THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA GIFT OF Franklin P. Nutting HEROES, HERO WORSHIP AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY. By THOMAS CARLYLE. NEW YORK: A. L. BUKT. PUBLISHER. co> CONTENTS. LECTURE I. PAGE. THE HERO AS DIVINITY. Odin Paganism Scandinavian Mythology 1 LECTURE II. THE HERO AS PROPHET. Mahomet Islam 49 LECTURE III. THE HERO AS POET. Dante Shakespeare 92 LECTURE IV. THE HERO AS PRIEST. Luther Reformation Knox Puri- tanism 136 LECTURE V. THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns 182 LECTURE VI. THE HERO AS KING. Cromwell, Napoleon Modern Revo- lutionism 231 SUMMARY AND INDEX 289, 299 962 HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY. LECTUEE L* THE HERO AS DIVINITY ODIN PAGANISM SCANDINAVIAN MYTHOLOGY. 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; 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 then 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 bot- tom the history of the great men who have worked here. They are the leaders of men, these great ones ; the modelers, 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 'Delivered Tuesday, May 5, 1940. 2 LECTURES ON HEROES. material result, the practical realization and embodi- ment 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 some- thing 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 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 V 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 THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 3 nation of men's. By religion I do not mean 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 as- sertion ; which is often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argument- ative region of him, if even so deep as that. But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enought 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 religion ; or, it may be, his mere skepticism and 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. Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all. What religion they had ? Was it Heathenism- plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation of this mystery of life, and for chief recognised 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 skepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an unseen world, and mystery of life except a mad one doubt as to all this, or unbelief and flat denial ? Answering of this 4 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 ; their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them. In these dis- courses 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, con- fusions, falsehoods and absurdities, covering the whole field of life ! A thing that fills us with astonishment, almost, if it were possible, with incredulity 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 wor- shiped 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 incred- ible fable. Nevertheless it is a clear fact that they did it. Such hideous inextricable jungle of miswor- ships, 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 THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 5 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 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 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, their 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 quack- eries 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 e very vy here is the born enemy of lies. I find grand lamaism itself to have a kind of truth in it. Bead the candid, clear-sighted, rather skeptical Mr.Turner's "Account of his Embassy " to that country and see. They have their belief, these poor Thibet people^ that Providence sends down always an 6 LECTURES ON HEROES. incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of pope ! At bottom still better, belief that there is a greatest man ; that 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 " discover- ability " 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 meth- ods : but they are so much worse than our methods of understanding him to be always the eldest-born of a certain genealogy? Alas, it is a difficult thing to find good methods for ! We shall begin to have a chance of understanding paganism, when we first ad- mit that to its followers it was, at one time, earnestly true. Let us consider it very certain that men did be- lieve 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, attrib- utes such things to allegory. It was a play of poetic minds, say these theorists ; a shado\ving-forth, in alle- gorical 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 feel 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 TEE HERO AS DIVINITY. 7 this business. The hypothesis which ascribes pagan- ism wholly or mostly to this agency, I call a little more respectable ; but I cannot yet call it the true hypothesis. Think, would 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 earn- est 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 toward 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 mversion, 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 " Pilgrim's Progress " is an allegory and a beautiful, just and serious one : but consider whether Bunyan's alle- gory could hwQ preceded the faith it symbolizes ! The faith had to be already there, standing believed by everybody of which the allegory could then become a shadow ; and, with all its seriousness, we may say a sportful shadow, a mere play of the fancy, in compar- ison 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 8 LECTURES ON HEROES. Bunyan's nor in any other case. For paganism, there- fore, we have still to inquire, whence came that scien- tific 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 " ex- plaining," in this place, or in any place, such a phenom- enon as that far-distant distracted cloudy imbroglio of paganism -more like a cloud field than a distant con- tinent of firm land and facts ! It is no longer a reality ? yet it was one. We ought to understand that this seeming cioudfield 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 destesting quacks. Let us try if, leaving out both the quack theory and the allegory one and listening with affectionate at- tention 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 astonish- ment 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 THE HERO AS DIVINITY. Q 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 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, jprefcrnatoral. This green flowery rock- built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many- sounding seas ; 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 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 want of insight. It is by 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 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 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 filip This world, after all our science and sciences, is still ;i 1 LECTURES ON miracle ; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it. That great mystery of 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 not : this is forever very literally a miracle ; a thing to strike us dumb for we have no word to speak about it. This universe, ah me what could the wild man know of it ; what can we yet know 2 That it is a force and thousandfold complexity of forces ; a force which is not we. That is all ; it is not we, it is alto- gether different from us. Force, force, everywhere force ; we ourselves a mysterious force in the center 