; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest
he knew. A great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]alternates
between the highest height and the lowest depth; can, of all things,
the least measure\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Himself! What others take
him for, and what he guesses that he may be; these two items strangely
act on one another, help to determine one another. With all men reverently
admiring him; with his own wild soul full of noble ardors and affections,
of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious new light; a divine Universe
bursting all into godlike beauty round him, and no man to whom the
like ever had befallen, what could he think himself to be? {}``Wuotan?''
All men answered, {}``Wuotan!''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

And then consider what mere Time will do in such cases; how if a man
was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead. What
an enormous \textit{camera-obscura} magnifier is Tradition! How a
thing grows in the human Memory, in the human Imagination, when love,
worship and all that lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage
it. And in the darkness, in the entire ignorance; without date or
document, no book, no Arundel-marble; only here and there some dumb
monumental cairn. Why, in thirty or forty years, were there no books,
any great man would grow \textit{mythic}, the contemporaries who had
seen him, being once all dead. And in three hundred years, and in
three thousand years\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]! To attempt \textit{theorizing}
on such matters would profit little: they are matters which refuse
to be \textit{theoremed} and diagramed; which Logic ought to know
that she \textit{cannot} speak of. Enough for us to discern, far in
the uttermost distance, some gleam as of a small real light shining
in the centre of that enormous camera-obscure image; to discern that
the centre of it all was not a madness and nothing, but a sanity and
something.

This light, kindled in the great dark vortex of the Norse Mind, dark
but living, waiting only for light; this is to me the centre of the
whole. How such light will then shine out, and with wondrous thousand-fold
expansion spread itself, in forms and colors, depends not on \textit{it},
so much as on the National Mind recipient of it. The colors and forms
of your light will be those of the \textit{cut-glass} it has to shine
through.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Curious to think how, for every man,
any the truest fact is modelled by the nature of the man! I said,
The earnest man, speaking to his brother men, must always have stated
what seemed to him a \textit{fact}, a real Appearance of Nature. But
the way in which such Appearance or fact shaped itself,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]what
sort of \textit{fact} it became for him,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]was
and is modified by his own laws of thinking; deep, subtle, but universal,
ever-operating laws. The world of Nature, for every man, is the Fantasy
of Himself.\  this world is the multiplex {}``Image of his own Dream.''
Who knows to what unnamable subtleties of spiritual law all these
Pagan Fables owe their shape! The number Twelve, divisiblest of all,
which could be halved, quartered, parted into three, into six, the
most remarkable number,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]this was enough to
determine the \textit{Signs of the Zodiac}, the number of Odin's \textit{Sons},
and innumerable other Twelves. Any vague rumor of number had a tendency
to settle itself into Twelve. So with regard to every other matter.
And quite unconsciously too,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]with no notion
of building up {}``Allegories {}``! But the fresh clear glance of
those First Ages would be prompt in discerning the secret relations
of things, and wholly open to obey these. Schiller finds in the \textit{Cestus
of Venus} an everlasting aesthetic truth as to the nature of all Beauty;
curious:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]but he is careful not to insinuate
that the old Greek Mythists had any notion of lecturing about the
{}``Philosophy of Criticism''!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]On the whole,
we must leave those boundless regions. Cannot we conceive that Odin
was a reality? Error indeed, error enough: but sheer falsehood, idle
fables, allegory aforethought,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]we will not
believe that our Fathers believed in these.

Odin's \textit{Runes} are a significant feature of him. Runes, and
the miracles of {}``magic'' he worked by them, make a great feature
in tradition. Runes are the Scandinavian Alphabet; suppose Odin to
have been the inventor of Letters, as well as {}``magic,'' among
that people! It is the greatest invention man has ever made! this
of marking down the unseen thought that is in him by written characters.
It is a kind of second speech, almost as miraculous as the first.
You remember the astonishment and incredulity of Atahualpa the Peruvian
King; how he made the Spanish Soldier who was guarding him scratch
\textit{Dios} on his thumb-nail, that he might try the next soldier
with it, to ascertain whether such a miracle was possible. If Odin
brought Letters among his people, he might work magic enough!

Writing by Runes has some air of being original among the Norsemen:
not a Phoenician Alphabet, but a native Scandinavian one. Snorro tells
us farther that Odin invented Poetry; the music of human speech, as
well as that miraculous runic marking of it. Transport yourselves
into the early childhood of nations; the first beautiful morning-light
of our Europe, when all yet lay in fresh young radiance as of a great
sunrise, and our Europe was first beginning to think, to be! Wonder,
hope; infinite radiance of hope and wonder, as of a young child's
thoughts, in the hearts of these strong men! Strong sons of Nature;
and here was not only a wild Captain and Fighter; discerning with
his wild flashing eyes what to do, with his wild lion-heart daring
and doing it; but a Poet too, all that we mean by a Poet, Prophet,
great devout Thinker and Inventor,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as the truly
Great Man ever is. A Hero is a Hero at all points; in the soul and
thought of him first of all. This Odin, in his rude semi-articulate
way, had a word to speak. A great heart laid open to take in this
great Universe, and man's Life here, and utter a great word about
it. A Hero, as I say, in his own rude manner; a wise, gifted, noble-hearted
man. And now, if we still admire such a man beyond all others, what
must these wild Norse souls, first awakened into thinking, have made
of him! To them, as yet without names for it, he was noble and noblest;
Hero, Prophet, God; \textit{Wuotan}, the greatest of all. Thought
is Thought, however it speak or spell itself. Intrinsically, I conjecture,
this Odin must have been of the same sort of stuff as the greatest
kind of men. A great thought in the wild deep heart of him! The rough
words he articulated, are they not the rudimental roots of those English
words we still use? He worked so, in that obscure element. But he
was as a \textit{light} kindled in it; a light of Intellect, rude
Nobleness of heart, the only kind of lights we have yet; a Hero, as
I say: and he had to shine there, and make his obscure element a little
lighter,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as is still the task of us all.

We will fancy him to be the Type Norseman; the finest Teuton whom
that race had yet produced. The rude Norse heart burst up into \textit{boundless}
admiration round him; into adoration. He is as a root of so many great
things; the fruit of him is found growing from deep thousands of years,
over the whole field of Teutonic Life. Our own Wednesday, as I said,
is it not still Odin's Day? Wednesbury, Wansborough, Wanstead, Wandsworth:
Odin grew into England too, these are still leaves from that root!
He was the Chief God to all the Teutonic Peoples; their Pattern Norseman;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]in
such way did \textit{they} admire their Pattern Norseman; that was
the fortune he had in the world.

Thus if the man Odin himself have vanished utterly, there is this
huge Shadow of him which still projects itself over the whole History
of his People. For this Odin once admitted to be God, we can understand
well that the whole Scandinavian Scheme of Nature, or dim No-scheme,
whatever it might before have been, would now begin to develop itself
altogether differently, and grow thenceforth in a new manner. What
this Odin saw into, and taught with his runes and his rhymes, the
whole Teutonic People laid to heart and carried forward. His way of
thought became their way of thought:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]such,
under new conditions, is the history of every great thinker still.
In gigantic confused lineaments, like some enormous camera-obscure
shadow thrown upwards from the dead deeps of the Past, and covering
the whole Northern Heaven, is not that Scandinavian Mythology in some
sort the Portraiture of this man Odin? The gigantic image of \textit{his}
natural face, legible or not legible there, expanded and confused
in that manner! Ah, Thought, I say, is always Thought. No great man
lives in vain. The History of the world is but the Biography of great
men.

To me there is something very touching in this primeval figure of
Heroism; in such artless, helpless, but hearty entire reception of
a Hero by his fellow-men. Never so helpless in shape, it is the noblest
of feelings, and a feeling in some shape or other perennial as man
himself. If I could show in any measure, what I feel deeply for a
long time now, That it is the vital element of manhood, the soul of
man's history here in our world,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]it would be
the chief use of this discoursing at present. We do not now call our
great men Gods, nor admire \textit{without} limit; ah no, \textit{with}
limit enough! But if we have no great men, or do not admire at all,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]that
were a still worse case.

This poor Scandinavian Hero-worship, that whole Norse way of looking
at the Universe, and adjusting oneself there, has an indestructible
merit for us. A rude childlike way of recognizing the divineness of
Nature, the divineness of Man; most rude, yet heartfelt, robust, giantlike;
betokening what a giant of a man this child would yet grow to!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]It
was a truth, and is none. Is it not as the half-dumb stifled voice
of the long-buried generations of our own Fathers, calling out of
the depths of ages to us, in whose veins their blood still runs: {}``This
then, this is what we made of the world: this is all the image and
notion we could form to ourselves of this great mystery of a Life
and Universe. Despise it not. You are raised high above it, to large
free scope of vision; but you too are not yet at the top. No, your
notion too, so much enlarged, is but a partial, imperfect one; that
matter is a thing no man will ever, in time or out of time, comprehend;
after thousands of years of ever-new expansion, man will find himself
but struggling to comprehend again a part of it: the thing is larger
shall man, not to be comprehended by him; an Infinite thing!''

The essence of the Scandinavian, as indeed of all Pagan Mythologies,
we found to be recognition of the divineness of Nature; sincere communion
of man with the mysterious invisible Powers visibly seen at work in
the world round him. This, I should say, is more sincerely done in
the Scandinavian than in any Mythology I know. Sincerity is the great
characteristic of it. Superior sincerity (far superior) consoles us
for the total want of old Grecian grace. Sincerity, I think, is better
than grace. I feel that these old Northmen wore looking into Nature
with open eye and soul: most earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike;
with a great-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true,
loving, admiring, unfearing way. A right valiant, true old race of
men. Such recognition of Nature one finds to be the chief element
of Paganism; recognition of Man, and his Moral Duty, though this too
is not wanting, comes to be the chief element only in purer forms
of religion. Here, indeed, is a great distinction and epoch in Human
Beliefs; a great landmark in the religious development of Mankind.
Man first puts himself in relation with Nature and her Powers, wonders
and worships over those; not till a later epoch does he discern that
all Power is Moral, that the grand point is the distinction for him
of Good and Evil, of \textit{Thou shalt} and \textit{Thou shalt not}.

With regard to all these fabulous delineations in the \textit{Edda},
I will remark, moreover, as indeed was already hinted, that most probably
they must have been of much newer date; most probably, even from the
first, were comparatively idle for the old Norsemen, and as it were
a kind of Poetic sport. Allegory and Poetic Delineation, as I said
above, cannot be religious Faith; the Faith itself must first be there,
then Allegory enough will gather round it, as the fit body round its
soul. The Norse Faith, I can well suppose, like other Faiths, was
most active while it lay mainly in the silent state, and had not yet
much to say about itself, still less to sing.

Among those shadowy \textit{Edda} matters, amid all that fantastic
congeries of assertions, and traditions, in their musical Mythologies,
the main practical belief a man could have was probably not much more
than this: of the \textit{Valkyrs} and the \textit{Hall of Odin};
of an inflexible \textit{Destiny}; and that the one thing needful
for a man was \textit{to be brave}. The \textit{Valkyrs} are Choosers
of the Slain: a Destiny inexorable, which it is useless trying to
bend or soften, has appointed who is to be slain; this was a fundamental
point for the Norse believer;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as indeed it
is for all earnest men everywhere, for a Mahomet, a Luther, for a
Napoleon too. It lies at the basis this for every such man; it is
the woof out of which his whole system of thought is woven. The \textit{Valkyrs};
and then that these \textit{Choosers} lead the brave to a heavenly
\textit{Hall of Odin}; only the base and slavish being thrust elsewhither,
into the realms of Hela the Death-goddess: I take this to have been
the soul of the whole Norse Belief. They understood in their heart
that it was indispensable to be brave; that Odin would have no favor
for them, but despise and thrust them out, if they were not brave.
Consider too whether there is not something in this! It is an everlasting
duty, valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave.\  \textit{Valor}
is still \textit{value}. The first duty for a man is still that of
subduing \textit{Fear}. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at
all till then. A man's acts are slavish, not true but specious; his
very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and coward, till
he have got Fear under his feet. Odin's creed, if we disentangle the
real kernel of it, is true to this hour. A man shall and must be valiant;
he must march forward, and quit himself like a man,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]trusting
imperturbably in the appointment and \textit{choice} of the upper
Powers; and, on the whole, not fear at all. Now and always, the completeness
of his victory over Fear will determine how much of a man he is.

It is doubtless very savage that kind of valor of the old Northmen.
Snorro tells us they thought it a shame and misery not to die in battle;
and if natural death seemed to be coming on, they would cut wounds
in their flesh, that Odin might receive them as warriors slain. Old
kings, about to die, had their body laid into a ship; the ship sent
forth, with sails set and slow fire burning it; that, once out at
sea, it might blaze up in flame, and in such manner bury worthily
the old hero, at once in the sky and in the ocean! Wild bloody valor;
yet valor of its kind; better, I say, than none. In the old Sea-kings
too, what an indomitable rugged energy! Silent, with closed lips,
as I fancy them, unconscious that they were specially brave; defying
the wild ocean with its monsters, and all men and things;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]progenitors
of our own Blakes and Nelsons! No Homer sang these Norse Sea-kings;
but Agamemnon's was a small audacity, and of small fruit in the world,
to some of them;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]to Hrolf's of Normandy, for
instance! Hrolf, or Rollo Duke of Normandy, the wild Sea-king, has
a share in governing England at this hour.

Nor was it altogether nothing, even that wild sea-roving and battling,
through so many generations. It needed to be ascertained which was
the \textit{strongest} kind of men; who were to be ruler over whom.
Among the Northland Sovereigns, too, I find some who got the title
\textit{Wood-cutter}; Forest-felling Kings. Much lies in that. I suppose
at bottom many of them were forest-fellers as well as fighters, though
the Skalds talk mainly of the latter,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]misleading
certain critics not a little; for no nation of men could ever live
by fighting alone; there could not produce enough come out of that!
I suppose the right good fighter was oftenest also the right good
forest-feller,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the right good improver, discerner,
doer and worker in every kind; for true valor, different enough from
ferocity, is the basis of all. A more legitimate kind of valor that;
showing itself against the untamed Forests and dark brute Powers of
Nature, to conquer Nature for us. In the same direction have not we
their descendants since carried it far? May such valor last forever
with us!

That the man Odin, speaking with a Hero's voice and heart, as with
an impressiveness out of Heaven, told his People the infinite importance
of Valor, how man thereby became a god; and that his People, feeling
a response to it in their own hearts, believed this message of his,
and thought it a message out of Heaven, and him a Divinity for telling
it them: this seems to me the primary seed-grain of the Norse Religion,
from which all manner of mythologies, symbolic practices, speculations,
allegories, songs and sagas would naturally grow. Grow,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]how
strangely! I called it a small light shining and shaping in the huge
vortex of Norse darkness. Yet the darkness itself was \textit{alive};
consider that. It was the eager inarticulate uninstructed Mind of
the whole Norse People, longing only to become articulate, to go on
articulating ever farther! The living doctrine grows, grows;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]like
a Banyan-tree; the first \textit{seed} is the essential thing: any
branch strikes itself down into the earth, becomes a new root; and
so, in endless complexity, we have a whole wood, a whole jungle, one
seed the parent of it all. Was not the whole Norse Religion, accordingly,
in some sense, what we called {}``the enormous shadow of this man's
likeness''? Critics trace some affinity in some Norse mythuses, of
the Creation and such like, with those of the Hindoos. The Cow Adumbla,
{}``licking the rime from the rocks,'' has a kind of Hindoo look.
A Hindoo Cow, transported into frosty countries. Probably enough;
indeed we may say undoubtedly, these things will have a kindred with
the remotest lands, with the earliest times. Thought does not die,
but only is changed. The first man that began to think in this Planet
of ours, he was the beginner of all. And then the second man, and
the third man;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]nay, every true Thinker to this
hour is a kind of Odin, teaches men \textit{his} way of thought, spreads
a shadow of his own likeness over sections of the History of the World.

Of the distinctive poetic character or merit of this Norse Mythology
I have not room to speak; nor does it concern us much. Some wild Prophecies
we have, as the \textit{Voluspa} in the \textit{Elder Edda}; of a
rapt, earnest, sibylline sort. But they were comparatively an idle
adjunct of the matter, men who as it were but toyed with the matter,
these later Skalds; and it is \textit{their} songs chiefly that survive.
In later centuries, I suppose, they would go on singing, poetically
symbolizing, as our modern Painters paint, when it was no longer from
the innermost heart, or not from the heart at all. This is everywhere
to be well kept in mind.

Gray's fragments of Norse Lore, at any rate, will give one no notion
of it;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]any more than Pope will of Homer. It
is no square-built gloomy palace of black ashlar marble, shrouded
in awe and horror, as Gray gives it us: no; rough as the North rocks,
as the Iceland deserts, it is; with a heartiness, homeliness, even
a tint of good humor and robust mirth in the middle of these fearful
things. The strong old Norse heart did not go upon theatrical sublimities;
they had not time to tremble. I like much their robust simplicity;
their veracity, directness of conception. Thor {}``draws down his
brows'' in a veritable Norse rage; {}``grasps his hammer till the
\textit{knuckles grow white}.'' Beautiful traits of pity too, an
honest pity. Balder {}``the white God'' dies; the beautiful, benignant;
he is the Sungod. They try all Nature for a remedy; but he is dead.
Frigga, his mother, sends Hermoder to seek or see him: nine days and
nine nights he rides through gloomy deep valleys, a labyrinth of gloom;
arrives at the Bridge with its gold roof: the Keeper says, {}``Yes,
Balder did pass here; but the Kingdom of the Dead is down yonder,
far towards the North.'' Hermoder rides on; leaps Hell-gate, Hela's
gate; does see Balder, and speak with him: Balder cannot be delivered.
Inexorable! Hela will not, for Odin or any God, give him up. The beautiful
and gentle has to remain there. His Wife had volunteered to go with
him, to die with him. They shall forever remain there. He sends his
ring to Odin; Nanna his wife sends her \textit{thimble} to Frigga,
as a remembrance.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Ah me!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

For indeed Valor is the fountain of Pity too;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]of
Truth, and all that is great and good in man. The robust homely vigor
of the Norse heart attaches one much, in these delineations. Is it
not a trait of right honest strength, says Uhland, who has written
a fine \textit{Essay} on Thor, that the old Norse heart finds its
friend in the Thunder-god? That it is not frightened away by his thunder;
but finds that Summer-heat, the beautiful noble summer, must and will
have thunder withal! The Norse heart \textit{loves} this Thor and
his hammer-bolt; sports with him. Thor is Summer-heat: the god of
Peaceable Industry as well as Thunder. He is the Peasant's friend;
his true henchman and attendant is Thialfi, \textit{Manual Labor}.
Thor himself engages in all manner of rough manual work, scorns no
business for its plebeianism; is ever and anon travelling to the country
of the Jotuns, harrying those chaotic Frost-monsters, subduing them,
at least straitening and damaging them. There is a great broad humor
in some of these things.

Thor, as we saw above, goes to Jotun-land, to seek Hymir's Caldron,
that the Gods may brew beer. Hymir the huge Giant enters, his gray
beard all full of hoar-frost; splits pillars with the very glance
of his eye; Thor, after much rough tumult, snatches the Pot, claps
it on his head; the {}``handles of it reach down to his heels.''
The Norse Skald has a kind of loving sport with Thor. This is the
Hymir whose cattle, the critics have discovered, are Icebergs. Huge
untutored Brobdignag genius,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]needing only to
be tamed down; into Shakspeares, Dantes, Goethes! It is all gone now,
that old Norse work,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Thor the Thunder-god changed
into Jack the Giant-killer: but the mind that made it is here yet.
How strangely things grow, and die, and do not die! There are twigs
of that great world-tree of Norse Belief still curiously traceable.
This poor Jack of the Nursery, with his miraculous shoes of swiftness,
coat of darkness, sword of sharpness, he is one.\  \textit{Hynde
Etin}, and still more decisively \textit{Red Etin of Ireland}, \textit{in}
the Scottish Ballads, these are both derived from Norseland; \textit{Etin}
is evidently a \textit{Jotun}. Nay, Shakspeare's \textit{Hamlet} is
a twig too of this same world-tree; there seems no doubt of that.
Hamlet, \textit{Amleth} I find, is really a mythic personage; and
his Tragedy, of the poisoned Father, poisoned asleep by drops in his
ear, and the rest, is a Norse mythus! Old Saxo, as his wont was, made
it a Danish history; Shakspeare, out of Saxo, made it what we see.
That is a twig of the world-tree that has \textit{grown}, I think;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]by
nature or accident that one has grown!

In fact, these old Norse songs have a \textit{truth} in them, an inward
perennial truth and greatness,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as, indeed,
all must have that can very long preserve itself by tradition alone.
It is a greatness not of mere body and gigantic bulk, but a rude greatness
of soul. There is a sublime uncomplaining melancholy traceable in
these old hearts. A great free glance into the very deeps of thought.
They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen, what Meditation
has taught all men in all ages, That this world is after all but a
show,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing.
All deep souls see into that,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the Hindoo Mythologist,
the German Philosopher,--the Shakspeare, the earnest Thinker, wherever
he may be:

\noindent \begin{center}{\footnotesize {}``We are such stuff as Dreams
are made of!''}\end{center}{\footnotesize \par}

One of Thor's expeditions, to Utgard (the \textit{Outer} Garden, central
seat of Jotun-land), is remarkable in this respect. Thialfi was with
him, and Loke. After various adventures, they entered upon Giant-land;
wandered over plains, wild uncultivated places, among stones and trees.
At nightfall they noticed a house; and as the door, which indeed formed
one whole side of the house, was open, they entered. It was a simple
habitation; one large hall, altogether empty. They stayed there. Suddenly
in the dead of the night loud noises alarmed them. Thor grasped his
hammer; stood in the door, prepared for fight. His companions within
ran hither and thither in their terror, seeking some outlet in that
rude hall; they found a little closet at last, and took refuge there.
Neither had Thor any battle: for, lo, in the morning it turned out
that the noise had been only the \textit{snoring} of a certain enormous
but peaceable Giant, the Giant Skrymir, who lay peaceably sleeping
near by; and this that they took for a house was merely his \textit{Glove},
thrown aside there; the door was the Glove-wrist; the little closet
they had fled into was the Thumb! Such a glove;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I
remark too that it had not fingers as ours have, but only a thumb,
and the rest undivided: a most ancient, rustic glove!

Skrymir now carried their portmanteau all day; Thor, however, had
his own suspicions, did not like the ways of Skrymir; determined at
night to put an end to him as he slept. Raising his hammer, he struck
down into the Giant's face a right thunder-bolt blow, of force to
rend rocks. The Giant merely awoke; rubbed his cheek, and said, Did
a leaf fall? Again Thor struck, so soon as Skrymir again slept; a
better blow than before; but the Giant only murmured, Was that a grain
of sand? Thor's third stroke was with both his hands (the {}``knuckles
white'' I suppose), and seemed to dint deep into Skrymir's visage;
but he merely checked his snore, and remarked, There must be sparrows
roosting in this tree, I think; what is that they have dropt?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]At
the gate of Utgard, a place so high that you had to {}``strain your
neck bending back to see the top of it,'' Skrymir went his ways.
Thor and his companions were admitted; invited to take share in the
games going on. To Thor, for his part, they handed a Drinking-horn;
it was a common feat, they told him, to drink this dry at one draught.
Long and fiercely, three times over, Thor drank; but made hardly any
impression. He was a weak child, they told him: could he lift that
Cat he saw there? Small as the feat seemed, Thor with his whole godlike
strength could not; he bent up the creature's back, could not raise
its feet off the ground, could at the utmost raise one foot. Why,
you are no man, said the Utgard people; there is an Old Woman that
will wrestle you! Thor, heartily ashamed, seized this haggard Old
Woman; but could not throw her.

And now, on their quitting Utgard, the chief Jotun, escorting them
politely a little way, said to Thor: {}``You are beaten then:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]yet
be not so much ashamed; there was deception of appearance in it. That
Horn you tried to drink was the \textit{Sea}; you did make it ebb;
but who could drink that, the bottomless! The Cat you would have lifted,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]why,
that is the \textit{Midgard-snake}, the Great World-serpent, which,
tail in mouth, girds and keeps up the whole created world; had you
torn that up, the world must have rushed to ruin! As for the Old Woman,
she was \textit{Time}, Old Age, Duration: with her what can wrestle?
No man nor no god with her; gods or men, she prevails over all! And
then those three strokes you struck,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]look at
these \textit{three valleys}; your three strokes made these!'' Thor
looked at his attendant Jotun: it was Skrymir;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]it
was, say Norse critics, the old chaotic rocky \textit{Earth} in person,
and that glove-\textit{house} was some Earth-cavern! But Skrymir had
vanished; Utgard with its sky-high gates, when Thor grasped his hammer
to smite them, had gone to air; only the Giant's voice was heard mocking:
{}``Better come no more to Jotunheim!''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

This is of the allegoric period, as we see, and half play, not of
the prophetic and entirely devout: but as a mythus is there not real
antique Norse gold in it? More true metal, rough from the Mimer-stithy,
than in many a famed Greek Mythus \textit{shaped} far better! A great
broad Brobdignag grin of true humor is in this Skrymir; mirth resting
on earnestness and sadness, as the rainbow on black tempest: only
a right valiant heart is capable of that. It is the grim humor of
our own Ben Jonson, rare old Ben; runs in the blood of us, I fancy;
for one catches tones of it, under a still other shape, out of the
American Backwoods.

That is also a very striking conception that of the \textit{Ragnarok},
Consummation, or \textit{Twilight of the Gods}. It is in the \textit{Voluspa}
Song; seemingly a very old, prophetic idea. The Gods and Jotuns, the
divine Powers and the chaotic brute ones, after long contest and partial
victory by the former, meet at last in universal world-embracing wrestle
and duel; World-serpent against Thor, strength against strength; mutually
extinctive; and ruin, {}``twilight'' sinking into darkness, swallows
the created Universe. The old Universe with its Gods is sunk; but
it is not final death: there is to be a new Heaven and a new Earth;
a higher supreme God, and Justice to reign among men. Curious: this
law of mutation, which also is a law written in man's inmost thought,
had been deciphered by these old earnest Thinkers in their rude style;
and how, though all dies, and even gods die, yet all death is but
a phoenix fire-death, and new-birth into the Greater and the Better!
It is the fundamental Law of Being for a creature made of Time, living
in this Place of Hope. All earnest men have seen into it; may still
see into it.

And now, connected with this, let us glance at the \textit{last} mythus
of the appearance of Thor; and end there. I fancy it to be the latest
in date of all these fables; a sorrowing protest against the advance
of Christianity,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]set forth reproachfully by
some Conservative Pagan. King Olaf has been harshly blamed for his
over-zeal in introducing Christianity; surely I should have blamed
him far more for an under-zeal in that! He paid dear enough for it;
he died by the revolt of his Pagan people, in battle, in the year
1033, at Stickelstad, near that Drontheim, where the chief Cathedral
of the North has now stood for many centuries, dedicated gratefully
to his memory as \textit{Saint} Olaf. The mythus about Thor is to
this effect. King Olaf, the Christian Reform King, is sailing with
fit escort along the shore of Norway, from haven to haven; dispensing
justice, or doing other royal work: on leaving a certain haven, it
is found that a stranger, of grave eyes and aspect, red beard, of
stately robust figure, has stept in. The courtiers address him; his
answers surprise by their pertinency and depth: at length he is brought
to the King. The stranger's conversation here is not less remarkable,
as they sail along the beautiful shore; but after some time, he addresses
King Olaf thus: {}``Yes, King Olaf, it is all beautiful, with the
sun shining on it there; green, fruitful, a right fair home for you;
and many a sore day had Thor, many a wild fight with the rock Jotuns,
before he could make it so. And now you seem minded to put away Thor.
King Olaf, have a care!'' said the stranger, drawing down his brows;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
when they looked again, he was nowhere to be found.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]This
is the last appearance of Thor on the stage of this world!

Do we not see well enough how the Fable might arise, without unveracity
on the part of any one? It is the way most Gods have come to appear
among men: thus, if in Pindar's time {}``Neptune was seen once at
the Nemean Games,'' what was this Neptune too but a {}``stranger
of noble grave aspect,''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]fit to be {}``seen''!
There is something pathetic, tragic for me in this last voice of Paganism.
Thor is vanished, the whole Norse world has vanished; and will not
return ever again. In like fashion to that, pass away the highest
things. All things that have been in this world, all things that are
or will be in it, have to vanish: we have our sad farewell to give
them.

That Norse Religion, a rude but earnest, sternly impressive \textit{Consecration
of Valor} (so we may define it), sufficed for these old valiant Northmen.
Consecration of Valor is not a bad thing! We will take it for good,
so far as it goes. Neither is there no use in \textit{knowing} something
about this old Paganism of our Fathers. Unconsciously, and combined
with higher things, it is in us yet, that old Faith withal! To know
it consciously, brings us into closer and clearer relation with the
Past,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]with our own possessions in the Past.
For the whole Past, as I keep repeating, is the possession of the
Present; the Past had always something \textit{true}, and is a precious
possession. In a different time, in a different place, it is always
some other \textit{side} of our common Human Nature that has been
developing itself. The actual True is the sum of all these; not any
one of them by itself constitutes what of Human Nature is hitherto
developed. Better to know them all than misknow them. {}``To which
of these Three Religions do you specially adhere?'' inquires Meister
of his Teacher. {}``To all the Three!'' answers the other: {}``To
all the Three; for they by their union first constitute the True Religion.''


\chapter*{\raggedright {}{[}May 8, 1840.{]} LECTURE II. }

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{{[}May 8, 1840.{]} LECTURE II.}

\markboth{Heroes and Hero Worship}{The Hero as Prophet}


\subsection*{\textit{\emph{The}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{Hero}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{as}}
\emph{}\textit{\emph{Prophet}}\emph{.} \textit{\emph{Mahomet}}: \emph{}\textit{\emph{Islam}}\emph{.}}

From the first rude times of Paganism among the Scandinavians in the
North, we advance to a very different epoch of religion, among a very
different people: Mahometanism among the Arabs. A great change; what
a change and progress is indicated here, in the universal condition
and thoughts of men!

The Hero is not now regarded as a God among his fellowmen; but as
one God-inspired, as a Prophet. It is the second phasis of Hero-worship:
the first or oldest, we may say, has passed away without return; in
the history of the world there will not again be any man, never so
great, whom his fellowmen will take for a god. Nay we might rationally
ask, Did any set of human beings ever really think the man they \textit{saw}
there standing beside them a god, the maker of this world? Perhaps
not: it was usually some man they remembered, or \textit{had} seen.
But neither can this any more be. The Great Man is not recognized
henceforth as a god any more.

It was a rude gross error, that of counting the Great Man a god. Yet
let us say that it is at all times difficult to know \textit{what}
he is, or how to account of him and receive him! The most significant
feature in the history of an epoch is the manner it has of welcoming
a Great Man. Ever, to the true instincts of men, there is something
godlike in him. Whether they shall take him to be a god, to be a prophet,
or what they shall take him to be? that is ever a grand question;
by their way of answering that, we shall see, as through a little
window, into the very heart of these men's spiritual condition. For
at bottom the Great Man, as he comes from the hand of Nature, is ever
the same kind of thing: Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns; I hope to make
it appear that these are all originally of one stuff; that only by
the world's reception of them, and the shapes they assume, are they
so immeasurably diverse. The worship of Odin astonishes us,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]to
fall prostrate before the Great Man, into \textit{deliquium} of love
and wonder over him, and feel in their hearts that he was a denizen
of the skies, a god! This was imperfect enough: but to welcome, for
example, a Burns as we did, was that what we can call perfect? The
most precious gift that Heaven can give to the Earth; a man of {}``genius''
as we call it; the Soul of a Man actually sent down from the skies
with a God's-message to us,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]this we waste away
as an idle artificial firework, sent to amuse us a little, and sink
it into ashes, wreck and ineffectuality: \textit{such} reception of
a Great Man I do not call very perfect either! Looking into the heart
of the thing, one may perhaps call that of Burns a still uglier phenomenon,
betokening still sadder imperfections in mankind's ways, than the
Scandinavian method itself! To fall into mere unreasoning \textit{deliquium}
of love and admiration, was not good; but such unreasoning, nay irrational
supercilious no-love at all is perhaps still worse!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]It
is a thing forever changing, this of Hero-worship: different in each
age, difficult to do well in any age. Indeed, the heart of the whole
business of the age, one may say, is to do it well.

We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the
one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets;
but I do esteem him a true one. Farther, as there is no danger of
our becoming, any of us, Mahometans, I mean to say all the good of
him I justly can. It is the way to get at his secret: let us try to
understand what \textit{he} meant with the world; what the world meant
and means with him, will then be a more answerable question. Our current
hypothesis about Mahomet, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood
incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity,
begins really to be now untenable to any one. The lies, which well-meaning
zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to ourselves only.
When Pococke inquired of Grotius, Where the proof was of that story
of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's ear, and pass for
an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there was no proof!
It is really time to dismiss all that. The word this man spoke has
been the life-guidance now of a hundred and eighty millions of men
these twelve hundred years. These hundred and eighty millions were
made by God as well as we. A greater number of God's creatures believe
in Mahomet's word at this hour, than in any other word whatever. Are
we to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual legerdemain,
this which so many creatures of the Almighty have lived by and died
by? I, for my part, cannot form any such supposition. I will believe
most things sooner than that. One would be entirely at a loss what
to think of this world at all, if quackery so grew and were sanctioned
here.

Alas, such theories are very lamentable. If we would attain to knowledge
of anything in God's true Creation, let us disbelieve them wholly!
They are the product of an Age of Scepticism: they indicate the saddest
spiritual paralysis, and mere death-life of the souls of men: more
godless theory, I think, was never promulgated in this Earth. A false
man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house!
If he do not know and follow truly the properties of mortar, burnt
clay and what else be works in, it is no house that he makes, but
a rubbish-heap. It will not stand for twelve centuries, to lodge a
hundred and eighty millions; it will fall straightway. A man must
conform himself to Nature's laws, \textit{be} verily in communion
with Nature and the truth of things, or Nature will answer him, No,
not at all! Speciosities are specious\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]ah me!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a
Cagliostro, many Cagliostros, prominent world-leaders, do prosper
by their quackery, for a day. It is like a forged bank-note; they
get it passed out of \textit{their} worthless hands: others, not they,
have to smart for it. Nature bursts up in fire-flames, French Revolutions
and such like, proclaiming with terrible veracity that forged notes
are forged.

But of a Great Man especially, of him I will venture to assert that
it is incredible he should have been other than true. It seems to
me the primary foundation of him, and of all that can lie in him,
this. No Mirabeau, Napoleon, Burns, Cromwell, no man adequate to do
anything, but is first of all in right earnest about it; what I call
a sincere man. I should say \textit{sincerity}, a deep, great, genuine
sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.
Not the sincerity that calls itself sincere; ah no, that is a very
poor matter indeed;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a shallow braggart conscious
sincerity; oftenest self-conceit mainly. The Great Man's sincerity
is of the kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious of: nay, I suppose,
he is conscious rather of insincerity; for what man can walk accurately
by the law of truth for one day? No, the Great Man does not boast
himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he
is so: I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself;
he cannot help being sincere! The great Fact of Existence is great
to him. Fly as he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of
this Reality. His mind is so made; he is great by that, first of all.
Fearful and wonderful, real as Life, real as Death, is this Universe
to him. Though all men should forget its truth, and walk in a vain
show, he cannot. At all moments the Flame-image glares in upon him;
undeniable, there, there!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I wish you to take
this as my primary definition of a Great Man. A little man may have
this, it is competent to all men that God has made: but a Great Man
cannot be without it.

Such a man is what we call an \textit{original} man; he comes to us
at first-hand. A messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with
tidings to us. We may call him Poet, Prophet, God;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]in
one way or other, we all feel that the words he utters are as no other
man's words. Direct from the Inner Fact of things;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]he
lives, and has to live, in daily communion with that. Hearsays cannot
hide it from him; he is blind, homeless, miserable, following hearsays;
\textit{it} glares in upon him. Really his utterances, are they not
a kind of {}``revelation;''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]what we must
call such for want of some other name? It is from the heart of the
world that he comes; he is portion of the primal reality of things.
God has made many revelations: but this man too, has not God made
him, the latest and newest of all? The {}``inspiration of the Almighty
giveth him understanding:'' we must listen before all to him.

This Mahomet, then, we will in no wise consider as an Inanity and
Theatricality, a poor conscious ambitious schemer; we cannot conceive
him so. The rude message he delivered was a real one withal; an earnest
confused voice from the unknown Deep. The man's words were not false,
nor his workings here below; no Inanity and Simulacrum; a fiery mass
of Life cast up from the great bosom of Nature herself. To \textit{kindle}
the world; the world's Maker had ordered it so. Neither can the faults,
imperfections, insincerities even, of Mahomet, if such were never
so well proved against him, shake this primary fact about him.

On the whole, we make too much of faults; the details of the business
hide the real centre of it. Faults? The greatest of faults, I should
say, is to be conscious of none. Readers of the Bible above all, one
would think, might know better. Who is called there {}``the man according
to God's own heart''? David, the Hebrew King, had fallen into sins
enough; blackest crimes; there was no want of sins. And thereupon
the unbelievers sneer and ask, Is this your man according to God's
heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a shallow one. What
are faults, what are the outward details of a life; if the inner secret
of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended
struggle of it, be forgotten? {}``It is not in man that walketh to
direct his steps.'' Of all acts, is not, for a man, \textit{repentance}
the most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious
consciousness of no sin;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]that is death; the
heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility and fact;
is dead: it is {}``pure'' as dead dry sand is pure. David's life
and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider
to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare
here below. All earnest souls will ever discern in it the faithful
struggle of an earnest human soul towards what is good and best. Struggle
often baffled, sore baffled, down as into entire wreck; yet a struggle
never ended; ever, with tears, repentance, true unconquerable purpose,
begun anew. Poor human nature! Is not a man's walking, in truth, always
that: {}``a succession of falls''? Man can do no other. In this
wild element of a Life, he has to struggle onwards; now fallen, deep-abased;
and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleeding heart, he has to rise
again, struggle again still onwards. That his struggle \textit{be}
a faithful unconquerable one: that is the question of questions. We
will put up with many sad details, if the soul of it were true. Details
by themselves will never teach us what it is. I believe we misestimate
Mahomet's faults even as faults: but the secret of him will never
be got by dwelling there. We will leave all this behind us; and assuring
ourselves that he did mean some true thing, ask candidly what it was
or might be.

These Arabs Mahomet was born among are certainly a notable people.
Their country itself is notable; the fit habitation for such a race.
Savage inaccessible rock-mountains, great grim deserts, alternating
with beautiful strips of verdure: wherever water is, there is greenness,
beauty; odoriferous balm-shrubs, date-trees, frankincense-trees. Consider
that wide waste horizon of sand, empty, silent, like a sand-sea, dividing
habitable place from habitable. You are all alone there, left alone
with the Universe; by day a fierce sun blazing down on it with intolerable
radiance; by night the great deep Heaven with its stars. Such a country
is fit for a swift-handed, deep-hearted race of men. There is something
most agile, active, and yet most meditative, enthusiastic in the Arab
character. The Persians are called the French of the East; we will
call the Arabs Oriental Italians. A gifted noble people; a people
of wild strong feelings, and of iron restraint over these: the characteristic
of noble-mindedness, of genius. The wild Bedouin welcomes the stranger
to his tent, as one having right to all that is there; were it his
worst enemy, he will slay his foal to treat him, will serve him with
sacred hospitality for three days, will set him fairly on his way;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
then, by another law as sacred, kill him if he can. In words too as
in action. They are not a loquacious people, taciturn rather; but
eloquent, gifted when they do speak. An earnest, truthful kind of
men. They are, as we know, of Jewish kindred: but with that deadly
terrible earnestness of the Jews they seem to combine something graceful,
brilliant, which is not Jewish. They had {}``Poetic contests'' among
them before the time of Mahomet. Sale says, at Ocadh, in the South
of Arabia, there were yearly fairs, and there, when the merchandising
was done, Poets sang for prizes:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the wild people
gathered to hear that.

One Jewish quality these Arabs manifest; the outcome of many or of
all high qualities: what we may call religiosity. From of old they
had been zealous worshippers, according to their light. They worshipped
the stars, as Sabeans; worshipped many natural objects,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]recognized
them as symbols, immediate manifestations, of the Maker of Nature.
It was wrong; and yet not wholly wrong. All God's works are still
in a sense symbols of God. Do we not, as I urged, still account it
a merit to recognize a certain inexhaustible significance, {}``poetic
beauty'' as we name it, in all natural objects whatsoever? A man
is a poet, and honored, for doing that, and speaking or singing it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a
kind of diluted worship. They had many Prophets, these Arabs; Teachers
each to his tribe, each according to the light he had. But indeed,
have we not from of old the noblest of proofs, still palpable to every
one of us, of what devoutness and noble-mindedness had dwelt in these
rustic thoughtful peoples? Biblical critics seem agreed that our own
\textit{Book of Job} was written in that region of the world. I call
that, apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things
ever written with pen. One feels, indeed, as if it were not Hebrew;
such a noble universality, different from noble patriotism or sectarianism,
reigns in it. A noble Book; all men's Book! It is our first, oldest
statement of the never-ending Problem,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]man's
destiny, and God's ways with him here in this earth. And all in such
free flowing outlines; grand in its sincerity, in its simplicity;
in its epic melody, and repose of reconcilement. There is the seeing
eye, the mildly understanding heart. So \textit{true} every way; true
eyesight and vision for all things; material things no less than spiritual:
the Horse,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]{}``hast thou clothed his neck
with \textit{thunder}?''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]he {}``\textit{laughs}
at the shaking of the spear!'' Such living likenesses were never
since drawn. Sublime sorrow, sublime reconciliation; oldest choral
melody as of the heart of mankind;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]so soft,
and great; as the summer midnight, as the world with its seas and
stars! There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it,
of equal literary merit.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

To the idolatrous Arabs one of the most ancient universal objects
of worship was that Black Stone, still kept in the building called
Caabah, at Mecca. Diodorus Siculus mentions this Caabah in a way not
to be mistaken, as the oldest, most honored temple in his time; that
is, some half-century before our Era. Silvestre de Sacy says there
is some likelihood that the Black Stone is an aerolite. In that case,
some man might \textit{see} it fall out of Heaven! It stands now beside
the Well Zemzem; the Caabah is built over both. A Well is in all places
a beautiful affecting object, gushing out like life from the hard
earth;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]still more so in those hot dry countries,
where it is the first condition of being. The Well Zemzem has its
name from the bubbling sound of the waters, \textit{zem-zem}; they
think it is the Well which Hagar found with her little Ishmael in
the wilderness: the aerolite and it have been sacred now, and had
a Caabah over them, for thousands of years. A curious object, that
Caabah! There it stands at this hour, in the black cloth-covering
the Sultan sends it yearly; {}``twenty-seven cubits high;'' with
circuit, with double circuit of pillars, with festoon-rows of lamps
and quaint ornaments: the lamps will be lighted again \textit{this}
night,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]to glitter again under the stars. An
authentic fragment of the oldest Past. It is the \textit{Keblah} of
all Moslem: from Delhi all onwards to Morocco, the eyes of innumerable
praying men are turned towards it, five times, this day and all days:
one of the notablest centres in the Habitation of Men.

It had been from the sacredness attached to this Caabah Stone and
Hagar's Well, from the pilgrimings of all tribes of Arabs thither,
that Mecca took its rise as a Town. A great town once, though much
decayed now. It has no natural advantage for a town; stands in a sandy
hollow amid bare barren hills, at a distance from the sea; its provisions,
its very bread, have to be imported. But so many pilgrims needed lodgings:
and then all places of pilgrimage do, from the first, become places
of trade. The first day pilgrims meet, merchants have also met: where
men see themselves assembled for one object, they find that they can
accomplish other objects which depend on meeting together. Mecca became
the Fair of all Arabia. And thereby indeed the chief staple and warehouse
of whatever Commerce there was between the Indian and the Western
countries, Syria, Egypt, even Italy. It had at one time a population
of 100,000; buyers, forwarders of those Eastern and Western products;
importers for their own behoof of provisions and corn. The government
was a kind of irregular aristocratic republic, not without a touch
of theocracy. Ten Men of a chief tribe, chosen in some rough way,
were Governors of Mecca, and Keepers of the Caabah. The Koreish were
the chief tribe in Mahomet's time; his own family was of that tribe.
The rest of the Nation, fractioned and cut asunder by deserts, lived
under similar rude patriarchal governments by one or several: herdsmen,
carriers, traders, generally robbers too; being oftenest at war one
with another, or with all: held together by no open bond, if it were
not this meeting at the Caabah, where all forms of Arab Idolatry assembled
in common adoration;--held mainly by the \textit{inward} indissoluble
bond of a common blood and language. In this way had the Arabs lived
for long ages, unnoticed by the world; a people of great qualities,
unconsciously waiting for the day when they should become notable
to all the world. Their Idolatries appear to have been in a tottering
state; much was getting into confusion and fermentation among them.
Obscure tidings of the most important Event ever transacted in this
world, the Life and Death of the Divine Man in Judea, at once the
symptom and cause of immeasurable change to all people in the world,
had in the course of centuries reached into Arabia too; and could
not but, of itself, have produced fermentation there.

It was among this Arab people, so circumstanced, in the year 570 of
our Era, that the man Mahomet was born. He was of the family of Hashem,
of the Koreish tribe as we said; though poor, connected with the chief
persons of his country. Almost at his birth he lost his Father; at
the age of six years his Mother too, a woman noted for her beauty,
her worth and sense: he fell to the charge of his Grandfather, an
old man, a hundred years old. A good old man: Mahomet's Father, Abdallah,
had been his youngest favorite son. He saw in Mahomet, with his old
life-worn eyes, a century old, the lost Abdallah come back again,
all that was left of Abdallah. He loved the little orphan Boy greatly;
used to say, They must take care of that beautiful little Boy, nothing
in their kindred was more precious than he. At his death, while the
boy was still but two years old, he left him in charge to Abu Thaleb
the eldest of the Uncles, as to him that now was head of the house.
By this Uncle, a just and rational man as everything betokens, Mahomet
was brought up in the best Arab way.

Mahomet, as he grew up, accompanied his Uncle on trading journeys
and such like; in his eighteenth year one finds him a fighter following
his Uncle in war. But perhaps the most significant of all his journeys
is one we find noted as of some years' earlier date: a journey to
the Fairs of Syria. The young man here first came in contact with
a quite foreign world,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]with one foreign element
of endless moment to him: the Christian Religion. I know not what
to make of that {}``Sergius, the Nestorian Monk,'' whom Abu Thaleb
and he are said to have lodged with; or how much any monk could have
taught one still so young. Probably enough it is greatly exaggerated,
this of the Nestorian Monk. Mahomet was only fourteen; had no language
but his own: much in Syria must have been a strange unintelligible
whirlpool to him. But the eyes of the lad were open; glimpses of many
things would doubtless be taken in, and lie very enigmatic as yet,
which were to ripen in a strange way into views, into beliefs and
insights one day. These journeys to Syria were probably the beginning
of much to Mahomet.

One other circumstance we must not forget: that he had no school-learning;
of the thing we call school-learning none at all. The art of writing
was but just introduced into Arabia; it seems to be the true opinion
that Mahomet never could write! Life in the Desert, with its experiences,
was all his education. What of this infinite Universe he, from his
dim place, with his own eyes and thoughts, could take in, so much
and no more of it was he to know. Curious, if we will reflect on it,
this of having no books. Except by what he could see for himself,
or hear of by uncertain rumor of speech in the obscure Arabian Desert,
he could know nothing. The wisdom that had been before him or at a
distance from him in the world, was in a manner as good as not there
for him. Of the great brother souls, flame-beacons through so many
lands and times, no one directly communicates with this great soul.
He is alone there, deep down in the bosom of the Wilderness; has to
grow up so,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]alone with Nature and his own Thoughts.

But, from an early age, he had been remarked as a thoughtful man.
His companions named him {}``\textit{Al Amin}, The Faithful.'' A
man of truth and fidelity; true in what he did, in what he spake and
thought. They noted that \textit{he} always meant something. A man
rather taciturn in speech; silent when there was nothing to be said;
but pertinent, wise, sincere, when he did speak; always throwing light
on the matter. This is the only sort of speech \textit{worth} speaking!
Through life we find him to have been regarded as an altogether solid,
brotherly, genuine man. A serious, sincere character; yet amiable,
cordial, companionable, jocose even;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a good
laugh in him withal: there are men whose laugh is as untrue as anything
about them; who cannot laugh. One hears of Mahomet's beauty: his fine
sagacious honest face, brown florid complexion, beaming black eyes;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I
somehow like too that vein on the brow, which swelled up black when
he was in anger: like the {}``\textit{horseshoe} vein'' in Scott's
\textit{Redgauntlet}. It was a kind of feature in the Hashem family,
this black swelling vein in the brow; Mahomet had it prominent, as
would appear. A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man!
Full of wild faculty, fire and light; of wild worth, all uncultured;
working out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there.

How he was placed with Kadijah, a rich Widow, as her Steward, and
travelled in her business, again to the Fairs of Syria; how he managed
all, as one can well understand, with fidelity, adroitness; how her
gratitude, her regard for him grew: the story of their marriage is
altogether a graceful intelligible one, as told us by the Arab authors.
He was twenty-five; she forty, though still beautiful. He seems to
have lived in a most affectionate, peaceable, wholesome way with this
wedded benefactress; loving her truly, and her alone. It goes greatly
against the impostor theory, the fact that he lived in this entirely
unexceptionable, entirely quiet and commonplace way, till the heat
of his years was done. He was forty before he talked of any mission
from Heaven. All his irregularities, real and supposed, date from
after his fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died. All his {}``ambition,''
seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an honest life; his {}``fame,''
the mere good opinion of neighbors that knew him, had been sufficient
hitherto. Not till he was already getting old, the prurient heat of
his life all burnt out, and \textit{peace} growing to be the chief
thing this world could give him, did he start on the {}``career of
ambition;'' and, belying all his past character and existence, set
up as a wretched empty charlatan to acquire what he could now no longer
enjoy! For my share, I have no faith whatever in that.

Ah no: this deep-hearted Son of the Wilderness, with his beaming black
eyes and open social deep soul, had other thoughts in him than ambition.
A silent great soul; he was one of those who cannot \textit{but} be
in earnest; whom Nature herself has appointed to be sincere. While
others walk in formulas and hearsays, contented enough to dwell there,
this man could not screen himself in formulas; he was alone with his
own soul and the reality of things. The great Mystery of Existence,
as I said, glared in upon him, with its terrors, with its splendors;
no hearsays could hide that unspeakable fact, {}``Here am I!'' Such
\textit{sincerity}, as we named it, has in very truth something of
divine. The word of such a man is a Voice direct from Nature's own
Heart. Men do and must listen to that as to nothing else;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]all
else is wind in comparison. From of old, a thousand thoughts, in his
pilgrimings and wanderings, had been in this man: What am I? What
\textit{is} this unfathomable Thing I live in, which men name Universe?
What is Life; what is Death? What am I to believe? What am I to do?
The grim rocks of Mount Hara, of Mount Sinai, the stern sandy solitudes
answered not. The great Heaven rolling silent overhead, with its blue-glancing
stars, answered not. There was no answer. The man's own soul, and
what of God's inspiration dwelt there, had to answer!

It is the thing which all men have to ask themselves; which we too
have to ask, and answer. This wild man felt it to be of \textit{infinite}
moment; all other things of no moment whatever in comparison. The
jargon of argumentative Greek Sects, vague traditions of Jews, the
stupid routine of Arab Idolatry: there was no answer in these. A Hero,
as I repeat, has this first distinction, which indeed we may call
first and last, the Alpha and Omega of his whole Heroism, That he
looks through the shows of things into \textit{things}. Use and wont,
respectable hearsay, respectable formula: all these are good, or are
not good. There is something behind and beyond all these, which all
these must correspond with, be the image of, or they are\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]\textit{Idolatries};
{}``bits of black wood pretending to be God;'' to the earnest soul
a mockery and abomination. Idolatries never so gilded, waited on by
heads of the Koreish, will do nothing for this man. Though all men
walk by them, what good is it? The great Reality stands glaring there
upon \textit{him}. He there has to answer it, or perish miserably.
Now, even now, or else through all Eternity never! Answer it; \textit{thou}
must find an answer.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Ambition? What could all
Arabia do for this man; with the crown of Greek Heraclius, of Persian
Chosroes, and all crowns in the Earth;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]what
could they all do for him? It was not of the Earth he wanted to hear
tell; it was of the Heaven above and of the Hell beneath. All crowns
and sovereignties whatsoever, where would \textit{they} in a few brief
years be? To be Sheik of Mecca or Arabia, and have a bit of gilt wood
put into your hand,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]will that be one's salvation?
I decidedly think, not. We will leave it altogether, this impostor
hypothesis, as not credible; not very tolerable even, worthy chiefly
of dismissal by us.

Mahomet had been wont to retire yearly, during the month Ramadhan,
into solitude and silence; as indeed was the Arab custom; a praiseworthy
custom, which such a man, above all, would find natural and useful.
Communing with his own heart, in the silence of the mountains; himself
silent; open to the {}``small still voices:'' it was a right natural
custom! Mahomet was in his fortieth year, when having withdrawn to
a cavern in Mount Hara, near Mecca, during this Ramadhan, to pass
the month in prayer, and meditation on those great questions, he one
day told his wife Kadijah, who with his household was with him or
near him this year, That by the unspeakable special favor of Heaven
he had now found it all out; was in doubt and darkness no longer,
but saw it all. That all these Idols and Formulas were nothing, miserable
bits of wood; that there was One God in and over all; and we must
leave all Idols, and look to Him. That God is great; and that there
is nothing else great! He is the Reality. Wooden Idols are not real;
He is real. He made us at first, sustains us yet; we and all things
are but the shadow of Him; a transitory garment veiling the Eternal
Splendor.\ {} {}``\textit{Allah akbar}, God is great;''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
then also {}``\textit{Islam},'' That we must submit to God. That
our whole strength lies in resigned submission to Him, whatsoever
He do to us. For this world, and for the other! The thing He sends
to us, were it death and worse than death, shall be good, shall be
best; we resign ourselves to God.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

{}``If this be \textit{Islam},'' says Goethe, {}``do we not all
live in \textit{Islam}?'' Yes, all of us that have any moral life;
we all live so. It has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man
not merely to submit to Necessity,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Necessity
will make him submit,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]but to know and believe
well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the wisest,
the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pretension
of scanning this great God's-World in his small fraction of a brain;
to know that it \textit{had} verily, though deep beyond his soundings,
a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]that
his part in it was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout
silence follow that; not questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable.

I say, this is yet the only true morality known. A man is right and
invincible, virtuous and on the road towards sure conquest, precisely
while he joins himself to the great deep Law of the World, in spite
of all superficial laws, temporary appearances, profit-and-loss calculations;
he is victorious while he co-operates with that great central Law,
not victorious otherwise:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and surely his first
chance of co-operating with it, or getting into the course of it,
is to know with his whole soul that it is; that it is good, and alone
good! This is the soul of Islam; it is properly the soul of Christianity;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]for
Islam is definable as a confused form of Christianity; had Christianity
not been, neither had it been. Christianity also commands us, before
all, to be resigned to God. We are to take no counsel with flesh and
blood; give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes: to know
that we know nothing; that the worst and cruelest to our eyes is not
what it seems; that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent
from God above, and say, It is good and wise, God is great! {}``Though
He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.'' Islam means in its way Denial
of Self, Annihilation of Self. This is yet the highest Wisdom that
Heaven has revealed to our Earth.

Such light had come, as it could, to illuminate the darkness of this
wild Arab soul. A confused dazzling splendor as of life and Heaven,
in the great darkness which threatened to be death: he called it revelation
and the angel Gabriel;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]who of us yet can know
what to call it? It is the {}``inspiration of the Almighty'' that
giveth us understanding. To \textit{know}; to get into the truth of
anything, is ever a mystic act,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]of which the
best Logics can but babble on the surface. {}``Is not Belief the
true god-announcing Miracle?''\ says Novalis.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]That
Mahomet's whole soul, set in flame with this grand Truth vouchsafed
him, should feel as if it were important and the only important thing,
was very natural. That Providence had unspeakably honored him by revealing
it, saving him from death and darkness; that he therefore was bound
to make known the same to all creatures: this is what was meant by
{}``Mahomet is the Prophet of God;'' this too is not without its
true meaning.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

The good Kadijah, we can fancy, listened to him with wonder, with
doubt: at length she answered: Yes, it was true this that he said.
One can fancy too the boundless gratitude of Mahomet; and how of all
the kindnesses she had done him, this of believing the earnest struggling
word he now spoke was the greatest. {}``It is certain,'' says Novalis,
{}``my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will
believe in it.'' It is a boundless favor.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]He
never forgot this good Kadijah. Long afterwards, Ayesha his young
favorite wife, a woman who indeed distinguished herself among the
Moslem, by all manner of qualities, through her whole long life; this
young brilliant Ayesha was, one day, questioning him: {}``Now am
not I better than Kadijah? She was a widow; old, and had lost her
looks: you love me better than you did her?''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]{}``No,
by Allah!'' answered Mahomet: {}``No, by Allah! She believed in
me when none else would believe. In the whole world I had but one
friend, and she was that!''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Seid, his Slave,
also believed in him; these with his young Cousin Ali, Abu Thaleb's
son, were his first converts.

He spoke of his Doctrine to this man and that; but the most treated
it with ridicule, with indifference; in three years, I think, he had
gained but thirteen followers. His progress was slow enough. His encouragement
to go on, was altogether the usual encouragement that such a man in
such a case meets. After some three years of small success, he invited
forty of his chief kindred to an entertainment; and there stood up
and told them what his pretension was: that he had this thing to promulgate
abroad to all men; that it was the highest thing, the one thing: which
of them would second him in that? Amid the doubt and silence of all,
young Ali, as yet a lad of sixteen, impatient of the silence, started
up, and exclaimed in passionate fierce language, That he would! The
assembly, among whom was Abu Thaleb, Ali's Father, could not be unfriendly
to Mahomet; yet the sight there, of one unlettered elderly man, with
a lad of sixteen, deciding on such an enterprise against all mankind,
appeared ridiculous to them; the assembly broke up in laughter. Nevertheless
it proved not a laughable thing; it was a very serious thing! As for
this young Ali, one cannot but like him. A noble-minded creature,
as he shows himself, now and always afterwards; full of affection,
of fiery daring. Something chivalrous in him; brave as a lion; yet
with a grace, a truth and affection worthy of Christian knighthood.
He died by assassination in the Mosque at Bagdad; a death occasioned
by his own generous fairness, confidence in the fairness of others:
he said, If the wound proved not unto death, they must pardon the
Assassin; but if it did, then they must slay him straightway, that
so they two in the same hour might appear before God, and see which
side of that quarrel was the just one!

Mahomet naturally gave offence to the Koreish, Keepers of the Caabah,
superintendents of the Idols. One or two men of influence had joined
him: the thing spread slowly, but it was spreading. Naturally he gave
offence to everybody: Who is this that pretends to be wiser than we
all; that rebukes us all, as mere fools and worshippers of wood! Abu
Thaleb the good Uncle spoke with him: Could he not be silent about
all that; believe it all for himself, and not trouble others, anger
the chief men, endanger himself and them all, talking of it? Mahomet
answered: If the Sun stood on his right hand and the Moon on his left,
ordering him to hold his peace, he could not obey! No: there was something
in this Truth he had got which was of Nature herself; equal in rank
to Sun, or Moon, or whatsoever thing Nature had made. It would speak
itself there, so long as the Almighty allowed it, in spite of Sun
and Moon, and all Koreish and all men and things. It must do that,
and could do no other. Mahomet answered so; and, they say, {}``burst
into tears.'' Burst into tears: he felt that Abu Thaleb was good
to him; that the task he had got was no soft, but a stern and great
one.

He went on speaking to who would listen to him; publishing his Doctrine
among the pilgrims as they came to Mecca; gaining adherents in this
place and that. Continual contradiction, hatred, open or secret danger
attended him. His powerful relations protected Mahomet himself; but
by and by, on his own advice, all his adherents had to quit Mecca,
and seek refuge in Abyssinia over the sea. The Koreish grew ever angrier;
laid plots, and swore oaths among them, to put Mahomet to death with
their own hands. Abu Thaleb was dead, the good Kadijah was dead. Mahomet
is not solicitous of sympathy from us; but his outlook at this time
was one of the dismalest. He had to hide in caverns, escape in disguise;
fly hither and thither; homeless, in continual peril of his life.
More than once it seemed all over with him; more than once it turned
on a straw, some rider's horse taking fright or the like, whether
Mahomet and his Doctrine had not ended there, and not been heard of
at all. But it was not to end so.

In the thirteenth year of his mission, finding his enemies all banded
against him, forty sworn men, one out of every tribe, waiting to take
his life, and no continuance possible at Mecca for him any longer,
Mahomet fled to the place then called Yathreb, where he had gained
some adherents; the place they now call Medina, or {}``\textit{Medinat
al Nabi}, the City of the Prophet,'' from that circumstance. It lay
some two hundred miles off, through rocks and deserts; not without
great difficulty, in such mood as we may fancy, he escaped thither,
and found welcome. The whole East dates its era from this Flight,
\textit{hegira} as they name it: the Year 1 of this Hegira is 622
of our Era, the fifty-third of Mahomet's life. He was now becoming
an old man; his friends sinking round him one by one; his path desolate,
encompassed with danger: unless he could find hope in his own heart,
the outward face of things was but hopeless for him. It is so with
all men in the like case. Hitherto Mahomet had professed to publish
his Religion by the way of preaching and persuasion alone. But now,
driven foully out of his native country, since unjust men had not
only given no ear to his earnest Heaven's-message, the deep cry of
his heart, but would not even let him live if he kept speaking it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
wild Son of the Desert resolved to defend himself, like a man and
Arab. If the Koreish will have it so, they shall have it. Tidings,
felt to be of infinite moment to them and all men, they would not
listen to these; would trample them down by sheer violence, steel
and murder: well, let steel try it then! Ten years more this Mahomet
had; all of fighting of breathless impetuous toil and struggle; with
what result we know.

Much has been said of Mahomet's propagating his Religion by the sword.
It is no doubt far nobler what we have to boast of the Christian Religion,
that it propagated itself peaceably in the way of preaching and conviction.
Yet withal, if we take this for an argument of the truth or falsehood
of a religion, there is a radical mistake in it. The sword indeed:
but where will you get your sword! Every new opinion, at its starting,
is precisely in a \textit{minority of one}. In one man's head alone,
there it dwells as yet. One man alone of the whole world believes
it; there is one man against all men. That \textit{he} take a sword,
and try to propagate with that, will do little for him. You must first
get your sword! On the whole, a thing will propagate itself as it
can. We do not find, of the Christian Religion either, that it always
disdained the sword, when once it had got one. Charlemagne's conversion
of the Saxons was not by preaching. I care little about the sword:
I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any
sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. We will let
it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost bestir
itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that
it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to
be conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but
only what is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire,
and can do no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature,
what we call \textit{truest}, that thing and not the other will be
found growing at last.

Here however, in reference to much that there is in Mahomet and his
success, we are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness,
composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to
cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped
straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter:
you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds \textit{it} in, says nothing
of the rubbish. The yellow wheat is growing there; the good Earth
is silent about all the rest,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]has silently
turned all the rest to some benefit too, and makes no complaint about
it! So everywhere in Nature! She is true and not a lie; and yet so
great, and just, and motherly in her truth. She requires of a thing
only that it \textit{be} genuine of heart; she will protect it if
so; will not, if not so. There is a soul of truth in all the things
she ever gave harbor to. Alas, is not this the history of all highest
Truth that comes or ever came into the world? The \textit{body} of
them all is imperfection, an element of light in darkness: to us they
have to come embodied in mere Logic, in some merely \textit{scientific}
Theorem of the Universe; which \textit{cannot} be complete; which
cannot but be found, one day, incomplete, erroneous, and so die and
disappear. The body of all Truth dies; and yet in all, I say, there
is a soul which never dies; which in new and ever-nobler embodiment
lives immortal as man himself! It is the way with Nature. The genuine
essence of Truth never dies. That it be genuine, a voice from the
great Deep of Nature, there is the point at Nature's judgment-seat.
What \textit{we} call pure or impure, is not with her the final question.
Not how much chaff is in you; but whether you have any wheat. Pure?
I might say to many a man: Yes, you are pure; pure enough; but you
are chaff,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]insincere hypothesis, hearsay, formality;
you never were in contact with the great heart of the Universe at
all; you are properly neither pure nor impure; you \textit{are} nothing,
Nature has no business with you.

Mahomet's Creed we called a kind of Christianity; and really, if we
look at the wild rapt earnestness with which it was believed and laid
to heart, I should say a better kind than that of those miserable
Syrian Sects, with their vain janglings about \textit{Homoiousion}
and \textit{Homoousion}, the head full of worthless noise, the heart
empty and dead! The truth of it is embedded in portentous error and
falsehood; but the truth of it makes it be believed, not the falsehood:
it succeeded by its truth. A bastard kind of Christianity, but a living
kind; with a heart-life in it; not dead, chopping barren logic merely!
Out of all that rubbish of Arab idolatries, argumentative theologies,
traditions, subtleties, rumors and hypotheses of Greeks and Jews,
with their idle wire-drawings, this wild man of the Desert, with his
wild sincere heart, earnest as death and life, with his great flashing
natural eyesight, had seen into the kernel of the matter. Idolatry
is nothing: these Wooden Idols of yours, {}``ye rub them with oil
and wax, and the flies stick on them,''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]these
are wood, I tell you! They can do nothing for you; they are an impotent
blasphemous presence; a horror and abomination, if ye knew them. God
alone is; God alone has power; He made us, He can kill us and keep
us alive: {}``\textit{Allah akbar}, God is great.'' Understand that
His will is the best for you; that howsoever sore to flesh and blood,
you will find it the wisest, best: you are bound to take it so; in
this world and in the next, you have no other thing that you can do!

And now if the wild idolatrous men did believe this, and with their
fiery hearts lay hold of it to do it, in what form soever it came
to them, I say it was well worthy of being believed. In one form or
the other, I say it is still the one thing worthy of being believed
by all men. Man does hereby become the high-priest of this Temple
of a World. He is in harmony with the Decrees of the Author of this
World; cooperating with them, not vainly withstanding them: I know,
to this day, no better definition of Duty than that same. All that
is \textit{right} includes itself in this of co-operating with the
real Tendency of the World: you succeed by this (the World's Tendency
will succeed), you are good, and in the right course there.\  \textit{Homoiousion},
\textit{Homoousion}, vain logical jangle, then or before or at any
time, may jangle itself out, and go whither and how it likes: this
is the \textit{thing} it all struggles to mean, if it would mean anything.
If it do not succeed in meaning this, it means nothing. Not that Abstractions,
logical Propositions, be correctly worded or incorrectly; but that
living concrete Sons of Adam do lay this to heart: that is the important
point. Islam devoured all these vain jangling Sects; and I think had
right to do so. It was a Reality, direct from the great Heart of Nature
once more. Arab idolatries, Syrian formulas, whatsoever was not equally
real, had to go up in flame,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]mere dead \textit{fuel},
in various senses, for this which was \textit{fire}.

It was during these wild warfarings and strugglings, especially after
the Flight to Mecca, that Mahomet dictated at intervals his Sacred
Book, which they name \textit{Koran}, or \textit{Reading}, {}``Thing
to be read.'' This is the Work he and his disciples made so much
of, asking all the world, Is not that a miracle? The Mahometans regard
their Koran with a reverence which few Christians pay even to their
Bible. It is admitted every where as the standard of all law and all
practice; the thing to be gone upon in speculation and life; the message
sent direct out of Heaven, which this Earth has to conform to, and
walk by; the thing to be read. Their Judges decide by it; all Moslem
are bound to study it, seek in it for the light of their life. They
have mosques where it is all read daily; thirty relays of priests
take it up in succession, get through the whole each day. There, for
twelve hundred years, has the voice of this Book, at all moments,
kept sounding through the ears and the hearts of so many men. We hear
of Mahometan Doctors that had read it seventy thousand times!

Very curious: if one sought for {}``discrepancies of national taste,''
here surely were the most eminent instance of that! We also can read
the Koran; our Translation of it, by Sale, is known to be a very fair
one. I must say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A
wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness,
entanglement; most crude, incondite;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]insupportable
stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European
through the Koran. We read in it, as we might in the State-Paper Office,
unreadable masses of lumber, that perhaps we may get some glimpses
of a remarkable man. It is true we have it under disadvantages: the
Arabs see more method in it than we. Mahomet's followers found the
Koran lying all in fractions, as it had been written down at first
promulgation; much of it, they say, on shoulder-blades of mutton,
flung pell-mell into a chest: and they published it, without any discoverable
order as to time or otherwise;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]merely trying,
as would seem, and this not very strictly, to put the longest chapters
first. The real beginning of it, in that way, lies almost at the end:
for the earliest portions were the shortest. Read in its historical
sequence it perhaps would not be so bad. Much of it, too, they say,
is rhythmic; a kind of wild chanting song, in the original. This may
be a great point; much perhaps has been lost in the Translation here.
Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any mortal
ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in Heaven, too good
for the Earth; as a well-written book, or indeed as a \textit{book}
at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody; \textit{written}, so far as
writing goes, as badly as almost any book ever was! So much for national
discrepancies, and the standard of taste.

Yet I should say, it was not unintelligible how the Arabs might so
love it. When once you get this confused coil of a Koran fairly off
your hands, and have it behind you at a distance, the essential type
of it begins to disclose itself; and in this there is a merit quite
other than the literary one. If a book come from the heart, it will
contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small
amount to that. One would say the primary character of the Koran is
this of its \textit{genuineness}, of its being a \textit{bona-fide}
book. Prideaux, I know, and others have represented it as a mere bundle
of juggleries; chapter after chapter got up to excuse and varnish
the author's successive sins, forward his ambitions and quackeries:
but really it is time to dismiss all that. I do not assert Mahomet's
continual sincerity: who is continually sincere? But I confess I can
make nothing of the critic, in these times, who would accuse him of
deceit \textit{prepense}; of conscious deceit generally, or perhaps
at all;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]still more, of living in a mere element
of conscious deceit, and writing this Koran as a forger and juggler
would have done! Every candid eye, I think, will read the Koran far
otherwise than so. It is the confused ferment of a great rude human
soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest,
struggling vehemently to utter itself in words. With a kind of breathless
intensity he strives to utter himself; the thoughts crowd on him pell-mell:
for very multitude of things to say, he can get nothing said. The
meaning that is in him shapes itself into no form of composition,
is stated in no sequence, method, or coherence;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]they
are not \textit{shaped} at all, these thoughts of his; flung out unshaped,
as they struggle and tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate state.
We said {}``stupid:'' yet natural stupidity is by no means the character
of Mahomet's Book; it is natural uncultivation rather. The man has
not studied speaking; in the haste and pressure of continual fighting,
has not time to mature himself into fit speech. The panting breathless
haste and vehemence of a man struggling in the thick of battle for
life and salvation; this is the mood he is in! A headlong haste; for
very magnitude of meaning, he cannot get himself articulated into
words. The successive utterances of a soul in that mood, colored by
the various vicissitudes of three-and-twenty years; now well uttered,
now worse: this is the Koran.

For we are to consider Mahomet, through these three-and-twenty years,
as the centre of a world wholly in conflict. Battles with the Koreish
and Heathen, quarrels among his own people, backslidings of his own
wild heart; all this kept him in a perpetual whirl, his soul knowing
rest no more. In wakeful nights, as one may fancy, the wild soul of
the man, tossing amid these vortices, would hail any light of a decision
for them as a veritable light from Heaven; \textit{any} making-up
of his mind, so blessed, indispensable for him there, would seem the
inspiration of a Gabriel. Forger and juggler? No, no! This great fiery
heart, seething, simmering like a great furnace of thoughts, was not
a juggler's. His Life was a Fact to him; this God's Universe an awful
Fact and Reality. He has faults enough. The man was an uncultured
semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to
him: we must take him for that. But for a wretched Simulacrum, a hungry
Impostor without eyes or heart, practicing for a mess of pottage such
blasphemous swindlery, forgery of celestial documents, continual high-treason
against his Maker and Self, we will not and cannot take him.

Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what
had rendered it precious to the wild Arab men. It is, after all, the
first and last merit in a book; gives rise to merits of all kinds,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]nay,
at bottom, it alone can give rise to merit of any kind. Curiously,
through these incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint,
ejaculation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we
might almost call poetry, is found straggling. The body of the Book
is made up of mere tradition, and as it were vehement enthusiastic
extempore preaching. He returns forever to the old stories of the
Prophets as they went current in the Arab memory: how Prophet after
Prophet, the Prophet Abraham, the Prophet Hud, the Prophet Moses,
Christian and other real and fabulous Prophets, had come to this Tribe
and to that, warning men of their sin; and been received by them even
as he Mahomet was,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]which is a great solace
to him. These things he repeats ten, perhaps twenty times; again and
ever again, with wearisome iteration; has never done repeating them.
A brave Samuel Johnson, in his forlorn garret, might con over the
Biographies of Authors in that way! This is the great staple of the
Koran. But curiously, through all this, comes ever and anon some glance
as of the real thinker and seer. He has actually an eye for the world,
this Mahomet: with a certain directness and rugged vigor, he brings
home still, to our heart, the thing his own heart has been opened
to. I make but little of his praises of Allah, which many praise;
they are borrowed I suppose mainly from the Hebrew, at least they
are far surpassed there. But the eye that flashes direct into the
heart of things, and \textit{sees} the truth of them; this is to me
a highly interesting object. Great Nature's own gift; which she bestows
on all; but which only one in the thousand does not cast sorrowfully
away: it is what I call sincerity of vision; the test of a sincere
heart.

Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can
work no miracles. I? {}``I am a Public Preacher;'' appointed to
preach this doctrine to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see,
had really from of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over
the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly
{}``a sign to you,'' if your eyes were open! This Earth, God made
it for you; {}``appointed paths in it;'' you can live in it, go
to and fro on it.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]The clouds in the dry country
of Arabia, to Mahomet they are very wonderful: Great clouds, he says,
born in the deep bosom of the Upper Immensity, where do they come
from! They hang there, the great black monsters; pour down their rain-deluges
{}``to revive a dead earth,'' and grass springs, and {}``tall leafy
palm-trees with their date-clusters hanging round. Is not that a sign?''
Your cattle too,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Allah made them; serviceable
dumb creatures; they change the grass into milk; you have your clothing
from them, very strange creatures; they come ranking home at evening-time,
{}``and,'' adds he, {}``and are a credit to you!'' Ships also,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]he
talks often about ships: Huge moving mountains, they spread out their
cloth wings, go bounding through the water there, Heaven's wind driving
them; anon they lie motionless, God has withdrawn the wind, they lie
dead, and cannot stir! Miracles? cries he: What miracle would you
have? Are not you yourselves there? God made you, {}``shaped you
out of a little clay.'' Ye were small once; a few years ago ye were
not at all. Ye have beauty, strength, thoughts, {}``ye have compassion
on one another.'' Old age comes on you, and gray hairs; your strength
fades into feebleness; ye sink down, and again are not. {}``Ye have
compassion on one another:'' this struck me much: Allah might have
made you having no compassion on one another,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]how
had it been then! This is a great direct thought, a glance at first-hand
into the very fact of things. Rude vestiges of poetic genius, of whatsoever
is best and truest, are visible in this man. A strong untutored intellect;
eyesight, heart: a strong wild man,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]might have
shaped himself into Poet, King, Priest, any kind of Hero.

To his eyes it is forever clear that this world wholly is miraculous.
He sees what, as we said once before, all great thinkers, the rude
Scandinavians themselves, in one way or other, have contrived to see:
That this so solid-looking material world is, at bottom, in very deed,
Nothing; is a visual and factual Manifestation of God's power and
presence,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a shadow hung out by Him on the bosom
of the void Infinite; nothing more. The mountains, he says, these
great rock-mountains, they shall dissipate themselves {}``like clouds;''
melt into the Blue as clouds do, and not be! He figures the Earth,
in the Arab fashion, Sale tells us, as an immense Plain or flat Plate
of ground, the mountains are set on that to \textit{steady} it. At
the Last Day they shall disappear {}``like clouds;'' the whole Earth
shall go spinning, whirl itself off into wreck, and as dust and vapor
vanish in the Inane. Allah withdraws his hand from it, and it ceases
to be. The universal empire of Allah, presence everywhere of an unspeakable
Power, a Splendor, and a Terror not to be named, as the true force,
essence and reality, in all things whatsoever, was continually clear
to this man. What a modern talks of by the name, Forces of Nature,
Laws of Nature; and does not figure as a divine thing; not even as
one thing at all, but as a set of things, undivine enough,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]salable,
curious, good for propelling steamships! With our Sciences and Cyclopaedias,
we are apt to forget the \textit{divineness}, in those laboratories
of ours. We ought not to forget it! That once well forgotten, I know
not what else were worth remembering. Most sciences, I think were
then a very dead thing; withered, contentious, empty;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a
thistle in late autumn. The best science, without this, is but as
the dead \textit{timber}; it is not the growing tree and forest,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]which
gives ever-new timber, among other things! Man cannot \textit{know}
either, unless he can \textit{worship} in some way. His knowledge
is a pedantry, and dead thistle, otherwise.

Much has been said and written about the sensuality of Mahomet's Religion;
more than was just. The indulgences, criminal to us, which he permitted,
were not of his appointment; he found them practiced, unquestioned
from immemorial time in Arabia; what he did was to curtail them, restrict
them, not on one but on many sides. His Religion is not an easy one:
with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five
times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not {}``succeed by
being an easy religion.'' As if indeed any religion, or cause holding
of religion, could succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say
that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]sugar-plums
of any kind, in this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there
lies something nobler. The poor swearing soldier, hired to be shot,
has his {}``honor of a soldier,'' different from drill-regulations
and the shilling a day. It is not to taste sweet things, but to do
noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's Heaven as
a god-made Man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him
the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero.
They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty,
abnegation, martyrdom, death are the \textit{allurements} that act
on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have
a flame that burns up all lower considerations. Not happiness, but
something higher: one sees this even in the frivolous classes, with
their {}``point of honor'' and the like. Not by flattering our appetites;
no, by awakening the Heroic that slumbers in every heart, can any
Religion gain followers.

Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual
man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary,
intent mainly on base enjoyments,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]nay on enjoyments
of any kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread
and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted
on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend his
own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided
man; careless of what vulgar men toil for. Not a bad man, I should
say; something better in him than \textit{hunger} of any sort,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]or
these wild Arab men, fighting and jostling three-and-twenty years
at his hand, in close contact with him always, would not have reverenced
him so! They were wild men, bursting ever and anon into quarrel, into
all kinds of fierce sincerity; without right worth and manhood, no
man could have commanded them. They called him Prophet, you say? Why,
he stood there face to face with them; bare, not enshrined in any
mystery; visibly clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes; fighting,
counselling, ordering in the midst of them: they must have seen what
kind of a man he \textit{was}, let him be \textit{called} what you
like! No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak
of his own clouting. During three-and-twenty years of rough actual
trial. I find something of a veritable Hero necessary for that, of
itself.

His last words are a prayer; broken ejaculations of a heart struggling
up, in trembling hope, towards its Maker. We cannot say that his religion
made him \textit{worse}; it made him better; good, not bad. Generous
things are recorded of him: when he lost his Daughter, the thing he
answers is, in his own dialect, every way sincere, and yet equivalent
to that of Christians, {}``The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away;
blessed be the name of the Lord.'' He answered in like manner of
Seid, his emancipated well-beloved Slave, the second of the believers.
Seid had fallen in the War of Tabuc, the first of Mahomet's fightings
with the Greeks. Mahomet said, It was well; Seid had done his Master's
work, Seid had now gone to his Master: it was all well with Seid.
Yet Seid's daughter found him weeping over the body;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
old gray-haired man melting in tears! {}``What do I see?'' said
she.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]{}``You see a friend weeping over his
friend.''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]He went out for the last time into
the mosque, two days before his death; asked, If he had injured any
man? Let his own back bear the stripes. If he owed any man? A voice
answered, {}``Yes, me three drachms,'' borrowed on such an occasion.
Mahomet ordered them to be paid: {}``Better be in shame now,'' said
he, {}``than at the Day of Judgment.''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]You
remember Kadijah, and the {}``No, by Allah!'' Traits of that kind
show us the genuine man, the brother of us all, brought visible through
twelve centuries,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the veritable Son of our
common Mother.

Withal I like Mahomet for his total freedom from cant. He is a rough
self-helping son of the wilderness; does not pretend to be what he
is not. There is no ostentatious pride in him; but neither does he
go much upon humility: he is there as he can be, in cloak and shoes
of his own clouting; speaks plainly to all manner of Persian Kings,
Greek Emperors, what it is they are bound to do; knows well enough,
about himself, {}``the respect due unto thee.'' In a life-and-death
war with Bedouins, cruel things could not fail; but neither are acts
of mercy, of noble natural pity and generosity wanting. Mahomet makes
no apology for the one, no boast of the other. They were each the
free dictate of his heart; each called for, there and then. Not a
mealy-mouthed man! A candid ferocity, if the case call for it, is
in him; he does not mince matters! The War of Tabuc is a thing he
often speaks of: his men refused, many of them, to march on that occasion;
pleaded the heat of the weather, the harvest, and so forth; he can
never forget that. Your harvest? It lasts for a day. What will become
of your harvest through all Eternity? Hot weather? Yes, it was hot;
{}``but Hell will be hotter!'' Sometimes a rough sarcasm turns up:
He says to the unbelievers, Ye shall have the just measure of your
deeds at that Great Day. They will be weighed out to you; ye shall
not have short weight!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Everywhere he fixes
the matter in his eye; he \textit{sees} it: his heart, now and then,
is as if struck dumb by the greatness of it. {}``Assuredly,'' he
says: that word, in the Koran, is written down sometimes as a sentence
by itself: {}``Assuredly.''

No \textit{Dilettantism} in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation
and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest
about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search
for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin.
The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and
soul of the man never having been \textit{open} to Truth;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]{}``living
in a vain show.'' Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods,
but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of
the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death.
The very falsehoods of Mahomet are truer than the truths of such a
man. He is the insincere man: smooth-polished, respectable in some
times and places; inoffensive, says nothing harsh to anybody; most
\textit{cleanly},\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]just as carbonic acid is,
which is death and poison.

We will not praise Mahomet's moral precepts as always of the superfinest
sort; yet it can be said that there is always a tendency to good in
them; that they are the true dictates of a heart aiming towards what
is just and true. The sublime forgiveness of Christianity, turning
of the other cheek when the one has been smitten, is not here: you
\textit{are} to revenge yourself, but it is to be in measure, not
overmuch, or beyond justice. On the other hand, Islam, like any great
Faith, and insight into the essence of man, is a perfect equalizer
of men: the soul of one believer outweighs all earthly kingships;
all men, according to Islam too, are equal. Mahomet insists not on
the propriety of giving alms, but on the necessity of it: he marks
down by law how much you are to give, and it is at your peril if you
neglect. The tenth part of a man's annual income, whatever that may
be, is the \textit{property} of the poor, of those that are afflicted
and need help. Good all this: the natural voice of humanity, of pity
and equity dwelling in the heart of this wild Son of Nature speaks
\textit{so}.

Mahomet's Paradise is sensual, his Hell sensual: true; in the one
and the other there is enough that shocks all spiritual feeling in
us. But we are to recollect that the Arabs already had it so; that
Mahomet, in whatever he changed of it, softened and diminished all
this. The worst sensualities, too, are the work of doctors, followers
of his, not his work. In the Koran there is really very little said
about the joys of Paradise; they are intimated rather than insisted
on. Nor is it forgotten that the highest joys even there shall be
spiritual; the pure Presence of the Highest, this shall infinitely
transcend all other joys. He says, {}``Your salutation shall be,
Peace.'' \textit{Salam}, Have Peace!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the thing
that all rational souls long for, and seek, vainly here below, as
the one blessing. {}``Ye shall sit on seats, facing one another:
all grudges shall be taken away out of your hearts.'' All grudges!
Ye shall love one another freely; for each of you, in the eyes of
his brothers, there will be Heaven enough!

In reference to this of the sensual Paradise and Mahomet's sensuality,
the sorest chapter of all for us, there were many things to be said;
which it is not convenient to enter upon here. Two remarks only I
shall make, and therewith leave it to your candor. The first is furnished
me by Goethe; it is a casual hint of his which seems well worth taking
note of. In one of his Delineations, in \textit{Meister's Travels}
it is, the hero comes upon a Society of men with very strange ways,
one of which was this: {}``We require,'' says the Master, {}``that
each of our people shall restrict himself in one direction,'' shall
go right against his desire in one matter, and \textit{make} himself
do the thing he does not wish, {}``should we allow him the greater
latitude on all other sides.'' There seems to me a great justness
in this. Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil:
it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is. Let
a man assert withal that he is king over his habitudes; that he could
and would shake them off, on cause shown: this is an excellent law.
The Month Ramadhan for the Moslem, much in Mahomet's Religion, much
in his own Life, bears in that direction; if not by forethought, or
clear purpose of moral improvement on his part, then by a certain
healthy manful instinct, which is as good.

But there is another thing to be said about the Mahometan Heaven and
Hell. This namely, that, however gross and material they may be, they
are an emblem of an everlasting truth, not always so well remembered
elsewhere. That gross sensual Paradise of his; that horrible flaming
Hell; the great enormous Day of Judgment he perpetually insists on:
what is all this but a rude shadow, in the rude Bedouin imagination,
of that grand spiritual Fact, and Beginning of Facts, which it is
ill for us too if we do not all know and feel: the Infinite Nature
of Duty? That man's actions here are of \textit{infinite} moment to
him, and never die or end at all; that man, with his little life,
reaches upwards high as Heaven, downwards low as Hell, and in his
threescore years of Time holds an Eternity fearfully and wonderfully
hidden: all this had burnt itself, as in flame-characters, into the
wild Arab soul. As in flame and lightning, it stands written there;
awful, unspeakable, ever present to him. With bursting earnestness,
with a fierce savage sincerity, half-articulating, not able to articulate,
he strives to speak it, bodies it forth in that Heaven and that Hell.
Bodied forth in what way you will, it is the first of all truths.
It is venerable under all embodiments. What is the chief end of man
here below? Mahomet has answered this question, in a way that might
put some of us to shame! He does not, like a Bentham, a Paley, take
Right and Wrong, and calculate the profit and loss, ultimate pleasure
of the one and of the other; and summing all up by addition and subtraction
into a net result, ask you, Whether on the whole the Right does not
preponderate considerably? No; it is not \textit{better} to do the
one than the other; the one is to the other as life is to death,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as
Heaven is to Hell. The one must in nowise be done, the other in nowise
left undone. You shall not measure them; they are incommensurable:
the one is death eternal to a man, the other is life eternal. Benthamee
Utility, virtue by Profit and Loss; reducing this God's-world to a
dead brute Steam-engine, the infinite celestial Soul of Man to a kind
of Hay-balance for weighing hay and thistles on, pleasures and pains
on:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]If you ask me which gives, Mahomet or they,
the beggarlier and falser view of Man and his Destinies in this Universe,
I will answer, it is not Mahomet!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

On the whole, we will repeat that this Religion of Mahomet's is a
kind of Christianity; has a genuine element of what is spiritually
highest looking through it, not to be hidden by all its imperfections.
The Scandinavian God \textit{Wish}, the god of all rude men,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]this
has been enlarged into a Heaven by Mahomet; but a Heaven symbolical
of sacred Duty, and to be earned by faith and well-doing, by valiant
action, and a divine patience which is still more valiant. It is Scandinavian
Paganism, and a truly celestial element superadded to that. Call it
not false; look not at the falsehood of it, look at the truth of it.
For these twelve centuries, it has been the religion and life-guidance
of the fifth part of the whole kindred of Mankind. Above all things,
it has been a religion heartily \textit{believed}. These Arabs believe
their religion, and try to live by it! No Christians, since the early
ages, or only perhaps the English Puritans in modern times, have ever
stood by their Faith as the Moslem do by theirs,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]believing
it wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it. This night
the watchman on the streets of Cairo when he cries, {}``Who goes?''\ will
hear from the passenger, along with his answer, {}``There is no God
but God.'' \textit{Allah akbar}, \textit{Islam}, sounds through the
souls, and whole daily existence, of these dusky millions. Zealous
missionaries preach it abroad among Malays, black Papuans, brutal
Idolaters;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]displacing what is worse, nothing
that is better or good.

To the Arab Nation it was as a birth from darkness into light; Arabia
first became alive by means of it. A poor shepherd people, roaming
unnoticed in its deserts since the creation of the world: a Hero-Prophet
was sent down to them with a word they could believe: see, the unnoticed
becomes world-notable, the small has grown world-great; within one
century afterwards, Arabia is at Grenada on this hand, at Delhi on
that;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]glancing in valor and splendor and the
light of genius, Arabia shines through long ages over a great section
of the world. Belief is great, life-giving. The history of a Nation
becomes fruitful, soul-elevating, great, so soon as it believes. These
Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]is
it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed
black unnoticeable sand; but lo, the sand proves explosive powder,
blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Grenada! I said, the Great Man was
always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him
like fuel, and then they too would flame.


\chapter*{\raggedright {}{[}May 12, 1840.{]} LECTURE III. }

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{{[}May 12, 1840.{]} LECTURE III.}

\markboth{Heroes and Hero Worship}{The Hero as Poet}


\subsection*{\textit{\emph{The}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{Hero}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{as}}
\emph{}\textit{\emph{Poet}}\emph{.} \textit{\emph{Dante}}\emph{:}
\textit{\emph{Shakspeare}}\emph{.}}

The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old
ages; not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain rudeness
of conception, which the progress of mere scientific knowledge puts
an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a world vacant, or almost
vacant of scientific forms, if men in their loving wonder are to fancy
their fellow-man either a god or one speaking with the voice of a
god. Divinity and Prophet are past. We are now to see our Hero in
the less ambitious, but also less questionable, character of Poet;
a character which does not pass. The Poet is a heroic figure belonging
to all ages; whom all ages possess, when once he is produced, whom
the newest age as the oldest may produce;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
will produce, always when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul;
in no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a Poet.

Hero, Prophet, Poet,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]many different names,
in different times, and places, do we give to Great Men; according
to varieties we note in them, according to the sphere in which they
have displayed themselves! We might give many more names, on this
same principle. I will remark again, however, as a fact not unimportant
to be understood, that the different \textit{sphere} constitutes the
grand origin of such distinction; that the Hero can be Poet, Prophet,
King, Priest or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds
himself born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man
that could not be \textit{all} sorts of men. The Poet who could merely
sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth
much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were
at least a Heroic warrior too. I fancy there is in him the Politician,
the Thinker, Legislator, Philosopher;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]in one
or the other degree, he could have been, he is all these. So too I
cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that great glowing heart, with
the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears that were in it,
could not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts
in that way, had his course of life and education led him thitherward.
The grand fundamental character is that of Great Man; that the man
be great. Napoleon has words in him which are like Austerlitz Battles.
Louis Fourteenth's Marshals are a kind of poetical men withal; the
things Turenne says are full of sagacity and geniality, like sayings
of Samuel Johnson. The great heart, the clear deep-seeing eye: there
it lies; no man whatever, in what province soever, can prosper at
all without these. Petrarch and Boccaccio did diplomatic messages,
it seems, quite well: one can easily believe it; they had done things
a little harder than these! Burns, a gifted song-writer, might have
made a still better Mirabeau. Shakspeare,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]one
knows not what \textit{he} could not have made, in the supreme degree.