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 hugh illimitable whirlwind of force, which envelopes 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 hon- estly apply his sense, proclaims to be a living thing ah, an unspeakable, godlike thing ; toward 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 further : What in such a time as ours it requires a prophet or poet to teach us, namely, THE HEHO AS DIVINITY. H the stripping-off of those poor undevout wrappages, nomenclatures and scientific hearsays 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 : " 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 bright- ness, 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 speech for any feeling, it might seem a little eye, that Canopus, glancing-out on him from the great deep eternity ; re- vealing the inner splendor to him. Cannot we under- stand how these men worshiped Canopus ; became what we call Sabeans, worshiping the stars ? Such is to me the secret of all forms of paganism. Worship is tran- scendent 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 fiber 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 though which we may look into infinitude itself? " He that can discern the loveliness of things, we 12 LECTVttES ON HEROES. call him poet, painter, man of genius, gifted, lovable. These poor Sabeans did even what he does 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 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 refer- ence 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 " ah, what words have we for such things ? 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 than that high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this revela- tion 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 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 THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 13 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 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, adora- tion of a star or natural object, was a root or fiber 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. Eelig- ion I find stand upon it ; not paganism only, but far higher and truer religions all religion hitherto known. Hero-worship, heartfelt prostrate admiration, submis- sion, burning, boundless, for a noblest godlike v form of^ man is not that the germ of Christianity itself ? The greatest of all heroes is one 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 imspeakable provinces, is 14 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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, sub- missive admiration for the truly great ? Society is founded on hero-worship. All dignities of rank, on which human association rests, are what we might call a Heroarchy (government of heroes), or a hierarchy, for it is " sacred " enough withal ! The duke means dux, leader ; king is kon-ning, kan-ning, man that knows or cans. Society everywhere is some represen- tation, not msupportably inaccurate, of a graduated worship of heroes reverence and obedience done to men really great and wise. Not msupportably inac- curate, I say ! They are all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries, all representing gold and several of them, alas, always we* 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 the notes being all false and no gold to be had for them, people take to crying in their despair that there is no gold, that there never was any ! " Gold," hero-worship, 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 THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 15 him, but 'take the dimensions of him 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 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 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, 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 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 char- acters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling-down into ever worse distress toward final ruin all this I like^l 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 mold er ing sticks are thought to have called him forth. They did want him greatly; but as to call him forth 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 1G LECTURES ON HEROES. the heap of barren dead fuel. It is the last consum- mation of unbelief. In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find the great man to have been the indispens- able savior of his epoch the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burned. The history of the world, I said already, was the biography of great men. Such small critics do what they can to promote un- belief 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 per- verted it may be. Hero-worship endures forever while man endures. Boswell venerates his Johnson, right truly even in the eighteenth century. The un- believing French believe in their Yoltaire ; 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 Yoltaire. Truly, if Christianity be the highest instance of hero-worship, then we may find here in Yoltaireism 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 ad- mire at all as those French of Yoltaire. Persiflage w r as the character of their whole mind ; adoration had no- where a place in it. You see ! The old man of Ferney comes up to Paris; an old, tottering, infirm man 84 years old. They feel that he too is a kind of hero ; that he has spent his life in opposing error and injus- THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 17 tice, delivering Calases, unmasking hypocrites in high places in short that he too, though in a strange way, has fought like a valiant man. They feel withal that, if persiflage be the great thing, there never was such a 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 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 postillion, " Va ~bon train ; thou art driving M. de Yoltaire." 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, beautif ulest, 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 ency eloped ism, in all times and places, the hero has been worshiped. It will ever be so. We all love great men ; love, venerate and bow down submis- sive 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 skeptical 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 oon have to become times of revolution, much down- 18 LECTURES ON HEROES. rushing, sorrowful decay and ruin is visible to every- body. For nryself in these days, I seem to see in this indestructibility of hero-worship the everlasting ada- mant lower than which the confused wreck of revolution- ary 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 ; 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 the one fixed point in modern revolution- ary 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 worshipers 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 be- lieve 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, THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 19 In that strange island Iceland burst-up, the geolo- gists 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 gleam- ing beauty in summer-tirne ; 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 fi re vvhere of all places we least looked for literature or written memorials, the record of these things was written down. On the seaboard 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, col- lected certain of their old pagan songs, just about be- coming obsolete then poems or chants of a mythic, prophetic, mostly all of a