True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not make all
great men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. Varieties
of aptitude doubtless; but infinitely more of circumstance; and far
oftenest it is the \textit{latter} only that are looked to. But it
is as with common men in the learning of trades. You take any man,
as yet a vague capability of a man, who could be any kind of craftsman;
and make him into a smith, a carpenter, a mason: he is then and thenceforth
that and nothing else. And if, as Addison complains, you sometimes
see a street-porter, staggering under his load on spindle-shanks,
and near at hand a tailor with the frame of a Samson handling a bit
of cloth and small Whitechapel needle,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]it cannot
be considered that aptitude of Nature alone has been consulted here
either!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]The Great Man also, to what shall he
be bound apprentice? Given your Hero, is he to become Conqueror, King,
Philosopher, Poet? It is an inexplicably complex controversial-calculation
between the world and him! He will read the world and its laws; the
world with its laws will be there to be read. What the world, on \textit{this}
matter, shall permit and bid is, as we said, the most important fact
about the world.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them.
In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; \textit{Vates}
means both Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and
Poet, well understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally
indeed they are still the same; in this most important respect especially,
That they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of
the Universe; what Goethe calls {}``the open secret.'' {}``Which
is the great secret?'' asks one.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]{}``The
\textit{open} secret,''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]open to all, seen
by almost none! That divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all
Beings, {}``the Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the
bottom of Appearance,'' as Fichte styles it; of which all Appearance,
from the starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially the
Appearance of Man and his work, is but the \textit{vesture}, the embodiment
that renders it visible. This divine mystery \textit{is} in all times
and in all places; veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly
overlooked; and the Universe, definable always in one or the other
dialect, as the realized Thought of God, is considered a trivial,
inert, commonplace matter,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as if, says the
Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some upholsterer had put together!
It could do no good, at present, to \textit{speak} much about this;
but it is a pity for every one of us if we do not know it, live ever
in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful pity;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a
failure to live at all, if we live otherwise!

But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the \textit{Vates},
whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hither
to make it more impressively known to us. That always is his message;
he is to reveal that to us,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]that sacred mystery
which he more than others lives ever present with. While others forget
it, he knows it;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I might say, he has been driven
to know it; without consent asked of him, he finds himself living
in it, bound to live in it. Once more, here is no Hearsay, but a direct
Insight and Belief; this man too could not help being a sincere man!
Whosoever may live in the shows of things, it is for him a necessity
of nature to live in the very fact of things. A man once more, in
earnest with the Universe, though all others were but toying with
it. He is a \textit{Vates}, first of all, in virtue of being sincere.
So far Poet and Prophet, participators in the {}``open secret,''
are one.

With respect to their distinction again: The \textit{Vates} Prophet,
we might say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side,
as Good and Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the \textit{Vates} Poet on
what the Germans call the aesthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like.
The one we may call a revealer of what we are to do, the other of
what we are to love. But indeed these two provinces run into one another,
and cannot be disjoined. The Prophet too has his eye on what we are
to love: how else shall he know what it is we are to do? The highest
Voice ever heard on this earth said withal, {}``Consider the lilies
of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in
all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.'' A glance, that,
into the deepest deep of Beauty. {}``The lilies of the field,''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]dressed
finer than earthly princes, springing up there in the humble furrow-field;
a beautiful \textit{eye} looking out on you, from the great inner
Sea of Beauty! How could the rude Earth make these, if her Essence,
rugged as she looks and is, were not inwardly Beauty? In this point
of view, too, a saying of Goethe's, which has staggered several, may
have meaning: {}``The Beautiful,'' he intimates, {}``is higher
than the Good; the Beautiful includes in it the Good.'' The \textit{true}
Beautiful; which however, I have said somewhere, {}``differs from
the \textit{false} as Heaven does from Vauxhall!'' So much for the
distinction and identity of Poet and Prophet.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

In ancient and also in modern periods we find a few Poets who are
accounted perfect; whom it were a kind of treason to find fault with.
This is noteworthy; this is right: yet in strictness it is only an
illusion. At bottom, clearly enough, there is no perfect Poet! A vein
of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether
of Poetry. We are all poets when we \textit{read} a poem well. The
{}``imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante,'' is not that
the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own? No one but Shakspeare
can embody, out of \textit{Saxo Grammaticus}, the story of \textit{Hamlet}
as Shakspeare did: but every one models some kind of story out of
it; every one embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time
in defining. Where there is no specific difference, as between round
and square, all definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that
has \textit{so} much more of the poetic element developed in him as
to have become noticeable, will be called Poet by his neighbors. World-Poets
too, those whom we are to take for perfect Poets, are settled by critics
in the same way. One who rises \textit{so} far above the general level
of Poets will, to such and such critics, seem a Universal Poet; as
he ought to do. And yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary distinction.
All Poets, all men, have some touches of the Universal; no man is
wholly made of that. Most Poets are very soon forgotten: but not the
noblest Shakspeare or Homer of them can be remembered \textit{forever};\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a
day comes when he too is not!

Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a difference between true
Poetry and true Speech not poetical: what is the difference? On this
point many things have been written, especially by late German Critics,
some of which are not very intelligible at first. They say, for example,
that the Poet has an \textit{infinitude} in him; communicates an \textit{Unendlichkeit},
a certain character of {}``infinitude,'' to whatsoever he delineates.
This, though not very precise, yet on so vague a matter is worth remembering:
if well meditated, some meaning will gradually be found in it. For
my own part, I find considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction
of Poetry being \textit{metrical}, having music in it, being a Song.
Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one might say this as soon
as anything else: If your delineation be authentically \textit{musical},
musical not in word only, but in heart and substance, in all the thoughts
and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it, then it will
be poetical; if not, not.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Musical: how much
lies in that! A \textit{musical} thought is one spoken by a mind that
has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost
mystery of it, namely the \textit{melody} that lies hidden in it;
the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists,
and has a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may
say, are melodious; naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning
of Song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can express
the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech,
which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments
gaze into that!

Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has something of song in
it: not a parish in the world but has its parish-accent;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
rhythm or \textit{tune} to which the people there \textit{sing} what
they have to say! Accent is a kind of chanting; all men have accent
of their own,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]though they only \textit{notice}
that of others. Observe too how all passionate language does of itself
become musical,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]with a finer music than the
mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant,
a song. All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central
essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!
The primal element of us; of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled
of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner structure
of Nature; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect
music. Poetry, therefore, we will call \textit{musical Thought}. The
Poet is he who \textit{thinks} in that manner. At bottom, it turns
still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity and depth of
vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically;
the heart of Nature \textit{being} everywhere music, if you can only
reach it.

The \textit{Vates} Poet, with his melodious Apocalypse of Nature,
seems to hold a poor rank among us, in comparison with the \textit{Vates}
Prophet; his function, and our esteem of him for his function, alike
slight. The Hero taken as Divinity; the Hero taken as Prophet; then
next the Hero taken only as Poet: does it not look as if our estimate
of the Great Man, epoch after epoch, were continually diminishing?
We take him first for a god, then for one god-inspired; and now in
the next stage of it, his most miraculous word gains from us only
the recognition that he is a Poet, beautiful verse-maker, man of genius,
or such like!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]It looks so; but I persuade myself
that intrinsically it is not so. If we consider well, it will perhaps
appear that in man still there is the \textit{same} altogether peculiar
admiration for the Heroic Gift, by what name soever called, that there
at any time was.

I should say, if we do not now reckon a Great Man literally divine,
it is that our notions of God, of the supreme unattainable Fountain
of Splendor, Wisdom and Heroism, are ever rising \textit{higher};
not altogether that our reverence for these qualities, as manifested
in our like, is getting lower. This is worth taking thought of. Sceptical
Dilettantism, the curse of these ages, a curse which will not last
forever, does indeed in this the highest province of human things,
as in all provinces, make sad work; and our reverence for great men,
all crippled, blinded, paralytic as it is, comes out in poor plight,
hardly recognizable. Men worship the shows of great men; the most
disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship. The
dreariest, fatalest faith; believing which, one would literally despair
of human things. Nevertheless look, for example, at Napoleon! A Corsican
lieutenant of artillery; that is the show of \textit{him}: yet is
he not obeyed, worshipped after his sort, as all the Tiaraed and Diademed
of the world put together could not be? High Duchesses, and ostlers
of inns, gather round the Scottish rustic, Burns;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a
strange feeling dwelling in each that they never heard a man like
this; that, on the whole, this is the man! In the secret heart of
these people it still dimly reveals itself, though there is no accredited
way of uttering it at present, that this rustic, with his black brows
and flashing sun-eyes, and strange words moving laughter and tears,
is of a dignity far beyond all others, incommensurable with all others.
Do not we feel it so? But now, were Dilettantism, Scepticism, Triviality,
and all that sorrowful brood, cast out of us,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as,
by God's blessing, they shall one day be; were faith in the shows
of things entirely swept out, replaced by clear faith in the \textit{things},
so that a man acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the other
non-extant; what a new livelier feeling towards this Burns were it!

Nay here in these ages, such as they are, have we not two mere Poets,
if not deified, yet we may say beatified? Shakspeare and Dante are
Saints of Poetry; really, if we will think of it, \textit{canonized},
so that it is impiety to meddle with them. The unguided instinct of
the world, working across all these perverse impediments, has arrived
at such result. Dante and Shakspeare are a peculiar Two. They dwell
apart, in a kind of royal solitude; none equal, none second to them:
in the general feeling of the world, a certain transcendentalism,
a glory as of complete perfection, invests these two. They \textit{are}
canonized, though no Pope or Cardinals took hand in doing it! Such,
in spite of every perverting influence, in the most unheroic times,
is still our indestructible reverence for heroism.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]We
will look a little at these Two, the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakspeare:
what little it is permitted us to say here of the Hero as Poet will
most fitly arrange itself in that fashion.

Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and his
Book; yet, on the whole, with no great result. His Biography is, as
it were, irrecoverably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering, sorrow-stricken
man, not much note was taken of him while he lived; and the most of
that has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes. It is five
centuries since he ceased writing and living here. After all commentaries,
the Book itself is mainly what we know of him. The Book;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
one might add that Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto, which,
looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine, whoever
did it. To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all faces that
I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, with the
simple laurel wound round it; the deathless sorrow and pain, the known
victory which is also deathless;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]significant
of the whole history of Dante! I think it is the mournfulest face
that ever was painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting
face. There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness,
gentle affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed into
sharp contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain.
A soft ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant,
as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain
too, a silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of godlike
disdain of the thing that is eating out his heart,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as
if it were withal a mean insignificant thing, as if he whom it had
power to torture and strangle were greater than it. The face of one
wholly in protest, and lifelong unsurrendering battle, against the
world. Affection all converted into indignation: an implacable indignation;
slow, equable, silent, like that of a god! The eye too, it looks out
as in a kind of \textit{surprise}, a kind of inquiry, Why the world
was of such a sort? This is Dante: so he looks, this {}``voice of
ten silent centuries,'' and sings us {}``his mystic unfathomable
song.''

The little that we know of Dante's Life corresponds well enough with
this Portrait and this Book. He was born at Florence, in the upper
class of society, in the year 1265. His education was the best then
going; much school-divinity, Aristotelean logic, some Latin classics,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]no
inconsiderable insight into certain provinces of things: and Dante,
with his earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt, learned better
than most all that was learnable. He has a clear cultivated understanding,
and of great subtlety; this best fruit of education he had contrived
to realize from these scholastics. He knows accurately and well what
lies close to him; but, in such a time, without printed books or free
intercourse, he could not know well what was distant: the small clear
light, most luminous for what is near, breaks itself into singular
\textit{chiaroscuro} striking on what is far off. This was Dante's
learning from the schools. In life, he had gone through the usual
destinies; been twice out campaigning as a soldier for the Florentine
State, been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifth year, by natural gradation
of talent and service, become one of the Chief Magistrates of Florence.
He had met in boyhood a certain Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful little
girl of his own age and rank, and grown up thenceforth in partial
sight of her, in some distant intercourse with her. All readers know
his graceful affecting account of this; and then of their being parted;
of her being wedded to another, and of her death soon after. She makes
a great figure in Dante's Poem; seems to have made a great figure
in his life. Of all beings it might seem as if she, held apart from
him, far apart at last in the dim Eternity, were the only one he had
ever with his whole strength of affection loved. She died: Dante himself
was wedded; but it seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy, the
rigorous earnest man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether
easy to make happy.

We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with
him as he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podesta, or whatsoever
they call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbors,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
the world had wanted one of the most notable words ever spoken or
sung. Florence would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the
ten dumb centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening
centuries (for there will be ten of them and more) had no \textit{Divina
Commedia} to hear! We will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was
appointed for this Dante; and he, struggling like a man led towards
death and crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give \textit{him}
the choice of his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what was
really happy, what was really miserable.

In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or some
other confused disturbances rose to such a height, that Dante, whose
party had seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast unexpectedly
forth into banishment; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe and wandering.
His property was all confiscated and more; he had the fiercest feeling
that it was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight of God and man.
He tried what was in him to get reinstated; tried even by warlike
surprisal, with arms in his hand: but it would not do; bad only had
become worse. There is a record, I believe, still extant in the Florence
Archives, dooming this Dante, wheresoever caught, to be burnt alive.
Burnt alive; so it stands, they say: a very curious civic document.
Another curious document, some considerable number of years later,
is a Letter of Dante's to the Florentine Magistrates, written in answer
to a milder proposal of theirs, that he should return on condition
of apologizing and paying a fine. He answers, with fixed stern pride:
{}``If I cannot return without calling myself guilty, I will never
return, \textit{nunquam revertar}.''

For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wandered from patron
to patron, from place to place; proving, in his own bitter words,
{}``How hard is the path, \textit{Come e duro calle}.'' The wretched
are not cheerful company. Dante, poor and banished, with his proud
earnest nature, with his moody humors, was not a man to conciliate
men. Petrarch reports of him that being at Can della Scala's court,
and blamed one day for his gloom and taciturnity, he answered in no
courtier-like way. Della Scala stood among his courtiers, with mimes
and buffoons (\textit{nebulones ac histriones}) making him heartily
merry; when turning to Dante, he said: {}``Is it not strange, now,
that this poor fool should make himself so entertaining; while you,
a wise man, sit there day after day, and have nothing to amuse us
with at all?'' Dante answered bitterly: {}``No, not strange; your
Highness is to recollect the Proverb, \textit{Like to Like};''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]given
the amuser, the amusee must also be given! Such a man, with his proud
silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, was not made to succeed
at court. By degrees, it came to be evident to him that he had no
longer any resting-place, or hope of benefit, in this earth. The earthly
world had cast him forth, to wander, wander; no living heart to love
him now; for his sore miseries there was no solace here.

The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself on him;
that awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, with its
Florences and banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence
thou shalt never see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt
surely see! What is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life
altogether? \textit{Eternity}: thither, of a truth, not elsewhither,
art thou and all things bound! The great soul of Dante, homeless on
earth, made its home more and more in that awful other world. Naturally
his thoughts brooded on that, as on the one fact important for him.
Bodied or bodiless, it is the one fact important for all men:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]but
to Dante, in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific
shape; he no more doubted of that \textit{Malebolge} Pool, that it
all lay there with its gloomy circles, with its \textit{alti guai},
and that he himself should see it, than we doubt that we should see
Constantinople if we went thither. Dante's heart, long filled with
this, brooding over it in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth
at length into {}``mystic unfathomable song;'' and this his \textit{Divine
Comedy}, the most remarkable of all modern Books, is the result.

It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can
see, a proud thought for him at times, That he, here in exile, could
do this work; that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him
from doing it, or even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly,
that it was great; the greatest a man could do. {}``If thou follow
thy star, \textit{Se tu segui tua stella},''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]so
could the Hero, in his forsakenness, in his extreme need, still say
to himself: {}``Follow thou thy star, thou shalt not fail of a glorious
haven!'' The labor of writing, we find, and indeed could know otherwise,
was great and painful for him; he says, This Book, {}``which has
made me lean for many years.'' Ah yes, it was won, all of it, with
pain and sore toil,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]not in sport, but in grim
earnest. His Book, as indeed most good Books are, has been written,
in many senses, with his heart's blood. It is his whole history, this
Book. He died after finishing it; not yet very old, at the age of
fifty-six;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]broken-hearted rather, as is said.
He lies buried in his death-city Ravenna: \textit{Hic claudor Dantes
patriis extorris ab oris}. The Florentines begged back his body, in
a century after; the Ravenna people would not give it. {}``Here am
I Dante laid, shut out from my native shores.''

I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls it {}``a mystic
unfathomable Song;'' and such is literally the character of it. Coleridge
remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a sentence
musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is
something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and soul, word
and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song: we said
before, it was the Heroic of Speech! All \textit{old} Poems, Homer's
and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness,
that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not \textit{sung} is
properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]to
the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader,
for most part! What we wants to get at is the \textit{thought} the
man had, if he had any: why should he twist it into jingle, if he
\textit{could} speak it out plainly? It is only when the heart of
him is rapt into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him,
according to Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness,
depth and music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme
and sing; that we call him a Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic
of Speakers,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]whose speech is Song. Pretenders
to this are many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is for most
part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business, that
of reading rhyme! Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be rhymed;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]it
ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle, what it was aiming
at. I would advise all men who \textit{can} speak their thought, not
to sing it; to understand that, in a serious time, among serious men,
there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely as we love
the true song, and are charmed by it as by something divine, so shall
we hate the false song, and account it a mere wooden noise, a thing
hollow, superfluous, altogether an insincere and offensive thing.

I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his \textit{Divine Comedy}
that it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of
it there is a \textit{canto fermo}; it proceeds as by a chant. The
language, his simple \textit{terza rima}, doubtless helped him in
this. One reads along naturally with a sort of \textit{lilt}. But
I add, that it could not be otherwise; for the essence and material
of the work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and
sincerity, makes it musical;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]go \textit{deep}
enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward symmetry, what one
calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it, proportionates it all:
architectural; which also partakes of the character of music. The
three kingdoms, \textit{Inferno}, \textit{Purgatorio}, \textit{Paradiso},
look out on one another like compartments of a great edifice; a great
supernatural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern, solemn, awful;
Dante's World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the \textit{sincerest} of
all Poems; sincerity, here too,, we find to be the measure of worth.
It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts; and it goes deep,
and through long generations, into ours. The people of Verona, when
they saw him on the streets, used to say, {}``\textit{Eccovi l' uom
ch' e stato all' Inferno}, See, there is the man that was in Hell!''
Ah yes, he had been in Hell;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]in Hell enough,
in long severe sorrow and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure
to have been. Commedias that come out \textit{divine} are not accomplished
otherwise. Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself,
is it not the daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]true
\textit{effort}, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself:
that is Thought. In all ways we are {}``to become perfect through
\textit{suffering}.''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]\textit{But}, as I say,
no work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has all
been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made
him {}``lean'' for many years. Not the general whole only; every
compartment of it is worked out, with intense earnestness, into truth,
into clear visuality. Each answers to the other; each fits in its
place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is the
soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the middle ages, rendered forever
rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intense one: but
a task which is \textit{done}.

Perhaps one would say, \textit{intensity}, with the much that depends
on it, is the prevailing character of Dante's genius. Dante does not
come before us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow, and even
sectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and position, but
partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentred
itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great not because
he is worldwide, but because he is world-deep. Through all objects
he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I know nothing
so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to begin with the outermost
development of his intensity, consider how he paints. He has a great
power of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents that and
nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of the Hall of
Dite: \textit{red} pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron glowing through
the dim immensity of gloom;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]so vivid, so distinct,
visible at once and forever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius
of Dante. There is a brevity, an abrupt precision in him: Tacitus
is not briefer, more condensed; and then in Dante it seems a natural
condensation, spontaneous to the man. One smiting word; and then there
is silence, nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent than words.
It is strange with what a sharp decisive grace he snatches the true
likeness of a matter: cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire.
Plutus, the blustering giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke; it is
{}``as the sails sink, the mast being suddenly broken.'' Or that
poor Brunetto Latini, with the \textit{cotto aspetto}, {}``face \textit{baked},''
parched brown and lean; and the {}``fiery snow'' that falls on them
there, a {}``fiery snow without wind,'' slow, deliberate, never-ending!
Or the lids of those Tombs; square sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning
Hall, each with its Soul in torment; the lids laid open there; they
are to be shut at the Day of Judgment, through Eternity. And how Farinata
rises; and how Cavalcante falls\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]at hearing
of his Son, and the past tense {}``\textit{fue}''! The very movements
in Dante have something brief; swift, decisive, almost military. It
is of the inmost essence of his genius this sort of painting. The
fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent, passionate, with
its quick abrupt movements, its silent {}``pale rages,'' speaks
itself in these things.

For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of
a man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it
is physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you
a likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner
of doing it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he
could not have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type
of it, unless he had, what we may call, \textit{sympathized} with
it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]had sympathy in him to bestow on objects.
He must have been \textit{sincere} about it too; sincere and sympathetic:
a man without worth cannot give you the likeness of any object; he
dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay, about all
objects. And indeed may we not say that intellect altogether expresses
itself in this power of discerning what an object is? Whatsoever of
faculty a man's mind may have will come out here. Is it even of business,
a matter to be done? The gifted man is he who \textit{sees} the essential
point, and leaves all the rest aside as surplusage: it is his faculty
too, the man of business's faculty, that he discern the true \textit{likeness},
not the false superficial one, of the thing he has got to work in.
And how much of \textit{morality} is in the kind of insight we get
of anything; {}``the eye seeing in all things what it brought with
it the faculty of seeing''! To the mean eye all things are trivial,
as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, the Painters
tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No most gifted
eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the commonest human
face there lies more than Raphael will take away with him.

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness
as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is every way
noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what
qualities in that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of
eternal black. A small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there,
into our very heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too: \textit{della
bella persona, che mi fu tolta}; and how, even in the Pit of woe,
it is a solace that \textit{he} will never part from her! Saddest
tragedy in these \textit{alti guai}. And the racking winds, in that
\textit{aer bruno}, whirl them away again, to wail forever!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Strange
to think: Dante was the friend of this poor Francesca's father; Francesca
herself may have sat upon the Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little
child. Infinite pity, yet also infinite rigor of law: it is so Nature
is made; it is so Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry
notion is that of his \textit{Divine Comedy's} being a poor splenetic
impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into Hell whom he could
not be avenged upon on earth! I suppose if ever pity, tender as a
mother's, was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man
who does not know rigor cannot pity either. His very pity will be
cowardly, egoistic,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]sentimentality, or little
better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that of Dante.
It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like the wail
of AEolian harps, soft, soft; like a child's young heart;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
then that stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of his towards
his Beatrice; their meeting together in the \textit{Paradiso}; his
gazing in her pure transfigured eyes, her that had been purified by
death so long, separated from him so far:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]one
likens it to the song of angels; it is among the purest utterances
of affection, perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of a human
soul.

For the \textit{intense} Dante is intense in all things; he has got
into the essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion
too as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity.
Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of
all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as
indeed, what are they but the \textit{inverse} or \textit{converse}
of his love? {}``\textit{A Dio spiacenti ed a' nemici sui}, Hateful
to God and to the enemies of God: {}``lofty scorn, unappeasable silent
reprobation and aversion; {}``\textit{Non ragionam di lor}, We will
not speak of \textit{them}, look only and pass.'' Or think of this;
{}``They have not the \textit{hope} to die, \textit{Non han speranza
di morte}.'' One day, it had risen sternly benign on the scathed
heart of Dante, that he, wretched, never-resting, worn as he was,
would full surely \textit{die}; {}``that Destiny itself could not
doom him not to die.'' Such words are in this man. For rigor, earnestness
and depth, he is not to be paralleled in the modern world; to seek
his parallel we must go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique
Prophets there.

I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the
\textit{Inferno} to the two other parts of the Divine \textit{Commedia}.
Such preference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste,
and is like to be a transient feeling. Thc \textit{Purgatorio} and
\textit{Paradiso}, especially the former, one would almost say, is
even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing that \textit{Purgatorio},
{}``Mountain of Purification;'' an emblem of the noblest conception
of that age. If sin is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous,
awful, yet in Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand
Christian act. It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The \textit{tremolar
dell' onde}, that {}``trembling'' of the ocean-waves, under the
first pure gleam of morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is
as the type of an altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope,
if in company still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of demons
and reprobate is underfoot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher
and higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. {}``Pray for me,'' the
denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to him. {}``Tell my Giovanna
to pray for me,'' my daughter Giovanna; {}``I think her mother loves
me no more!'' They toil painfully up by that winding steep, {}``bent
down like corbels of a building,'' some of them,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]crushed
together so {}``for the sin of pride;'' yet nevertheless in years,
in ages and aeons, they shall have reached the top, which is heaven's
gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too of all,
when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a
psalm of praise rises, when one soul has perfected repentance and
got its sin and misery left behind! I call all this a noble embodiment
of a true noble thought.

But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, are
indispensable to one another. The \textit{Paradiso}, a kind of inarticulate
music to me, is the redeeming side of the \textit{Inferno}; the \textit{Inferno}
without it were untrue. All three make up the true Unseen World, as
figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing forever memorable,
forever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was perhaps delineated
in no human soul with such depth of veracity as in this of Dante's;
a man \textit{sent} to sing it, to keep it long memorable. Very notable
with what brief simplicity he passes out of the every-day reality,
into the Invisible one; and in the second or third stanza, we find
ourselves in the World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among things
palpable, indubitable! To Dante they \textit{were} so; the real world,
as it is called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely
higher Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as \textit{preternatural}
as the other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a spirit,
but is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believes
it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say
again, is the saving merit, now as always.

Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematic
representation of his Belief about this Universe:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]some
Critic in a future age, like those Scandinavian ones the other day,
who has ceased altogether to think as Dante did, may find this too
all an {}``Allegory,'' perhaps an idle Allegory! It is a sublime
embodiment, or sublimest, of the soul of Christianity. It expresses,
as in huge world-wide architectural emblems, how the Christian Dante
felt Good and Evil to be the two polar elements of this Creation,
on which it all turns; that these two differ not by preferability
of one to the other, but by incompatibility absolute and infinite;
that the one is excellent and high as light and Heaven, the other
hideous, black as Gehenna and the Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice,
yet with Penitence, with everlasting Pity,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]all
Christianism, as Dante and the Middle Ages had it, is emblemed here.
Emblemed: and yet, as I urged the other day, with what entire truth
of purpose; how unconscious of any embleming! Hell, Purgatory, Paradise:
these things were not fashioned as emblems; was there, in our Modern
European Mind, any thought at all of their being emblems! Were they
not indubitable awful facts; the whole heart of man taking them for
practically true, all Nature everywhere confirming them? So is it
always in these things. Men do not believe an Allegory. The future
Critic, whatever his new thought may be, who considers this of Dante
to have been all got up as an Allegory, will commit one sore mistake!--Paganism
we recognized as a veracious expression of the earnest awe-struck
feeling of man towards the Universe; veracious, true once, and still
not without worth for us. But mark here the difference of Paganism
and Christianism; one great difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly
the Operations of Nature; the destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes
of things and men in this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of
Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was for the sensuous nature:
a rude helpless utterance of the first Thought of men,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
chief recognized virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. The other was
not for the sensuous nature, but for the moral. What a progress is
here, if in that one respect only!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in a very
strange way, found a voice. The \textit{Divina Commedia} is of Dante's
writing; yet in truth it belongs to ten Christian centuries, only
the finishing of it is Dante's. So always. The craftsman there, the
smith with that metal of his, with these tools, with these cunning
methods,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]how little of all he does is properly
\textit{his} work! All past inventive men work there with him;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as
indeed with all of us, in all things. Dante is the spokesman of the
Middle Ages; the Thought they lived by stands here, in everlasting
music. These sublime ideas of his, terrible and beautiful, are the
fruit of the Christian Meditation of all the good men who had gone
before him. Precious they; but also is not he precious? Much, had
not he spoken, would have been dumb; not dead, yet living voiceless.

On the whole, is it not an utterance, this mystic Song, at once of
one of the greatest human souls, and of the highest thing that Europe
had hitherto realized for itself? Christianism, as Dante sings it,
is another than Paganism in the rude Norse mind; another than {}``Bastard
Christianism'' half-articulately spoken in the Arab Desert, seven
hundred years before!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]The noblest \textit{idea}
made \textit{real} hitherto among men, is sung, and emblemed forth
abidingly, by one of the noblest men. In the one sense and in the
other, are we not right glad to possess it? As I calculate, it may
last yet for long thousands of years. For the thing that is uttered
from the inmost parts of a man's soul, differs altogether from what
is uttered by the outer part. The outer is of the day, under the empire
of mode; the outer passes away, in swift endless changes; the inmost
is the same yesterday, to-day and forever. True souls, in all generations
of the world, who look on this Dante, will find a brotherhood in him;
the deep sincerity of his thoughts, his woes and hopes, will speak
likewise to their sincerity; they will feel that this Dante too was
a brother. Napoleon in Saint Helena is charmed with the genial veracity
of old Homer. The oldest Hebrew Prophet, under a vesture the most
diverse from ours, does yet, because he speaks from the heart of man,
speak to all men's hearts. It is the one sole secret of continuing
long memorable. Dante, for depth of sincerity, is like an antique
Prophet too; his words, like theirs, come from his very heart. One
need not wonder if it were predicted that his Poem might be the most
enduring thing our Europe has yet made; for nothing so endures as
a truly spoken word. All cathedrals, pontificalities, brass and stone,
and outer arrangement never so lasting, are brief in comparison to
an unfathomable heart-song like this: one feels as if it might survive,
still of importance to men, when these had all sunk into new irrecognizable
combinations, and had ceased individually to be. Europe has made much;
great cities, great empires, encyclopaedias, creeds, bodies of opinion
and practice: but it has made little of the class of Dante's Thought.
Homer yet \textit{is} veritably present face to face with every open
soul of us; and Greece, where is \textit{it}? Desolate for thousands
of years; away, vanished; a bewildered heap of stones and rubbish,
the life and existence of it all gone. Like a dream; like the dust
of King Agamemnon! Greece was; Greece, except in the \textit{words}
it spoke, is not.

The uses of this Dante? We will not say much about his {}``uses.''
A human soul who has once got into that primal element of \textit{Song},
and sung forth fitly somewhat therefrom, has worked in the \textit{depths}
of our existence; feeding through long times the life-roots of all
excellent human things whatsoever,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]in a way
that {}``utilities'' will not succeed well in calculating! We will
not estimate the Sun by the quantity of gaslight it saves us; Dante
shall be invaluable, or of no value. One remark I may make: the contrast
in this respect between the Hero-Poet and the Hero-Prophet. In a hundred
years, Mahomet, as we saw, had his Arabians at Grenada and at Delhi;
Dante's Italians seem to be yet very much where they were. Shall we
say, then, Dante's effect on the world was small in comparison? Not
so: his arena is far more restricted; but also it is far nobler, clearer;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]perhaps
not less but more important. Mahomet speaks to great masses of men,
in the coarse dialect adapted to such; a dialect filled with inconsistencies,
crudities, follies: on the great masses alone can he act, and there
with good and with evil strangely blended. Dante speaks to the noble,
the pure and great, in all times and places. Neither does he grow
obsolete, as the other does. Dante burns as a pure star, fixed there
in the firmament, at which the great and the high of all ages kindle
themselves: he is the possession of all the chosen of the world for
uncounted time. Dante, one calculates, may long survive Mahomet. In
this way the balance may be made straight again.

But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on the
world, by what \textit{we} can judge of their effect there, that a
man and his work are measured. Effect? Influence? Utility? Let a man
\textit{do} his work; the fruit of it is the care of Another than
he. It will grow its own fruit; and whether embodied in Caliph Thrones
and Arabian Conquests, so that it {}``fills all Morning and Evening
Newspapers,'' and all Histories, which are a kind of distilled Newspapers;
or not embodied so at all;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]what matters that?
That is not the real fruit of it! The Arabian Caliph, in so far only
as he did something, was something. If the great Cause of Man, and
Man's work in God's Earth, got no furtherance from the Arabian Caliph,
then no matter how many scimetars he drew, how many gold piasters
pocketed, and what uproar and blaring he made in this world,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]\textit{he}
was but a loud-sounding inanity and futility; at bottom, he \textit{was}
not at all. Let us honor the great empire of \textit{Silence}, once
more! The boundless treasury which we do not jingle in our pockets,
or count up and present before men! It is perhaps, of all things,
the usefulest for each of us to do, in these loud times.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically
the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe,
its Inner Life; so Shakspeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer
Life of our Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies,
humors, ambitions, what practical way of thinking, acting, looking
at the world, men then had. As in Homer we may still construe Old
Greece; so in Shakspeare and Dante, after thousands of years, what
our modern Europe was, in Faith and in Practice, will still be legible.
Dante has given us the Faith or soul; Shakspeare, in a not less noble
way, has given us the Practice or body. This latter also we were to
have; a man was sent for it, the man Shakspeare. Just when that chivalry
way of life had reached its last finish, and was on the point of breaking
down into slow or swift dissolution, as we now see it everywhere,
this other sovereign Poet, with his seeing eye, with his perennial
singing voice, was sent to take note of it, to give long-enduring
record of it. Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce as the central fire
of the world; Shakspeare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as the Sun, the
upper light of the world. Italy produced the one world-voice; we English
had the honor of producing the other.

Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident, this man came to
us. I think always, so great, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is
this Shakspeare, had the Warwickshire Squire not prosecuted him for
deer-stealing, we had perhaps never heard of him as a Poet! The woods
and skies, the rustic Life of Man in Stratford there, had been enough
for this man! But indeed that strange outbudding of our whole English
Existence, which we call the Elizabethan Era, did not it too come
as of its own accord? The {}``Tree Igdrasil'' buds and withers by
its own laws,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]too deep for our scanning. Yet
it does bud and wither, and every bough and leaf of it is there, by
fixed eternal laws; not a Sir Thomas Lucy but comes at the hour fit
for him. Curious, I say, and not sufficiently considered: how everything
does co-operate with all; not a leaf rotting on the highway but is
indissoluble portion of solar and stellar systems; no thought, word
or act of man but has sprung withal out of all men, and works sooner
or later, recognizably or irrecognizable, on all men! It is all a
Tree: circulation of sap and influences, mutual communication of every
minutest leaf with the lowest talon of a root, with every other greatest
and minutest portion of the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its
roots down in the Kingdoms of Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread
the highest Heaven!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

In some sense it may be said that this glorious Elizabethan Era with
its Shakspeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had preceded
it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages.
The Christian Faith, which was the theme of Dante's Song, had produced
this Practical Life which Shakspeare was to sing. For Religion then,
as it now and always is, was the soul of Practice; the primary vital
fact in men's life. And remark here, as rather curious, that Middle-Age
Catholicism was abolished, so far as Acts of Parliament could abolish
it, before Shakspeare, the noblest product of it, made his appearance.
He did make his appearance nevertheless. Nature at her own time, with
Catholicism or what else might be necessary, sent him forth; taking
small thought of Acts of Parliament. King Henrys, Queen Elizabeths
go their way; and Nature too goes hers. Acts of Parliament, on the
whole, are small, notwithstanding the noise they make. What Act of
Parliament, debate at St.\ Stephen's, on the hustings or elsewhere,
was it that brought this Shakspeare into being? No dining at Freemason's
Tavern, opening subscription-lists, selling of shares, and infinite
other jangling and true or false endeavoring! This Elizabethan Era,
and all its nobleness and blessedness, came without proclamation,
preparation of ours. Priceless Shakspeare was the free gift of Nature;
given altogether silently;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]received altogether
silently, as if it had been a thing of little account. And yet, very
literally, it is a priceless thing. One should look at that side of
matters too.

Of this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears
a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think
the best judgment not of this country only, but of Europe at large,
is slowly pointing to the conclusion, that Shakspeare is the chief
of all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded
world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature. On the
whole, I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought,
if we take all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness
of depth; placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great
soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea!
It has been said, that in the constructing of Shakspeare's Dramas
there is, apart from all other {}``faculties'' as they are called,
an understanding manifested, equal to that in Bacon's \textit{Novum
Organum} That is true; and it is not a truth that strikes every one.
It would become more apparent if we tried, any of us for himself,
how, out of Shakspeare's dramatic materials, \textit{we} could fashion
such a result! The built house seems all so fit,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]every
way as it should be, as if it came there by its own law and the nature
of things,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]we forget the rude disorderly quarry
it was shaped from. The very perfection of the house, as if Nature
herself had made it, hides the builder's merit. Perfect, more perfect
than any other man, we may call Shakspeare in this: he discerns, knows
as by instinct, what condition he works under, what his materials
are, what his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitory
glance of insight that will suffice; it is deliberate illumination
of the whole matter; it is a calmly \textit{seeing} eye; a great intellect,
in short. How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will
construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will
give of it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]is the best measure you could get
of what intellect is in the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall
stand prominent; which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is
the true \textit{beginning}, the true sequence and ending? To find
out this, you task the whole force of insight that is in the man.
He must \textit{understand} the thing; according to the depth of his
understanding, will the fitness of his answer be. You will try him
so. Does like join itself to like; does the spirit of method stir
in that confusion, so that its embroilment becomes order? Can the
man say, \textit{Fiat lux}, Let there be light; and out of chaos make
a world? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish
this.

Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting,
delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakspeare
is great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here.
It is unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakspeare.
The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its
inmost heart, and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light
before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative,
we said: poetic creation, what is this too but \textit{seeing} the
thing sufficiently? The \textit{word} that will describe the thing,
follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And
is not Shakspeare's \textit{morality}, his valor, candor, tolerance,
truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can
triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world.
No \textit{twisted}, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects
with its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly \textit{level}
mirror;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]that is to say withal, if we will understand
it, a man justly related to all things and men, a good man. It is
truly a lordly spectacle how this great soul takes in all kinds of
men and objects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets
them all forth to us in their round completeness; loving, just, the
equal brother of all.\  \textit{Novum Organum}, and all the intellect
you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; earthy, material,
poor in comparison with this. Among modern men, one finds, in strictness,
almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakspeare,
reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he \textit{saw} the object;
you may say what he himself says of Shakspeare: {}``His characters
are like watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal; they show
you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism also is all visible.''

The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things;
what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped up in these
often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye
that something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things?
You can laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way
or other genially relate yourself to them;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]you
can, at lowest, hold your peace about them, turn away your own and
others' face from them, till the hour come for practically exterminating
and extinguishing them! At bottom, it is the Poet's first gift, as
it is all men's, that he have intellect enough. He will be a Poet
if he have: a Poet in word; or failing that, perhaps still better,
a Poet in act. Whether he write at all; and if so, whether in prose
or in verse, will depend on accidents: who knows on what extremely
trivial accidents,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]perhaps on his having had
a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his boyhood! But
the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart of things,
and the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has a harmony
in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and exist), is not
the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of Nature herself;
the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort soever. To the Poet,
as to every other, we say first of all, \textit{See}. If you cannot
do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling
sensibilities against each other, and \textit{name} yourself a Poet;
there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse,
in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster
used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, {}``But are ye sure
he's \textit{not a dunce}?'' Why, really one might ask the same thing,
in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider
it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he's not a dunce? There
is, in this world, no other entirely fatal person.

For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a
correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakspeare's faculty,
I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all
under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if
they were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination,
fancy, \&c., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a capital error.
Then again, we hear of a man's {}``intellectual nature,'' and of
his {}``moral nature,'' as if these again were divisible, and existed
apart. Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such forms of
utterance; we must speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are to speak
at all. But words ought not to harden into things for us. It seems
to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part, radically
falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep forever in
mind, that these divisions are at bottom but \textit{names}; that
man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially
one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding,
and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power of Insight,
all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically related;
that if we knew one of them, we might know all of them. Morality itself,
what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this but another
\textit{side} of the one vital Force whereby he is and works? All
that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may see how a man would
fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or want of courage,
is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he has formed, no
less than in the stroke he strikes. He is \textit{one}; and preaches
the same Self abroad in all these ways.

Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but, consider
it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]without morality, intellect were impossible
for him; a thoroughly immoral \textit{man} could not know anything
at all! To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first
\textit{love} the thing, sympathize with it: that is, be \textit{virtuously}
related to it. If he have not the justice to put down his own selfishness
at every turn, the courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every
turn, how shall he know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded
in his knowledge. Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the
selfish and the pusillanimous forever a sealed book: what such can
know of Nature is mean, superficial, small; for the uses of the day
merely.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]But does not the very Fox know something
of Nature? Exactly so: it knows where the geese lodge! The human Reynard,
very frequent everywhere in the world, what more does he know but
this and the like of this? Nay, it should be considered too, that
if the Fox had not a certain vulpine \textit{morality}, he could not
even know where the geese were, or get at the geese! If he spent his
time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his own misery, his ill
usage by Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and so forth; and had not
courage, promptitude, practicality, and other suitable vulpine gifts
and graces, he would catch no geese. We may say of the Fox too, that
his morality and insight are of the same dimensions; different faces
of the same internal unity of vulpine life!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]These
things are worth stating; for the contrary of them acts with manifold
very baleful perversion, in this time: what limitations, modifications
they require, your own candor will supply.

If I say, therefore, that Shakspeare is the greatest of Intellects,
I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakspeare's
intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious
intellect; there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware of.
Novalis beautifully remarks of him, that those Dramas of his are Products
of Nature too, deep as Nature herself. I find a great truth in this
saying. Shakspeare's Art is not Artifice; the noblest worth of it
is not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows up from the deeps
of Nature, through this noble sincere soul, who is a voice of Nature.
The latest generations of men will find new meanings in Shakspeare,
new elucidations of their own human being; {}``new harmonies with
the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later ideas,
affinities with the higher powers and senses of man.'' This well
deserves meditating. It is Nature's highest reward to a true simple
great soul, that he get thus to be \textit{a part of herself}. Such
a man's works, whatsoever he with utmost conscious exertion and forethought
shall accomplish, grow up withal unconsciously, from the unknown deeps
in him;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as the oak-tree grows from the Earth's
bosom, as the mountains and waters shape themselves; with a symmetry
grounded on Nature's own laws, conformable to all Truth whatsoever.
How much in Shakspeare lies hid; his sorrows, his silent struggles
known to himself; much that was not known at all, not speakable at
all: like \textit{roots}, like sap and forces working underground!
Speech is great; but Silence is greater.

Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable. I will not
blame Dante for his misery: it is as battle without victory; but true
battle,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the first, indispensable thing. Yet
I call Shakspeare greater than Dante, in that he fought truly, and
did conquer. Doubt it not, he had his own sorrows: those \textit{Sonnets}
of his will even testify expressly in what deep waters he had waded,
and swum struggling for his life;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as what man
like him ever failed to have to do? It seems to me a heedless notion,
our common one, that he sat like a bird on the bough; and sang forth,
free and off-hand, never knowing the troubles of other men. Not so;
with no man is it so. How could a man travel forward from rustic deer-poaching
to such tragedy-writing, and not fall in with sorrows by the way?
Or, still better, how could a man delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus,
a Macbeth, so many suffering heroic hearts, if his own heroic heart
had never suffered?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]And now, in contrast with
all this, observe his mirthfulness, his genuine overflowing love of
laughter! You would say, in no point does he \textit{exaggerate} but
only in laughter. Fiery objurgations, words that pierce and burn,
are to be found in Shakspeare; yet he is always in measure here; never
what Johnson would remark as a specially {}``good hater.'' But his
laughter seems to pour from him in floods; he heaps all manner of
ridiculous nicknames on the butt he is bantering, tumbles and tosses
him in all sorts of horse-play; you would say, with his whole heart
laughs. And then, if not always the finest, it is always a genial
laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No man
who \textit{can} laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these
things. It is some poor character only \textit{desiring} to laugh,
and have the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means sympathy;
good laughter is not {}``the crackling of thorns under the pot.''
Even at stupidity and pretension this Shakspeare does not laugh otherwise
than genially. Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts; and we
dismiss them covered with explosions of laughter: but we like the
poor fellows only the better for our laughing; and hope they will
get on well there, and continue Presidents of the City-watch. Such
laughter, like sunshine on the deep sea, is very beautiful to me.

We have no room to speak of Shakspeare's individual works; though
perhaps there is much still waiting to be said on that head. Had we,
for instance, all his plays reviewed as \textit{Hamlet}, in \textit{Wilhelm
Meister}, is! A thing which might, one day, be done. August Wilhelm
Schlegel has a remark on his Historical Plays, \textit{Henry Fifth}
and the others, which is worth remembering. He calls them a kind of
National Epic. Marlborough, you recollect, said, he knew no English
History but what he had learned from Shakspeare. There are really,
if we look to it, few as memorable Histories. The great salient points
are admirably seized; all rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic
coherence; it is, as Schlegel says, epic;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as
indeed all delineation by a great thinker will be. There are right
beautiful things in those Pieces, which indeed together form one beautiful
thing. That battle of Agincourt strikes me as one of the most perfect
things, in its sort, we anywhere have of Shakspeare's. The description
of the two hosts: the worn-out, jaded English; the dread hour, big
with destiny, when the battle shall begin; and then that deathless
valor: {}``Ye good yeomen, whose limbs were made in England!'' There
is a noble Patriotism in it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]far other than
the {}``indifference'' you sometimes hear ascribed to Shakspeare.
A true English heart breathes, calm and strong, through the whole
business; not boisterous, protrusive; all the better for that. There
is a sound in it like the ring of steel. This man too had a right
stroke in him, had it come to that!

But I will say, of Shakspeare's works generally, that we have no full
impress of him there; even as full as we have of many men. His works
are so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that
was in him. All his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory, imperfect,
written under cramping circumstances; giving only here and there a
note of the full utterance of the man. Passages there are that come
upon you like splendor out of Heaven; bursts of radiance, illuminating
the very heart of the thing: you say, {}``That is \textit{true},
spoken once and forever; wheresoever and whensoever there is an open
human soul, that will be recognized as true!'' Such bursts, however,
make us feel that the surrounding matter is not radiant; that it is,
in part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakspeare had to write for
the Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could,
into that and no other mould. It was with him, then, as it is with
us all. No man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set
his own free Thought before us; but his Thought as he could translate
it into the stone that was given, with the tools that were given.\ 
\textit{Disjecta membra} are all that we find of any Poet, or of any
man.

Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakspeare may recognize that
he too was a \textit{Prophet}, in his way; of an insight analogous
to the Prophetic, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed
to this man also divine; unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven;
{}``We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!'' That scroll in Westminster
Abbey, which few read with understanding, is of the depth of any seer.
But the man sang; did not preach, except musically. We called Dante
the melodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism. May we not call Shakspeare
the still more melodious Priest of a \textit{true} Catholicism, the
{}``Universal Church'' of the Future and of all times? No narrow
superstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness
or perversion: a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousand-fold
hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature; which let all men
worship as they can! We may say without offence, that there rises
a kind of universal Psalm out of this Shakspeare too; not unfit to
make itself heard among the still more sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony
with these, if we understood them, but in harmony!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I
cannot call this Shakspeare a {}``Sceptic,'' as some do; his indifference
to the creeds and theological quarrels of his time misleading them.
No: neither unpatriotic, though he says little about his Patriotism;
nor sceptic, though he says little about his Faith. Such {}``indifference''
was the fruit of his greatness withal: his whole heart was in his
own grand sphere of worship (we may call it such); these other controversies,
vitally important to other men, were not vital to him.

But call it worship, call it what you will, is it not a right glorious
thing, and set of things, this that Shakspeare has brought us? For
myself, I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness in the
fact of such a man being sent into this Earth. Is he not an eye to
us all; a blessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]And,
at bottom, was it not perhaps far better that this Shakspeare, every
way an unconscious man, was \textit{conscious} of no Heavenly message?
He did not feel, like Mahomet, because he saw into those internal
Splendors, that he specially was the {}``Prophet of God:'' and was
he not greater than Mahomet in that? Greater; and also, if we compute
strictly, as we did in Dante's case, more successful. It was intrinsically
an error that notion of Mahomet's, of his supreme Prophethood; and
has come down to us inextricably involved in error to this day; dragging
along with it such a coil of fables, impurities, intolerances, as
makes it a questionable step for me here and now to say, as I have
done, that Mahomet was a true Speaker at all, and not rather an ambitious
charlatan, perversity and simulacrum; no Speaker, but a Babbler! Even
in Arabia, as I compute, Mahomet will have exhausted himself and become
obsolete, while this Shakspeare, this Dante may still be young;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]while
this Shakspeare may still pretend to be a Priest of Mankind, of Arabia
as of other places, for unlimited periods to come!

Compared with any speaker or singer one knows, even with Aeschylus
or Homer, why should he not, for veracity and universality, last like
them? He is \textit{sincere} as they; reaches deep down like them,
to the universal and perennial. But as for Mahomet, I think it had
been better for him \textit{not} to be so conscious! Alas, poor Mahomet;
all that he was \textit{conscious} of was a mere error; a futility
and triviality,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as indeed such ever is. The
truly great in him too was the unconscious: that he was a wild Arab
lion of the desert, and did speak out with that great thunder-voice
of his, not by words which he \textit{thought} to be great, but by
actions, by feelings, by a history which \textit{were} great! His
Koran has become a stupid piece of prolix absurdity; we do not believe,
like him, that God wrote that! The Great Man here too, as always,
is a Force of Nature.\  whatsoever is truly great in him springs
up from the \textit{in}articulate deeps.

Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager
of a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl
of Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many
thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account
him a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]on
which point there were much to be said. But I will say rather, or
repeat: In spite of the sad state Hero-worship now lies in, consider
what this Shakspeare has actually become among us. Which Englishman
we ever made, in this land of ours, which million of Englishmen, would
we not give up rather than the Stratford Peasant? There is no regiment
of highest Dignitaries that we would sell him for. He is the grandest
thing we have yet done. For our honor among foreign nations, as an
ornament to our English Household, what item is there that we would
not surrender rather than him? Consider now, if they asked us, Will
you give up your Indian Empire or your Shakspeare, you English; never
have had any Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakspeare? Really
it were a grave question. Official persons would answer doubtless
in official language; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced
to answer: Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without
Shakspeare! Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this
Shakspeare does not go, he lasts forever with us; we cannot give up
our Shakspeare!

Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him merely as a real,
marketable, tangibly useful possession. England, before long, this
Island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in
America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there
will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what
is it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation,
so that they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike
intercourse, helping one another? This is justly regarded as the greatest
practical problem, the thing all manner of sovereignties and governments
are here to accomplish: what is it that will accomplish this? Acts
of Parliament, administrative prime-ministers cannot. America is parted
from us, so far as Parliament could part it. Call it not fantastic,
for there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is an English King,
whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of Parliaments,
can dethrone! This King Shakspeare, does not he shine, in crowned
sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest
of rallying-signs; indestructible; really more valuable in that point
of view than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We can fancy
him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a thousand
years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever, under what
sort of Parish-Constable soever, English men and women are, they will
say to one another: {}``Yes, this Shakspeare is ours; we produced
him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind with
him.'' The most common-sense politician, too, if he pleases, may
think of that.

Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate
voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what
the heart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered,
scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity
at all; yet the noble Italy is actually \textit{one}: Italy produced
its Dante; Italy can speak! The Czar of all the Russias, he is strong
with so many bayonets, Cossacks and cannons; and does a great feat
in keeping such a tract of Earth politically together; but he cannot
yet speak. Something great in him, but it is a dumb greatness. He
has had no voice of genius, to be heard of all men and times. He must
learn to speak. He is a great dumb monster hitherto. His cannons and
Cossacks will all have rusted into nonentity, while that Dante's voice
is still audible. The Nation that has a Dante is bound together as
no dumb Russia can be.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]We must here end what
we had to say of the \textit{Hero-Poet}.


\chapter*{\raggedright {}{[}May 15, 1840.{]} LECTURE IV. }

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{{[}May 15, 1840.{]} LECTURE IV.}

\markboth{Heroes and Hero Worship}{The Hero as Priest}


\subsection*{\textit{\emph{The}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{Hero}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{as}}
\emph{}\textit{\emph{Priest}}\emph{.} \textit{\emph{Luther}}\emph{;}
\textit{\emph{Reformation}}\emph{:} \textit{\emph{Knox}}\emph{;} \textit{\emph{Puritanism}}\emph{.}}

Our present discourse is to be of the Great Man as Priest. We have
repeatedly endeavored to explain that all sorts of Heroes are intrinsically
of the same material; that given a great soul, open to the Divine
Significance of Life, then there is given a man fit to speak of this,
to sing of this, to fight and work for this, in a great, victorious,
enduring manner; there is given a Hero,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
outward shape of whom will depend on the time and the environment
he finds himself in. The Priest too, as I understand it, is a kind
of Prophet; in him too there is required to be a light of inspiration,
as we must name it. He presides over the worship of the people; is
the Uniter of them with the Unseen Holy. He is the spiritual Captain
of the people; as the Prophet is their spiritual King with many captains:
he guides them heavenward, by wise guidance through this Earth and
its work. The ideal of him is, that he too be what we can call a voice
from the unseen Heaven; interpreting, even as the Prophet did, and
in a more familiar manner unfolding the same to men. The unseen Heaven,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
{}``open secret of the Universe,''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]which
so few have an eye for! He is the Prophet shorn of his more awful
splendor; burning with mild equable radiance, as the enlightener of
daily life. This, I say, is the ideal of a Priest. So in old times;
so in these, and in all times. One knows very well that, in reducing
ideals to practice, great latitude of tolerance is needful; very great.
But a Priest who is not this at all, who does not any longer aim or
try to be this, is a character\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]of whom we had
rather not speak in this place.

Luther and Knox were by express vocation Priests, and did faithfully
perform that function in its common sense. Yet it will suit us better
here to consider them chiefly in their historical character, rather
as Reformers than Priests. There have been other Priests perhaps equally
notable, in calmer times, for doing faithfully the office of a Leader
of Worship; bringing down, by faithful heroism in that kind, a light
from Heaven into the daily life of their people; leading them forward,
as under God's guidance, in the way wherein they were to go. But when
this same \textit{way} was a rough one, of battle, confusion and danger,
the spiritual Captain, who led through that, becomes, especially to
us who live under the fruit of his leading, more notable than any
other. He is the warfaring and battling Priest; who led his people,
not to quiet faithful labor as in smooth times, but to faithful valorous
conflict, in times all violent, dismembered: a more perilous service,
and a more memorable one, be it higher or not. These two men we will
account our best Priests, inasmuch as they were our best Reformers.
Nay I may ask, Is not every true Reformer, by the nature of him, a
\textit{Priest} first of all? He appeals to Heaven's invisible justice
against Earth's visible force; knows that it, the invisible, is strong
and alone strong. He is a believer in the divine truth of things;
a \textit{seer}, seeing through the shows of things; a worshipper,
in one way or the other, of the divine truth of things; a Priest,
that is. If he be not first a Priest, he will never be good for much
as a Reformer.

Thus then, as we have seen Great Men, in various situations, building
up Religions, heroic Forms of human Existence in this world, Theories
of Life worthy to be sung by a Dante, Practices of Life by a Shakspeare,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]we
are now to see the reverse process; which also is necessary, which
also may be carried on in the Heroic manner. Curious how this should
be necessary: yet necessary it is. The mild shining of the Poet's
light has to give place to the fierce lightning of the Reformer: unfortunately
the Reformer too is a personage that cannot fail in History! The Poet
indeed, with his mildness, what is he but the product and ultimate
adjustment of Reform, or Prophecy, with its fierceness? No wild Saint
Dominics and Thebaid Eremites, there had been no melodious Dante;
rough Practical Endeavor, Scandinavian and other, from Odin to Walter
Raleigh, from Ulfila to Cranmer, enabled Shakspeare to speak. Nay
the finished Poet, I remark sometimes, is a symptom that his epoch
itself has reached perfection and is finished; that before long there
will be a new epoch, new Reformers needed.

Doubtless it were finer, could we go along always in the way of \textit{music};
be tamed and taught by our Poets, as the rude creatures were by their
Orpheus of old. Or failing this rhythmic \textit{musical} way, how
good were it could we get so much as into the \textit{equable} way;
I mean, if \textit{peaceable} Priests, reforming from day to day,
would always suffice us! But it is not so; even this latter has not
yet been realized. Alas, the battling Reformer too is, from time to
time, a needful and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never
wanting: the very things that were once indispensable furtherances
become obstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a
business often of enormous difficulty. It is notable enough, surely,
how a Theorem or spiritual Representation, so we may call it, which
once took in the whole Universe, and was completely satisfactory in
all parts of it to the highly discursive acute intellect of Dante,
one of the greatest in the world,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]had in the
course of another century become dubitable to common intellects; become
deniable; and is now, to every one of us, flatly incredible, obsolete
as Odin's Theorem! To Dante, human Existence, and God's ways with
men, were all well represented by those \textit{Malebolges}, \textit{Purgatorios};
to Luther not well. How was this? Why could not Dante's Catholicism
continue; but Luther's Protestantism must needs follow? Alas, nothing
will \textit{continue}.

I do not make much of {}``Progress of the Species,'' as handled
in these times of ours; nor do I think you would care to hear much
about it. The talk on that subject is too often of the most extravagant,
confused sort. Yet I may say, the fact itself seems certain enough;
nay we can trace out the inevitable necessity of it in the nature
of things. Every man, as I have stated somewhere, is not only a learner
but a doer: he learns with the mind given him what has been; but with
the same mind he discovers farther, he invents and devises somewhat
of his own. Absolutely without originality there is no man. No man
whatever believes, or can believe, exactly what his grandfather believed:
he enlarges somewhat, by fresh discovery, his view of the Universe,
and consequently his Theorem of the Universe,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]which
is an \textit{infinite} Universe, and can never be embraced wholly
or finally by any view or Theorem, in any conceivable enlargement:
he enlarges somewhat, I say; finds somewhat that was credible to his
grandfather incredible to him, false to him, inconsistent with some
new thing he has discovered or observed. It is the history of every
man; and in the history of Mankind we see it summed up into great
historical amounts,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]revolutions, new epochs.
Dante's Mountain of Purgatory does \textit{not} stand {}``in the
ocean of the other Hemisphere,'' when Columbus has once sailed thither!
Men find no such thing extant in the other Hemisphere. It is not there.
It must cease to be believed to be there. So with all beliefs whatsoever
in this world,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]all Systems of Belief, and Systems
of Practice that spring from these.

If we add now the melancholy fact, that when Belief waxes uncertain,
Practice too becomes unsound, and errors, injustices and miseries
everywhere more and more prevail, we shall see material enough for
revolution. At all turns, a man who will \textit{do} faithfully, needs
to believe firmly. If he have to ask at every turn the world's suffrage;
if he cannot dispense with the world's suffrage, and make his own
suffrage serve, he is a poor eye-servant; the work committed to him
will be \textit{mis}done. Every such man is a daily contributor to
the inevitable downfall. Whatsoever work he does, dishonestly, with
an eye to the outward look of it, is a new offence, parent of new
misery to somebody or other. Offences accumulate till they become
insupportable; and are then violently burst through, cleared off as
by explosion. Dante's sublime Catholicism, incredible now in theory,
and defaced still worse by faithless, doubting and dishonest practice,
has to be torn asunder by a Luther, Shakspeare's noble Feudalism,
as beautiful as it once looked and was, has to end in a French Revolution.
The accumulation of offences is, as we say, too literally \textit{exploded},
blasted asunder volcanically; and there are long troublous periods,
before matters come to a settlement again.

Surely it were mournful enough to look only at this face of the matter,
and find in all human opinions and arrangements merely the fact that
they were uncertain, temporary, subject to the law of death! At bottom,
it is not so: all death, here too we find, is but of the body, not
of the essence or soul; all destruction, by violent revolution or
howsoever it be, is but new creation on a wider scale. Odinism was
\textit{Valor}; Christianism was \textit{Humility}, a nobler kind
of Valor. No thought that ever dwelt honestly as true in the heart
of man but \textit{was} an honest insight into God's truth on man's
part, and \textit{has} an essential truth in it which endures through
all changes, an everlasting possession for us all. And, on the other
hand, what a melancholy notion is that, which has to represent all
men, in all countries and times except our own, as having spent their
life in blind condemnable error, mere lost Pagans, Scandinavians,
Mahometans, only that we might have the true ultimate knowledge! All
generations of men were lost and wrong, only that this present little
section of a generation might be saved and right. They all marched
forward there, all generations since the beginning of the world, like
the Russian soldiers into the ditch of Schweidnitz Fort, only to fill
up the ditch with their dead bodies, that we might march over and
take the place! It is an incredible hypothesis.

Such incredible hypothesis we have seen maintained with fierce emphasis;
and this or the other poor individual man, with his sect of individual
men, marching as over the dead bodies of all men, towards sure victory
but when he too, with his hypothesis and ultimate infallible credo,
sank into the ditch, and became a dead body, what was to be said?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Withal,
it is an important fact in the nature of man, that he tends to reckon
his own insight as final, and goes upon it as such. He will always
do it, I suppose, in one or the other way; but it must be in some
wider, wiser way than this. Are not all true men that live, or that
ever lived, soldiers of the same army, enlisted, under Heaven's captaincy,
to do battle against the same enemy, the empire of Darkness and Wrong?
Why should we misknow one another, fight not against the enemy but
against ourselves, from mere difference of uniform? All uniforms shall
be good, so they hold in them true valiant men. All fashions of arms,
the Arab turban and swift scimetar, Thor's strong hammer smiting down
\textit{Jotuns}, shall be welcome. Luther's battle-voice, Dante's
march-melody, all genuine things are with us, not against us. We are
all under one Captain.\  soldiers of the same host.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Let
us now look a little at this Luther's fighting; what kind of battle
it was, and how he comported himself in it. Luther too was of our
spiritual Heroes; a Prophet to his country and time.

As introductory to the whole, a remark about Idolatry will perhaps
be in place here. One of Mahomet's characteristics, which indeed belongs
to all Prophets, is unlimited implacable zeal against Idolatry. It
is the grand theme of Prophets: Idolatry, the worshipping of dead
Idols as the Divinity, is a thing they cannot away with, but have
to denounce continually, and brand with inexpiable reprobation; it
is the chief of all the sins they see done under the sun. This is
worth noting. We will not enter here into the theological question
about Idolatry. Idol is \textit{Eidolon}, a thing seen, a symbol.
It is not God, but a Symbol of God; and perhaps one may question whether
any the most benighted mortal ever took it for more than a Symbol.
I fancy, he did not think that the poor image his own hands had made
\textit{was} God; but that God was emblemed by it, that God was in
it some way or other. And now in this sense, one may ask, Is not all
worship whatsoever a worship by Symbols, by \textit{eidola}, or things
seen? Whether \textit{seen}, rendered visible as an image or picture
to the bodily eye; or visible only to the inward eye, to the imagination,
to the intellect: this makes a superficial, but no substantial difference.
It is still a Thing Seen, significant of Godhead; an Idol. The most
rigorous Puritan has his Confession of Faith, and intellectual Representation
of Divine things, and worships thereby; thereby is worship first made
possible for him. All creeds, liturgies, religious forms, conceptions
that fitly invest religious feelings, are in this sense \textit{eidola},
things seen. All worship whatsoever must proceed by Symbols, by Idols:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]we
may say, all Idolatry is comparative, and the worst Idolatry is only
\textit{more} idolatrous.

Where, then, lies the evil of it? Some fatal evil must lie in it,
or earnest prophetic men would not on all hands so reprobate it. Why
is Idolatry so hateful to Prophets? It seems to me as if, in the worship
of those poor wooden symbols, the thing that had chiefly provoked
the Prophet, and filled his inmost soul with indignation and aversion,
was not exactly what suggested itself to his own thought, and came
out of him in words to others, as the thing. The rudest heathen that
worshipped Canopus, or the Caabah Black-Stone, he, as we saw, was
superior to the horse that worshipped nothing at all! Nay there was
a kind of lasting merit in that poor act of his; analogous to what
is still meritorious in Poets: recognition of a certain endless \textit{divine}
beauty and significance in stars and all natural objects whatsoever.
Why should the Prophet so mercilessly condemn him? The poorest mortal
worshipping his Fetish, while his heart is full of it, may be an object
of pity, of contempt and avoidance, if you will; but cannot surely
be an object of hatred. Let his heart \textit{be} honestly full of
it, the whole space of his dark narrow mind illuminated thereby; in
one word, let him entirely \textit{believe} in his Fetish,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]it
will then be, I should say, if not well with him, yet as well as it
can readily be made to be, and you will leave him alone, unmolested
there.

But here enters the fatal circumstance of Idolatry, that, in the era
of the Prophets, no man's mind \textit{is} any longer honestly filled
with his Idol or Symbol. Before the Prophet can arise who, seeing
through it, knows it to be mere wood, many men must have begun dimly
to doubt that it was little more. Condemnable Idolatry is \textit{insincere}
Idolatry. Doubt has eaten out the heart of it: a human soul is seen
clinging spasmodically to an Ark of the Covenant, which it half feels
now to have become a Phantasm. This is one of the balefulest sights.
Souls are no longer filled with their Fetish; but only pretend to
be filled, and would fain make themselves feel that they are filled.
{}``You do not believe,'' said Coleridge; {}``you only believe
that you believe.'' It is the final scene in all kinds of Worship
and Symbolism; the sure symptom that death is now nigh. It is equivalent
to what we call Formulism, and Worship of Formulas, in these days
of ours. No more immoral act can be done by a human creature; for
it is the beginning of all immorality, or rather it is the impossibility
henceforth of any morality whatsoever: the innermost moral soul is
paralyzed thereby, cast into fatal magnetic sleep! Men are no longer
\textit{sincere} men. I do not wonder that the earnest man denounces
this, brands it, prosecutes it with inextinguishable aversion. He
and it, all good and it, are at death-feud. Blamable Idolatry is \textit{Cant},
and even what one may call Sincere-Cant. Sincere-Cant: that is worth
thinking of! Every sort of Worship ends with this phasis.

I find Luther to have been a Breaker of Idols, no less than any other
Prophet. The wooden gods of the Koreish, made of timber and bees-wax,
were not more hateful to Mahomet than Tetzel's Pardons of Sin, made
of sheepskin and ink, were to Luther. It is the property of every
Hero, in every time, in every place and situation, that he come back
to reality; that he stand upon things, and not shows of things. According
as he loves, and venerates, articulately or with deep speechless thought,
the awful realities of things, so will the hollow shows of things,
however regular, decorous, accredited by Koreishes or Conclaves, be
intolerable and detestable to him. Protestantism, too, is the work
of a Prophet: the prophet-work of that sixteenth century. The first
stroke of honest demolition to an ancient thing grown false and idolatrous;
preparatory afar off to a new thing, which shall be true, and authentically
divine!

At first view it might seem as if Protestantism were entirely destructive
to this that we call Hero-worship, and represent as the basis of all
possible good, religious or social, for mankind. One often hears it
said that Protestantism introduced a new era, radically different
from any the world had ever seen before: the era of {}``private judgment,''
as they call it. By this revolt against the Pope, every man became
his own Pope; and learnt, among other things, that he must never trust
any Pope, or spiritual Hero-captain, any more! Whereby, is not spiritual
union, all hierarchy and subordination among men, henceforth an impossibility?
So we hear it said.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Now I need not deny that
Protestantism was a revolt against spiritual sovereignties, Popes
and much else. Nay I will grant that English Puritanism, revolt against
earthly sovereignties, was the second act of it; that the enormous
French Revolution itself was the third act, whereby all sovereignties
earthly and spiritual were, as might seem, abolished or made sure
of abolition. Protestantism is the grand root from which our whole
subsequent European History branches out. For the spiritual will always
body itself forth in the temporal history of men; the spiritual is
the beginning of the temporal. And now, sure enough, the cry is everywhere
for Liberty and Equality, Independence and so forth; instead of \textit{Kings},
Ballot-boxes and Electoral suffrages: it seems made out that any Hero-sovereign,
or loyal obedience of men to a man, in things temporal or things spiritual,
has passed away forever from the world. I should despair of the world
altogether, if so. One of my deepest convictions is, that it is not
so. Without sovereigns, true sovereigns, temporal and spiritual, I
see nothing possible but an anarchy; the hatefulest of things. But
I find Protestantism, whatever anarchic democracy it have produced,
to be the beginning of new genuine sovereignty and order. I find it
to be a revolt against \textit{false} sovereigns; the painful but
indispensable first preparative for \textit{true} sovereigns getting
place among us! This is worth explaining a little.

Let us remark, therefore, in the first place, that this of {}``private
judgment'' is, at bottom, not a new thing in the world, but only
new at that epoch of the world. There is nothing generically new or
peculiar in the Reformation; it was a return to Truth and Reality
in opposition to Falsehood and Semblance, as all kinds of Improvement
and genuine Teaching are and have been. Liberty of private judgment,
if we will consider it, must at all times have existed in the world.
Dante had not put out his eyes, or tied shackles on himself; he was
at home in that Catholicism of his, a free-seeing soul in it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]if
many a poor Hogstraten, Tetzel, and Dr. Eck had now become slaves
in it. Liberty of judgment? No iron chain, or outward force of any
kind, could ever compel the soul of a man to believe or to disbelieve:
it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign,
and believe there, by the grace of God alone! The sorriest sophistical
Bellarmine, preaching sightless faith and passive obedience, must
first, by some kind of \textit{conviction}, have abdicated his right
to be convinced. His {}``private judgment'' indicated that, as the
advisablest step \textit{he} could take. The right of private judgment
will subsist, in full force, wherever true men subsist. A true man
\textit{believes} with his whole judgment, with all the illumination
and discernment that is in him, and has always so believed. A false
man, only struggling to {}``believe that he believes,'' will naturally
manage it in some other way. Protestantism said to this latter, Woe!
and to the former, Well done! At bottom, it was no new saying; it
was a return to all old sayings that ever had been said. Be genuine,
be sincere: that was, once more, the meaning of it. Mahomet believed
with his whole mind; Odin with his whole mind,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]he,
and all \textit{true} Followers of Odinism. They, by their private
judgment, had {}``judged {}``--\textit{so}.

And now I venture to assert, that the exercise of private judgment,
faithfully gone about, does by no means necessarily end in selfish
independence, isolation; but rather ends necessarily in the opposite
of that. It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error,
insincerity, half-belief and untruth that make it. A man protesting
against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that
believe in truth. There is no communion possible among men who believe
only in hearsays. The heart of each is lying dead; has no power of
sympathy even with \textit{things},\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]or he would
believe \textit{them} and not hearsays. No sympathy even with things;
how much less with his fellow-men! He cannot unite with men; he is
an anarchic man. Only in a world of sincere men is unity possible;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
there, in the long-run, it is as good as \textit{certain}.

For observe one thing, a thing too often left out of view, or rather
altogether lost sight of in this controversy: That it is not necessary
a man should himself have \textit{discovered} the truth he is to believe
in, and never so \textit{sincerely} to believe in. A Great Man, we
said, was always sincere, as the first condition of him. But a man
need not be great in order to be sincere; that is not the necessity
of Nature and all Time, but only of certain corrupt unfortunate epochs
of Time. A man can believe, and make his own, in the most genuine
way, what he has received from another;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
with boundless gratitude to that other! The merit of \textit{originality}
is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original
man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.
Every son of Adam can become a sincere man, an original man, in this
sense; no mortal is doomed to be an insincere man. Whole ages, what
we call ages of Faith, are original; all men in them, or the most
of men in them, sincere. These are the great and fruitful ages: every
worker, in all spheres, is a worker not on semblance but on substance;
every work issues in a result: the general sum of such work is great;
for all of it, as genuine, tends towards one goal; all of it is \textit{additive},
none of it subtractive. There is true union, true kingship, loyalty,
all true and blessed things, so far as the poor Earth can produce
blessedness for men.

Hero-worship? Ah me, that a man be self-subsistent, original, true,
or what we call it, is surely the farthest in the world from indisposing
him to reverence and believe other men's truth! It only disposes,
necessitates and invincibly compels him to disbelieve other men's
dead formulas, hearsays and untruths. A man embraces truth with his
eyes open, and because his eyes are open: does he need to shut them
before he can love his Teacher of truth? He alone can love, with a
right gratitude and genuine loyalty of soul, the Hero-Teacher who
has delivered him out of darkness into light. Is not such a one a
true Hero and Serpent-queller; worthy of all reverence! The black
monster, Falsehood, our one enemy in this world, lies prostrate by
his valor; it was he that conquered the world for us!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]See,
accordingly, was not Luther himself reverenced as a true Pope, or
Spiritual Father, \textit{being} verily such? Napoleon, from amid
boundless revolt of Sansculottism, became a King. Hero-worship never
dies, nor can die. Loyalty and Sovereignty are everlasting in the
world:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and there is this in them, that they
are grounded not on garnitures and semblances, but on realities and
sincerities. Not by shutting your eyes, your {}``private judgment;''
no, but by opening them, and by having something to see! Luther's
message was deposition and abolition to all false Popes and Potentates,
but life and strength, though afar off, to new genuine ones.

All this of Liberty and Equality, Electoral suffrages, Independence
and so forth, we will take, therefore, to be a temporary phenomenon,
by no means a final one. Though likely to last a long time, with sad
enough embroilments for us all, we must welcome it, as the penalty
of sins that are past, the pledge of inestimable benefits that are
coming. In all ways, it behooved men to quit simulacra and return
to fact; cost what it might, that did behoove to be done. With spurious
Popes, and Believers having no private judgment,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]quacks
pretending to command over dupes,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]what can
you do? Misery and mischief only. You cannot make an association out
of insincere men; you cannot build an edifice except by plummet and
level,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]at right-angles to one another! In all
this wild revolutionary work, from Protestantism downwards, I see
the blessedest result preparing itself: not abolition of Hero-worship,
but rather what I would call a whole World of Heroes. If Hero mean
\textit{sincere man}, why may not every one of us be a Hero? A world
all sincere, a believing world: the like has been; the like will again
be,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]cannot help being. That were the right
sort of Worshippers for Heroes: never could the truly Better be so
reverenced as where all were True and Good!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]But
we must hasten to Luther and his Life.

Luther's birthplace was Eisleben in Saxony; he came into the world
there on the 10th of November, 1483. It was an accident that gave
this honor to Eisleben. His parents, poor mine-laborers in a village
of that region, named Mohra, had gone to the Eisleben Winter-Fair:
in the tumult of this scene the Frau Luther was taken with travail,
found refuge in some poor house there, and the boy she bore was named
\textit{Martin} \textit{Luther}. Strange enough to reflect upon it.
This poor Frau Luther, she had gone with her husband to make her small
merchandisings; perhaps to sell the lock of yarn she had been spinning,
to buy the small winter-necessaries for her narrow hut or household;
in the whole world, that day, there was not a more entirely unimportant-looking
pair of people than this Miner and his Wife. And yet what were all
Emperors, Popes and Potentates, in comparison? There was born here,
once more, a Mighty Man; whose light was to flame as the beacon over
long centuries and epochs of the world; the whole world and its history
was waiting for this man. It is strange, it is great. It leads us
back to another Birth-hour, in a still meaner environment, Eighteen
Hundred years ago,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]of which it is fit that
we \textit{say} nothing, that we think only in silence; for what words
are there! The Age of Miracles past? The Age of Miracles is forever
here!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

I find it altogether suitable to Luther's function in this Earth,
and doubtless wisely ordered to that end by the Providence presiding
over him and us and all things, that he was born poor, and brought
up poor, one of the poorest of men. He had to beg, as the school-children
in those times did; singing for alms and bread, from door to door.
Hardship, rigorous Necessity was the poor boy's companion; no man
nor no thing would put on a false face to flatter Martin Luther. Among
things, not among the shows of things, had he to grow. A boy of rude
figure, yet with weak health, with his large greedy soul, full of
all faculty and sensibility, he suffered greatly. But it was his task
to get acquainted with \textit{realities}, and keep acquainted with
them, at whatever cost: his task was to bring the whole world back
to reality, for it had dwelt too long with semblance! A youth nursed
up in wintry whirlwinds, in desolate darkness and difficulty, that
he may step forth at last from his stormy Scandinavia, strong as a
true man, as a god: a Christian Odin,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a right
Thor once more, with his thunder-hammer, to smite asunder ugly enough
\textit{Jotuns} and Giant-monsters!

Perhaps the turning incident of his life, we may fancy, was that death
of his friend Alexis, by lightning, at the gate of Erfurt. Luther
had struggled up through boyhood, better and worse; displaying, in
spite of all hindrances, the largest intellect, eager to learn: his
father judging doubtless that he might promote himself in the world,
set him upon the study of Law. This was the path to rise; Luther,
with little will in it either way, had consented: he was now nineteen
years of age. Alexis and he had been to see the old Luther people
at Mansfeldt; were got back again near Erfurt, when a thunder-storm
came on; the bolt struck Alexis, he fell dead at Luther's feet. What
is this Life of ours?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]gone in a moment, burnt
up like a scroll, into the blank Eternity! What are all earthly preferments,
Chancellorships, Kingships? They lie shrunk together\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]there!
The Earth has opened on them; in a moment they are not, and Eternity
is. Luther, struck to the heart, determined to devote himself to God
and God's service alone. In spite of all dissuasions from his father
and others, he became a Monk in the Augustine Convent at Erfurt.

This was probably the first light-point in the history of Luther,
his purer will now first decisively uttering itself; but, for the
present, it was still as one light-point in an element all of darkness.
He says he was a pious monk, \textit{ich bin ein frommer Monch gewesen};
faithfully, painfully struggling to work out the truth of this high
act of his; but it was to little purpose. His misery had not lessened;
had rather, as it were, increased into infinitude. The drudgeries
he had to do, as novice in his Convent, all sorts of slave-work, were
not his grievance: the deep earnest soul of the man had fallen into
all manner of black scruples, dubitations; he believed himself likely
to die soon, and far worse than die. One hears with a new interest
for poor Luther that, at this time, he lived in terror of the unspeakable
misery; fancied that he was doomed to eternal reprobation. Was it
not the humble sincere nature of the man? What was he, that he should
be raised to Heaven! He that had known only misery, and mean slavery:
the news was too blessed to be credible. It could not become clear
to him how, by fasts, vigils, formalities and mass-work, a man's soul
could be saved. He fell into the blackest wretchedness; had to wander
staggering as on the verge of bottomless Despair.

It must have been a most blessed discovery, that of an old Latin Bible
which he found in the Erfurt Library about this time. He had never
seen the Book before. It taught him another lesson than that of fasts
and vigils. A brother monk too, of pious experience, was helpful.
Luther learned now that a man was saved not by singing masses, but
by the infinite grace of God: a more credible hypothesis. He gradually
got himself founded, as on the rock. No wonder he should venerate
the Bible, which had brought this blessed help to him. He prized it
as the Word of the Highest must be prized by such a man. He determined
to hold by that; as through life and to death he firmly did.

This, then, is his deliverance from darkness, his final triumph over
darkness, what we call his conversion; for himself the most important
of all epochs. That he should now grow daily in peace and clearness;
that, unfolding now the great talents and virtues implanted in him,
he should rise to importance in his Convent, in his country, and be
found more and more useful in all honest business of life, is a natural
result. He was sent on missions by his Augustine Order, as a man of
talent and fidelity fit to do their business well: the Elector of
Saxony, Friedrich, named the Wise, a truly wise and just prince, had
cast his eye on him as a valuable person; made him Professor in his
new University of Wittenberg, Preacher too at Wittenberg; in both
which capacities, as in all duties he did, this Luther, in the peaceable
sphere of common life, was gaining more and more esteem with all good
men.

It was in his twenty-seventh year that he first saw Rome; being sent
thither, as I said, on mission from his Convent. Pope Julius the Second,
and what was going on at Rome, must have filled the mind of Luther
with amazement. He had come as to the Sacred City, throne of God's
High-priest on Earth; and he found it\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]what
we know! Many thoughts it must have given the man; many which we have
no record of, which perhaps he did not himself know how to utter.
This Rome, this scene of false priests, clothed not in the beauty
of holiness, but in far other vesture, is \textit{false}: but what
is it to Luther? A mean man he, how shall he reform a world? That
was far from his thoughts. A humble, solitary man, why should he at
all meddle with the world? It was the task of quite higher men than
he. His business was to guide his own footsteps wisely through the
world. Let him do his own obscure duty in it well; the rest, horrible
and dismal as it looks, is in God's hand, not in his.

It is curious to reflect what might have been the issue, had Roman
Popery happened to pass this Luther by; to go on in its great wasteful
orbit, and not come athwart his little path, and force him to assault
it! Conceivable enough that, in this case, he might have held his
peace about the abuses of Rome; left Providence, and God on high,
to deal with them! A modest quiet man; not prompt he to attack irreverently
persons in authority. His clear task, as I say, was to do his own
duty; to walk wisely in this world of confused wickedness, and save
his own soul alive. But the Roman High-priesthood did come athwart
him: afar off at Wittenberg he, Luther, could not get lived in honesty
for it; he remonstrated, resisted, came to extremity; was struck at,
struck again, and so it came to wager of battle between them! This
is worth attending to in Luther's history. Perhaps no man of so humble,
peaceable a disposition ever filled the world with contention. We
cannot but see that he would have loved privacy, quiet diligence in
the shade; that it was against his will he ever became a notoriety.
Notoriety: what would that do for him? The goal of his march through
this world was the Infinite Heaven; an indubitable goal for him: in
a few years, he should either have attained that, or lost it forever!
We will say nothing at all, I think, of that sorrowfulest of theories,
of its being some mean shopkeeper grudge, of the Augustine Monk against
the Dominican, that first kindled the wrath of Luther, and produced
the Protestant Reformation. We will say to the people who maintain
it, if indeed any such exist now: Get first into the sphere of thought
by which it is so much as possible to judge of Luther, or of any man
like Luther, otherwise than distractedly; we may then begin arguing
with you.

The Monk Tetzel, sent out carelessly in the way of trade, by Leo Tenth,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]who
merely wanted to raise a little money, and for the rest seems to have
been a Pagan rather than a Christian, so far as he was anything,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]arrived
at Wittenberg, and drove his scandalous trade there. Luther's flock
bought Indulgences; in the confessional of his Church, people pleaded
to him that they had already got their sins pardoned. Luther, if he
would not be found wanting at his own post, a false sluggard and coward
at the very centre of the little space of ground that was his own
and no other man's, had to step forth against Indulgences, and declare
aloud that \textit{they} were a futility and sorrowful mockery, that
no man's sins could be pardoned by \textit{them}. It was the beginning
of the whole Reformation. We know how it went; forward from this first
public challenge of Tetzel, on the last day of October, 1517, through
remonstrance and argument;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]spreading ever wider,
rising ever higher; till it became unquenchable, and enveloped all
the world. Luther's heart's desire was to have this grief and other
griefs amended; his thought was still far other than that of introducing
separation in the Church, or revolting against the Pope, Father of
Christendom.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]The elegant Pagan Pope cared little
about this Monk and his doctrines; wished, however, to have done with
the noise of him: in a space of some three years, having tried various
softer methods, he thought good to end it by \textit{fire}. He dooms
the Monk's writings to be burnt by the hangman, and his body to be
sent bound to Rome,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]probably for a similar
purpose. It was the way they had ended with Huss, with Jerome, the
century before. A short argument, fire. Poor Huss: he came to that
Constance Council, with all imaginable promises and safe-conducts;
an earnest, not rebellious kind of man: they laid him instantly in
a stone dungeon {}``three feet wide, six feet high, seven feet long;''
\textit{burnt} the true voice of him out of this world; choked it
in smoke and fire. That was \textit{not} well done!

I, for one, pardon Luther for now altogether revolting against the
Pope. The elegant Pagan, by this fire-decree of his, had kindled into
noble just wrath the bravest heart then living in this world. The
bravest, if also one of the humblest, peaceablest; it was now kindled.
These words of mine, words of truth and soberness, aiming faithfully,
as human inability would allow, to promote God's truth on Earth, and
save men's souls, you, God's vicegerent on earth, answer them by the
hangman and fire? You will burn me and them, for answer to the God's-message
they strove to bring you? You are not God's vicegerent; you are another's
than his, I think! I take your Bull, as an emparchmented Lie, and
burn \textit{it}.\  \textit{You} will do what you see good next:
this is what I do.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]It was on the 10th of December,
1520, three years after the beginning of the business, that Luther,
{}``with a great concourse of people,'' took this indignant step
of burning the Pope's fire-decree {}``at the Elster-Gate of Wittenberg.''
Wittenberg looked on {}``with shoutings;'' the whole world was looking
on. The Pope should not have provoked that {}``shout''! It was the
shout of the awakening of nations. The quiet German heart, modest,
patient of much, had at length got more than it could bear. Formulism,
Pagan Popeism, and other Falsehood and corrupt Semblance had ruled
long enough: and here once more was a man found who durst tell all
men that God's-world stood not on semblances but on realities; that
Life was a truth, and not a lie!

At bottom, as was said above, we are to consider Luther as a Prophet
Idol-breaker; a bringer-back of men to reality. It is the function
of great men and teachers. Mahomet said, These idols of yours are
wood; you put wax and oil on them, the flies stick on them: they are
not God, I tell you, they are black wood! Luther said to the Pope,
This thing of yours that you call a Pardon of Sins, it is a bit of
rag-paper with ink. It is nothing else; it, and so much like it, is
nothing else. God alone can pardon sins. Popeship, spiritual Fatherhood
of God's Church, is that a vain semblance, of cloth and parchment?
It is an awful fact. God's Church is not a semblance, Heaven and Hell
are not semblances. I stand on this, since you drive me to it. Standing
on this, I a poor German Monk am stronger than you all. I stand solitary,
friendless, but on God's Truth; you with your tiaras, triple-hats,
with your treasuries and armories, thunders spiritual and temporal,
stand on the Devil's Lie, and are not so strong!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

The Diet of Worms, Luther's appearance there on the 17th of April,
1521, may be considered as the greatest scene in Modern European History;
the point, indeed, from which the whole subsequent history of civilization
takes its rise. After multiplied negotiations, disputations, it had
come to this. The young Emperor Charles Fifth, with all the Princes
of Germany, Papal nuncios, dignitaries spiritual and temporal, are
assembled there: Luther is to appear and answer for himself, whether
he will recant or not. The world's pomp and power sits there on this
hand: on that, stands up for God's Truth, one man, the poor miner
Hans Luther's Son. Friends had reminded him of Huss, advised him not
to go; he would not be advised. A large company of friends rode out
to meet him, with still more earnest warnings; he answered, {}``Were
there as many Devils in Worms as there are roof-tiles, I would on.''
The people, on the morrow, as he went to the Hall of the Diet, crowded
the windows and house-tops, some of them calling out to him, in solemn
words, not to recant: {}``Whosoever denieth me before men!'' they
cried to him,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as in a kind of solemn petition
and adjuration. Was it not in reality our petition too, the petition
of the whole world, lying in dark bondage of soul, paralyzed under
a black spectral Nightmare and triple-hatted Chimera, calling itself
Father in God, and what not: {}``Free us; it rests with thee; desert
us not!''

Luther did not desert us. His speech, of two hours, distinguished
itself by its respectful, wise and honest tone; submissive to whatsoever
could lawfully claim submission, not submissive to any more than that.
His writings, he said, were partly his own, partly derived from the
Word of God. As to what was his own, human infirmity entered into
it; unguarded anger, blindness, many things doubtless which it were
a blessing for him could he abolish altogether. But as to what stood
on sound truth and the Word of God, he could not recant it. How could
he? {}``Confute me,'' he concluded, {}``by proofs of Scripture,
or else by plain just arguments: I cannot recant otherwise. For it
is neither safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience. Here stand
I; I can do no other: God assist me!''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]It
is, as we say, the greatest moment in the Modern History of Men. English
Puritanism, England and its Parliaments, Americas, and vast work these
two centuries; French Revolution, Europe and its work everywhere at
present: the germ of it all lay there: had Luther in that moment done
other, it had all been otherwise! The European World was asking him:
Am I to sink ever lower into falsehood, stagnant putrescence, loathsome
accursed death; or, with whatever paroxysm, to cast the falsehoods
out of me, and be cured and live?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

Great wars, contentions and disunion followed out of this Reformation;
which last down to our day, and are yet far from ended. Great talk
and crimination has been made about these. They are lamentable, undeniable;
but after all, what has Luther or his cause to do with them? It seems
strange reasoning to charge the Reformation with all this. When Hercules
turned the purifying river into King Augeas's stables, I have no doubt
the confusion that resulted was considerable all around: but I think
it was not Hercules's blame; it was some other's blame! The Reformation
might bring what results it liked when it came, but the Reformation
simply could not help coming. To all Popes and Popes' advocates, expostulating,
lamenting and accusing, the answer of the world is: Once for all,
your Popehood has become untrue. No matter how good it was, how good
you say it is, we cannot believe it; the light of our whole mind,
given us to walk by from Heaven above, finds it henceforth a thing
unbelievable. We will not believe it, we will not try to believe it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]we
dare not! The thing is \textit{untrue}; we were traitors against the
Giver of all Truth, if we durst pretend to think it true. Away with
it; let whatsoever likes come in the place of it: with \textit{it}
we can have no farther trade!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Luther and his
Protestantism is not responsible for wars; the false Simulacra that
forced him to protest, they are responsible. Luther did what every
man that God has made has not only the right, but lies under the sacred
duty, to do: answered a Falsehood when it questioned him, Dost thou
believe me?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]No!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]At what
cost soever, without counting of costs, this thing behooved to be
done. Union, organization spiritual and material, a far nobler than
any Popedom or Feudalism in their truest days, I never doubt, is coming
for the world; sure to come. But on Fact alone, not on Semblance and
Simulacrum, will it be able either to come, or to stand when come.
With union grounded on falsehood, and ordering us to speak and act
lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is
peaceable, the noisome grave is peaceable. We hope for a living peace,
not a dead one!

And yet, in prizing justly the indispensable blessings of the New,
let us not be unjust to the Old. The Old was true, if it no longer
is. In Dante's days it needed no sophistry, self-blinding or other
dishonesty, to get itself reckoned true. It was good then; nay there
is in the soul of it a deathless good. The cry of {}``No Popery''
is foolish enough in these days. The speculation that Popery is on
the increase, building new chapels and so forth, may pass for one
of the idlest ever started. Very curious: to count up a few Popish
chapels, listen to a few Protestant logic-choppings,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]to
much dull-droning drowsy inanity that still calls itself Protestant,
and say: See, Protestantism is \textit{dead}; Popeism is more alive
than it, will be alive after it!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Drowsy inanities,
not a few, that call themselves Protestant are dead; but \textit{Protestantism}
has not died yet, that I hear of! Protestantism, if we will look,
has in these days produced its Goethe, its Napoleon; German Literature
and the French Revolution; rather considerable signs of life! Nay,
at bottom, what else is alive \textit{but} Protestantism? The life
of most else that one meets is a galvanic one merely,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]not
a pleasant, not a lasting sort of life!

Popery can build new chapels; welcome to do so, to all lengths. Popery
cannot come back, any more than Paganism can,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]\textit{which}
also still lingers in some countries. But, indeed, it is with these
things, as with the ebbing of the sea: you look at the waves oscillating
hither, thither on the beach; for \textit{minutes} you cannot tell
how it is going; look in half an hour where it is,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]look
in half a century where your Popehood is! Alas, would there were no
greater danger to our Europe than the poor old Pope's revival! Thor
may as soon try to revive.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]And withal this
oscillation has a meaning. The poor old Popehood will not die away
entirely, as Thor has done, for some time yet; nor ought it. We may
say, the Old never dies till this happen, Till all the soul of good
that was in it have got itself transfused into the practical New.
While a good work remains capable of being done by the Romish form;
or, what is inclusive of all, while a pious \textit{life} remains
capable of being led by it, just so long, if we consider, will this
or the other human soul adopt it, go about as a living witness of
it. So long it will obtrude itself on the eye of us who reject it,
till we in our practice too have appropriated whatsoever of truth
was in it. Then, but also not till then, it will have no charm more
for any man. It lasts here for a purpose. Let it last as long as it
can.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

Of Luther I will add now, in reference to all these wars and bloodshed,
the noticeable fact that none of them began so long as he continued
living. The controversy did not get to fighting so long as he was
there. To me it is proof of his greatness in all senses, this fact.
How seldom do we find a man that has stirred up some vast commotion,
who does not himself perish, swept away in it! Such is the usual course
of revolutionists. Luther continued, in a good degree, sovereign of
this greatest revolution; all Protestants, of what rank or function
soever, looking much to him for guidance: and he held it peaceable,
continued firm at the centre of it. A man to do this must have a kingly
faculty: he must have the gift to discern at all turns where the true
heart of the matter lies, and to plant himself courageously on that,
as a strong true man, that other true men may rally round him there.
He will not continue leader of men otherwise. Luther's clear deep
force of judgment, his force of all sorts, of \textit{silence}, of
tolerance and moderation, among others, are very notable in these
circumstances.

Tolerance, I say; a very genuine kind of tolerance: he distinguishes
what is essential, and what is not; the unessential may go very much
as it will. A complaint comes to him that such and such a Reformed
Preacher {}``will not preach without a cassock.'' Well, answers
Luther, what harm will a cassock do the man? {}``Let him have a cassock
to preach in; let him have three cassocks if he find benefit in them!''
His conduct in the matter of Karlstadt's wild image-breaking; of the
Anabaptists; of the Peasants' War, shows a noble strength, very different
from spasmodic violence. With sure prompt insight he discriminates
what is what: a strong just man, he speaks forth what is the wise
course, and all men follow him in that. Luther's Written Works give
similar testimony of him. The dialect of these speculations is now
grown obsolete for us; but one still reads them with a singular attraction.
And indeed the mere grammatical diction is still legible enough; Luther's
merit in literary history is of the greatest: his dialect became the
language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty
Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects.
But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble
faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity;
a rugged sterling sense and strength. He dashes out illumination from
him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret
of the matter. Good humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness and
depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to \textit{work}
an Epic Poem, not write one. I call him a great Thinker; as indeed
his greatness of heart already betokens that.

Richter says of Luther's words, {}``His words are half-battles.''
They may be called so. The essential quality of him was, that he could
fight and conquer; that he was a right piece of human Valor. No more
valiant man, no mortal heart to be called \textit{braver}, that one
has record of, ever lived in that Teutonic Kindred, whose character
is valor. His defiance of the {}``Devils'' in Worms was not a mere
boast, as the like might be if now spoken. It was a faith of Luther's
that there were Devils, spiritual denizens of the Pit, continually
besetting men. Many times, in his writings, this turns up; and a most
small sneer has been grounded on it by some. In the room of the Wartburg
where he sat translating the Bible, they still show you a black spot
on the wall; the strange memorial of one of these conflicts. Luther
sat translating one of the Psalms; he was worn down with long labor,
with sickness, abstinence from food: there rose before him some hideous
indefinable Image, which he took for the Evil One, to forbid his work:
Luther started up, with fiend-defiance; flung his inkstand at the
spectre, and it disappeared! The spot still remains there; a curious
monument of several things. Any apothecary's apprentice can now tell
us what we are to think of this apparition, in a scientific sense:
but the man's heart that dare rise defiant, face to face, against
Hell itself, can give no higher proof of fearlessness. The thing he
will quail before exists not on this Earth or under it.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Fearless
enough! {}``The Devil is aware,'' writes he on one occasion, {}``that
this does not proceed out of fear in me. I have seen and defied innumerable
Devils. Duke George,'' of Leipzig, a great enemy of his, {}``Duke
George is not equal to one Devil,''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]far short
of a Devil! {}``If I had business at Leipzig, I would ride into Leipzig,
though it rained Duke Georges for nine days running.'' What a reservoir
of Dukes to ride into!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

At the same time, they err greatly who imagine that this man's courage
was ferocity, mere coarse disobedient obstinacy and savagery, as many
do. Far from that. There may be an absence of fear which arises from
the absence of thought or affection, from the presence of hatred and
stupid fury. We do not value the courage of the tiger highly! With
Luther it was far otherwise; no accusation could be more unjust than
this of mere ferocious violence brought against him. A most gentle
heart withal, full of pity and love, as indeed the truly valiant heart
ever is. The tiger before a \textit{stronger} foe\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]flies:
the tiger is not what we call valiant, only fierce and cruel. I know
few things more touching than those soft breathings of affection,
soft as a child's or a mother's, in this great wild heart of Luther.
So honest, unadulterated with any cant; homely, rude in their utterance;
pure as water welling from the rock. What, in fact, was all that down-pressed
mood of despair and reprobation, which we saw in his youth, but the
outcome of pre-eminent thoughtful gentleness, affections too keen
and fine? It is the course such men as the poor Poet Cowper fall into.
Luther to a slight observer might have seemed a timid, weak man; modesty,
affectionate shrinking tenderness the chief distinction of him. It
is a noble valor which is roused in a heart like this, once stirred
up into defiance, all kindled into a heavenly blaze.

In Luther's \textit{Table-Talk}, a posthumous Book of anecdotes and
sayings collected by his friends, the most interesting now of all
the Books proceeding from him, we have many beautiful unconscious
displays of the man, and what sort of nature he had. His behavior
at the death-bed of his little Daughter, so still, so great and loving,
is among the most affecting things. He is resigned that his little
Magdalene should die, yet longs inexpressibly that she might live;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]follows,
in awe-struck thought, the flight of her little soul through those
unknown realms. Awe-struck; most heartfelt, we can see; and sincere,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]for
after all dogmatic creeds and articles, he feels what nothing it is
that we know, or can know: His little Magdalene shall be with God,
as God wills; for Luther too that is all; \textit{Islam} is all.

Once, he looks out from his solitary Patmos, the Castle of Coburg,
in the middle of the night: The great vault of Immensity, long flights
of clouds sailing through it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]dumb, gaunt,
huge:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]who supports all that? {}``None ever
saw the pillars of it; yet it is supported.'' God supports it. We
must know that God is great, that God is good; and trust, where we
cannot see.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Returning home from Leipzig once,
he is struck by the beauty of the harvest-fields: How it stands, that
golden yellow corn, on its fair taper stem, its golden head bent,
all rich and waving there,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the meek Earth,
at God's kind bidding, has produced it once again; the bread of man!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]In
the garden at Wittenberg one evening at sunset, a little bird has
perched for the night: That little bird, says Luther, above it are
the stars and deep Heaven of worlds; yet it has folded its little
wings; gone trustfully to rest there as in its home: the Maker of
it has given it too a home!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Neither are mirthful
turns wanting: there is a great free human heart in this man. The
common speech of him has a rugged nobleness, idiomatic, expressive,
genuine; gleams here and there with beautiful poetic tints. One feels
him to be a great brother man. His love of Music, indeed, is not this,
as it were, the summary of all these affections in him? Many a wild
unutterability he spoke forth from him in the tones of his flute.
The Devils fled from his flute, he says. Death-defiance on the one
hand, and such love of music on the other; I could call these the
two opposite poles of a great soul; between these two all great things
had room.

Luther's face is to me expressive of him; in Kranach's best portraits
I find the true Luther. A rude plebeian face; with its huge crag-like
brows and bones, the emblem of rugged energy; at first, almost a repulsive
face. Yet in the eyes especially there is a wild silent sorrow; an
unnamable melancholy, the element of all gentle and fine affections;
giving to the rest the true stamp of nobleness. Laughter was in this
Luther, as we said; but tears also were there. Tears also were appointed
him; tears and hard toil. The basis of his life was Sadness, Earnestness.
In his latter days, after all triumphs and victories, he expresses
himself heartily weary of living; he considers that God alone can
and will regulate the course things are taking, and that perhaps the
Day of Judgment is not far. As for him, he longs for one thing: that
God would release him from his labor, and let him depart and be at
rest. They understand little of the man who cite this in discredit
of him!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I will call this Luther a true Great
Man; great in intellect, in courage, affection and integrity; one
of our most lovable and precious men. Great, not as a hewn obelisk;
but as an Alpine mountain,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]so simple, honest,
spontaneous, not setting up to be great at all; there for quite another
purpose than being great! Ah yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far
and wide into the Heavens; yet in the clefts of it fountains, green
beautiful valleys with flowers! A right Spiritual Hero and Prophet;
once more, a true Son of Nature and Fact, for whom these centuries,
and many that are to come yet, will be thankful to Heaven.

The most interesting phasis which the Reformation anywhere assumes,
especially for us English, is that of Puritanism. In Luther's own
country Protestantism soon dwindled into a rather barren affair: not
a religion or faith, but rather now a theological jangling of argument,
the proper seat of it not the heart; the essence of it sceptical contention:
which indeed has jangled more and more, down to Voltaireism itself,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]through
Gustavus-Adolphus contentions onwards to French-Revolution ones! But
in our Island there arose a Puritanism, which even got itself established
as a Presbyterianism and National Church among the Scotch; which came
forth as a real business of the heart; and has produced in the world
very notable fruit. In some senses, one may say it is the only phasis
of Protestantism that ever got to the rank of being a Faith, a true
heart-communication with Heaven, and of exhibiting itself in History
as such. We must spare a few words for Knox; himself a brave and remarkable
man; but still more important as Chief Priest and Founder, which one
may consider him to be, of the Faith that became Scotland's, New England's,
Oliver Cromwell's. History will have something to say about this,
for some time to come!

We may censure Puritanism as we please; and no one of us, I suppose,
but would find it a very rough defective thing. But we, and all men,
may understand that it was a genuine thing; for Nature has adopted
it, and it has grown, and grows. I say sometimes, that all goes by
wager-of-battle in this world; that \textit{strength}, well understood,
is the measure of all worth. Give a thing time; if it can succeed,
it is a right thing. Look now at American Saxondom; and at that little
Fact of the sailing of the Mayflower, two hundred years ago, from
Delft Haven in Holland! Were we of open sense as the Greeks were,
we had found a Poem here; one of Nature's own Poems, such as she writes
in broad facts over great continents. For it was properly the beginning
of America: there were straggling settlers in America before, some
material as of a body was there; but the soul of it was first this.
These poor men, driven out of their own country, not able well to
live in Holland, determine on settling in the New World. Black untamed
forests are there, and wild savage creatures; but not so cruel as
Star-chamber hangmen. They thought the Earth would yield them food,
if they tilled honestly; the everlasting heaven would stretch, there
too, overhead; they should be left in peace, to prepare for Eternity
by living well in this world of Time; worshipping in what they thought
the true, not the idolatrous way. They clubbed their small means together;
hired a ship, the little ship Mayflower, and made ready to set sail.

In Neal's \textit{History of the Puritans} {[}Neal (London, 1755),
i.\ 490{]} is an account of the ceremony of their departure: solemnity,
we might call it rather, for it was a real act of worship. Their minister
went down with them to the beach, and their brethren whom they were
to leave behind; all joined in solemn prayer, That God would have
pity on His poor children, and go with them into that waste wilderness,
for He also had made that, He was there also as well as here.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Hah!
These men, I think, had a work! The weak thing, weaker than a child,
becomes strong one day, if it be a true thing. Puritanism was only
despicable, laughable then; but nobody can manage to laugh at it now.
Puritanism has got weapons and sinews; it has firearms, war-navies;
it has cunning in its ten fingers, strength in its right arm; it can
steer ships, fell forests, remove mountains;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]it
is one of the strongest things under this sun at present!

In the history of Scotland, too, I can find properly but one epoch:
we may say, it contains nothing of world-interest at all but this
Reformation by Knox. A poor barren country, full of continual broils,
dissensions, massacrings; a people in the last state of rudeness and
destitution; little better perhaps than Ireland at this day. Hungry
fierce barons, not so much as able to form any arrangement with each
other \textit{how to divide} what they fleeced from these poor drudges;
but obliged, as the Colombian Republics are at this day, to make of
every alteration a revolution; no way of changing a ministry but by
hanging the old ministers on gibbets: this is a historical spectacle
of no very singular significance! {}``Bravery'' enough, I doubt
not; fierce fighting in abundance: but not braver or fiercer than
that of their old Scandinavian Sea-king ancestors; \textit{whose}
exploits we have not found worth dwelling on! It is a country as yet
without a soul: nothing developed in it but what is rude, external,
semi-animal. And now at the Reformation, the internal life is kindled,
as it were, under the ribs of this outward material death. A cause,
the noblest of causes kindles itself, like a beacon set on high; high
as Heaven, yet attainable from Earth;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]whereby
the meanest man becomes not a Citizen only, but a Member of Christ's
visible Church; a veritable Hero, if he prove a true man!

Well; this is what I mean by a whole {}``nation of heroes;'' a \textit{believing}
nation. There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a
god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a
great soul! The like has been seen, we find. The like will be again
seen, under wider forms than the Presbyterian: there can be no lasting
good done till then.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Impossible! say some.
Possible? Has it not \textit{been}, in this world, as a practiced
fact? Did Hero-worship fail in Knox's case? Or are we made of other
clay now? Did the Westminster Confession of Faith add some new property
to the soul of man? God made the soul of man. He did not doom any
soul of man to live as a Hypothesis and Hearsay, in a world filled
with such, and with the fatal work and fruit of such!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

But to return: This that Knox did for his Nation, I say, we may really
call a resurrection as from death. It was not a smooth business; but
it was welcome surely, and cheap at that price, had it been far rougher.
On the whole, cheap at any price!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as life is.
The people began to \textit{live}: they needed first of all to do
that, at what cost and costs soever. Scotch Literature and Thought,
Scotch Industry; James Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert Burns:
I find Knox and the Reformation acting in the heart's core of every
one of these persons and phenomena; I find that without the Reformation
they would not have been. Or what of Scotland? The Puritanism of Scotland
became that of England, of New England. A tumult in the High Church
of Edinburgh spread into a universal battle and struggle over all
these realms;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]there came out, after fifty years'
struggling, what we all call the {}``\textit{Glorious} Revolution''
a \textit{Habeas Corpus} Act, Free Parliaments, and much else!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Alas,
is it not too true what we said, That many men in the van do always,
like Russian soldiers, march into the ditch of Schweidnitz, and fill
it up with their dead bodies, that the rear may pass over them dry-shod,
and gain the honor? How many earnest rugged Cromwells, Knoxes, poor
Peasant Covenanters, wrestling, battling for very life, in rough miry
places, have to struggle, and suffer, and fall, greatly censured,
\textit{bemired},\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]before a beautiful Revolution
of Eighty-eight can step over them in official pumps and silk-stockings,
with universal three-times-three!

It seems to me hard measure that this Scottish man, now after three
hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit before the world;
intrinsically for having been, in such way as it was then possible
to be, the bravest of all Scotchmen! Had he been a poor Half-and-half,
he could have crouched into the corner, like so many others; Scotland
had not been delivered; and Knox had been without blame. He is the
one Scotchman to whom, of all others, his country and the world owe
a debt. He has to plead that Scotland would forgive him for having
been worth to it any million {}``unblamable'' Scotchmen that need
no forgiveness! He bared his breast to the battle; had to row in French
galleys, wander forlorn in exile, in clouds and storms; was censured,
shot at through his windows; had a right sore fighting life: if this
world were his place of recompense, he had made but a bad venture
of it. I cannot apologize for Knox. To him it is very indifferent,
these two hundred and fifty years or more, what men say of him. But
we, having got above all those details of his battle, and living now
in clearness on the fruits of his victory, we, for our own sake, ought
to look through the rumors and controversies enveloping the man, into
the man himself.

For one thing, I will remark that this post of Prophet to his Nation
was not of his seeking; Knox had lived forty years quietly obscure,
before he became conspicuous. He was the son of poor parents; had
got a college education; become a Priest; adopted the Reformation,
and seemed well content to guide his own steps by the light of it,
nowise unduly intruding it on others. He had lived as Tutor in gentlemen's
families; preaching when any body of persons wished to hear his doctrine:
resolute he to walk by the truth, and speak the truth when called
to do it; not ambitious of more; not fancying himself capable of more.
In this entirely obscure way he had reached the age of forty; was
with the small body of Reformers who were standing siege in St.\ Andrew's
Castle,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]when one day in their chapel, the Preacher
after finishing his exhortation to these fighters in the forlorn hope,
said suddenly, That there ought to be other speakers, that all men
who had a priest's heart and gift in them ought now to speak;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]which
gifts and heart one of their own number, John Knox the name of him,
had: Had he not? said the Preacher, appealing to all the audience:
what then is \textit{his} duty? The people answered affirmatively;
it was a criminal forsaking of his post, if such a man held the word
that was in him silent. Poor Knox was obliged to stand up; he attempted
to reply; he could say no word;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]burst into
a flood of tears, and ran out. It is worth remembering, that scene.
He was in grievous trouble for some days. He felt what a small faculty
was his for this great work. He felt what a baptism he was called
to be baptized withal. He {}``burst into tears.''

Our primary characteristic of a Hero, that he is sincere, applies
emphatically to Knox. It is not denied anywhere that this, whatever
might be his other qualities or faults, is among the truest of men.
With a singular instinct he holds to the truth and fact; the truth
alone is there for him, the rest a mere shadow and deceptive nonentity.
However feeble, forlorn the reality may seem, on that and that only
\textit{can} he take his stand. In the Galleys of the River Loire,
whither Knox and the others, after their Castle of St.\ Andrew's
was taken, had been sent as Galley-slaves,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]some
officer or priest, one day, presented them an Image of the Virgin
Mother, requiring that they, the blasphemous heretics, should do it
reverence. Mother? Mother of God? said Knox, when the turn came to
him: This is no Mother of God: this is {}``\textit{a pented bredd},''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]\textit{\emph{a}}
piece of wood, I tell you, with paint on it! She is fitter for swimming,
I think, than for being worshipped, added Knox; and flung the thing
into the river. It was not very cheap jesting there: but come of it
what might, this thing to Knox was and must continue nothing other
than the real truth; it was a \textit{pented bredd}: worship it he
would not.

He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of courage;
the Cause they had was the true one, and must and would prosper; the
whole world could not put it down. Reality is of God's making; it
is alone strong. How many \textit{pented bredds}, pretending to be
real, are fitter to swim than to be worshipped!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]This
Knox cannot live but by fact: he clings to reality as the shipwrecked
sailor to the cliff. He is an instance to us how a man, by sincerity
itself, becomes heroic: it is the grand gift he has. We find in Knox
a good honest intellectual talent, no transcendent one;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a
narrow, inconsiderable man, as compared with Luther: but in heartfelt
instinctive adherence to truth, in \textit{sincerity}, as we say,
he has no superior; nay, one might ask, What equal he has? The heart
of him is of the true Prophet cast. {}``He lies there,'' said the
Earl of Morton at his grave, {}``who never feared the face of man.''
He resembles, more than any of the moderns, an Old-Hebrew Prophet.
The same inflexibility, intolerance, rigid narrow-looking adherence
to God's truth, stern rebuke in the name of God to all that forsake
truth: an Old-Hebrew Prophet in the guise of an Edinburgh Minister
of the Sixteenth Century. We are to take him for that; not require
him to be other.

Knox's conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh visits he used to make in
her own palace, to reprove her there, have been much commented upon.
Such cruelty, such coarseness fills us with indignation. On reading
the actual narrative of the business, what Knox said, and what Knox
meant, I must say one's tragic feeling is rather disappointed. They
are not so coarse, these speeches; they seem to me about as fine as
the circumstances would permit! Knox was not there to do the courtier;
he came on another errand. Whoever, reading these colloquies of his
with the Queen, thinks they are vulgar insolences of a plebeian priest
to a delicate high lady, mistakes the purport and essence of them
altogether. It was unfortunately not possible to be polite with the
Queen of Scotland, unless one proved untrue to the Nation and Cause
of Scotland. A man who did not wish to see the land of his birth made
a hunting-field for intriguing ambitious Guises, and the Cause of
God trampled underfoot of Falsehoods, Formulas and the Devil's Cause,
had no method of making himself agreeable! {}``Better that women
weep,'' said Morton, {}``than that bearded men be forced to weep.''
Knox was the constitutional opposition-party in Scotland: the Nobles
of the country, called by their station to take that post, were not
found in it; Knox had to go, or no one. The hapless Queen;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]but
the still more hapless Country, if \textit{she} were made happy! Mary
herself was not without sharpness enough, among her other qualities:
{}``Who are you,'' said she once, {}``that presume to school the
nobles and sovereign of this realm?''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]{}``Madam,
a subject born within the same,'' answered he. Reasonably answered!
If the {}``subject'' have truth to speak, it is not the {}``subject's''
footing that will fail him here.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

We blame Knox for his intolerance. Well, surely it is good that each
of us be as tolerant as possible. Yet, at bottom, after all the talk
there is and has been about it, what is tolerance? Tolerance has to
tolerate the unessential; and to see well what that is. Tolerance
has to be noble, measured, just in its very wrath, when it can tolerate
no longer. But, on the whole, we are not altogether here to tolerate!
We are here to resist, to control and vanquish withal. We do not {}``tolerate''
Falsehoods, Thieveries, Iniquities, when they fasten on us; we say
to them, Thou art false, thou art not tolerable! We are here to extinguish
Falsehoods, and put an end to them, in some wise way! I will not quarrel
so much with the way; the doing of the thing is our great concern.
In this sense Knox was, full surely, intolerant.

A man sent to row in French Galleys, and such like, for teaching the
Truth in his own land, cannot always be in the mildest humor! I am
not prepared to say that Knox had a soft temper; nor do I know that
he had what we call an ill temper. An ill nature he decidedly had
not. Kind honest affections dwelt in the much-enduring, hard-worn,
ever-battling man. That he \textit{could} rebuke Queens, and had such
weight among those proud turbulent Nobles, proud enough whatever else
they were; and could maintain to the end a kind of virtual Presidency
and Sovereignty in that wild realm, he who was only {}``a subject
born within the same:'' this of itself will prove to us that he was
found, close at hand, to be no mean acrid man; but at heart a healthful,
strong, sagacious man. Such alone can bear rule in that kind. They
blame him for pulling down cathedrals, and so forth, as if he were
a seditious rioting demagogue: precisely the reverse is seen to be
the fact, in regard to cathedrals and the rest of it, if we examine!
Knox wanted no pulling down of stone edifices; he wanted leprosy and
darkness to be thrown out of the lives of men. Tumult was not his
element; it was the tragic feature of his life that he was forced
to dwell so much in that. Every such man is the born enemy of Disorder;
hates to be in it: but what then? Smooth Falsehood is not Order; it
is the general sum-total of Disorder. Order is \textit{Truth},\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]each
thing standing on the basis that belongs to it: Order and Falsehood
cannot subsist together.

Withal, unexpectedly enough, this Knox has a vein of drollery in him;
which I like much, in combination with his other qualities. He has
a true eye for the ridiculous. His \textit{History}, with its rough
earnestness, is curiously enlivened with this. When the two Prelates,
entering Glasgow Cathedral, quarrel about precedence; march rapidly
up, take to hustling one another, twitching one another's rochets,
and at last flourishing their crosiers like quarter-staves, it is
a great sight for him every way! Not mockery, scorn, bitterness alone;
though there is enough of that too. But a true, loving, illuminating
laugh mounts up over the earnest visage; not a loud laugh; you would
say, a laugh in the \textit{eyes} most of all. An honest-hearted,
brotherly man; brother to the high, brother also to the low; sincere
in his sympathy with both. He had his pipe of Bourdeaux too, we find,
in that old Edinburgh house of his; a cheery social man, with faces
that loved him! They go far wrong who think this Knox was a gloomy,
spasmodic, shrieking fanatic. Not at all: he is one of the solidest
of men. Practical, cautious-hopeful, patient; a most shrewd, observing,
quietly discerning man. In fact, he has very much the type of character
we assign to the Scotch at present: a certain sardonic taciturnity
is in him; insight enough; and a stouter heart than he himself knows
of. He has the power of holding his peace over many things which do
not vitally concern him,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]{}``They? what are
they?'' But the thing which does vitally concern him, that thing
he will speak of; and in a tone the whole world shall be made to hear:
all the more emphatic for his long silence.

This Prophet of the Scotch is to me no hateful man!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]He
had a sore fight of an existence; wrestling with Popes and Principalities;
in defeat, contention, life-long struggle; rowing as a galley-slave,
wandering as an exile. A sore fight: but he won it. {}``Have you
hope?'' they asked him in his last moment, when he could no longer
speak. He lifted his finger, {}``pointed upwards with his finger,''
and so died. Honor to him! His works have not died. The letter of
his work dies, as of all men's; but the spirit of it never.

One word more as to the letter of Knox's work. The unforgivable offence
in him is, that he wished to set up Priests over the head of Kings.
In other words, he strove to make the Government of Scotland a \textit{Theocracy}.
This indeed is properly the sum of his offences, the essential sin;
for which what pardon can there be? It is most true, he did, at bottom,
consciously or unconsciously, mean a Theocracy, or Government of God.
He did mean that Kings and Prime Ministers, and all manner of persons,
in public or private, diplomatizing or whatever else they might be
doing, should walk according to the Gospel of Christ, and understand
that this was their Law, supreme over all laws. He hoped once to see
such a thing realized; and the Petition, \textit{Thy Kingdom come},
no longer an empty word. He was sore grieved when he saw greedy worldly
Barons clutch hold of the Church's property; when he expostulated
that it was not secular property, that it was spiritual property,
and should be turned to \textit{true} churchly uses, education, schools,
worship;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and the Regent Murray had to answer,
with a shrug of the shoulders, {}``It is a devout imagination!''
This was Knox's scheme of right and truth; this he zealously endeavored
after, to realize it. If we think his scheme of truth was too narrow,
was not true, we may rejoice that he could not realize it; that it
remained after two centuries of effort, unrealizable, and is a {}``devout
imagination'' still. But how shall we blame \textit{him} for struggling
to realize it? Theocracy, Government of God, is precisely the thing
to be struggled for! All Prophets, zealous Priests, are there for
that purpose. Hildebrand wished a Theocracy; Cromwell wished it, fought
for it; Mahomet attained it. Nay, is it not what all zealous men,
whether called Priests, Prophets, or whatsoever else called, do essentially
wish, and must wish? That right and truth, or God's Law, reign supreme
among men, this is the Heavenly Ideal (well named in Knox's time,
and namable in all times, a revealed {}``Will of God'') towards
which the Reformer will insist that all be more and more approximated.
All true Reformers, as I said, are by the nature of them Priests,
and strive for a Theocracy.

How far such Ideals can ever be introduced into Practice, and at what
point our impatience with their non-introduction ought to begin, is
always a question. I think we may say safely, Let them introduce themselves
as far as they can contrive to do it! If they are the true faith of
men, all men ought to be more or less impatient always where they
are not found introduced. There will never be wanting Regent Murrays
enough to shrug their shoulders, and say, {}``A devout imagination!''
We will praise the Hero-priest rather, who does what is in him to
bring them in; and wears out, in toil, calumny, contradiction, a noble
life, to make a God's Kingdom of this Earth. The Earth will not become
too godlike!


\chapter*{\raggedright {}{[}May 19, 1840.{]} LECTURE V. }

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{{[}May 19, 1840.{]} LECTURE V.}

\markboth{Heroes and Hero Worship}{The Hero as Man of Letters}


\subsection*{\textit{\emph{The}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{Hero}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{as}}
\emph{}\textit{\emph{Man}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{of}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{Letters}}\emph{.}
\textit{\emph{Johnson}}\emph{,} \textit{\emph{Rousseau}}\emph{,} \textit{\emph{Burns}}\emph{.}}

Hero-Gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are forms of Heroism that belong
to the old ages, make their appearance in the remotest times; some
of them have ceased to be possible long since, and cannot any more
show themselves in this world. The Hero as \textit{Man of Letters},
again, of which class we are to speak to-day, is altogether a product
of these new ages; and so long as the wondrous art of \textit{Writing},
or of Ready-writing which we call \textit{Printing}, subsists, he
may be expected to continue, as one of the main forms of Heroism for
all future ages. He is, in various respects, a very singular phenomenon.

He is new, I say; he has hardly lasted above a century in the world
yet. Never, till about a hundred years ago, was there seen any figure
of a Great Soul living apart in that anomalous manner; endeavoring
to speak forth the inspiration that was in him by Printed Books, and
find place and subsistence by what the world would please to give
him for doing that. Much had been sold and bought, and left to make
its own bargain in the market-place; but the inspired wisdom of a
Heroic Soul never till then, in that naked manner. He, with his copy-rights
and copy-wrongs, in his squalid garret, in his rusty coat; ruling
(for this is what he does), from his grave, after death, whole nations
and generations who would, or would not, give him bread while living,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]is
a rather curious spectacle! Few shapes of Heroism can be more unexpected.

Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strange shapes:
the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign
is his aspect in the world! It seemed absurd to us, that men, in their
rude admiration, should take some wise great Odin for a god, and worship
him as such; some wise great Mahomet for one god-inspired, and religiously
follow his Law for twelve centuries: but that a wise great Johnson,
a Burns, a Rousseau, should be taken for some idle nondescript, extant
in the world to amuse idleness, and have a few coins and applauses
thrown him, that he might live thereby; \textit{this} perhaps, as
before hinted, will one day seem a still absurder phasis of things!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Meanwhile,
since it is the spiritual always that determines the material, this
same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern
person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all. What he teaches,
the whole world will do and make. The world's manner of dealing with
him is the most significant feature of the world's general position.
Looking well at his life, we may get a glance, as deep as is readily
possible for us, into the life of those singular centuries which have
produced him, in which we ourselves live and work.

There are genuine Men of Letters, and not genuine; as in every kind
there is a genuine and a spurious. If \textit{hero} be taken to mean
genuine, then I say the Hero as Man of Letters will be found discharging
a function for us which is ever honorable, ever the highest; and was
once well known to be the highest. He is uttering forth, in such way
as he has, the inspired soul of him; all that a man, in any case,
can do. I say \textit{inspired}; for what we call {}``originality,''
{}``sincerity,'' {}``genius,'' the heroic quality we have no good
name for, signifies that. The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere
of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists always, unseen
to most, under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in that; he declares
that abroad, by act or speech as it may be in declaring himself abroad.
His life, as we said before, is a piece of the everlasting heart of
Nature herself: all men's life is,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]but the
weak many know not the fact, and are untrue to it, in most times;
the strong few are strong, heroic, perennial, because it cannot be
hidden from them. The Man of Letters, like every Hero, is there to
proclaim this in such sort as he can. Intrinsically it is the same
function which the old generations named a man Prophet, Priest, Divinity
for doing; which all manner of Heroes, by speech or by act, are sent
into the world to do.

Fichte the German Philosopher delivered, some forty years ago at Erlangen,
a highly remarkable Course of Lectures on this subject: {}``\textit{Ueber
das Wesen des Gelehrten}, On the Nature of the Literary Man.'' Fichte,
in conformity with the Transcendental Philosophy, of which he was
a distinguished teacher, declares first: That all things which we
see or work with in this Earth, especially we ourselves and all persons,
are as a kind of vesture or sensuous Appearance: that under all there
lies, as the essence of them, what he calls the {}``Divine Idea of
the World;'' this is the Reality which {}``lies at the bottom of
all Appearance.'' To the mass of men no such Divine Idea is recognizable
in the world; they live merely, says Fichte, among the superficialities,
practicalities and shows of the world, not dreaming that there is
anything divine under them. But the Man of Letters is sent hither
specially that he may discern for himself, and make manifest to us,
this same Divine Idea: in every new generation it will manifest itself
in a new dialect; and he is there for the purpose of doing that. Such
is Fichte's phraseology; with which we need not quarrel. It is his
way of naming what I here, by other words, am striving imperfectly
to name; what there is at present no name for: The unspeakable Divine
Significance, full of splendor, of wonder and terror, that lies in
the being of every man, of every thing,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
Presence of the God who made every man and thing. Mahomet taught this
in his dialect; Odin in his: it is the thing which all thinking hearts,
in one dialect or another, are here to teach.

Fichte calls the Man of Letters, therefore, a Prophet, or as he prefers
to phrase it, a Priest, continually unfolding the Godlike to men:
Men of Letters are a perpetual Priesthood, from age to age, teaching
all men that a God is still present in their life, that all {}``Appearance,''
whatsoever we see in the world, is but as a vesture for the {}``Divine
Idea of the World,'' for {}``that which lies at the bottom of Appearance.''
In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by
the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's
Priest;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of
Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time. Fichte discriminates
with sharp zeal the \textit{true} Literary Man, what we here call
the \textit{Hero} as Man of Letters, from multitudes of false unheroic.
Whoever lives not wholly in this Divine Idea, or living partially
in it, struggles not, as for the one good, to live wholly in it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]he
is, let him live where else he like, in what pomps and prosperities
he like, no Literary Man; he is, says Fichte, a {}``Bungler, \textit{Stumper}.''
Or at best, if he belong to the prosaic provinces, he may be a {}``Hodman;''
Fichte even calls him elsewhere a {}``Nonentity,'' and has in short
no mercy for him, no wish that \textit{he} should continue happy among
us! This is Fichte's notion of the Man of Letters. It means, in its
own form, precisely what we here mean.

In this point of view, I consider that, for the last hundred years,
by far the notablest of all Literary Men is Fichte's countryman, Goethe.
To that man too, in a strange way, there was given what we may call
a life in the Divine Idea of the World; vision of the inward divine
mystery: and strangely, out of his Books, the world rises imaged once
more as godlike, the workmanship and temple of a God. Illuminated
all, not in fierce impure fire-splendor as of Mahomet, but in mild
celestial radiance;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]really a Prophecy in these
most unprophetic times; to my mind, by far the greatest, though one
of the quietest, among all the great things that have come to pass
in them. Our chosen specimen of the Hero as Literary Man would be
this Goethe. And it were a very pleasant plan for me here to discourse
of his heroism: for I consider him to be a true Hero; heroic in what
he said and did, and perhaps still more in what he did not say and
did not do; to me a noble spectacle: a great heroic ancient man, speaking
and keeping silence as an ancient Hero, in the guise of a most modern,
high-bred, high-cultivated Man of Letters! We have had no such spectacle;
no man capable of affording such, for the last hundred and fifty years.

But at present, such is the general state of knowledge about Goethe,
it were worse than useless to attempt speaking of him in this case.
Speak as I might, Goethe, to the great majority of you, would remain
problematic, vague; no impression but a false one could be realized.
Him we must leave to future times. Johnson, Burns, Rousseau, three
great figures from a prior time, from a far inferior state of circumstances,
will suit us better here. Three men of the Eighteenth Century; the
conditions of their life far more resemble what those of ours still
are in England, than what Goethe's in Germany were. Alas, these men
did not conquer like him; they fought bravely, and fell. They were
not heroic bringers of the light, but heroic seekers of it. They lived
under galling conditions; struggling as under mountains of impediment,
and could not unfold themselves into clearness, or victorious interpretation
of that {}``Divine Idea.'' It is rather the \textit{Tombs} of three
Literary Heroes that I have to show you. There are the monumental
heaps, under which three spiritual giants lie buried. Very mournful,
but also great and full of interest for us. We will linger by them
for a while.

Complaint is often made, in these times, of what we call the disorganized
condition of society: how ill many forces of society fulfil their
work; how many powerful are seen working in a wasteful, chaotic, altogether
unarranged manner. It is too just a complaint, as we all know. But
perhaps if we look at this of Books and the Writers of Books, we shall
find here, as it were, the summary of all other disorganizations;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a
sort of \textit{heart}, from which, and to which all other confusion
circulates in the world! Considering what Book writers do in the world,
and what the world does with Book writers, I should say, It is the
most anomalous thing the world at present has to show.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]We
should get into a sea far beyond sounding, did we attempt to give
account of this: but we must glance at it for the sake of our subject.
The worst element in the life of these three Literary Heroes was,
that they found their business and position such a chaos. On the beaten
road there is tolerable travelling; but it is sore work, and many
have to perish, fashioning a path through the impassable!

Our pious Fathers, feeling well what importance lay in the speaking
of man to men, founded churches, made endowments, regulations; everywhere
in the civilized world there is a Pulpit, environed with all manner
of complex dignified appurtenances and furtherances, that therefrom
a man with the tongue may, to best advantage, address his fellow-men.
They felt that this was the most important thing; that without this
there was no good thing. It is a right pious work, that of theirs;
beautiful to behold! But now with the art of Writing, with the art
of Printing, a total change has come over that business. The Writer
of a Book, is not he a Preacher preaching not to this parish or that,
on this day or that, but to all men in all times and places? Surely
it is of the last importance that \textit{he} do his work right, whoever
do it wrong;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]that the \textit{eye} report not
falsely, for then all the other members are astray! Well; how he may
do his work, whether he do it right or wrong, or do it at all, is
a point which no man in the world has taken the pains to think of.
To a certain shopkeeper, trying to get some money for his books, if
lucky, he is of some importance; to no other man of any. Whence he
came, whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived, by what he might
be furthered on his course, no one asks. He is an accident in society.
He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is as the
spiritual light, either the guidance or the misguidance!

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things
man has devised. Odin's \textit{Runes} were the first form of the
work of a Hero; \textit{Books} written words, are still miraculous
\textit{Runes}, the latest form! In Books lies the \textit{soul} of
the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when
the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like
a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities,
high-domed, many-engined,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]they are precious,
great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses,
and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful
wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There Greece, to every
thinker, still very literally lives: can be called up again into life.
No magic \textit{Rune} is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has
done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation
in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.

Do not Books still accomplish \textit{miracles}, as \textit{Runes}
were fabled to do? They persuade men. Not the wretchedest circulating-library
novel, which foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages, but will
help to regulate the actual practical weddings and households of those
foolish girls. So {}``Celia'' felt, so {}``Clifford'' acted: the
foolish Theorem of Life, stamped into those young brains, comes out
as a solid Practice one day. Consider whether any \textit{Rune} in
the wildest imagination of Mythologist ever did such wonders as, on
the actual firm Earth, some Books have done! What built St. Paul's
Cathedral? Look at the heart of the matter, it was that divine Hebrew
\textit{book},\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the word partly of the man Moses,
an outlaw tending his Midianitish herds, four thousand years ago,
in the wildernesses of Sinai! It is the strangest of things, yet nothing
is truer. With the art of Writing, of which Printing is a simple,
an inevitable and comparatively insignificant corollary, the true
reign of miracles for mankind commenced. It related, with a wondrous
new contiguity and perpetual closeness, the Past and Distant with
the Present in time and place; all times and all places with this
our actual Here and Now. All things were altered for men; all modes
of important work of men: teaching, preaching, governing, and all
else.

To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a notable, respectable
product of the modern ages. Their existence too is modified, to the
very basis of it, by the existence of Books. Universities arose while
there were yet no Books procurable; while a man, for a single Book,
had to give an estate of land. That, in those circumstances, when
a man had some knowledge to communicate, he should do it by gathering
the learners round him, face to face, was a necessity for him. If
you wanted to know what Abelard knew, you must go and listen to Abelard.
Thousands, as many as thirty thousand, went to hear Abelard and that
metaphysical theology of his. And now for any other teacher who had
also something of his own to teach, there was a great convenience
opened: so many thousands eager to learn were already assembled yonder;
of all places the best place for him was that. For any third teacher
it was better still; and grew ever the better, the more teachers there
came. It only needed now that the King took notice of this new phenomenon;
combined or agglomerated the various schools into one school; gave
it edifices, privileges, encouragements, and named it \textit{Universitas},
or School of all Sciences: the University of Paris, in its essential
characters, was there. The model of all subsequent Universities; which
down even to these days, for six centuries now, have gone on to found
themselves. Such, I conceive, was the origin of Universities.

It is clear, however, that with this simple circumstance, facility
of getting Books, the whole conditions of the business from top to
bottom were changed. Once invent Printing, you metamorphosed all Universities,
or superseded them! The Teacher needed not now to gather men personally
round him, that he might \textit{speak} to them what he knew: print
it in a Book, and all learners far and wide, for a trifle, had it
each at his own fireside, much more effectually to learn it!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Doubtless
there is still peculiar virtue in Speech; even writers of Books may
still, in some circumstances, find it convenient to speak also,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]witness
our present meeting here! There is, one would say, and must ever remain
while man has a tongue, a distinct province for Speech as well as
for Writing and Printing. In regard to all things this must remain;
to Universities among others. But the limits of the two have nowhere
yet been pointed out, ascertained; much less put in practice: the
University which would completely take in that great new fact, of
the existence of Printed Books, and stand on a clear footing for the
Nineteenth Century as the Paris one did for the Thirteenth, has not
yet come into existence. If we think of it, all that a University,
or final highest School can do for us, is still but what the first
School began doing,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]teach us to \textit{read}.
We learn to \textit{read}, in various languages, in various sciences;
we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of Books. But the
place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is
the Books themselves! It depends on what we read, after all manner
of Professors have done their best for us. The true University of
these days is a Collection of Books.

But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, all is changed, in
its preaching, in its working, by the introduction of Books. The Church
is the working recognized Union of our Priests or Prophets, of those
who by wise teaching guide the souls of men. While there was no Writing,
even while there was no Easy-writing, or \textit{Printing}, the preaching
of the voice was the natural sole method of performing this. But now
with Books! \mbox{---}\linebreak[1]He that can write a true Book,
to persuade England, is not he the Bishop and Archbishop, the Primate
of England and of All England? I many a time say, the writers of Newspapers,
Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these \textit{are} the real working effective
Church of a modern country. Nay not only our preaching, but even our
worship, is not it too accomplished by means of Printed Books? The
noble sentiment which a gifted soul has clothed for us in melodious
words, which brings melody into our hearts,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]is
not this essentially, if we will understand it, of the nature of worship?
There are many, in all countries, who, in this confused time, have
no other method of worship. He who, in any way, shows us better than
we knew before that a lily of the fields is beautiful, does he not
show it us as an effluence of the Fountain of all Beauty; as the \textit{handwriting},
made visible there, of the great Maker of the Universe? He has sung
for us, made us sing with him, a little verse of a sacred Psalm. Essentially
so. How much more he who sings, who says, or in any way brings home
to our heart the noble doings, feelings, darings and endurances of
a brother man! He has verily touched our hearts as with a live coal
\textit{from the altar}. Perhaps there is no worship more authentic.

Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an {}``apocalypse of Nature,''
a revealing of the {}``open secret.'' It may well enough be named,
in Fichte's style, a {}``continuous revelation'' of the Godlike
in the Terrestrial and Common. The Godlike does ever, in very truth,
endure there; is brought out, now in this dialect, now in that, with
various degrees of clearness: all true gifted Singers and Speakers
are, consciously or unconsciously, doing so. The dark stormful indignation
of a Byron, so wayward and perverse, may have touches of it; nay the
withered mockery of a French sceptic,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]his mockery
of the False, a love and worship of the True. How much more the sphere-harmony
of a Shakspeare, of a Goethe; the cathedral music of a Milton! They
are something too, those humble genuine lark-notes of a Burns,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]skylark,
starting from the humble furrow, far overhead into the blue depths,
and singing to us so genuinely there! For all true singing is of the
nature of worship; as indeed all true \textit{working} may be said
to be,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]whereof such \textit{singing} is but
the record, and fit melodious representation, to us. Fragments of
a real {}``Church Liturgy'' and {}``Body of Homilies,'' strangely
disguised from the common eye, are to be found weltering in that huge
froth-ocean of Printed Speech we loosely call Literature! Books are
our Church too.

Or turning now to the Government of men. Witenagemote, old Parliament,
was a great thing. The affairs of the nation were there deliberated
and decided; what we were to \textit{do} as a nation. But does not,
though the name Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on
now, everywhere and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way,
\textit{out} of Parliament altogether? Burke said there were Three
Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there
sat a \textit{Fourth Estate} more important far than they all. It
is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]very
momentous to us in these times. Literature is our Parliament too.
Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is
equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable.
Writing brings Printing; brings universal everyday extempore Printing,
as we see at present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole
nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable
weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what
rank he has, what revenues or garnitures.\  the requisite thing is,
that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing
more is requisite. The nation is governed by all that has tongue in
the nation: Democracy is virtually \textit{there}. Add only, that
whatsoever power exists will have itself, by and by, organized; working
secretly under bandages, obscurations, obstructions, it will never
rest till it get to work free, unencumbered, visible to all. Democracy
virtually extant will insist on becoming palpably extant.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

On all sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of the things
which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful
and worthy are the things we call Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper
with black ink on them;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]from the Daily Newspaper
to the sacred Hebrew \textit{book}, what have they not done, what
are they not doing!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]For indeed, whatever be
the outward form of the thing (bits of paper, as we say, and black
ink), is it not verily, at bottom, the highest act of man's faculty
that produces a Book? It is the \textit{Thought} of man; the true
thaumaturgic virtue; by which man works all things whatsoever. All
that he does, and brings to pass, is the vesture of a Thought. This
London City, with all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals,
and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what is it but a Thought,
but millions of Thoughts made into One;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a huge
immeasurable Spirit of a \textit{thought}, embodied in brick, in iron,
smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks,
and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to \textit{think}
of the making of that brick.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]The thing we called
{}``bits of paper with traces of black ink,'' is the \textit{purest}
embodiment a Thought of man can have. No wonder it is, in all ways,
the activest and noblest.

All this, of the importance and supreme importance of the Man of Letters
in modern Society, and how the Press is to such a degree superseding
the Pulpit, the Senate, the \textit{Senatus Academicus} and much else,
has been admitted for a good while; and recognized often enough, in
late times, with a sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment. It
seems to me, the Sentimental by and by will have to give place to
the Practical. If Men of Letters \textit{are} so incalculably influential,
actually performing such work for us from age to age, and even from
day to day, then I think we may conclude that Men of Letters will
not always wander like unrecognized unregulated Ishmaelites among
us! Whatsoever thing, as I said above, has virtual unnoticed power
will cast off its wrappages, bandages, and step forth one day with
palpably articulated, universally visible power. That one man wear
the clothes, and take the wages, of a function which is done by quite
another: there can be no profit in this; this is not right, it is
wrong. And yet, alas, the \textit{making} of it right,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]what
a business, for long times to come! Sure enough, this that we call
Organization of the Literary Guild is still a great way off, encumbered
with all manner of complexities. If you asked me what were the best
possible organization for the Men of Letters in modern society; the
arrangement of furtherance and regulation, grounded the most accurately
on the actual facts of their position and of the world's position,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I
should beg to say that the problem far exceeded my faculty! It is
not one man's faculty; it is that of many successive men turned earnestly
upon it, that will bring out even an approximate solution. What the
best arrangement were, none of us could say. But if you ask, Which
is the worst? I answer: This which we now have, that Chaos should
sit umpire in it; this is the worst. To the best, or any good one,
there is yet a long way.

One remark I must not omit, That royal or parliamentary grants of
money are by no means the chief thing wanted! To give our Men of Letters
stipends, endowments and all furtherance of cash, will do little towards
the business. On the whole, one is weary of hearing about the omnipotence
of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is no evil
to be poor; that there ought to be Literary Men poor,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]to
show whether they are genuine or not! Mendicant Orders, bodies of
good men doomed to beg, were instituted in the Christian Church; a
most natural and even necessary development of the spirit of Christianity.
It was itself founded on Poverty, on Sorrow, Contradiction, Crucifixion,
every species of worldly Distress and Degradation. We may say, that
he who has not known those things, and learned from them the priceless
lessons they have to teach, has missed a good opportunity of schooling.
To beg, and go barefoot, in coarse woollen cloak with a rope round
your loins, and be despised of all the world, was no beautiful business;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]nor
an honorable one in any eye, till the nobleness of those who did so
had made it honored of some!

Begging is not in our course at the present time: but for the rest
of it, who will say that a Johnson is not perhaps the better for being
poor? It is needful for him, at all rates, to know that outward profit,
that success of any kind is \textit{not} the goal he has to aim at.
Pride, vanity, ill-conditioned egoism of all sorts, are bred in his
heart, as in every heart; need, above all, to be cast out of his heart,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]to
be, with whatever pangs, torn out of it, cast forth from it, as a
thing worthless. Byron, born rich and noble, made out even less than
Burns, poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in that same {}``best possible
organization'' as yet far off, Poverty may still enter as an important
element? What if our Men of Letters, men setting up to be Spiritual
Heroes, were still \textit{then}, as they now are, a kind of {}``involuntary
monastic order;'' bound still to this same ugly Poverty,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]till
they had tried what was in it too, till they had learned to make it
too do for them! Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all.
We must know the province of it, and confine it there; and even spurn
it back, when it wishes to get farther.

Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season for them,
the fit assigner of them, all settled,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]how
is the Burns to be recognized that merits these? He must pass through
the ordeal, and prove himself.\  \textit{This} ordeal; this wild
welter of a chaos which is called Literary Life: this too is a kind
of ordeal! There is clear truth in the idea that a struggle from the
lower classes of society, towards the upper regions and rewards of
society, must ever continue. Strong men are born there, who ought
to stand elsewhere than there. The manifold, inextricably complex,
universal struggle of these constitutes, and must constitute, what
is called the progress of society. For Men of Letters, as for all
other sorts of men. How to regulate that struggle? There is the whole
question. To leave it as it is, at the mercy of blind Chance; a whirl
of distracted atoms, one cancelling the other; one of the thousand
arriving saved, nine hundred and ninety-nine lost by the way; your
royal Johnson languishing inactive in garrets, or harnessed to the
yoke of Printer Cave; your Burns dying broken-hearted as a Gauger;
your Rousseau driven into mad exasperation, kindling French Revolutions
by his paradoxes: this, as we said, is clearly enough the \textit{worst}
regulation. The \textit{best}, alas, is far from us!

And yet there can be no doubt but it is coming; advancing on us, as
yet hidden in the bosom of centuries: this is a prophecy one can risk.
For so soon as men get to discern the importance of a thing, they
do infallibly set about arranging it, facilitating, forwarding it;
and rest not till, in some approximate degree, they have accomplished
that. I say, of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes
at present extant in the world, there is no class comparable for importance
to that Priesthood of the Writers of Books. This is a fact which he
who runs may read,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and draw inferences from.
{}``Literature will take care of itself,'' answered Mr.\ Pitt,
when applied to for some help for Burns. {}``Yes,'' adds Mr.\ Southey,
{}``it will take care of itself; \textit{and of you too}, if you
do not look to it!''

The result to individual Men of Letters is not the momentous one;
they are but individuals, an infinitesimal fraction of the great body;
they can struggle on, and live or else die, as they have been wont.
But it deeply concerns the whole society, whether it will set its
\textit{light} on high places, to walk thereby; or trample it under
foot, and scatter it in all ways of wild waste (not without conflagration),
as heretofore! Light is the one thing wanted for the world. Put wisdom
in the head of the world, the world will fight its battle victoriously,
and be the best world man can make it. I called this anomaly of a
disorganic Literary Class the heart of all other anomalies, at once
product and parent; some good arrangement for that would be as the
\textit{punctum saliens} of a new vitality and just arrangement for
all. Already, in some European countries, in France, in Prussia, one
traces some beginnings of an arrangement for the Literary Class; indicating
the gradual possibility of such. I believe that it is possible; that
it will have to be possible.

By far the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese is one on
which we cannot arrive at clearness, but which excites endless curiosity
even in the dim state: this namely, that they do attempt to make their
Men of Letters their Governors! It would be rash to say, one understood
how this was done, or with what degree of success it was done. All
such things must be very unsuccessful; yet a small degree of success
is precious; the very attempt how precious! There does seem to be,
all over China, a more or less active search everywhere to discover
the men of talent that grow up in the young generation. Schools there
are for every one: a foolish sort of training, yet still a sort. The
youths who distinguish themselves in the lower school are promoted
into favorable stations in the higher, that they may still more distinguish
themselves,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]forward and forward: it appears
to be out of these that the Official Persons, and incipient Governors,
are taken. These are they whom they \textit{try} first, whether they
can govern or not. And surely with the best hope: for they are the
men that have already shown intellect. Try them: they have not governed
or administered as yet; perhaps they cannot; but there is no doubt
they \textit{have} some Understanding,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]without
which no man can! Neither is Understanding a \textit{tool}, as we
are too apt to figure; {}``it is a \textit{hand} which can handle
any tool.'' Try these men: they are of all others the best worth
trying.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Surely there is no kind of government,
constitution, revolution, social apparatus or arrangement, that I
know of in this world, so promising to one's scientific curiosity
as this. The man of intellect at the top of affairs: this is the aim
of all constitutions and revolutions, if they have any aim. For the
man of true intellect, as I assert and believe always, is the noble-hearted
man withal, the true, just, humane and valiant man. Get him for governor,
all is got; fail to get him, though you had Constitutions plentiful
as blackberries, and a Parliament in every village, there is nothing
yet got!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

These things look strange, truly; and are not such as we commonly
speculate upon. But we are fallen into strange times; these things
will require to be speculated upon; to be rendered practicable, to
be in some way put in practice. These, and many others. On all hands
of us, there is the announcement, audible enough, that the old Empire
of Routine has ended; that to say a thing has long been, is no reason
for its continuing to be. The things which have been are fallen into
decay, are fallen into incompetence; large masses of mankind, in every
society of our Europe, are no longer capable of living at all by the
things which have been. When millions of men can no longer by their
utmost exertion gain food for themselves, and {}``the third man for
thirty-six weeks each year is short of third-rate potatoes,'' the
things which have been must decidedly prepare to alter themselves!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I
will now quit this of the organization of Men of Letters.

Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest on those Literary Heroes of ours
was not the want of organization for Men of Letters, but a far deeper
one; out of which, indeed, this and so many other evils for the Literary
Man, and for all men, had, as from their fountain, taken rise. That
our Hero as Man of Letters had to travel without highway, companionless,
through an inorganic chaos,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and to leave his
own life and faculty lying there, as a partial contribution towards
\textit{pushing} some highway through it: this, had not his faculty
itself been so perverted and paralyzed, he might have put up with,
might have considered to be but the common lot of Heroes. His fatal
misery was the \textit{spiritual paralysis}, so we may name it, of
the Age in which his life lay; whereby his life too, do what he might,
was half paralyzed! The Eighteenth was a \textit{Sceptical} Century;
in which little word there is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries. Scepticism
means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of
infidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, in few centuries
that one could specify since the world began, was a life of Heroism
more difficult for a man. That was not an age of Faith,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]an
age of Heroes! The very possibility of Heroism had been, as it were,
formally abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever;
Triviality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. The {}``age
of miracles'' had been, or perhaps had not been; but it was not any
longer. An effete world; wherein Wonder, Greatness, Godhood could
not now dwell;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]in one word, a godless world!

How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]compared
not with the Christian Shakspeares and Miltons, but with the old Pagan
Skalds, with any species of believing men! The living \textit{tree}
Igdrasil, with the melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs,
deep-rooted as Hela, has died out into the clanking of a World-\textit{machine}.
{}``Tree'' and {}``Machine:'' contrast these two things. I, for
my share, declare the world to be no machine! I say that it does \textit{not}
go by wheel-and-pinion {}``motives'' self-interests, checks, balances;
that there is something far other in it than the clank of spinning-jennies,
and parliamentary majorities; and, on the whole, that it is not a
machine at all!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]The old Norse Heathen had a
truer motion of God's-world than these poor Machine-Sceptics: the
old Heathen Norse were \textit{sincere} men. But for these poor Sceptics
there was no sincerity, no truth. Half-truth and hearsay was called
truth. Truth, for most men, meant plausibility; to be measured by
the number of votes you could get. They had lost any notion that sincerity
was possible, or of what sincerity was. How many Plausibilities asking,
with unaffected surprise and the air of offended virtue, What! am
not I sincere? Spiritual Paralysis, I say, nothing left but a Mechanical
life, was the characteristic of that century. For the common man,
unless happily he stood \textit{below} his century and belonged to
another prior one, it was impossible to be a Believer, a Hero; he
lay buried, unconscious, under these baleful influences. To the strongest
man, only with infinite struggle and confusion was it possible to
work himself half loose; and lead as it were, in an enchanted, most
tragical way, a spiritual death-in-life, and be a Half-Hero!

Scepticism is the name we give to all this; as the chief symptom,
as the chief origin of all this. Concerning which so much were to
be said! It would take many Discourses, not a small fraction of one
Discourse, to state what one feels about that Eighteenth Century and
its ways. As indeed this, and the like of this, which we now call
Scepticism, is precisely the black malady and life-foe, against which
all teaching and discoursing since man's life began has directed itself:
the battle of Belief against Unbelief is the never-ending battle!
Neither is it in the way of crimination that one would wish to speak.
Scepticism, for that century, we must consider as the decay of old
ways of believing, the preparation afar off for new better and wider
ways,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]an inevitable thing. We will not blame
men for it; we will lament their hard fate. We will understand that
destruction of old \textit{forms} is not destruction of everlasting
\textit{substances}; that Scepticism, as sorrowful and hateful as
we see it, is not an end but a beginning.

The other day speaking, without prior purpose that way, of Bentham's
theory of man and man's life, I chanced to call it a more beggarly
one than Mahomet's. I am bound to say, now when it is once uttered,
that such is my deliberate opinion. Not that one would mean offence
against the man Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe him.
Bentham himself, and even the creed of Bentham, seems to me comparatively
worthy of praise. It is a determinate \textit{being} what all the
world, in a cowardly half-and-half manner, was tending to be. Let
us have the crisis; we shall either have death or the cure. I call
this gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith.
It was a laying-down of cant; a saying to oneself: {}``Well then,
this world is a dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation and selfish
Hunger; let us see what, by checking and balancing, and good adjustment
of tooth and pinion, can be made of it!'' Benthamism has something
complete, manful, in such fearless committal of itself to what it
finds true; you may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its \textit{eyes}
put out! It is the culminating point, and fearless ultimatum, of what
lay in the half-and-half state, pervading man's whole existence in
that Eighteenth Century. It seems to me, all deniers of Godhood, and
all lip-believers of it, are bound to be Benthamites, if they have
courage and honesty. Benthamism is an \textit{eyeless} Heroism: the
Human Species, like a hapless blinded Samson grinding in the Philistine
Mill, clasps convulsively the pillars of its Mill; brings huge ruin
down, but ultimately deliverance withal. Of Bentham I meant to say
no harm.

But this I do say, and would wish all men to know and lay to heart,
that he who discerns nothing but Mechanism in the Universe has in
the fatalest way missed the secret of the Universe altogether. That
all Godhood should vanish out of men's conception of this Universe
seems to me precisely the most brutal error,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I
will not disparage Heathenism by calling it a Heathen error,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]that
men could fall into. It is not true; it is false at the very heart
of it. A man who thinks so will think \textit{wrong} about all things
in the world; this original sin will vitiate all other conclusions
he can form. One might call it the most lamentable of Delusions,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]not
forgetting Witchcraft itself! Witchcraft worshipped at least a living
Devil; but this worships a dead iron Devil; no God, not even a Devil!
Whatsoever is noble, divine, inspired, drops thereby out of life.
There remains everywhere in life a despicable \textit{caput-mortuum};
the mechanical hull, all soul fled out of it. How can a man act heroically?
The {}``Doctrine of Motives'' will teach him that it is, under more
or less disguise, nothing but a wretched love of Pleasure, fear of
Pain; that Hunger, of applause, of cash, of whatsoever victual it
may be, is the ultimate fact of man's life. Atheism, in brief;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]which
does indeed frightfully punish itself. The man, I say, is become spiritually
a paralytic man; this godlike Universe a dead mechanical steam-engine,
all working by motives, checks, balances, and I know not what; wherein,
as in the detestable belly of some Phalaris'-Bull of his own contriving,
he the poor Phalaris sits miserably dying!

Belief I define to be the healthy act of a man's mind. It is a mysterious
indescribable process, that of getting to believe;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]indescribable,
as all vital acts are. We have our mind given us, not that it may
cavil and argue, but that it may see into something, give us clear
belief and understanding about something, whereon we are then to proceed
to act. Doubt, truly, is not itself a crime. Certainly we do not rush
out, clutch up the first thing we find, and straightway believe that!
All manner of doubt, inquiry, $\sigma\kappa\varepsilon\psi\iota\varsigma$
as it is named, about all manner of objects, dwells in every reasonable
mind. It is the mystic working of the mind, on the object it is \textit{getting}
to know and believe. Belief comes out of all this, above ground, like
the tree from its hidden \textit{roots}. But now if, even on common
things, we require that a man keep his doubts \textit{silent}, and
not babble of them till they in some measure become affirmations or
denials; how much more in regard to the highest things, impossible
to speak of in words at all! That a man parade his doubt, and get
to imagine that debating and logic (which means at best only the manner
of \textit{telling} us your thought, your belief or disbelief, about
a thing) is the triumph and true work of what intellect he has: alas,
this is as if you should \textit{overturn} the tree, and instead of
green boughs, leaves and fruits, show us ugly taloned roots turned
up into the air,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and no growth, only death
and misery going on!

For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral
also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives
by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things.
A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something
he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and
digest! Lower than that he will not get. We call those ages in which
he gets so low the mournfulest, sickest and meanest of all ages. The
world's heart is palsied, sick: how can any limb of it be whole? Genuine
Acting ceases in all departments of the world's work; dexterous Similitude
of Acting begins. The world's wages are pocketed, the world's work
is not done. Heroes have gone out; Quacks have come in. Accordingly,
what Century, since the end of the Roman world, which also was a time
of scepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, so abounds with
Quacks as that Eighteenth? Consider them, with their tumid sentimental
vaporing about virtue, benevolence,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the wretched
Quack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head of them! Few men were without
quackery; they had got to consider it a necessary ingredient and amalgam
for truth. Chatham, our brave Chatham himself, comes down to the House,
all wrapt and bandaged; he {}``has crawled out in great bodily suffering,''
and so on;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]\textit{forgets}, says Walpole,
that he is acting the sick man; in the fire of debate, snatches his
arm from the sling, and oratorically swings and brandishes it! Chatham
himself lives the strangest mimetic life, half-hero, half-quack, all
along. For indeed the world is full of dupes; and you have to gain
the \textit{world's} suffrage! How the duties of the world will be
done in that case, what quantities of error, which means failure,
which means sorrow and misery, to some and to many, will gradually
accumulate in all provinces of the world's business, we need not compute.

It seems to me, you lay your finger here on the heart of the world's
maladies, when you call it a Sceptical World. An insincere world;
a godless untruth of a world! It is out of this, as I consider, that
the whole tribe of social pestilences, French Revolutions, Chartisms,
and what not, have derived their being,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]their
chief necessity to be. This must alter. Till this alter, nothing can
beneficially alter. My one hope of the world, my inexpugnable consolation
in looking at the miseries of the world, is that this is altering.
Here and there one does now find a man who knows, as of old, that
this world is a Truth, and no Plausibility and Falsity; that he himself
is alive, not dead or paralytic; and that the world is alive, instinct
with Godhood, beautiful and awful, even as in the beginning of days!
One man once knowing this, many men, all men, must by and by come
to know it. It lies there clear, for whosoever will take the \textit{spectacles}
off his eyes and honestly look, to know! For such a man the Unbelieving
Century, with its unblessed Products, is already past; a new century
is already come. The old unblessed Products and Performances, as solid
as they look, are Phantasms, preparing speedily to vanish. To this
and the other noisy, very great-looking Simulacrum with the whole
world huzzaing at its heels, he can say, composedly stepping aside:
Thou art not \textit{true}; thou art not extant, only semblant; go
thy way!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Yes, hollow Formulism, gross Benthamism,
and other unheroic atheistic Insincerity is visibly and even rapidly
declining. An unbelieving Eighteenth Century is but an exception,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]such
as now and then occurs. I prophesy that the world will once more become
\textit{sincere}; a believing world; with \textit{many} Heroes in
it, a heroic world! It will then be a victorious world; never till
then.

Or indeed what of the world and its victories? Men speak too much
about the world. Each one of us here, let the world go how it will,
and be victorious or not victorious, has he not a Life of his own
to lead? One Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities;
no second chance to us forevermore! It were well for us to live not
as fools and simulacra, but as wise and realities. The world's being
saved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. We
should look to ourselves: there is great merit here in the {}``duty
of staying at home''! And, on the whole, to say truth, I never heard
of {}``world's'' being {}``saved'' in any other way. That mania
of saving worlds is itself a piece of the Eighteenth Century with
its windy sentimentalism. Let us not follow it too far. For the saving
of the \textit{world} I will trust confidently to the Maker of the
world; and look a little to my own saving, which I am more competent
to!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]In brief, for the world's sake, and for
our own, we will rejoice greatly that Scepticism, Insincerity, Mechanical
Atheism, with all their poison-dews, are going, and as good as gone.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

Now it was under such conditions, in those times of Johnson, that
our Men of Letters had to live. Times in which there was properly
no truth in life. Old truths had fallen nigh dumb; the new lay yet
hidden, not trying to speak. That Man's Life here below was a Sincerity
and Fact, and would forever continue such, no new intimation, in that
dusk of the world, had yet dawned. No intimation; not even any French
Revolution,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]which we define to be a Truth once
more, though a Truth clad in hell-fire! How different was the Luther's
pilgrimage, with its assured goal, from the Johnson's, girt with mere
traditions, suppositions, grown now incredible, unintelligible! Mahomet's
Formulas were of {}``wood waxed and oiled,'' and could be burnt
out of one's way: poor Johnson's were far more difficult to burn.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]The
strong man will ever find \textit{work}, which means difficulty, pain,
to the full measure of his strength. But to make out a victory, in
those circumstances of our poor Hero as Man of Letters, was perhaps
more difficult than in any. Not obstruction, disorganization, Bookseller
Osborne and Fourpence-halfpenny a day; not this alone; but the light
of his own soul was taken from him. No landmark on the Earth; and,
alas, what is that to having no loadstar in the Heaven! We need not
wonder that none of those Three men rose to victory. That they fought
truly is the highest praise. With a mournful sympathy we will contemplate,
if not three living victorious Heroes, as I said, the Tombs of three
fallen Heroes! They fell for us too; making a way for us. There are
the mountains which they hurled abroad in their confused War of the
Giants; under which, their strength and life spent, they now lie buried.

I have already written of these three Literary Heroes, expressly or
incidentally; what I suppose is known to most of you; what need not
be spoken or written a second time. They concern us here as the singular
\textit{Prophets} of that singular age; for such they virtually were;
and the aspect they and their world exhibit, under this point of view,
might lead us into reflections enough! I call them, all three, Genuine
Men more or less; faithfully, for most part unconsciously, struggling
to be genuine, and plant themselves on the everlasting truth of things.
This to a degree that eminently distinguishes them from the poor artificial
mass of their contemporaries; and renders them worthy to be considered
as Speakers, in some measure, of the everlasting truth, as Prophets
in that age of theirs. By Nature herself a noble necessity was laid
on them to be so. They were men of such magnitude that they could
not live on unrealities,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]clouds, froth and
all inanity gave way under them: there was no footing for them but
on firm earth; no rest or regular motion for them, if they got not
footing there. To a certain extent, they were Sons of Nature once
more in an age of Artifice; once more, Original Men.

As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by nature, one
of our great English souls. A strong and noble man; so much left undeveloped
in him to the last: in a kindlier element what might he not have been,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Poet,
Priest, sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a man must not complain of
his {}``element,'' of his {}``time,'' or the like; it is thriftless
work doing so. His time is bad: well then, he is there to make it
better!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Johnson's youth was poor, isolated,
hopeless, very miserable. Indeed, it does not seem possible that,
in any the favorablest outward circumstances, Johnson's life could
have been other than a painful one. The world might have had more
of profitable \textit{work} out of him, or less; but his \textit{effort}
against the world's work could never have been a light one. Nature,
in return for his nobleness, had said to him, Live in an element of
diseased sorrow. Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the nobleness were intimately
and even inseparably connected with each other. At all events, poor
Johnson had to go about girt with continual hypochondria, physical
and spiritual pain. Like a Hercules with the burning Nessus'-shirt
on him, which shoots in on him dull incurable misery: the Nessus'-shirt
not to be stript off, which is his own natural skin! In this manner
\textit{he} had to live. Figure him there, with his scrofulous diseases,
with his great greedy heart, and unspeakable chaos of thoughts; stalking
mournful as a stranger in this Earth; eagerly devouring what spiritual
thing he could come at: school-languages and other merely grammatical
stuff, if there were nothing better! The largest soul that was in
all England; and provision made for it of {}``fourpence-halfpenny
a day.'' Yet a giant invincible soul; a true man's. One remembers
always that story of the shoes at Oxford: the rough, seamy-faced,
rawboned College Servitor stalking about, in winter-season, with his
shoes worn out; how the charitable Gentleman Commoner secretly places
a new pair at his door; and the rawboned Servitor, lifting them, looking
at them near, with his dim eyes, with what thoughts,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]pitches
them out of window! Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will;
but not beggary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help
here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want,
yet of nobleness and manfulness withal. It is a type of the man's
life, this pitching away of the shoes. An original man;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]not
a second-hand, borrowing or begging man. Let us stand on our own basis,
at any rate! On such shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud,
if you will, but honestly on that;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]on the reality
and substance which Nature gives \textit{us}, not on the semblance,
on the thing she has given another than us!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there
ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was
really higher than he? Great souls are always loyally submissive,
reverent to what is over them; only small mean souls are otherwise.
I could not find a better proof of what I said the other day, That
the sincere man was by nature the obedient man; that only in a World
of Heroes was there loyal Obedience to the Heroic. The essence of
\textit{originality} is not that it be \textit{new}: Johnson believed
altogether in the old; he found the old opinions credible for him,
fit for him; and in a right heroic manner lived under them. He is
well worth study in regard to that. For we are to say that Johnson
was far other than a mere man of words and formulas; he was a man
of truths and facts. He stood by the old formulas; the happier was
it for him that he could so stand: but in all formulas that \textit{he}
could stand by, there needed to be a most genuine substance. Very
curious how, in that poor Paper-age, so barren, artificial, thick-quilted
with Pedantries, Hearsays, the great Fact of this Universe glared
in, forever wonderful, indubitable, unspeakable, divine-infernal,
upon this man too! How he harmonized his Formulas with it, how he
managed at all under such circumstances: that is a thing worth seeing.
A thing {}``to be looked at with reverence, with pity, with awe.''
That Church of St.\ Clement Danes, where Johnson still \textit{worshipped}
in the era of Voltaire, is to me a venerable place.

It was in virtue of his \textit{sincerity}, of his speaking still
in some sort from the heart of Nature, though in the current artificial
dialect, that Johnson was a Prophet. Are not all dialects {}``artificial''?
Artificial things are not all false;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]nay every
true Product of Nature will infallibly \textit{shape} itself; we may
say all artificial things are, at the starting of them, \textit{true}.
What we call {}``Formulas'' are not in their origin bad; they are
indispensably good. Formula is \textit{method}, habitude; found wherever
man is found. Formulas fashion themselves as Paths do, as beaten Highways,
leading toward some sacred or high object, whither many men are bent.
Consider it. One man, full of heartfelt earnest impulse, finds out
a way of doing somewhat,--were it of uttering his soul's reverence
for the Highest, were it but of fitly saluting his fellow-man. An
inventor was needed to do that, a \textit{poet}; he has articulated
the dim-struggling thought that dwelt in his own and many hearts.
This is his way of doing that; these are his footsteps, the beginning
of a {}``Path.'' And now see: the second men travels naturally in
the footsteps of his foregoer, it is the \textit{easiest} method.
In the footsteps of his foregoer; yet with improvements, with changes
where such seem good; at all events with enlargements, the Path ever
\textit{widening} itself as more travel it;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]till
at last there is a broad Highway whereon the whole world may travel
and drive. While there remains a City or Shrine, or any Reality to
drive to, at the farther end, the Highway shall be right welcome!
When the City is gone, we will forsake the Highway. In this manner
all Institutions, Practices, Regulated Things in the world have come
into existence, and gone out of existence. Formulas all begin by being
\textit{full} of substance; you may call them the \textit{skin}, the
articulation into shape, into limbs and skin, of a substance that
is already there: \textit{they} had not been there otherwise. Idols,
as we said, are not idolatrous till they become doubtful, empty for
the worshipper's heart. Much as we talk against Formulas, I hope no
one of us is ignorant withal of the high significance of \textit{true}
Formulas; that they were, and will ever be, the indispensablest furniture
of our habitation in this world.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his {}``sincerity.'' He
has no suspicion of his being particularly sincere,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]of
his being particularly anything! A hard-struggling, weary-hearted
man, or {}``scholar'' as he calls himself, trying hard to get some
honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]without
stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in him. He does not {}``engrave
\textit{Truth} on his watch-seal;'' no, but he stands by truth, speaks
by it, works and lives by it. Thus it ever is. Think of it once more.
The man whom Nature has appointed to do great things is, first of
all, furnished with that openness to Nature which renders him incapable
of being \textit{in}sincere! To his large, open, deep-feeling heart
Nature is a Fact: all hearsay is hearsay; the unspeakable greatness
of this Mystery of Life, let him acknowledge it or not, nay even though
he seem to forget it or deny it, is ever present to \textit{him},\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]fearful
and wonderful, on this hand and on that. He has a basis of sincerity;
unrecognized, because never questioned or capable of question. Mirabeau,
Mahomet, Cromwell, Napoleon: all the Great Men I ever heard of have
this as the primary material of them. Innumerable commonplace men
are debating, are talking everywhere their commonplace doctrines,
which they have learned by logic, by rote, at second-hand: to that
kind of man all this is still nothing. He must have truth; truth which
\textit{he} feels to be true. How shall he stand otherwise? His whole
soul, at all moments, in all ways, tells him that there is no standing.
He is under the noble necessity of being true. Johnson's way of thinking
about this world is not mine, any more than Mahomet's was: but I recognize
the everlasting element of \textit{heart-sincerity} in both; and see
with pleasure how neither of them remains ineffectual. Neither of
them is as \textit{chaff} sown; in both of them is something which
the seedfield will \textit{grow}.

Johnson was a Prophet to his people; preached a Gospel to them,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as
all like him always do. The highest Gospel he preached we may describe
as a kind of Moral Prudence: {}``in a world where much is to be done,
and little is to be known,'' see how you will \textit{do} it! A thing
well worth preaching. {}``A world where much is to be done, and little
is to be known:'' do not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless
abysses of Doubt, of wretched god-forgetting Unbelief;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]you
were miserable then, powerless, mad: how could you \textit{do} or
work at all? Such Gospel Johnson preached and taught;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]coupled,
theoretically and practically, with this other great Gospel, {}``Clear
your mind of Cant!'' Have no trade with Cant: stand on the cold mud
in the frosty weather, but let it be in your own \textit{real} torn
shoes: {}``that will be better for you,'' as Mahomet says! I call
this, I call these two things \textit{joined together}, a great Gospel,
the greatest perhaps that was possible at that time.

Johnson's Writings, which once had such currency and celebrity, are
now as it were disowned by the young generation. It is not wonderful;
Johnson's opinions are fast becoming obsolete: but his style of thinking
and of living, we may hope, will never become obsolete. I find in
Johnson's Books the indisputablest traces of a great intellect and
great heart;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]ever welcome, under what obstructions
and perversions soever. They are \textit{sincere} words, those of
his; he means things by them. A wondrous buckram style,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
best he could get to then; a measured grandiloquence, stepping or
rather stalking along in a very solemn way, grown obsolete now; sometimes
a tumid \textit{size} of phraseology not in proportion to the contents
of it: all this you will put up with. For the phraseology, tumid or
not, has always \textit{something within it}. So many beautiful styles
and books, with \textit{nothing} in them;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a
man is a malefactor to the world who writes such! \textit{They} are
the avoidable kind!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Had Johnson left nothing
but his \textit{Dictionary}, one might have traced there a great intellect,
a genuine man. Looking to its clearness of definition, its general
solidity, honesty, insight and successful method, it may be called
the best of all Dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural
nobleness; it stands there like a great solid square-built edifice,
finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a true Builder did
it.

One word, in spite of our haste, must be granted to poor Bozzy. He
passes for a mean, inflated, gluttonous creature; and was so in many
senses. Yet the fact of his reverence for Johnson will ever remain
noteworthy. The foolish conceited Scotch Laird, the most conceited
man of his time, approaching in such awe-struck attitude the great
dusty irascible Pedagogue in his mean garret there: it is a genuine
reverence for Excellence; a \textit{worship} for Heroes, at a time
when neither Heroes nor worship were surmised to exist. Heroes, it
would seem, exist always, and a certain worship of them! We will also
take the liberty to deny altogether that of the witty Frenchman, that
no man is a Hero to his valet-de-chambre. Or if so, it is not the
Hero's blame, but the Valet's: that his soul, namely, is a mean \textit{valet}-soul!
He expects his Hero to advance in royal stage-trappings, with measured
step, trains borne behind him, trumpets sounding before him. It should
stand rather, No man can be a \textit{Grand-Monarque} to his valet-de-chambre.
Strip your Louis Quatorze of his king-gear, and there \textit{is}
left nothing but a poor forked radish with a head fantastically carved;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]admirable
to no valet. The Valet does not know a Hero when he sees him! Alas,
no: it requires a kind of \textit{Hero} to do that;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
one of the world's wants, in \textit{this} as in other senses, is
for most part want of such.

On the whole, shall we not say, that Boswell's admiration was well
bestowed; that he could have found no soul in all England so worthy
of bending down before? Shall we not say, of this great mournful Johnson
too, that he guided his difficult confused existence wisely; led it
\textit{well}, like a right valiant man? That waste chaos of Authorship
by trade; that waste chaos of Scepticism in religion and politics,
in life-theory and life-practice; in his poverty, in his dust and
dimness, with the sick body and the rusty coat: he made it do for
him, like a brave man. Not wholly without a loadstar in the Eternal;
he had still a loadstar, as the brave all need to have: with his eye
set on that, he would change his course for nothing in these confused
vortices of the lower sea of Time. {}``To the Spirit of Lies, bearing
death and hunger, he would in nowise strike his flag.'' Brave old
Samuel: \textit{ultimus Romanorum}!

Of Rousseau and his Heroism I cannot say so much. He is not what I
call a strong man. A morbid, excitable, spasmodic man; at best, intense
rather than strong. He had not {}``the talent of Silence,'' an invaluable
talent; which few Frenchmen, or indeed men of any sort in these times,
excel in! The suffering man ought really {}``to consume his own smoke;''
there is no good in emitting \textit{smoke} till you have made it
into \textit{fire},\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]which, in the metaphorical
sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming! Rousseau has not depth
or width, not calm force for difficulty; the first characteristic
of true greatness. A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity
strength! A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six
men cannot hold him then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight
without staggering, he is the strong man. We need forever, especially
in these loud-shrieking days, to remind ourselves of that. A man who
cannot \textit{hold his peace}, till the time come for speaking and
acting, is no right man.

Poor Rousseau's face is to me expressive of him. A high but narrow
contracted intensity in it: bony brows; deep, strait-set eyes, in
which there is something bewildered-looking,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]bewildered,
peering with lynx-eagerness. A face full of misery, even ignoble misery,
and also of the antagonism against that; something mean, plebeian
there, redeemed only by \textit{intensity}: the face of what is called
a Fanatic,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a sadly \textit{contracted} Hero!
We name him here because, with all his drawbacks, and they are many,
he has the first and chief characteristic of a Hero: he is heartily
\textit{in earnest}. In earnest, if ever man was; as none of these
French Philosophers were. Nay, one would say, of an earnestness too
great for his otherwise sensitive, rather feeble nature; and which
indeed in the end drove him into the strangest incoherences, almost
delirations. There had come, at last, to be a kind of madness in him:
his Ideas \textit{possessed} him like demons; hurried him so about,
drove him over steep places!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

The fault and misery of Rousseau was what we easily name by a single
word, \textit{Egoism}; which is indeed the source and summary of all
faults and miseries whatsoever. He had not perfected himself into
victory over mere Desire; a mean Hunger, in many sorts, was still
the motive principle of him. I am afraid he was a very vain man; hungry
for the praises of men. You remember Genlis's experience of him. She
took Jean Jacques to the Theatre; he bargaining for a strict incognito,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]{}``He
would not be seen there for the world!'' The curtain did happen nevertheless
to be drawn aside: the Pit recognized Jean Jacques, but took no great
notice of him! He expressed the bitterest indignation; gloomed all
evening, spake no other than surly words. The glib Countess remained
entirely convinced that his anger was not at being seen, but at not
being applauded when seen. How the whole nature of the man is poisoned;
nothing but suspicion, self-isolation, fierce moody ways! He could
not live with anybody. A man of some rank from the country, who visited
him often, and used to sit with him, expressing all reverence and
affection for him, comes one day; finds Jean Jacques full of the sourest
unintelligible humor. {}``Monsieur,'' said Jean Jacques, with flaming
eyes, {}``I know why you come here. You come to see what a poor life
I lead; how little is in my poor pot that is boiling there. Well,
look into the pot! There is half a pound of meat, one carrot and three
onions; that is all: go and tell the whole world that, if you like,
Monsieur!''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]A man of this sort was far gone.
The whole world got itself supplied with anecdotes, for light laughter,
for a certain theatrical interest, from these perversions and contortions
of poor Jean Jacques. Alas, to him they were not laughing or theatrical;
too real to him! The contortions of a dying gladiator: the crowded
amphitheatre looks on with entertainment; but the gladiator is in
agonies and dying.

And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passionate appeals to Mothers,
with his \textit{contrat-social}, with his celebrations of Nature,
even of savage life in Nature, did once more touch upon Reality, struggle
towards Reality; was doing the function of a Prophet to his Time.
As he could, and as the Time could! Strangely through all that defacement,
degradation and almost madness, there is in the inmost heart of poor
Rousseau a spark of real heavenly fire. Once more, out of the element
of that withered mocking Philosophism, Scepticism and Persiflage,
there has arisen in this man the ineradicable feeling and knowledge
that this Life of ours is true: not a Scepticism, Theorem, or Persiflage,
but a Fact, an awful Reality. Nature had made that revelation to him;
had ordered him to speak it out. He got it spoken out; if not well
and clearly, then ill and dimly,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]as clearly
as he could. Nay what are all errors and perversities of his, even
those stealings of ribbons, aimless confused miseries and vagabondisms,
if we will interpret them kindly, but the blinkard dazzlement and
staggerings to and fro of a man sent on an errand he is too weak for,
by a path he cannot yet find? Men are led by strange ways. One should
have tolerance for a man, hope of him; leave him to try yet what he
will do. While life lasts, hope lasts for every man.

Of Rousseau's literary talents, greatly celebrated still among his
countrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like himself, are what I
call unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. There is a sensuality
in Rousseau. Combined with such an intellectual gift as his, it makes
pictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness: but they are not genuinely
poetical. Not white sunlight: something \textit{operatic}; a kind
of rose-pink, artificial bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it
is universal, among the French since his time. Madame de Stael has
something of it; St.\ Pierre; and down onwards to the present astonishing
convulsionary {}``Literature of Desperation,'' it is everywhere
abundant. That same \textit{rose-pink} is not the right hue. Look
at a Shakspeare, at a Goethe, even at a Walter Scott! He who has once
seen into this, has seen the difference of the True from the Sham-True,
and will discriminate them ever afterwards.

We had to observe in Johnson how much good a Prophet, under all disadvantages
and disorganizations, can accomplish for the world. In Rousseau we
are called to look rather at the fearful amount of evil which, under
such disorganization, may accompany the good. Historically it is a
most pregnant spectacle, that of Rousseau. Banished into Paris garrets,
in the gloomy company of his own Thoughts and Necessities there; driven
from post to pillar; fretted, exasperated till the heart of him went
mad, he had grown to feel deeply that the world was not his friend
nor the world's law. It was expedient, if any way possible, that such
a man should \textit{not} have been set in flat hostility with the
world. He could be cooped into garrets, laughed at as a maniac, left
to starve like a wild beast in his cage;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]but
he could not be hindered from setting the world on fire. The French
Revolution found its Evangelist in Rousseau. His semi-delirious speculations
on the miseries of civilized life, the preferability of the savage
to the civilized, and such like, helped well to produce a whole delirium
in France generally. True, you may well ask, What could the world,
the governors of the world, do with such a man? Difficult to say what
the governors of the world could do with him! What he could do with
them is unhappily clear enough,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]\textit{guillotine}
a great many of them! Enough now of Rousseau.

It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbelieving second-hand
Eighteenth Century, that of a Hero starting up, among the artificial
pasteboard figures and productions, in the guise of a Robert Burns.
Like a little well in the rocky desert places,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]like
a sudden splendor of Heaven in the artificial Vauxhall! People knew
not what to make of it. They took it for a piece of the Vauxhall fire-work;
alas, it \textit{let} itself be so taken, though struggling half-blindly,
as in bitterness of death, against that! Perhaps no man had such a
false reception from his fellow-men. Once more a very wasteful life-drama
was enacted under the sun.

The tragedy of Burns's life is known to all of you. Surely we may
say, if discrepancy between place held and place merited constitute
perverseness of lot for a man, no lot could be more perverse then
Burns's. Among those second-hand acting-figures, \textit{mimes} for
most part, of the Eighteenth Century, once more a giant Original Man;
one of those men who reach down to the perennial Deeps, who take rank
with the Heroic among men: and he was born in a poor Ayrshire hut.
The largest soul of all the British lands came among us in the shape
of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant.

His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things; did not succeed
in any; was involved in continual difficulties. The Steward, Factor
as the Scotch call him, used to send letters and threatenings, Burns
says, {}``which threw us all into tears.'' The brave, hard-toiling,
hard-suffering Father, his brave heroine of a wife; and those children,
of whom Robert was one! In this Earth, so wide otherwise, no shelter
for \textit{them}. The letters {}``threw us all into tears:'' figure
it. The brave Father, I say always;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a \textit{silent}
Hero and Poet; without whom the son had never been a speaking one!
Burns's Schoolmaster came afterwards to London, learnt what good society
was; but declares that in no meeting of men did he ever enjoy better
discourse than at the hearth of this peasant. And his poor {}``seven
acres of nursery-ground,''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]not that, nor the
miserable patch of clay-farm, nor anything he tried to get a living
by, would prosper with him; he had a sore unequal battle all his days.
But he stood to it valiantly; a wise, faithful, unconquerable man;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]swallowing
down how many sore sufferings daily into silence; fighting like an
unseen Hero,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]nobody publishing newspaper paragraphs
about his nobleness; voting pieces of plate to him! However, he was
not lost; nothing is lost. Robert is there the outcome of him,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
indeed of many generations of such as him.

This Burns appeared under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor,
born only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that,
in a rustic special dialect, known only to a small province of the
country he lived in. Had he written, even what he did write, in the
general language of England, I doubt not he had already become universally
recognized as being, or capable to be, one of our greatest men. That
he should have tempted so many to penetrate through the rough husk
of that dialect of his, is proof that there lay something far from
common within it. He has gained a certain recognition, and is continuing
to do so over all quarters of our wide Saxon world: wheresoever a
Saxon dialect is spoken, it begins to be understood, by personal inspection
of this and the other, that one of the most considerable Saxon men
of the Eighteenth Century was an Ayrshire Peasant named Robert Burns.
Yes, I will say, here too was a piece of the right Saxon stuff: strong
as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]rock,
yet with wells of living softness in it! A wild impetuous whirlwind
of passion and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly \textit{melody}
dwelling in the heart of it. A noble rough genuineness; homely, rustic,
honest; true simplicity of strength; with its lightning-fire, with
its soft dewy pity;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]like the old Norse Thor,
the Peasant-god!

Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and worth, has told me
that Robert, in his young days, in spite of their hardship, was usually
the gayest of speech; a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter, sense
and heart; far pleasanter to hear there, stript cutting peats in the
bog, or such like, than he ever afterwards knew him. I can well believe
it. This basis of mirth ({}``\textit{fond gaillard},'' as old Marquis
Mirabeau calls it), a primal element of sunshine and joyfulness, coupled
with his other deep and earnest qualities, is one of the most attractive
characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope dwells in him; spite
of his tragical history, he is not a mourning man. He shakes his sorrows
gallantly aside; bounds forth victorious over them. It is as the lion
shaking {}``dew-drops from his mane;'' as the swift-bounding horse,
that \textit{laughs} at the shaking of the spear.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]But
indeed, Hope, Mirth, of the sort like Burns's, are they not the outcome
properly of warm generous affection,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]such as
is the beginning of all to every man?

You would think it strange if I called Burns the most gifted British
soul we had in all that century of his: and yet I believe the day
is coming when there will be little danger in saying so. His writings,
all that he \textit{did} under such obstructions, are only a poor
fragment of him. Professor Stewart remarked very justly, what indeed
is true of all Poets good for much, that his poetry was not any particular
faculty; but the general result of a naturally vigorous original mind
expressing itself in that way. Burns's gifts, expressed in conversation,
are the theme of all that ever heard him. All kinds of gifts: from
the gracefulest utterances of courtesy, to the highest fire of passionate
speech; loud floods of mirth, soft wailings of affection, laconic
emphasis, clear piercing insight; all was in him. Witty duchesses
celebrate him as a man whose speech {}``led them off their feet.''
This is beautiful: but still more beautiful that which Mr.\ Lockhart
has recorded, which I have more than once alluded to, How the waiters
and ostlers at inns would get out of bed, and come crowding to hear
this man speak! Waiters and ostlers:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]they too
were men, and here was a man! I have heard much about his speech;
but one of the best things I ever heard of it was, last year, from
a venerable gentleman long familiar with him. That it was speech distinguished
by always \textit{having something in it}. {}``He spoke rather little
than much,'' this old man told me; {}``sat rather silent in those
early days, as in the company of persons above him; and always when
he did speak, it was to throw new light on the matter.'' I know not
why any one should ever speak otherwise!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]But
if we look at his general force of soul, his healthy \textit{robustness}
every way, the rugged downrightness, penetration, generous valor and
manfulness that was in him,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]where shall we
readily find a better-gifted man?

Among the great men of the Eighteenth Century, I sometimes feel as
if Burns might be found to resemble Mirabeau more than any other.
They differ widely in vesture; yet look at them intrinsically. There
is the same burly thick-necked strength of body as of soul;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]built,
in both cases, on what the old Marquis calls a \textit{fond gaillard}.
By nature, by course of breeding, indeed by nation, Mirabeau has much
more of bluster; a noisy, forward, unresting man. But the characteristic
of Mirabeau too is veracity and sense, power of true \textit{insight},
superiority of vision. The thing that he says is worth remembering.
It is a flash of insight into some object or other: so do both these
men speak. The same raging passions; capable too in both of manifesting
themselves as the tenderest noble affections. Wit; wild laughter,
energy, directness, sincerity: these were in both. The types of the
two men are not dissimilar. Burns too could have governed, debated
in National Assemblies; politicized, as few could. Alas, the courage
which had to exhibit itself in capture of smuggling schooners in the
Solway Frith; in keeping \textit{silence} over so much, where no good
speech, but only inarticulate rage was possible: this might have bellowed
forth Ushers de Breze and the like; and made itself visible to all
men, in managing of kingdoms, in ruling of great ever-memorable epochs!
But they said to him reprovingly, his Official Superiors said, and
wrote: {}``You are to work, not think.'' Of your \textit{thinking-faculty},
the greatest in this land, we have no need; you are to gauge beer
there; for that only are you wanted. Very notable;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
worth mentioning, though we know what is to be said and answered!
As if Thought, Power of Thinking, were not, at all times, in all places
and situations of the world, precisely the thing that was wanted.
The fatal man, is he not always the unthinking man, the man who cannot
think and \textit{see}; but only grope, and hallucinate, and \textit{mis}see
the nature of the thing he works with? He mis-sees it, mis\_takes\_
it as we say; takes it for one thing, and it \textit{is} another thing,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
leaves him standing like a Futility there! He is the fatal man; unutterably
fatal, put in the high places of men.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]{}``Why
complain of this?'' say some: {}``Strength is mournfully denied
its arena; that was true from of old.'' Doubtless; and the worse
for the \textit{arena}, answer I! \textit{Complaining} profits little;
stating of the truth may profit. That a Europe, with its French Revolution
just breaking out, finds no need of a Burns except for gauging beer,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]is
a thing I, for one, cannot \textit{rejoice} at!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

Once more we have to say here, that the chief quality of Burns is
the \textit{sincerity} of him. So in his Poetry, so in his Life. The
song he sings is not of fantasticalities; it is of a thing felt, really
there; the prime merit of this, as of all in him, and of his Life
generally, is truth. The Life of Burns is what we may call a great
tragic sincerity. A sort of savage sincerity,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]not
cruel, far from that; but wild, wrestling naked with the truth of
things. In that sense, there is something of the savage in all great
men.

Hero-worship,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Odin, Burns? Well; these Men
of Letters too were not without a kind of Hero-worship: but what a
strange condition has that got into now! The waiters and ostlers of
Scotch inns, prying about the door, eager to catch any word that fell
from Burns, were doing unconscious reverence to the Heroic. Johnson
had his Boswell for worshipper. Rousseau had worshippers enough; princes
calling on him in his mean garret; the great, the beautiful doing
reverence to the poor moon-struck man. For himself a most portentous
contradiction; the two ends of his life not to be brought into harmony.
He sits at the tables of grandees; and has to copy music for his own
living. He cannot even get his music copied: {}``By dint of dining
out,'' says he, {}``I run the risk of dying by starvation at home.''
For his worshippers too a most questionable thing! If doing Hero-worship
well or badly be the test of vital well-being or ill-being to a generation,
can we say that \textit{these} generations are very first-rate?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]And
yet our heroic Men of Letters do teach, govern, are kings, priests,
or what you like to call them; intrinsically there is no preventing
it by any means whatever. The world has to obey him who thinks and
sees in the world. The world can alter the manner of that; can either
have it as blessed continuous summer sunshine, or as unblessed black
thunder and tornado,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]with unspeakable difference
of profit for the world! The manner of it is very alterable; the matter
and fact of it is not alterable by any power under the sky. Light;
or, failing that, lightning: the world can take its choice. Not whether
we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, or what we call him; but whether
we believe the word he tells us: there it all lies. If it be a true
word, we shall have to believe it; believing it, we shall have to
do it. What \textit{name} or welcome we give him or it, is a point
that concerns ourselves mainly.\  \textit{It}, the new Truth, new
deeper revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verily of the
nature of a message from on high; and must and will have itself obeyed.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns's history,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]his
visit to Edinburgh. Often it seems to me as if his demeanor there
were the highest proof he gave of what a fund of worth and genuine
manhood was in him. If we think of it, few heavier burdens could be
laid on the strength of a man. So sudden; all common \textit{Lionism}.\ 
which ruins innumerable men, was as nothing to this. It is as if Napoleon
had been made a King of, not gradually, but at once from the Artillery
Lieutenancy in the Regiment La Fere. Burns, still only in his twenty-seventh
year, is no longer even a ploughman; he is flying to the West Indies
to escape disgrace and a jail. This month he is a ruined peasant,
his wages seven pounds a year, and these gone from him: next month
he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing down jewelled Duchesses
to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes! Adversity is sometimes hard upon
a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred
that will stand adversity. I admire much the way in which Burns met
all this. Perhaps no man one could point out, was ever so sorely tried,
and so little forgot himself. Tranquil, unastonished; not abashed,
not inflated, neither awkwardness nor affectation: he feels that \textit{he}
there is the man Robert Burns; that the {}``rank is but the guinea-stamp;''
that the celebrity is but the candle-light, which will show \textit{what}
man, not in the least make him a better or other man! Alas, it may
readily, unless he look to it, make him a \textit{worse} man; a wretched
inflated wind-bag,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]inflated till he \textit{burst},
and become a \textit{dead} lion; for whom, as some one has said, {}``there
is no resurrection of the body;'' worse than a living dog!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Burns
is admirable here.

And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these Lion-hunters were
the ruin and death of Burns. It was they that rendered it impossible
for him to live! They gathered round him in his Farm; hindered his
industry; no place was remote enough from them. He could not get his
Lionism forgotten, honestly as he was disposed to do so. He falls
into discontents, into miseries, faults; the world getting ever more
desolate for him; health, character, peace of mind, all gone;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]solitary
enough now. It is tragical to think of! These men came but to \textit{see}
him; it was out of no sympathy with him, nor no hatred to him. They
came to get a little amusement; they got their amusement;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
the Hero's life went for it!

Richter says, in the Island of Sumatra there is a kind of {}``Light-chafers,''
large Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits, and illuminate the
ways with at night. Persons of condition can thus travel with a pleasant
radiance, which they much admire. Great honor to the Fire-flies! But\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]!


\chapter*{\raggedright {}{[}May 22, 1840.{]} LECTURE VI. }

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{{[}May 22, 1840.{]} LECTURE VI.}

\markboth{Heroes and Hero Worship}{The Hero as King}


\subsection*{\textit{\emph{The}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{Hero}} \emph{}\textit{\emph{as}}
\emph{}\textit{\emph{King}}\emph{.} \textit{\emph{Cromwell}}\emph{,}
\textit{\emph{Napoleon}}\emph{:} \textit{\emph{Modern}} Revolutionism\emph{.}}

We come now to the last form of Heroism; that which we call Kingship.
The Commander over Men; he to whose will our wills are to be subordinated,
and loyally surrender themselves, and find their welfare in doing
so, may be reckoned the most important of Great Men. He is practically
the summary for us of \textit{all} the various figures of Heroism;
Priest, Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of spiritual dignity we
can fancy to reside in a man, embodies itself here, to \textit{command}
over us, to furnish us with constant practical teaching, to tell us
for the day and hour what we are to \textit{do}. He is called \textit{Rex},
Regulator, \textit{Roi}: our own name is still better; King, \textit{Konning},
which means \textit{Can}-ning, Able-man.

Numerous considerations, pointing towards deep, questionable, and
indeed unfathomable regions, present themselves here: on the most
of which we must resolutely for the present forbear to speak at all.
As Burke said that perhaps fair \textit{Trial by Jury} was the soul
of Government, and that all legislation, administration, parliamentary
debating, and the rest of it, went on, in {}``order to bring twelve
impartial men into a jury-box;''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]so, by much
stronger reason, may I say here, that the finding of your \textit{Ableman}
and getting him invested with the \textit{symbols of ability}, with
dignity, worship (\textit{worth}-ship), royalty, kinghood, or whatever
we call it, so that \textit{he} may actually have room to guide according
to his faculty of doing it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]is the business,
well or ill accomplished, of all social procedure whatsoever in this
world! Hustings-speeches, Parliamentary motions, Reform Bills, French
Revolutions, all mean at heart this; or else nothing. Find in any
country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise \textit{him} to the
supreme place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect government
for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting,
constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it
a whit. It is in the perfect state; an ideal country. The Ablest Man;
he means also the truest-hearted, justest, the Noblest Man: what he
\textit{tells us to do} must be precisely the wisest, fittest, that
we could anywhere or anyhow learn;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the thing
which it will in all ways behoove \textit{us}, with right loyal thankfulness
and nothing doubting, to do! Our \textit{doing} and life were then,
so far as government could regulate it, well regulated; that were
the ideal of constitutions.

Alas, we know very well that Ideals can never be completely embodied
in practice. Ideals must ever lie a very great way off; and we will
right thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation
thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously {}``measure
by a scale of perfection the meagre product of reality'' in this
poor world of ours. We will esteem him no wise man; we will esteem
him a sickly, discontented, foolish man. And yet, on the other hand,
it is never to be forgotten that Ideals do exist; that if they be
not approximated to at all, the whole matter goes to wreck! Infallibly.
No bricklayer builds a wall \textit{perfectly} perpendicular, mathematically
this is not possible; a certain degree of perpendicularity suffices
him; and he, like a good bricklayer, who must have done with his job,
leaves it so. And yet if he sway \textit{too much} from the perpendicular;
above all, if he throw plummet and level quite away from him, and
pile brick on brick heedless, just as it comes to hand\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]!
Such bricklayer, I think, is in a bad way. He has forgotten himself:
but the Law of Gravitation does not forget to act on him; he and his
wall rush down into confused welter of ruin!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

This is the history of all rebellions, French Revolutions, social
explosions in ancient or modern times. You have put the too \textit{Un}able
Man at the head of affairs! The too ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man.
You have forgotten that there is any rule, or natural necessity whatever,
of putting the Able Man there. Brick must lie on brick as it may and
can. Unable Simulacrum of Ability, \textit{quack}, in a word, must
adjust himself with quack, in all manner of administration of human
things;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]which accordingly lie unadministered,
fermenting into unmeasured masses of failure, of indigent misery:
in the outward, and in the inward or spiritual, miserable millions
stretch out the hand for their due supply, and it is not there. The
{}``law of gravitation'' acts; Nature's laws do none of them forget
to act. The miserable millions burst forth into Sansculottism, or
some other sort of madness: bricks and bricklayer lie as a fatal chaos!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

Much sorry stuff, written some hundred years ago or more, about the
{}``Divine right of Kings,'' moulders unread now in the Public Libraries
of this country. Far be it from us to disturb the calm process by
which it is disappearing harmlessly from the earth, in those repositories!
At the same time, not to let the immense rubbish go without leaving
us, as it ought, some soul of it behind\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I will
say that it did mean something; something true, which it is important
for us and all men to keep in mind. To assert that in whatever man
you chose to lay hold of (by this or the other plan of clutching at
him); and claps a round piece of metal on the head of, and called
King,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]there straightway came to reside a divine
virtue, so that \textit{he} became a kind of god, and a Divinity inspired
him with faculty and right to rule over you to all lengths: this,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]what
can we do with this but leave it to rot silently in the Public Libraries?
But I will say withal, and that is what these Divine-right men meant,
That in Kings, and in all human Authorities, and relations that men
god-created can form among each other, there is verily either a Divine
Right or else a Diabolic Wrong; one or the other of these two! For
it is false altogether, what the last Sceptical Century taught us,
that this world is a steam-engine. There is a God in this world; and
a God's-sanction, or else the violation of such, does look out from
all ruling and obedience, from all moral acts of men. There is no
act more moral between men than that of rule and obedience. Woe to
him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses
it when it is! God's law is in that, I say, however the Parchment-laws
may run: there is a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong at the heart
of every claim that one man makes upon another.

It can do none of us harm to reflect on this: in all the relations
of life it will concern us; in Loyalty and Royalty, the highest of
these. I esteem the modern error, That all goes by self-interest and
the checking and balancing of greedy knaveries, and that in short,
there is nothing divine whatever in the association of men, a still
more despicable error, natural as it is to an unbelieving century,
than that of a {}``divine right'' in people \textit{called} Kings.
I say, Find me the true \textit{Konning}, King, or Able-man, and he
\textit{has} a divine right over me. That we knew in some tolerable
measure how to find him, and that all men were ready to acknowledge
his divine right when found: this is precisely the healing which a
sick world is everywhere, in these ages, seeking after! The true King,
as guide of the practical, has ever something of the Pontiff in him,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]guide
of the spiritual, from which all practice has its rise. This too is
a true saying, That the \textit{King} is head of the \textit{Church}.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]But
we will leave the Polemic stuff of a dead century to lie quiet on
its bookshelves.

Certainly it is a fearful business, that of having your Ableman to
\textit{seek}, and not knowing in what manner to proceed about it!
That is the world's sad predicament in these times of ours. They are
times of revolution, and have long been. The bricklayer with his bricks,
no longer heedful of plummet or the law of gravitation, have toppled,
tumbled, and it all welters as we see! But the beginning of it was
not the French Revolution; that is rather the \textit{end}, we can
hope. It were truer to say, the \textit{beginning} was three centuries
farther back: in the Reformation of Luther. That the thing which still
called itself Christian Church had become a Falsehood, and brazenly
went about pretending to pardon men's sins for metallic coined money,
and to do much else which in the everlasting truth of Nature it did
\textit{not} now do: here lay the vital malady. The inward being wrong,
all outward went ever more and more wrong. Belief died away; all was
Doubt, Disbelief. The builder cast \textit{away} his plummet; said
to himself, {}``What is gravitation? Brick lies on brick there!''
Alas, does it not still sound strange to many of us, the assertion
that there \textit{is} a God's-truth in the business of god-created
men; that all is not a kind of grimace, an {}``expediency,'' diplomacy,
one knows not what!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

From that first necessary assertion of Luther's, {}``You, self-styled
\textit{Papa}, you are no Father in God at all; you are\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a
Chimera, whom I know not how to name in polite language!''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]from
that onwards to the shout which rose round Camille Desmoulins in the
Palais-Royal, {}``\textit{Aux armes}!'' when the people had burst
up against \textit{all} manner of Chimeras,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I
find a natural historical sequence. That shout too, so frightful,
half-infernal, was a great matter. Once more the voice of awakened
nations;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]starting confusedly, as out of nightmare,
as out of death-sleep, into some dim feeling that Life was real; that
God's-world was not an expediency and diplomacy! Infernal;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]yes,
since they would not have it otherwise. Infernal, since not celestial
or terrestrial! Hollowness, insincerity \textit{has} to cease; sincerity
of some sort has to begin. Cost what it may, reigns of terror, horrors
of French Revolution or what else, we have to return to truth. Here
is a Truth, as I said: a Truth clad in hell-fire, since they would
not but have it so!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

A common theory among considerable parties of men in England and elsewhere
used to be, that the French Nation had, in those days, as it were
gone \textit{mad}; that the French Revolution was a general act of
insanity, a temporary conversion of France and large sections of the
world into a kind of Bedlam. The Event had risen and raged; but was
a madness and nonentity,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]gone now happily into
the region of Dreams and the Picturesque!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]To
such comfortable philosophers, the Three Days of July, 183O, must
have been a surprising phenomenon. Here is the French Nation risen
again, in musketry and death-struggle, out shooting and being shot,
to make that same mad French Revolution good! The sons and grandsons
of those men, it would seem, persist in the enterprise: they do not
disown it; they will have it made good; will have themselves shot,
if it be not made good. To philosophers who had made up their life-system,
on that {}``madness'' quietus, no phenomenon could be more alarming.
Poor Niebuhr, they say, the Prussian Professor and Historian, fell
broken-hearted in consequence; sickened, if we can believe it, and
died of the Three Days! It was surely not a very heroic death;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]little
better than Racine's, dying because Louis Fourteenth looked sternly
on him once. The world had stood some considerable shocks, in its
time; might have been expected to survive the Three Days too, and
be found turning on its axis after even them! The Three Days told
all mortals that the old French Revolution, mad as it might look,
was not a transitory ebullition of Bedlam, but a genuine product of
this Earth where we all live; that it was verily a Fact, and that
the world in general would do well everywhere to regard it as such.

Truly, without the French Revolution, one would not know what to make
of an age like this at all. We will hail the French Revolution, as
shipwrecked mariners might the sternest rock, in a world otherwise
all of baseless sea and waves. A true Apocalypse, though a terrible
one, to this false withered artificial time; testifying once more
that Nature is \textit{preter}natural; if not divine, then diabolic;
that Semblance is not Reality; that it has to become Reality, or the
world will take fire under it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]burn \textit{it}
into what it is, namely Nothing! Plausibility has ended; empty Routine
has ended; much has ended. This, as with a Trump of Doom, has been
proclaimed to all men. They are the wisest who will learn it soonest.
Long confused generations before it be learned; peace impossible till
it be! The earnest man, surrounded, as ever, with a world of inconsistencies,
can await patiently, patiently strive to do \textit{his} work, in
the midst of that. Sentence of Death is written down in Heaven against
all that; sentence of Death is now proclaimed on the Earth against
it: this he with his eyes may see. And surely, I should say, considering
the other side of the matter, what enormous difficulties lie there,
and how fast, fearfully fast, in all countries, the inexorable demand
for solution of them is pressing on,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]he may
easily find other work to do than laboring in the Sansculottic province
at this time of day!

To me, in these circumstances, that of {}``Hero-worship'' becomes
a fact inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in
the world at present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management
of the world. Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies
that men ever instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty
of Heroes being sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence
Heroes when sent: it shines like a polestar through smoke-clouds,
dust-clouds, and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration.

Hero-worship would have sounded very strange to those workers and
fighters in the French Revolution. Not reverence for Great Men; not
any hope or belief, or even wish, that Great Men could again appear
in the world! Nature, turned into a {}``Machine,'' was as if effete
now; could not any longer produce Great Men:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I
can tell her, she may give up the trade altogether, then; we cannot
do without Great Men!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]But neither have I any
quarrel with that of {}``Liberty and Equality;'' with the faith
that, wise great men being impossible, a level immensity of foolish
small men would suffice. It was a natural faith then and there. {}``Liberty
and Equality; no Authority needed any longer. Hero-worship, reverence
for \textit{such} Authorities, has proved false, is itself a falsehood;
no more of it! We have had such \textit{forgeries}, we will now trust
nothing. So many base plated coins passing in the market, the belief
has now become common that no gold any longer exists,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
even that we can do very well without gold!'' I find this, among
other things, in that universal cry of Liberty and Equality; and find
it very natural, as matters then stood.

And yet surely it is but the \textit{transition} from false to true.
Considered as the whole truth, it is false altogether;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
product of entire sceptical blindness, as yet only \textit{struggling}
to see. Hero-worship exists forever, and everywhere: not Loyalty alone;
it extends from divine adoration down to the lowest practical regions
of life. {}``Bending before men,'' if it is not to be a mere empty
grimace, better dispensed with than practiced, is Hero-worship,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a
recognition that there does dwell in that presence of our brother
something divine; that every created man, as Novalis said, is a {}``revelation
in the Flesh.'' They were Poets too, that devised all those graceful
courtesies which make life noble! Courtesy is not a falsehood or grimace;
it need not be such. And Loyalty, religious Worship itself, are still
possible; nay still inevitable.

May we not say, moreover, while so many of our late Heroes have worked
rather as revolutionary men, that nevertheless every Great Man, every
genuine man, is by the nature of him a son of Order, not of Disorder?
It is a tragical position for a true man to work in revolutions. He
seems an anarchist; and indeed a painful element of anarchy does encumber
him at every step,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]him to whose whole soul
anarchy is hostile, hateful. His mission is Order; every man's is.
He is here to make what was disorderly, chaotic, into a thing ruled,
regular. He is the missionary of Order. Is not all work of man in
this world a \textit{making of Order}? The carpenter finds rough trees;
shapes them, constrains them into square fitness, into purpose and
use. We are all born enemies of Disorder: it is tragical for us all
to be concerned in image-breaking and down-pulling; for the Great
Man, \textit{more} a man than we, it is doubly tragical.

Thus too all human things, maddest French Sansculottisms, do and must
work towards Order. I say, there is not a \textit{man} in them, raging
in the thickest of the madness, but is impelled withal, at all moments,
towards Order. His very life means that; Disorder is dissolution,
death. No chaos but it seeks a \textit{centre} to revolve round. While
man is man, some Cromwell or Napoleon is the necessary finish of a
Sansculottism.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Curious: in those days when
Hero-worship was the most incredible thing to every one, how it does
come out nevertheless, and assert itself practically, in a way which
all have to credit. Divine \textit{right}, take it on the great scale,
is found to mean divine \textit{might} withal! While old false Formulas
are getting trampled everywhere into destruction, new genuine Substances
unexpectedly unfold themselves indestructible. In rebellious ages,
when Kingship itself seems dead and abolished, Cromwell, Napoleon
step forth again as Kings. The history of these men is what we have
now to look at, as our last phasis of Heroism. The old ages are brought
back to us; the manner in which Kings were made, and Kingship itself
first took rise, is again exhibited in the history of these Two.

We have had many civil wars in England; wars of Red and White Roses,
wars of Simon de Montfort; wars enough, which are not very memorable.
But that war of the Puritans has a significance which belongs to no
one of the others. Trusting to your candor, which will suggest on
the other side what I have not room to say, I will call it a section
once more of that great universal war which alone makes up the true
History of the World,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the war of Belief against
Unbelief! The struggle of men intent on the real essence of things,
against men intent on the semblances and forms of things. The Puritans,
to many, seem mere savage Iconoclasts, fierce destroyers of Forms;
but it were more just to call them haters of \textit{untrue} Forms.
I hope we know how to respect Laud and his King as well as them. Poor
Laud seems to me to have been weak and ill-starred, not dishonest
an unfortunate Pedant rather than anything worse. His {}``Dreams''
and superstitions, at which they laugh so, have an affectionate, lovable
kind of character. He is like a College-Tutor, whose whole world is
forms, College-rules; whose notion is that these are the life and
safety of the world. He is placed suddenly, with that unalterable
luckless notion of his, at the head not of a College but of a Nation,
to regulate the most complex deep-reaching interests of men. He thinks
they ought to go by the old decent regulations; nay that their salvation
will lie in extending and improving these. Like a weak man, he drives
with spasmodic vehemence towards his purpose; cramps himself to it,
heeding no voice of prudence, no cry of pity: He will have his College-rules
obeyed by his Collegians; that first; and till that, nothing. He is
an ill-starred Pedant, as I said. He would have it the world was a
College of that kind, and the world was \textit{not} that. Alas, was
not his doom stern enough? Whatever wrongs he did, were they not all
frightfully avenged on him?

It is meritorious to insist on forms; Religion and all else naturally
clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the \textit{formed} world is the
only habitable one. The naked formlessness of Puritanism is not the
thing I praise in the Puritans; it is the thing I pity,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]praising
only the spirit which had rendered that inevitable! All substances
clothe themselves in forms: but there are suitable true forms, and
then there are untrue unsuitable. As the briefest definition, one
might say, Forms which \textit{grow} round a substance, if we rightly
understand that, will correspond to the real nature and purport of
it, will be true, good; forms which are consciously \textit{put} round
a substance, bad. I invite you to reflect on this. It distinguishes
true from false in Ceremonial Form, earnest solemnity from empty pageant,
in all human things.

There must be a veracity, a natural spontaneity in forms. In the commonest
meeting of men, a person making, what we call, {}``set speeches,''
is not he an offence? In the mere drawing-room, whatsoever courtesies
you see to be grimaces, prompted by no spontaneous reality within,
are a thing you wish to get away from. But suppose now it were some
matter of vital concernment, some transcendent matter (as Divine Worship
is), about which your whole soul, struck dumb with its excess of feeling,
knew not how to \textit{form} itself into utterance at all, and preferred
formless silence to any utterance there possible,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]what
should we say of a man coming forward to represent or utter it for
you in the way of upholsterer-mummery? Such a man,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]let
him depart swiftly, if he love himself! You have lost your only son;
are mute, struck down, without even tears: an importunate man importunately
offers to celebrate Funeral Games for him in the manner of the Greeks!
Such mummery is not only not to be accepted,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]it
is hateful, unendurable. It is what the old Prophets called {}``Idolatry,''
worshipping of hollow \textit{shows}; what all earnest men do and
will reject. We can partly understand what those poor Puritans meant.
Laud dedicating that St. Catherine Creed's Church, in the manner we
have it described; with his multiplied ceremonial bowings, gesticulations,
exclamations: surely it is rather the rigorous formal Pedant, intent
on his {}``College-rules,'' than the earnest Prophet intent on the
essence of the matter!

Puritanism found \textit{such} forms insupportable; trampled on such
forms;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]we have to excuse it for saying, No
form at all rather than such! It stood preaching in its bare pulpit,
with nothing but the Bible in its hand. Nay, a man preaching from
his earnest \textit{soul} into the earnest \textit{souls} of men:
is not this virtually the essence of all Churches whatsoever? The
nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any semblance,
however dignified. Besides, it will clothe itself with \textit{due}
semblance by and by, if it be real. No fear of that; actually no fear
at all. Given the living \textit{man}, there will be found \textit{clothes}
for him; he will find himself clothes. But the suit-of-clothes pretending
that \textit{it} is both clothes and man\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]!
We cannot {}``fight the French'' by three hundred thousand red uniforms;
there must be \textit{men} in the inside of them! Semblance, I assert,
must actually \textit{not} divorce itself from Reality. If Semblance
do,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]why then there must be men found to rebel
against Semblance, for it has become a lie! These two Antagonisms
at war here, in the case of Laud and the Puritans, are as old nearly
as the world. They went to fierce battle over England in that age;
and fought out their confused controversy to a certain length, with
many results for all of us.

In the age which directly followed that of the Puritans, their cause
or themselves were little likely to have justice done them. Charles
Second and his Rochesters were not the kind of men you would set to
judge what the worth or meaning of such men might have been. That
there could be any faith or truth in the life of a man, was what these
poor Rochesters, and the age they ushered in, had forgotten. Puritanism
was hung on gibbets,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]like the bones of the
leading Puritans. Its work nevertheless went on accomplishing itself.
All true work of a man, hang the author of it on what gibbet you like,
must and will accomplish itself. We have our \textit{Habeas-Corpus},
our free Representation of the People; acknowledgment, wide as the
world, that all men are, or else must, shall, and will become, what
we call \textit{free} men;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]men with their life
grounded on reality and justice, not on tradition, which has become
unjust and a chimera! This in part, and much besides this, was the
work of the Puritans.

And indeed, as these things became gradually manifest, the character
of the Puritans began to clear itself. Their memories were, one after
another, taken \textit{down} from the gibbet; nay a certain portion
of them are now, in these days, as good as canonized. Eliot, Hampden,
Pym, nay Ludlow, Hutchinson, Vane himself, are admitted to be a kind
of Heroes; political Conscript Fathers, to whom in no small degree
we owe what makes us a free England: it would not be safe for anybody
to designate these men as wicked now. Few Puritans of note but find
their apologists somewhere, and have a certain reverence paid them
by earnest men. One Puritan, I think, and almost he alone, our poor
Cromwell, seems to hang yet on the gibbet, and find no hearty apologist
anywhere. Him neither saint nor sinner will acquit of great wickedness.
A man of ability, infinite talent, courage, and so forth: but he betrayed
the Cause. Selfish ambition, dishonesty, duplicity; a fierce, coarse,
hypocritical \textit{Tartuffe}; turning all that noble Struggle for
constitutional Liberty into a sorry farce played for his own benefit:
this and worse is the character they give of Cromwell. And then there
come contrasts with Washington and others; above all, with these noble
Pyms and Hampdens, whose noble work he stole for himself, and ruined
into a futility and deformity.

This view of Cromwell seems to me the not unnatural product of a century
like the Eighteenth. As we said of the Valet, so of the Sceptic: He
does not know a Hero when he sees him! The Valet expected purple mantles,
gilt sceptres, bodyguards and flourishes of trumpets: the Sceptic
of the Eighteenth century looks for regulated respectable Formulas,
{}``Principles,'' or what else he may call them; a style of speech
and conduct which has got to seem {}``respectable,'' which can plead
for itself in a handsome articulate manner, and gain the suffrages
of an enlightened sceptical Eighteenth century! It is, at bottom,
the same thing that both the Valet and he expect: the garnitures of
some \textit{acknowledged} royalty, which \textit{then} they will
acknowledge! The King coming to them in the rugged \textit{un}formulistic
state shall be no King.

For my own share, far be it from me to say or insinuate a word of
disparagement against such characters as Hampden, Elliot, Pym; whom
I believe to have been right worthy and useful men. I have read diligently
what books and documents about them I could come at;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]with
the honestest wish to admire, to love and worship them like Heroes;
but I am sorry to say, if the real truth must be told, with very indifferent
success! At bottom, I found that it would not do. They are very noble
men, these; step along in their stately way, with their measured euphemisms,
philosophies, parliamentary eloquences, Ship-moneys, \textit{Monarchies
of Man}; a most constitutional, unblamable, dignified set of men.
But the heart remains cold before them; the fancy alone endeavors
to get up some worship of them. What man's heart does, in reality,
break forth into any fire of brotherly love for these men? They are
become dreadfully dull men! One breaks down often enough in the constitutional
eloquence of the admirable Pym, with his {}``seventhly and lastly.''
You find that it may be the admirablest thing in the world, but that
it is heavy,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]heavy as lead, barren as brick-clay;
that, in a word, for you there is little or nothing now surviving
there! One leaves all these Nobilities standing in their niches of
honor: the rugged outcast Cromwell, he is the man of them all in whom
one still finds human stuff. The great savage \textit{Baresark}: he
could write no euphemistic \textit{Monarchy of Man}; did not speak,
did not work with glib regularity; had no straight story to tell for
himself anywhere. But he stood bare, not cased in euphemistic coat-of-mail;
he grappled like a giant, face to face, heart to heart, with the naked
truth of things! That, after all, is the sort of man for one. I plead
guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other sorts of men. Smooth-shaven
Respectabilities not a few one finds, that are not good for much.
Small thanks to a man for keeping his hands clean, who would not touch
the work but with gloves on!

Neither, on the whole, does this constitutional tolerance of the Eighteenth
century for the other happier Puritans seem to be a very great matter.
One might say, it is but a piece of Formulism and Scepticism, like
the rest. They tell us, It was a sorrowful thing to consider that
the foundation of our English Liberties should have been laid by {}``Superstition.''
These Puritans came forward with Calvinistic incredible Creeds, Anti-Laudisms,
Westminster Confessions; demanding, chiefly of all, that they should
have liberty to \textit{worship} in their own way. Liberty to \textit{tax}
themselves: that was the thing they should have demanded! It was Superstition,
Fanaticism, disgraceful ignorance of Constitutional Philosophy to
insist on the other thing!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Liberty to \textit{tax}
oneself? Not to pay out money from your pocket except on reason shown?
No century, I think, but a rather barren one would have fixed on that
as the first right of man! I should say, on the contrary, A just man
will generally have better cause than \textit{money} in what shape
soever, before deciding to revolt against his Government. Ours is
a most confused world; in which a good man will be thankful to see
any kind of Government maintain itself in a not insupportable manner:
and here in England, to this hour, if he is not ready to pay a great
many taxes which he can see very small reason in, it will not go well
with him, I think! He must try some other climate than this. Tax-gatherer?
Money? He will say: {}``Take my money, since you \textit{can}, and
it is so desirable to you; take it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and take
yourself away with it; and leave me alone to my work here. I am still
here; can still work, after all the money you have taken from me!''
But if they come to him, and say, {}``Acknowledge a Lie; pretend
to say you are worshipping God, when you are not doing it: believe
not the thing that you find true, but the thing that I find, or pretend
to find true!'' He will answer: {}``No; by God's help, no! You may
take my purse; but I cannot have my moral Self annihilated. The purse
is any Highwayman's who might meet me with a loaded pistol: but the
Self is mine and God my Maker's; it is not yours; and I will resist
you to the death, and revolt against you, and, on the whole, front
all manner of extremities, accusations and confusions, in defence
of that!''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

Really, it seems to me the one reason which could justify revolting,
this of the Puritans. It has been the soul of all just revolts among
men. Not \textit{Hunger} alone produced even the French Revolution;
no, but the feeling of the insupportable all-pervading \textit{Falsehood}
which had now embodied itself in Hunger, in universal material Scarcity
and Nonentity, and thereby become \textit{indisputably} false in the
eyes of all! We will leave the Eighteenth century with its {}``liberty
to tax itself.'' We will not astonish ourselves that the meaning
of such men as the Puritans remained dim to it. To men who believe
in no reality at all, how shall a \textit{real} human soul, the intensest
of all realities, as it were the Voice of this world's Maker still
speaking to us,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]be intelligible? What it cannot
reduce into constitutional doctrines relative to {}``taxing,'' or
other the like material interest, gross, palpable to the sense, such
a century will needs reject as an amorphous heap of rubbish. Hampdens,
Pyms and Ship-money will be the theme of much constitutional eloquence,
striving to be fervid;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]which will glitter,
if not as fire does, then as ice does: and the irreducible Cromwell
will remain a chaotic mass of {}``madness,'' {}``hypocrisy,''
and much else.

From of old, I will confess, this theory of Cromwell's falsity has
been incredible to me. Nay I cannot believe the like, of any Great
Man whatever. Multitudes of Great Men figure in History as false selfish
men; but if we will consider it, they are but \textit{figures} for
us, unintelligible shadows; we do not see into them as men that could
have existed at all. A superficial unbelieving generation only, with
no eye but for the surfaces and semblances of things, could form such
notions of Great Men. Can a great soul be possible without a \textit{conscience}
in it, the essence of all \textit{real} souls, great or small?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]No,
we cannot figure Cromwell as a Falsity and Fatuity; the longer I study
him and his career, I believe this the less. Why should we? There
is no evidence of it. Is it not strange that, after all the mountains
of calumny this man has been subject to, after being represented as
the very prince of liars, who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth,
but always some cunning counterfeit of truth, there should not yet
have been one falsehood brought clearly home to him? A prince of liars,
and no lie spoken by him. Not one that I could yet get sight of. It
is like Pococke asking Grotius, Where is your \textit{proof} of Mahomet's
Pigeon? No proof!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Let us leave all these calumnious
chimeras, as chimeras ought to be left. They are not portraits of
the man; they are distracted phantasms of him, the joint product of
hatred and darkness.

Looking at the man's life with our own eyes, it seems to me, a very
different hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of his earlier
obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it not all
betoken an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? His nervous
melancholic temperament indicates rather a seriousness \textit{too}
deep for him. Of those stories of {}``Spectres;'' of the white Spectre
in broad daylight, predicting that he should be King of England, we
are not bound to believe much;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]probably no
more than of the other black Spectre, or Devil in person, to whom
the Officer \textit{saw} him sell himself before Worcester Fight!
But the mournful, oversensitive, hypochondriac humor of Oliver, in
his young years, is otherwise indisputably known. The Huntingdon Physician
told Sir Philip Warwick himself, He had often been sent for at midnight;
Mr.\ Cromwell was full of hypochondria, thought himself near dying,
and {}``had fancies about the Town-cross.'' These things are significant.
Such an excitable deep-feeling nature, in that rugged stubborn strength
of his, is not the symptom of falsehood; it is the symptom and promise
of quite other than falsehood!

The young Oliver is sent to study Law; falls, or is said to have fallen,
for a little period, into some of the dissipations of youth; but if
so, speedily repents, abandons all this: not much above twenty, he
is married, settled as an altogether grave and quiet man. {}``He
pays back what money he had won at gambling,'' says the story;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]he
does not think any gain of that kind could be really \textit{his}.
It is very interesting, very natural, this {}``conversion,'' as
they well name it; this awakening of a great true soul from the worldly
slough, to see into the awful \textit{truth} of things;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]to
see that Time and its shows all rested on Eternity, and this poor
Earth of ours was the threshold either of Heaven or of Hell! Oliver's
life at St.\ Ives and Ely, as a sober industrious Farmer, is it not
altogether as that of a true and devout man? He has renounced the
world and its ways; \textit{its} prizes are not the thing that can
enrich him. He tills the earth; he reads his Bible; daily assembles
his servants round him to worship God. He comforts persecuted ministers,
is fond of preachers; nay can himself preach,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]exhorts
his neighbors to be wise, to redeem the time. In all this what {}``hypocrisy,''
{}``ambition,'' {}``cant,'' or other falsity? The man's hopes,
I do believe, were fixed on the other Higher World; his aim to get
well \textit{thither}, by walking well through his humble course in
\textit{this} world. He courts no notice: what could notice here do
for him? {}``Ever in his great Taskmaster's eye.''

It is striking, too, how he comes out once into public view; he, since
no other is willing to come: in resistance to a public grievance.
I mean, in that matter of the Bedford Fens. No one else will go to
law with Authority; therefore he will. That matter once settled, he
returns back into obscurity, to his Bible and his Plough. {}``Gain
influence''? His influence is the most legitimate; derived from personal
knowledge of him, as a just, religious, reasonable and determined
man. In this way he has lived till past forty; old age is now in view
of him, and the earnest portal of Death and Eternity; it was at this
point that he suddenly became {}``ambitious''! I do not interpret
his Parliamentary mission in that way!

His successes in Parliament, his successes through the war, are honest
successes of a brave man; who has more resolution in the heart of
him, more light in the head of him than other men. His prayers to
God; his spoken thanks to the God of Victory, who had preserved him
safe, and carried him forward so far, through the furious clash of
a world all set in conflict, through desperate-looking envelopments
at Dunbar; through the death-hail of so many battles; mercy after
mercy; to the {}``crowning mercy'' of Worcester Fight: all this
is good and genuine for a deep-hearted Calvinistic Cromwell. Only
to vain unbelieving Cavaliers, worshipping not God but their own {}``love-locks,''
frivolities and formalities, living quite apart from contemplations
of God, living \textit{without} God in the world, need it seem hypocritical.

Nor will his participation in the King's death involve him in condemnation
with us. It is a stern business killing of a King! But if you once
go to war with him, it lies \textit{there}; this and all else lies
there. Once at war, you have made wager of battle with him: it is
he to die, or else you. Reconciliation is problematic; may be possible,
or, far more likely, is impossible. It is now pretty generally admitted
that the Parliament, having vanquished Charles First, had no way of
making any tenable arrangement with him. The large Presbyterian party,
apprehensive now of the Independents, were most anxious to do so;
anxious indeed as for their own existence; but it could not be. The
unhappy Charles, in those final Hampton-Court negotiations, shows
himself as a man fatally incapable of being dealt with. A man who,
once for all, could not and would not \textit{understand}:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]whose
thought did not in any measure represent to him the real fact of the
matter; nay worse, whose \textit{word} did not at all represent his
thought. We may say this of him without cruelty, with deep pity rather:
but it is true and undeniable. Forsaken there of all but the \textit{name}
of Kingship, he still, finding himself treated with outward respect
as a King, fancied that he might play off party against party, and
smuggle himself into his old power by deceiving both. Alas, they both
\textit{discovered} that he was deceiving them. A man whose \textit{word}
will not inform you at all what he means or will do, is not a man
you can bargain with. You must get out of that man's way, or put him
out of yours! The Presbyterians, in their despair, were still for
believing Charles, though found false, unbelievable again and again.
Not so Cromwell: {}``For all our fighting,'' says he, {}``we are
to have a little bit of paper?'' No!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

In fact, everywhere we have to note the decisive practical \textit{eye}
of this man; how he drives towards the practical and practicable;
has a genuine insight into what \textit{is} fact. Such an intellect,
I maintain, does not belong to a false man: the false man sees false
shows, plausibilities, expediences: the true man is needed to discern
even practical truth. Cromwell's advice about the Parliament's Army,
early in the contest, How they were to dismiss their city-tapsters,
flimsy riotous persons, and choose substantial yeomen, whose heart
was in the work, to be soldiers for them: this is advice by a man
who \textit{saw}. Fact answers, if you see into Fact! Cromwell's \textit{Ironsides}
were the embodiment of this insight of his; men fearing God; and without
any other fear. No more conclusively genuine set of fighters ever
trod the soil of England, or of any other land.

Neither will we blame greatly that word of Cromwell's to them; which
was so blamed: {}``If the King should meet me in battle, I would
kill the King.'' Why not? These words were spoken to men who stood
as before a Higher than Kings. They had set more than their own lives
on the cast. The Parliament may call it, in official language, a fighting
{}``\textit{for} the King;'' but we, for our share, cannot understand
that. To us it is no dilettante work, no sleek officiality; it is
sheer rough death and earnest. They have brought it to the calling-forth
of War; horrid internecine fight, man grappling with man in fire-eyed
rage,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the \textit{infernal} element in man
called forth, to try it by that! \textit{Do} that therefore; since
that is the thing to be done.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]The successes
of Cromwell seem to me a very natural thing! Since he was not shot
in battle, they were an inevitable thing. That such a man, with the
eye to see, with the heart to dare, should advance, from post to post,
from victory to victory, till the Huntingdon Farmer became, by whatever
name you might call him, the acknowledged Strongest Man in England,
virtually the King of England, requires no magic to explain it!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a man, to fall into Scepticism,
into dilettantism, insincerity; not to know Sincerity when they see
it. For this world, and for all worlds, what curse is so fatal? The
heart lying dead, the eye cannot see. What intellect remains is merely
the \textit{vulpine} intellect. That a true \textit{King} be sent
them is of small use; they do not know him when sent. They say scornfully,
Is this your King? The Hero wastes his heroic faculty in bootless
contradiction from the unworthy; and can accomplish little. For himself
he does accomplish a heroic life, which is much, which is all; but
for the world he accomplishes comparatively nothing. The wild rude
Sincerity, direct from Nature, is not glib in answering from the witness-box:
in your small-debt \textit{pie-powder} court, he is scouted as a counterfeit.
The vulpine intellect {}``detects'' him. For being a man worth any
thousand men, the response your Knox, your Cromwell gets, is an argument
for two centuries whether he was a man at all. God's greatest gift
to this Earth is sneeringly flung away. The miraculous talisman is
a paltry plated coin, not fit to pass in the shops as a common guinea.

Lamentable this! I say, this must be remedied. Till this be remedied
in some measure, there is nothing remedied. {}``Detect quacks''?
Yes do, for Heaven's sake; but know withal the men that are to be
trusted! Till we know that, what is all our knowledge; how shall we
even so much as {}``detect''? For the vulpine sharpness, which considers
itself to be knowledge, and {}``detects'' in that fashion, is far
mistaken. Dupes indeed are many: but, of all \textit{dupes}, there
is none so fatally situated as he who lives in undue terror of being
duped. The world does exist; the world has truth in it, or it would
not exist! First recognize what is true, we shall \textit{then} discern
what is false; and properly never till then.

{}``Know the men that are to be trusted:'' alas, this is yet, in
these days, very far from us. The sincere alone can recognize sincerity.
Not a Hero only is needed, but a world fit for him; a world not of
\textit{Valets};\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the Hero comes almost in vain
to it otherwise! Yes, it is far from us: but it must come; thank God,
it is visibly coming. Till it do come, what have we? Ballot-boxes,
suffrages, French Revolutions:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]if we are as
Valets, and do not know the Hero when we see him, what good are all
these? A heroic Cromwell comes; and for a hundred and fifty years
he cannot have a vote from us. Why, the insincere, unbelieving world
is the \textit{natural property} of the Quack, and of the Father of
quacks and quackeries! Misery, confusion, unveracity are alone possible
there. By ballot-boxes we alter the \textit{figure} of our Quack;
but the substance of him continues. The Valet-World \textit{has} to
be governed by the Sham-Hero, by the King merely \textit{dressed}
in King-gear. It is his; he is its! In brief, one of two things: We
shall either learn to know a Hero, a true Governor and Captain, somewhat
better, when we see him; or else go on to be forever governed by the
Unheroic;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]had we ballot-boxes clattering at
every street-corner, there were no remedy in these.

Poor Cromwell,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]great Cromwell! The inarticulate
Prophet; Prophet who could not \textit{speak}. Rude, confused, struggling
to utter himself, with his savage depth, with his wild sincerity;
and he looked so strange, among the elegant Euphemisms, dainty little
Falklands, didactic Chillingworths, diplomatic Clarendons! Consider
him. An outer hull of chaotic confusion, visions of the Devil, nervous
dreams, almost semi-madness; and yet such a clear determinate man's-energy
working in the heart of that. A kind of chaotic man. The ray as of
pure starlight and fire, working in such an element of boundless hypochondria,
unformed black of darkness! And yet withal this hypochondria, what
was it but the very greatness of the man? The depth and tenderness
of his wild affections: the quantity of \textit{sympathy} he had with
things,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the quantity of insight he would yet
get into the heart of things, the mastery he would yet get over things:
this was his hypochondria. The man's misery, as man's misery always
does, came of his greatness. Samuel Johnson too is that kind of man.
Sorrow-stricken, half-distracted; the wide element of mournful \textit{black}
enveloping him,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]wide as the world. It is the
character of a prophetic man; a man with his whole soul \textit{seeing},
and struggling to see.

On this ground, too, I explain to myself Cromwell's reputed confusion
of speech. To himself the internal meaning was sun-clear; but the
material with which he was to clothe it in utterance was not there.
He had \textit{lived} silent; a great unnamed sea of Thought round
him all his days; and in his way of life little call to attempt \textit{naming}
or uttering that. With his sharp power of vision, resolute power of
action, I doubt not he could have learned to write Books withal, and
speak fluently enough;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]he did harder things
than writing of Books. This kind of man is precisely he who is fit
for doing manfully all things you will set him on doing. Intellect
is not speaking and logicizing; it is seeing and ascertaining. Virtue,
Virtues, manhood, \textit{hero}hood, is not fair-spoken immaculate
regularity; it is first of all, what the Germans well name it, \textit{Tugend}
(\textit{Taugend}, \textit{dow}-ing or \textit{Dough}-tinesS), Courage
and the Faculty to \textit{do}. This basis of the matter Cromwell
had in him.

One understands moreover how, though he could not speak in Parliament,
he might \textit{preach}, rhapsodic preaching; above all, how he might
be great in extempore prayer. These are the free outpouring utterances
of what is in the heart: method is not required in them; warmth, depth,
sincerity are all that is required. Cromwell's habit of prayer is
a notable feature of him. All his great enterprises were commenced
with prayer. In dark inextricable-looking difficulties, his Officers
and he used to assemble, and pray alternately, for hours, for days,
till some definite resolution rose among them, some {}``door of hope,''
as they would name it, disclosed itself. Consider that. In tears,
in fervent prayers, and cries to the great God, to have pity on them,
to make His light shine before them. They, armed Soldiers of Christ,
as they felt themselves to be; a little band of Christian Brothers,
who had drawn the sword against a great black devouring world not
Christian, but Mammonish, Devilish,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]they cried
to God in their straits, in their extreme need, not to forsake the
Cause that was His. The light which now rose upon them,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]how
could a human soul, by any means at all, get better light? Was not
the purpose so formed like to be precisely the best, wisest, the one
to be followed without hesitation any more? To them it was as the
shining of Heaven's own Splendor in the waste-howling darkness; the
Pillar of Fire by night, that was to guide them on their desolate
perilous way.\  \textit{Was} it not such? Can a man's soul, to this
hour, get guidance by any other method than intrinsically by that
same,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]devout prostration of the earnest struggling
soul before the Highest, the Giver of all Light; be such \textit{prayer}
a spoken, articulate, or be it a voiceless, inarticulate one? There
is no other method. {}``Hypocrisy''? One begins to be weary of all
that. They who call it so, have no right to speak on such matters.
They never formed a purpose, what one can call a purpose. They went
about balancing expediencies, plausibilities; gathering votes, advices;
they never were alone with the \textit{truth} of a thing at all.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Cromwell's
prayers were likely to be {}``eloquent,'' and much more than that.
His was the heart of a man who \textit{could} pray.

But indeed his actual Speeches, I apprehend, were not nearly so ineloquent,
incondite, as they look. We find he was, what all speakers aim to
be, an impressive speaker, even in Parliament; one who, from the first,
had weight. With that rude passionate voice of his, he was always
understood to \textit{mean} something, and men wished to know what.
He disregarded eloquence, nay despised and disliked it; spoke always
without premeditation of the words he was to use. The Reporters, too,
in those days seem to have been singularly candid; and to have given
the Printer precisely what they found on their own note-paper. And
withal, what a strange proof is it of Cromwell's being the premeditative
ever-calculating hypocrite, acting a play before the world, That to
the last he took no more charge of his Speeches! How came he not to
study his words a little, before flinging them out to the public?
If the words were true words, they could be left to shift for themselves.

But with regard to Cromwell's {}``lying,'' we will make one remark.
This, I suppose, or something like this, to have been the nature of
it. All parties found themselves deceived in him; each party understood
him to be meaning \textit{this}, heard him even say so, and behold
he turns out to have been meaning \textit{that}! He was, cry they,
the chief of liars. But now, intrinsically, is not all this the inevitable
fortune, not of a false man in such times, but simply of a superior
man? Such a man must have \textit{reticences} in him. If he walk wearing
his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at, his journey will not
extend far! There is no use for any man's taking up his abode in a
house built of glass. A man always is to be himself the judge how
much of his mind he will show to other men; even to those he would
have work along with him. There are impertinent inquiries made: your
rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on that matter; not, if
you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he was! This,
could one hit the right phrase of response, is what the wise and faithful
man would aim to answer in such a case.

Cromwell, no doubt of it, spoke often in the dialect of small subaltern
parties; uttered to them a \textit{part} of his mind. Each little
party thought him all its own. Hence their rage, one and all, to find
him not of their party, but of his own party. Was it his blame? At
all seasons of his history he must have felt, among such people, how,
if he explained to them the deeper insight he had, they must either
have shuddered aghast at it, or believing it, their own little compact
hypothesis must have gone wholly to wreck. They could not have worked
in his province any more; nay perhaps they could not now have worked
in their own province. It is the inevitable position of a great man
among small men. Small men, most active, useful, are to be seen everywhere,
whose whole activity depends on some conviction which to you is palpably
a limited one; imperfect, what we call an \textit{error}. But would
it be a kindness always, is it a duty always or often, to disturb
them in that? Many a man, doing loud work in the world, stands only
on some thin traditionality, conventionality; to him indubitable,
to you incredible: break that beneath him, he sinks to endless depths!
{}``I might have my hand full of truth,'' said Fontenelle, {}``and
open only my little finger.''

And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how much more
in all departments of practice! He that cannot withal \textit{keep
his mind to himself} cannot practice any considerable thing whatever.
And we call it {}``dissimulation,'' all this? What would you think
of calling the general of an army a dissembler because he did not
tell every corporal and private soldier, who pleased to put the question,
what his thoughts were about everything?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Cromwell,
I should rather say, managed all this in a manner we must admire for
its perfection. An endless vortex of such questioning {}``corporals''
rolled confusedly round him through his whole course; whom he did
answer. It must have been as a great true-seeing man that he managed
this too. Not one proved falsehood, as I said; not one! Of what man
that ever wound himself through such a coil of things will you say
so much?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

But in fact there are two errors, widely prevalent, which pervert
to the very basis our judgments formed about such men as Cromwell;
about their {}``ambition,'' {}``falsity,'' and such like. The
first is what I might call substituting the \textit{goal} of their
career for the course and starting-point of it. The vulgar Historian
of a Cromwell fancies that he had determined on being Protector of
England, at the time when he was ploughing the marsh lands of Cambridgeshire.
His career lay all mapped out: a program of the whole drama; which
he then step by step dramatically unfolded, with all manner of cunning,
deceptive dramaturgy, as he went on,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the hollow,
scheming $\Upsilon\pi$o$\kappa\rho\iota\tau\eta\varsigma$, or Play-actor,
that he was! This is a radical perversion; all but universal in such
cases. And think for an instant how different the fact is! How much
does one of us foresee of his own life? Short way ahead of us it is
all dim; an unwound skein of possibilities, of apprehensions, attemptabilities,
vague-looming hopes. This Cromwell had \textit{not} his life lying
all in that fashion of Program, which he needed then, with that unfathomable
cunning of his, only to enact dramatically, scene after scene! Not
so. We see it so; but to him it was in no measure so. What absurdities
would fall away of themselves, were this one undeniable fact kept
honestly in view by History! Historians indeed will tell you that
they do keep it in view;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]but look whether such
is practically the fact! Vulgar History, as in this Cromwell's case,
omits it altogether; even the best kinds of History only remember
it now and then. To remember it duly with rigorous perfection, as
in the fact it \textit{stood}, requires indeed a rare faculty; rare,
nay impossible. A very Shakspeare for faculty; or more than Shakspeare;
who could \textit{enact} a brother man's biography, see with the brother
man's eyes at all points of his course what things \textit{he} saw;
in short, \textit{know} his course and him, as few {}``Historians''
are like to do. Half or more of all the thick-plied perversions which
distort our image of Cromwell, will disappear, if we honestly so much
as try to represent them so; in sequence, as they \textit{were}; not
in the lump, as they are thrown down before us.

But a second error, which I think the generality commit, refers to
this same {}``ambition'' itself. We exaggerate the ambition of Great
Men; we mistake what the nature of it is. Great Men are not ambitious
in that sense; he is a small poor man that is ambitious so. Examine
the man who lives in misery because he does not shine above other
men; who goes about producing himself, pruriently anxious about his
gifts and claims; struggling to force everybody, as it were begging
everybody for God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set
him over the heads of men! Such a creature is among the wretchedest
sights seen under this sun. A \textit{great} man? A poor morbid prurient
empty man; fitter for the ward of a hospital, than for a throne among
men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet
paths; unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs
about him, he cannot live. It is the \textit{emptiness} of the man,
not his greatness. Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers
and thirsts that you would find something in him. In good truth, I
believe no great man, not so much as a genuine man who had health
and real substance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented
in this way.

Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be {}``noticed'' by
noisy crowds of people? God his Maker already noticed him. He, Cromwell,
was already there; no notice would make \textit{him} other than he
already was. Till his hair was grown gray; and Life from the down-hill
slope was all seen to be limited, not infinite but finite, and all
a measurable matter \textit{how} it went,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]he
had been content to plough the ground, and read his Bible. He in his
old days could not support it any longer, without selling himself
to Falsehood, that he might ride in gilt carriages to Whitehall, and
have clerks with bundles of papers haunting him, {}``Decide this,
decide that,'' which in utmost sorrow of heart no man can perfectly
decide! What could gilt carriages do for this man? From of old, was
there not in his life a weight of meaning, a terror and a splendor
as of Heaven itself? His existence there as man set him beyond the
need of gilding. Death, Judgment and Eternity: these already lay as
the background of whatsoever he thought or did. All his life lay begirt
as in a sea of nameless Thoughts, which no speech of a mortal could
name. God's Word, as the Puritan prophets of that time had read it:
this was great, and all else was little to him. To call such a man
{}``ambitious,'' to figure him as the prurient wind-bag described
above, seems to me the poorest solecism. Such a man will say: {}``Keep
your gilt carriages and huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tape clerks,
your influentialities, your important businesses. Leave me alone,
leave me alone; there is \textit{too much of life} in me already!''
Old Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in England in his day, was not
ambitious. {}``Corsica Boswell'' flaunted at public shows with printed
ribbons round his hat; but the great old Samuel stayed at home. The
world-wide soul wrapt up in its thoughts, in its sorrows;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]what
could paradings, and ribbons in the hat, do for it?

Ah yes, I will say again: The great \textit{silent} men! Looking round
on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions
with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great Empire of \textit{Silence}.
The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his department;
silently thinking, silently working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes
mention of! They are the salt of the Earth. A country that has none
or few of these is in a bad way. Like a forest which had no \textit{roots};
which had all turned into leaves and boughs;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]which
must soon wither and be no forest. Woe for us if we had nothing but
what we can \textit{show}, or speak. Silence, the great Empire of
Silence: higher than the stars; deeper than the Kingdoms of Death!
It alone is great; all else is small.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I hope
we English will long maintain our \textit{grand talent pour le silence}.
Let others that cannot do without standing on barrel-heads, to spout,
and be seen of all the market-place, cultivate speech exclusively,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]become
a most green forest without roots! Solomon says, There is a time to
speak; but also a time to keep silence. Of some great silent Samuel,
not urged to writing, as old Samuel Johnson says he was, by \textit{want
of money}, and nothing other, one might ask, {}``Why do not you too
get up and speak; promulgate your system, found your sect?'' {}``Truly,''
he will answer, {}``I am \textit{continent} of my thought hitherto;
happily I have yet had the ability to keep it in me, no compulsion
strong enough to speak it. My `system' is not for promulgation first
of all; it is for serving myself to live by. That is the great purpose
of it to me. And then the `honor'? Alas, yes;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]but
as Cato said of the statue: So many statues in that Forum of yours,
may it not be better if they ask, Where is Cato's statue?''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

But now, by way of counterpoise to this of Silence, let me say that
there are two kinds of ambition; one wholly blamable, the other laudable
and inevitable. Nature has provided that the great silent Samuel shall
not be silent too long. The selfish wish to shine over others, let
it be accounted altogether poor and miserable. {}``Seekest thou great
things, seek them not:'' this is most true. And yet, I say, there
is an irrepressible tendency in every man to develop himself according
to the magnitude which Nature has made him of; to speak out, to act
out, what nature has laid in him. This is proper, fit, inevitable;
nay it is a duty, and even the summary of duties for a man. The meaning
of life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this: To unfold
your \textit{self}, to work what thing you have the faculty for. It
is a necessity for the human being, the first law of our existence.
Coleridge beautifully remarks that the infant learns to \textit{speak}
by this necessity it feels.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]We will say therefore:
To decide about ambition, whether it is bad or not, you have two things
to take into view. Not the coveting of the place alone, but the fitness
of the man for the place withal: that is the question. Perhaps the
place was \textit{his}; perhaps he had a natural right, and even obligation,
to seek the place! Mirabeau's ambition to be Prime Minister, how shall
we blame it, if he were {}``the only man in France that could have
done any good there''? Hopefuler perhaps had he not so clearly \textit{felt}
how much good he could do! But a poor Necker, who could do no good,
and had even felt that he could do none, yet sitting broken-hearted
because they had flung him out, and he was now quit of it, well might
Gibbon mourn over him.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Nature, I say, has provided
amply that the silent great man shall strive to speak withal; \textit{too}
amply, rather!

Fancy, for example, you had revealed to the brave old Samuel Johnson,
in his shrouded-up existence, that it was possible for him to do priceless
divine work for his country and the whole world. That the perfect
Heavenly Law might be made Law on this Earth; that the prayer he prayed
daily, {}``Thy kingdom come,'' was at length to be fulfilled! If
you had convinced his judgment of this; that it was possible, practicable;
that he the mournful silent Samuel was called to take a part in it!
Would not the whole soul of the man have flamed up into a divine clearness,
into noble utterance and determination to act; casting all sorrows
and misgivings under his feet, counting all affliction and contradiction
small,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the whole dark element of his existence
blazing into articulate radiance of light and lightning? It were a
true ambition this! And think now how it actually was with Cromwell.
From of old, the sufferings of God's Church, true zealous Preachers
of the truth flung into dungeons, whips, set on pillories, their ears
crops off, God's Gospel-cause trodden under foot of the unworthy:
all this had lain heavy on his soul. Long years he had looked upon
it, in silence, in prayer; seeing no remedy on Earth; trusting well
that a remedy in Heaven's goodness would come,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]that
such a course was false, unjust, and could not last forever. And now
behold the dawn of it; after twelve years silent waiting, all England
stirs itself; there is to be once more a Parliament, the Right will
get a voice for itself: inexpressible well-grounded hope has come
again into the Earth. Was not such a Parliament worth being a member
of? Cromwell threw down his ploughs, and hastened thither.

He spoke there,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]rugged bursts of earnestness,
of a self-seen truth, where we get a glimpse of them. He worked there;
he fought and strove, like a strong true giant of a man, through cannon-tumult
and all else,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]on and on, till the Cause \textit{triumphed},
its once so formidable enemies all swept from before it, and the dawn
of hope had become clear light of victory and certainty. That \textit{he}
stood there as the strongest soul of England, the undisputed Hero
of all England,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]what of this? It was possible
that the Law of Christ's Gospel could now establish itself in the
world! The Theocracy which John Knox in his pulpit might dream of
as a {}``devout imagination,'' this practical man, experienced in
the whole chaos of most rough practice, dared to consider as capable
of being \textit{realized}. Those that were highest in Christ's Church,
the devoutest wisest men, were to rule the land: in some considerable
degree, it might be so and should be so. Was it not \textit{true},
God's truth? And if \textit{true}, was it not then the very thing
to do? The strongest practical intellect in England dared to answer,
Yes! This I call a noble true purpose; is it not, in its own dialect,
the noblest that could enter into the heart of Statesman or man? For
a Knox to take it up was something; but for a Cromwell, with his great
sound sense and experience of what our world \textit{was},\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]History,
I think, shows it only this once in such a degree. I account it the
culminating point of Protestantism; the most heroic phasis that {}``Faith
in the Bible'' was appointed to exhibit here below. Fancy it: that
it were made manifest to one of us, how we could make the Right supremely
victorious over Wrong, and all that we had longed and prayed for,
as the highest good to England and all lands, an attainable fact!

Well, I must say, the \textit{vulpine} intellect, with its knowingness,
its alertness and expertness in {}``detecting hypocrites,'' seems
to me a rather sorry business. We have had but one such Statesman
in England; one man, that I can get sight of, who ever had in the
heart of him any such purpose at all. One man, in the course of fifteen
hundred years; and this was his welcome. He had adherents by the hundred
or the ten; opponents by the million. Had England rallied all round
him,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]why, then, England might have been a \textit{Christian}
land! As it is, vulpine knowingness sits yet at its hopeless problem,
{}``Given a world of Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their united
action;''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]how cumbrous a problem, you may
see in Chancery Law-Courts, and some other places! Till at length,
by Heaven's just anger, but also by Heaven's great grace, the matter
begins to stagnate; and this problem is becoming to all men a \textit{palpably}
hopeless one.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

But with regard to Cromwell and his purposes: Hume, and a multitude
following him, come upon me here with an admission that Cromwell \textit{was}
sincere at first; a sincere {}``Fanatic'' at first, but gradually
became a {}``Hypocrite'' as things opened round him. This of the
Fanatic-Hypocrite is Hume's theory of it; extensively applied since,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]to
Mahomet and many others. Think of it seriously, you will find something
in it; not much, not all, very far from all. Sincere hero hearts do
not sink in this miserable manner. The Sun flings forth impurities,
gets balefully incrusted with spots; but it does not quench itself,
and become no Sun at all, but a mass of Darkness! I will venture to
say that such never befell a great deep Cromwell; I think, never.
Nature's own lionhearted Son; Antaeus-like, his strength is got by
\textit{touching the Earth}, his Mother; lift him up from the Earth,
lift him up into Hypocrisy, Inanity, his strength is gone. We will
not assert that Cromwell was an immaculate man; that he fell into
no faults, no insincerities among the rest. He was no dilettante professor
of {}``perfections,'' {}``immaculate conducts.'' He was a rugged
Orson, rending his rough way through actual true \textit{work},\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]\textit{doubtless}
with many a \textit{fall} therein. Insincerities, faults, very many
faults daily and hourly: it was too well known to him; known to God
and him! The Sun was dimmed many a time; but the Sun had not himself
grown a Dimness. Cromwell's last words, as he lay waiting for death,
are those of a Christian heroic man. Broken prayers to God, that He
would judge him and this Cause, He since man could not, in justice
yet in pity. They are most touching words. He breathed out his wild
great soul, its toils and sins all ended now, into the presence of
his Maker, in this manner.

I, for one, will not call the man a Hypocrite! Hypocrite, mummer,
the life of him a mere theatricality; empty barren quack, hungry for
the shouts of mobs? The man had made obscurity do very well for him
till his head was gray; and now he \textit{was}, there as he stood
recognized unblamed, the virtual King of England. Cannot a man do
without King's Coaches and Cloaks? Is it such a blessedness to have
clerks forever pestering you with bundles of papers in red tape? A
simple Diocletian prefers planting of cabbages; a George Washington,
no very immeasurable man, does the like. One would say, it is what
any genuine man could do; and would do. The instant his real work
were out in the matter of Kingship,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]away with
it!

Let us remark, meanwhile, how indispensable everywhere a \textit{King}
is, in all movements of men. It is strikingly shown, in this very
War, what becomes of men when they cannot find a Chief Man, and their
enemies can. The Scotch Nation was all but unanimous in Puritanism;
zealous and of one mind about it, as in this English end of the Island
was always far from being the case. But there was no great Cromwell
among them; poor tremulous, hesitating, diplomatic Argyles and such
like: none of them had a heart true enough for the truth, or durst
commit himself to the truth. They had no leader; and the scattered
Cavalier party in that country had one: Montrose, the noblest of all
the Cavaliers; an accomplished, gallant-hearted, splendid man; what
one may call the Hero-Cavalier. Well, look at it; on the one hand
subjects without a King; on the other a King without subjects! The
subjects without King can do nothing; the subjectless King can do
something. This Montrose, with a handful of Irish or Highland savages,
few of them so much as guns in their hands, dashes at the drilled
Puritan armies like a wild whirlwind; sweeps them, time after time,
some five times over, from the field before him. He was at one period,
for a short while, master of all Scotland. One man; but he was a man;
a million zealous men, but without the one; they against him were
powerless! Perhaps of all the persons in that Puritan struggle, from
first to last, the single indispensable one was verily Cromwell. To
see and dare, and decide; to be a fixed pillar in the welter of uncertainty;--a
King among them, whether they called him so or not.

Precisely here, however, lies the rub for Cromwell. His other proceedings
have all found advocates, and stand generally justified; but this
dismissal of the Rump Parliament and assumption of the Protectorship,
is what no one can pardon him. He had fairly grown to be King in England;
Chief Man of the victorious party in England: but it seems he could
not do without the King's Cloak, and sold himself to perdition in
order to get it. Let us see a little how this was.

England, Scotland, Ireland, all lying now subdued at the feet of the
Puritan Parliament, the practical question arose, What was to be done
with it? How will you govern these Nations, which Providence in a
wondrous way has given up to your disposal? Clearly those hundred
surviving members of the Long Parliament, who sit there as supreme
authority, cannot continue forever to sit. What \textit{is} to be
done?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]It was a question which theoretical constitution-builders
may find easy to answer; but to Cromwell, looking there into the real
practical facts of it, there could be none more complicated. He asked
of the Parliament, What it was they would decide upon? It was for
the Parliament to say. Yet the Soldiers too, however contrary to Formula,
they who had purchased this victory with their blood, it seemed to
them that they also should have something to say in it! We will not
{}``for all our fighting have nothing but a little piece of paper.''
We understand that the Law of God's Gospel, to which He through us
has given the victory, shall establish itself, or try to establish
itself, in this land!

For three years, Cromwell says, this question had been sounded in
the ears of the Parliament. They could make no answer; nothing but
talk, talk. Perhaps it lies in the nature of parliamentary bodies;
perhaps no Parliament could in such case make any answer but even
that of talk, talk! Nevertheless the question must and shall be answered.
You sixty men there, becoming fast odious, even despicable, to the
whole nation, whom the nation already calls Rump Parliament, you cannot
continue to sit there: who or what then is to follow? {}``Free Parliament,''
right of Election, Constitutional Formulas of one sort or the other,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
thing is a hungry Fact coming on us, which we must answer or be devoured
by it! And who are you that prate of Constitutional Formulas, rights
of Parliament? You have had to kill your King, to make Pride's Purges,
to expel and banish by the law of the stronger whosoever would not
let your Cause prosper: there are but fifty or threescore of you left
there, debating in these days. Tell us what we shall do; not in the
way of Formula, but of practicable Fact!

How they did finally answer, remains obscure to this day. The diligent
Godwin himself admits that he cannot make it out. The likeliest is,
that this poor Parliament still would not, and indeed could not dissolve
and disperse; that when it came to the point of actually dispersing,
they again, for the tenth or twentieth time, adjourned it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and
Cromwell's patience failed him. But we will take the favorablest hypothesis
ever started for the Parliament; the favorablest, though I believe
it is not the true one, but too favorable.

According to this version: At the uttermost crisis, when Cromwell
and his Officers were met on the one hand, and the fifty or sixty
Rump Members on the other, it was suddenly told Cromwell that the
Rump in its despair \textit{was} answering in a very singular way;
that in their splenetic envious despair, to keep out the Army at least,
these men were hurrying through the House a kind of Reform Bill,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Parliament
to be chosen by the whole of England; equable electoral division into
districts; free suffrage, and the rest of it! A very questionable,
or indeed for \textit{them} an unquestionable thing. Reform Bill,
free suffrage of Englishmen? Why, the Royalists themselves, silenced
indeed but not exterminated, perhaps \textit{outnumber} us; the great
numerical majority of England was always indifferent to our Cause,
merely looked at it and submitted to it. It is in weight and force,
not by counting of heads, that we are the majority! And now with your
Formulas and Reform Bills, the whole matter, sorely won by our swords,
shall again launch itself to sea; become a mere hope, and likelihood,
\textit{small} even as a likelihood? And it is not a likelihood; it
is a certainty, which we have won, by God's strength and our own right
hands, and do now hold \textit{here}. Cromwell walked down to these
refractory Members; interrupted them in that rapid speed of their
Reform Bill;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]ordered them to begone, and talk
there no more.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Can we not forgive him? Can
we not understand him? John Milton, who looked on it all near at hand,
could applaud him. The Reality had swept the Formulas away before
it. I fancy, most men who were realities in England might see into
the necessity of that.

The strong daring man, therefore, has set all manner of Formulas and
logical superficialities against him; has dared appeal to the genuine
Fact of this England, Whether it will support him or not? It is curious
to see how he struggles to govern in some constitutional way; find
some Parliament to support him; but cannot. His first Parliament,
the one they call Barebones's Parliament, is, so to speak, a \textit{Convocation
of the Notables}. From all quarters of England the leading Ministers
and chief Puritan Officials nominate the men most distinguished by
religious reputation, influence and attachment to the true Cause:
these are assembled to shape out a plan. They sanctioned what was
past; shaped as they could what was to come. They were scornfully
called \textit{Barebones's Parliament}: the man's name, it seems,
was not \textit{Barebones}, but Barbone,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a
good enough man. Nor was it a jest, their work; it was a most serious
reality,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a trial on the part of these Puritan
Notables how far the Law of Christ could become the Law of this England.
There were men of sense among them, men of some quality; men of deep
piety I suppose the most of them were. They failed, it seems, and
broke down, endeavoring to reform the Court of Chancery! They dissolved
themselves, as incompetent; delivered up their power again into the
hands of the Lord General Cromwell, to do with it what he liked and
could.

What \textit{will} he do with it? The Lord General Cromwell, {}``Commander-in-chief
of all the Forces raised and to be raised;'' he hereby sees himself,
at this unexampled juncture, as it were the one available Authority
left in England, nothing between England and utter Anarchy but him
alone. Such is the undeniable Fact of his position and England's,
there and then. What will he do with it? After deliberation, he decides
that he will \textit{accept} it; will formally, with public solemnity,
say and vow before God and men, {}``Yes, the Fact is so, and I will
do the best I can with it!'' Protectorship, Instrument of Government,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]these
are the external forms of the thing; worked out and sanctioned as
they could in the circumstances be, by the Judges, by the leading
Official people, {}``Council of Officers and Persons of interest
in the Nation:'' and as for the thing itself, undeniably enough,
at the pass matters had now come to, there \textit{was} no alternative
but Anarchy or that. Puritan England might accept it or not; but Puritan
England was, in real truth, saved from suicide thereby!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]I
believe the Puritan People did, in an inarticulate, grumbling, yet
on the whole grateful and real way, accept this anomalous act of Oliver's;
at least, he and they together made it good, and always better to
the last. But in their Parliamentary \textit{articulate} way, they
had their difficulties, and never knew fully what to say to it!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

Oliver's second Parliament, properly his \textit{first} regular Parliament,
chosen by the rule laid down in the Instrument of Government, did
assemble, and worked;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]but got, before long,
into bottomless questions as to the Protector's \textit{right}, as
to {}``usurpation,'' and so forth; and had at the earliest legal
day to be dismissed. Cromwell's concluding Speech to these men is
a remarkable one. So likewise to his third Parliament, in similar
rebuke for their pedantries and obstinacies. Most rude, chaotic, all
these Speeches are; but most earnest-looking. You would say, it was
a sincere helpless man; not used to \textit{speak} the great inorganic
thought of him, but to act it rather! A helplessness of utterance,
in such bursting fulness of meaning. He talks much about {}``births
of Providence:'' All these changes, so many victories and events,
were not forethoughts, and theatrical contrivances of men, of \textit{me}
or of men; it is blind blasphemers that will persist in calling them
so! He insists with a heavy sulphurous wrathful emphasis on this.
As he well might. As if a Cromwell in that dark huge game he had been
playing, the world wholly thrown into chaos round him, had \textit{foreseen}
it all, and played it all off like a precontrived puppet-show by wood
and wire! These things were foreseen by no man, he says; no man could
tell what a day would bring forth: they were {}``births of Providence,''
God's finger guided us on, and we came at last to clear height of
victory, God's Cause triumphant in these Nations; and you as a Parliament
could assemble together, and say in what manner all this could be
\textit{organized}, reduced into rational feasibility among the affairs
of men. You were to help with your wise counsel in doing that. {}``You
have had such an opportunity as no Parliament in England ever had.''
Christ's Law, the Right and True, was to be in some measure made the
Law of this land. In place of that, you have got into your idle pedantries,
constitutionalities, bottomless cavillings and questionings about
written laws for my coming here;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]and would
send the whole matter into Chaos again, because I have no Notary's
parchment, but only God's voice from the battle-whirlwind, for being
President among you! That opportunity is gone; and we know not when
it will return. You have had your constitutional Logic; and Mammon's
Law, not Christ's Law, rules yet in this land. {}``God be judge between
you and me!'' These are his final words to them: Take you your constitution-formulas
in your hand; and I my informal struggles, purposes, realities and
acts; and {}``God be judge between you and me!''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

We said above what shapeless, involved chaotic things the printed
Speeches of Cromwell are.\  \textit{Wilfully} ambiguous, unintelligible,
say the most: a hypocrite shrouding himself in confused Jesuitic jargon!
To me they do not seem so. I will say rather, they afforded the first
glimpses I could ever get into the reality of this Cromwell, nay into
the possibility of him. Try to believe that he means something, search
lovingly what that may be: you will find a real \textit{speech} lying
imprisoned in these broken rude tortuous utterances; a meaning in
the great heart of this inarticulate man! You will, for thc first
time, begin to see that he was a man; not an enigmatic chimera, unintelligible
to you, incredible to you. The Histories and Biographies written of
this Cromwell, written in shallow sceptical generations that could
not know or conceive of a deep believing man, are far more \textit{obscure}
than Cromwell's Speeches. You look through them only into the infinite
vague of Black and the Inane. {}``Heats and jealousies,'' says Lord
Clarendon himself: {}``heats and jealousies,'' mere crabbed whims,
theories and crotchets; these induced slow sober quiet Englishmen
to lay down their ploughs and work; and fly into red fury of confused
war against the best-conditioned of Kings! \textit{Try} if you can
find that true. Scepticism writing about Belief may have great gifts;
but it is really \textit{ultra vires} there. It is Blindness laying
down the Laws of Optics.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

Cromwell's third Parliament split on the same rock as his second.
Ever the constitutional Formula: How came you there? Show us some
Notary parchment! Blind pedants:\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]{}``Why,
surely the same power which makes you a Parliament, that, and something
more, made me a Protector!'' If my Protectorship is nothing, what
in the name of wonder is your Parliamenteership, a reflex and creation
of that?\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]

Parliaments having failed, there remained nothing but the way of Despotism.
Military Dictators, each with his district, to \textit{coerce} the
Royalist and other gainsayers, to govern them, if not by act of Parliament,
then by the sword. Formula shall \textit{not} carry it, while the
Reality is here! I will go on, protecting oppressed Protestants abroad,
appointing just judges, wise managers, at home, cherishing true Gospel
ministers; doing the best I can to make England a Christian England,
greater than old Rome, the Queen of Protestant Christianity; I, since
you will not help me; I while God leaves me life!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Why
did he not give it up; retire into obscurity again, since the Law
would not acknowledge him? cry several. That is where they mistake.
For him there was no giving of it up! Prime ministers have governed
countries, Pitt, Pombal, Choiseul; and their word was a law while
it held: but this Prime Minister was one that \textit{could not get
resigned}. Let him once resign, Charles Stuart and the Cavaliers waited
to kill him; to kill the Cause \textit{and} him. Once embarked, there
is no retreat, no return. This Prime Minister could \textit{retire}
no-whither except into his tomb.

One is sorry for Cromwell in his old days. His complaint is incessant
of the heavy burden Providence has laid on him. Heavy; which he must
bear till death. Old Colonel Hutchinson, as his wife relates it, Hutchinson,
his old battle-mate, coming to see him on some indispensable business,
much against his will,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Cromwell {}``follows
him to the door,'' in a most fraternal, domestic, conciliatory style;
begs that he would be reconciled to him, his old brother in arms;
says how much it grieves him to be misunderstood, deserted by true
fellow-soldiers, dear to him from of old: the rigorous Hutchinson,
cased in his Republican formula, sullenly goes his way.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]And
the man's head now white; his strong arm growing weary with its long
work! I think always too of his poor Mother, now very old, living
in that Palace of his; a right brave woman; as indeed they lived all
an honest God-fearing Household there: if she heard a shot go off,
she thought it was her son killed. He had to come to her at least
once a day, that she might see with her own eyes that he was yet living.
The poor old Mother!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]What had this man gained;
what had he gained? He had a life of sore strife and toil, to his
last day. Fame, ambition, place in History? His dead body was hung
in chains, his {}``place in History,''\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]place
in History forsooth!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]has been a place of ignominy,
accusation, blackness and disgrace; and here, this day, who knows
if it is not rash in me to be among the first that ever ventured to
pronounce him not a knave and liar, but a genuinely honest man! Peace
to him. Did he not, in spite of all, accomplish much for us? \textit{We}
walk smoothly over his great rough heroic life; step over his body
sunk in the ditch there. We need not \textit{spurn} it, as we step
on it!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]Let the Hero rest. It was not to \textit{men's}
judgment that he appealed; nor have men judged him very well.

Precisely a century and a year after this of Puritanism had got itself
hushed up into decent composure, and its results made smooth, in 1688,
there broke out a far deeper explosion, much more difficult to hush
up, known to all mortals, and like to be long known, by the name of
French Revolution. It is properly the third and final act of Protestantism;
the explosive confused return of mankind to Reality and Fact, now
that they were perishing of Semblance and Sham. We call our English
Puritanism the second act: {}``Well then, the Bible is true; let
us go by the Bible!'' {}``In Church,'' said Luther; {}``In Church
and State,'' said Cromwell, {}``let us go by what actually \textit{is}
God's Truth.'' Men have to return to reality; they cannot live on
semblance. The French Revolution, or third act, we may well call the
final one; for lower than that savage \textit{Sansculottism} men cannot
go. They stand there on the nakedest haggard Fact, undeniable in all
seasons and circumstances; and may and must begin again confidently
to build up from that. The French explosion, like the English one,
got its King,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]who had no Notary parchment to
show for himself. We have still to glance for a moment at Napoleon,
our second modern King.

Napoleon does by no means seem to me so great a man as Cromwell. His
enormous victories which reached over all Europe, while Cromwell abode
mainly in our little England, are but as the high \textit{stilts}
on which the man is seen standing; the stature of the man is not altered
thereby. I find in him no such \textit{sincerity} as in Cromwell;
only a far inferior sort. No silent walking, through long years, with
the Awful Unnamable of this Universe; {}``walking with God,'' as
he called it; and faith and strength in that alone: \textit{latent}
thought and valor, content to lie latent, then burst out as in blaze
of Heaven's lightning! Napoleon lived in an age when God was no longer
believed; the meaning of all Silence, Latency, was thought to be Nonentity:
he had to begin not out of the Puritan Bible, but out of poor Sceptical
\textit{Encyclopedies}. This was the length the man carried it. Meritorious
to get so far. His compact, prompt, every way articulate character
is in itself perhaps small, compared with our great chaotic inarticulate
Cromwell's. Instead of {}``dumb Prophet struggling to speak,'' we
have a portentous mixture of the Quack withal! Hume's notion of the
Fanatic-Hypocrite, with such truth as it has, will apply much better
to Napoleon than it did to Cromwell, to Mahomet or the like,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]where
indeed taken strictly it has hardly any truth at all. An element of
blamable ambition shows itself, from the first, in this man; gets
the victory over him at last, and involves him and his work in ruin.

{}``False as a bulletin'' became a proverb in Napoleon's time. He
makes what excuse he could for it: that it was necessary to mislead
the enemy, to keep up his own men's courage, and so forth. On the
whole, there are no excuses. A man in no case has liberty to tell
lies. It had been, in the long-run, \textit{better} for Napoleon too
if he had not told any. In fact, if a man have any purpose reaching
beyond the hour and day, meant to be found extant \textit{next} day,
what good can it ever be to promulgate lies? The lies are found out;
ruinous penalty is exacted for them. No man will believe the liar
next time even when he speaks truth, when it is of the last importance
that he be believed. The old cry of wolf!\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]A
Lie is no-thing; you cannot of nothing make something; you make \textit{nothing}
at last, and lose your labor into the bargain.

Yet Napoleon \textit{had} a sincerity: we are to distinguish between
what is superficial and what is fundamental in insincerity. Across
these outer manoeuverings and quackeries of his, which were many and
most blamable, let us discern withal that the man had a certain instinctive
ineradicable feeling for reality; and did base himself upon fact,
so long as he had any basis. He has an instinct of Nature better than
his culture was. His \textit{savans}, Bourrienne tells us, in that
voyage to Egypt were one evening busily occupied arguing that there
could be no God. They had proved it, to their satisfaction, by all
manner of logic. Napoleon looking up into the stars, answers, {}``Very
ingenious, Messieurs: but \textit{who made} all that?'' The Atheistic
logic runs off from him like water; the great Fact stares him in the
face: {}``Who made all that?'' So too in Practice: he, as every
man that can be great, or have victory in this world, sees, through
all entanglements, the practical heart of the matter; drives straight
towards that. When the steward of his Tuileries Palace was exhibiting
the new upholstery, with praises, and demonstration how glorious it
was, and how cheap withal, Napoleon, making little answer, asked for
a pair of scissors, clips one of the gold tassels from a window-curtain,
put it in his pocket, and walked on. Some days afterwards, he produced
it at the right moment, to the horror of his upholstery functionary;
it was not gold but tinsel! In St.\ Helena, it is notable how he
still, to his last days, insists on the practical, the real. {}``Why
talk and complain; above all, why quarrel with one another? There
is no \textit{result} in it; it comes to nothing that one can \textit{do}.
Say nothing, if one can do nothing!'' He speaks often so, to his
poor discontented followers; he is like a piece of silent strength
in the middle of their morbid querulousness there.

And accordingly was there not what we can call a \textit{faith} in
him, genuine so far as it went? That this new enormous Democracy asserting
itself here in the French Revolution is an unsuppressible Fact, which
the whole world, with its old forces and institutions, cannot put
down; this was a true insight of his, and took his conscience and
enthusiasm along with it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]a \textit{faith}.
And did he not interpret the dim purport of it well? {}``\textit{La
carriere ouverte aux talens}, The implements to him who can handle
them:'' this actually is the truth, and even the whole truth; it
includes whatever the French Revolution or any Revolution, could mean.
Napoleon, in his first period, was a true Democrat. And yet by the
nature of him, fostered too by his military trade, he knew that Democracy,
if it were a true thing at all, could not be an anarchy: the man had
a heart-hatred for anarchy. On that Twentieth of June (1792), Bourrienne
and he sat in a coffee-house, as the mob rolled by: Napoleon expresses
the deepest contempt for persons in authority that they do not restrain
this rabble. On the Tenth of August he wonders why there is no man
to command these poor Swiss; they would conquer if there were. Such
a faith in Democracy, yet hatred of anarchy, it is that carries Napoleon
through all his great work. Through his brilliant Italian Campaigns,
onwards to the Peace of Leoben, one would say, his inspiration is:
{}``Triumph to the French Revolution; assertion of it against these
Austrian Simulacra that pretend to call it a Simulacrum!'' Withal,
however, he feels, and has a right to feel, how necessary a strong
Authority is; how the Revolution cannot prosper or last without such.
To bridle in that great devouring, self-devouring French Revolution;
to \textit{tame} it, so that its intrinsic purpose can be made good,
that it may become \textit{organic}, and be able to live among other
organisms and \textit{formed} things, not as a wasting destruction
alone: is not this still what he partly aimed at, as the true purport
of his life; nay what he actually managed to do? Through Wagrams,
Austerlitzes; triumph after triumph,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]he triumphed
so far. There was an eye to see in this man, a soul to dare and do.
He rose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he \textit{was}
such. The common soldiers used to say on the march: {}``These babbling
\textit{Avocats}, up at Paris; all talk and no work! What wonder it
runs all wrong? We shall have to go and put our \textit{Petit Caporal}
there!'' They went, and put him there; they and France at large.
Chief-consulship, Emperorship, victory over Europe;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]till
the poor Lieutenant of \textit{La Fere}, not unnaturally, might seem
to himself the greatest of all men that had been in the world for
some ages.

But at this point, I think, the fatal charlatan-element got the upper
hand. He apostatized from his old faith in Facts, took to believing
in Semblances; strove to connect himself with Austrian Dynasties,
Popedoms, with the old false Feudalities which he once saw clearly
to be false;\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]considered that \textit{he} would
found {}``his Dynasty'' and so forth; that the enormous French Revolution
meant only that! The man was {}``given up to strong delusion, that
he should believe a lie;'' a fearful but most sure thing. He did
not know true from false now when he looked at them,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]the
fearfulest penalty a man pays for yielding to untruth of heart.\ 
\textit{Self} and false ambition had now become his god: self-deception
once yielded to, \textit{all} other deceptions follow naturally more
and more. What a paltry patchwork of theatrical paper-mantles, tinsel
and mummery, had this man wrapt his own great reality in, thinking
to make it more real thereby! His hollow \textit{Pope's-Concordat},
pretending to be a re-establishment of Catholicism, felt by himself
to be the method of extirpating it, {}``\textit{la vaccine de la
religion}:'' his ceremonial Coronations, consecrations by the old
Italian Chimera in Notre-Dame,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]{}``wanting
nothing to complete the pomp of it,'' as Augereau said, {}``nothing
but the half-million of men who had died to put an end to all that''!
Cromwell's Inauguration was by the Sword and Bible; what we must call
a genuinely \textit{true} one. Sword and Bible were borne before him,
without any chimera: were not these the \textit{real} emblems of Puritanism;
its true decoration and insignia? It had used them both in a very
real manner, and pretended to stand by them now! But this poor Napoleon
mistook: he believed too much in the \textit{Dupability} of men; saw
no fact deeper in man than Hunger and this! He was mistaken. Like
a man that should build upon cloud; his house and he fall down in
confused wreck, and depart out of the world.

Alas, in all of us this charlatan-element exists; and \textit{might}
be developed, were the temptation strong enough. {}``Lead us not
into temptation''! But it is fatal, I say, that it \textit{be} developed.
The thing into which it enters as a cognizable ingredient is doomed
to be altogether transitory; and, however huge it may \textit{look},
is in itself small. Napoleon's working, accordingly, what was it with
all the noise it made? A flash as of gunpowder wide-spread; a blazing-up
as of dry heath. For an hour the whole Universe seems wrapt in smoke
and flame; but only for an hour. It goes out: the Universe with its
old mountains and streams, its stars above and kind soil beneath,
is still there.

The Duke of Weimar told his friends always, To be of courage; this
Napoleonism was \textit{unjust}, a falsehood, and could not last.
It is true doctrine. The heavier this Napoleon trampled on the world,
holding it tyrannously down, the fiercer would the world's recoil
against him be, one day. Injustice pays itself with frightful compound-interest.
I am not sure but he had better have lost his best park of artillery,
or had his best regiment drowned in the sea, than shot that poor German
Bookseller, Palm! It was a palpable tyrannous murderous injustice,
which no man, let him paint an inch thick, could make out to be other.
It burnt deep into the hearts of men, it and the like of it; suppressed
fire flashed in the eyes of men, as they thought of it,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]waiting
their day! Which day \textit{came}: Germany rose round him.\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]What
Napoleon \textit{did} will in the long-run amount to what he did justly;
what Nature with her laws will sanction. To what of reality was in
him; to that and nothing more. The rest was all smoke and waste.\ 
\textit{La carriere ouverte aux talens}: that great true Message,
which has yet to articulate and fulfil itself everywhere, he left
in a most inarticulate state. He was a great \textit{ebauche}, a rude-draught
never completed; as indeed what great man is other? Left in \textit{too}
rude a state, alas!

His notions of the world, as he expresses them there at St.\ Helena,
are almost tragical to consider. He seems to feel the most unaffected
surprise that it has all gone so; that he is flung out on the rock
here, and the World is still moving on its axis. France is great,
and all-great: and at bottom, he is France. England itself, he says,
is by Nature only an appendage of France; {}``another Isle of Oleron
to France.'' So it was by \textit{Nature}, by Napoleon-Nature; and
yet look how in fact\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]\textit{here} \textit{am}
I! He cannot understand it: inconceivable that the reality has not
corresponded to his program of it; that France was not all-great,
that he was not France. {}``Strong delusion,'' that he should believe
the thing to be which \textit{is} not! The compact, clear-seeing,
decisive Italian nature of him, strong, genuine, which he once had,
has enveloped itself, half-dissolved itself, in a turbid atmosphere
of French fanfaronade. The world was not disposed to be trodden down
underfoot; to be bound into masses, and built together, as \textit{he}
liked, for a pedestal to France and him: the world had quite other
purposes in view! Napoleon's astonishment is extreme. But alas, what
help now? He had gone that way of his; and Nature also had gone her
way. Having once parted with Reality, he tumbles helpless in Vacuity;
no rescue for him. He had to sink there, mournfully as man seldom
did; and break his great heart, and die,\mbox{---}\linebreak[1]this
poor Napoleon: a great implement too soon wasted, till it was useless:
our last Great Man!

Our last, in a double sense. For here finally these wide roamings
of ours through so many times and places, in search and study of Heroes,
are to terminate. I am sorry for it: there was pleasure for me in
this business, if also much pain. It is a great subject, and a most
grave and wide one, this which, not to be too grave about it, I have
named \textit{Hero-worship}. It enters deeply, as I think, into the
secret of Mankind's ways and vitalest interests in this world, and
is well worth explaining at present. With six months, instead of six
days, we might have done better. I promised to break ground on it;
I know not whether I have even managed to do that. I have had to tear
it up in the rudest manner in order to get into it at all. Often enough,
with these abrupt utterances thrown out isolated, unexplained, has
your tolerance been put to the trial. Tolerance, patient candor, all-hoping
favor and kindness, which I will not speak of at present. The accomplished
and distinguished, the beautiful, the wise, something of what is best
in England, have listened patiently to my rude words. With many feelings,
I heartily thank you all; and say, Good be with you all! 
\end{document}