religious character : that is what Norse critics call the Elder or poetic Edda. Edda, a word of uncertain etymology, is thought to signify Ancestress. Snorro Sturleson, an Iceland gentle- man, an extremely notable personage, educated by this Saemund's grandson, took in hand next, near a century afterward, to put together, among several books he wrote, a kind of prose synopsis of the whole mythoU ogy ; elucidated by new fragments of traditionary verse. A work constructed really with great ingenuity, native talent, what one might call unconscious art ; 20 LECTURES ON HEROES. altogether a perspicuous clear work, pleasant reading still : This is th e Younger or prose Edda. By these and the numerous other Sagas, mostty Icelandic, with the commentaries, Icelandic or not, which go on zeal- ously 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 his 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 miracu- lous, 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 " Jotuns" giants, hugh 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 fire, or 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 demon, of the brood of the Jotuns. The sav- ages of the Ladrones Islands too (say some Spanish vov- THIS HERO AS DIVINITY. 21 agers) 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 is flame '{ Frost the old Norse seer discerns to be a monstrous hoary Jotun, the giant Thrym, Hrym ; or Rime, the old word now nearly obsolete here, but still used in Scotland to signify hoar frost. Rime was not then as now a dead chemical thing, but a living Jotun or devil ; the monstrous Jotun Rime drove home his horses at night, sat " combing their manes " which horses were Hail-Clouds, or fleet Frost -Winds. His cows No, not his, but a kinsman's, the giant Hymir's cows are Icebergs : this Hymir " looks at the rocks " with his devil-eye and they split in the glance of it. Thunder was not then mere electricity, vitreous or resinous ; it was the god Donner (thunder) or Thor ; 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 that is the peal; wrathful he " blows in his red beard " that is the rustling storm- blast before the thunder begin. Balder again the white god, the beautiful, the just and benignant (whom the early Christian missionaries found to resem- ble Christ), is the sun; beautifulest of visible things; wonderous too, and divine still, after all our astrono- mies and almanacs ? But perhaps the notablest god we hear tell of is one of whom Grimm the German etymologist finds trace ; the god Wunsch or Wish. The god Wish' who could give us. all that we wished / 22 LECTURES ON HEROES. Is not this the sincerest and yet rudest voice of the spirit of man ? The 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 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 Aegir, a very dangerous Jotun ; 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 eager coming !" Curious ; that word surviving like the peak of a submerged world ! The oldest Not- tingham bargemen had believed in the god Aegir. Indeed our English blood too in a good part is Danish, Norse ; or rather, at bottom, Danish and Norse and Saxon have no distinction, except a superficial one as of heathen and Christian, or the like. But all over our island we are mingled largely with Danes proper from the incessant invasions there were : and this of course in a greater proportion along the east coast; the greatest of all, as I find, in the north country. From the humbler upward, all over Scotland, the speech of the common people is still in a singular degree Icelan- dic ; its Germanism has still a peculiar Norse tinge. They too are " Norman," Northmen, if that be any great beauty ! Of the chief god, Odin, we shall speak by and by. Mark at present so much ; what the essence of Scandi- navian and indeed of all paganism is : a recognition of the forces of nature as godlike, stupendous, personal agencies, as gods and demons. Not inconceivable to us. It is the infant thought of man opening itself ? THK HERO AS DIVINITY. 23 with awe and wonder, on this ever-stupendous uni- verse. To me there is in the Norse system something very genuine, very great and manlike. A broad sim- plicity, rusticity, so very different from the light grace- fulness 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 the first characteristic of all good thought in all times. Not graceful light- ness, 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 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 pri- mary 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 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 As- gard their gods'-d welling ; his skull was the great blue vault of immensity, and the brains of it became the clouds. What a hyper-brobdignagian business ! Un- tamed thought, great, giantlike,, enormous } to be 24 LECTURES ON HEROES. tamed in due time into the compact greatness, not giantlike, but godlike and stronger than gianthood, of the Shakespeare, the Goethes. 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. Ig- drasil, 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 uni- verse : it is the tree of existence. At the foot of it, in the death-kingdom, sit three Nornas, fates the past, present, future ; watering its roots from the sacred well. Its "boughs," with their buddings and dis- leafings events, things suffered, things done, catas- trophes stretch through all lands and times. Is not every leaf of it a biography, every -fiber there an act or word? Its boughs are histories of nations. The rustle of it is the noise of human existence, onward from of old. It grows there, the breath of human passion rustling through it or storrn-tossed, 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 to do" Considering how human things circulate, each inextricably in communion with all 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 I find no similtude so true as this of a tree. Beautiful ; altogether beautiful and great. The " machine of the universe " alas, do but think of that in contrast ! it is strange enough this old Norse view of THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 25 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 from the thought, above all, of the first Norse man who had an original power of thinking. The first Norse " man of genius,' as we should call him ! In- numerable 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 won- der, such as men only feel till the great thinker came, the 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 spir- itual 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 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 bless- ing for them ; a prophet, a god ! Thought once awak- ened does not again slumber ; unfolds itself into a sys- tem of thought ; grows, in man after man, generation after generation till its full stature is reached and such system of thought can grow no further, 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 im- measurable admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds, became adoration. Has he not the 26 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 as- surance 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! 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 uni- verse once promulgated, a like view starts into being in all minds ; grows, keeps ever growing, while it con- tinues 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 ar- rival of a thinker in the world ! 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 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, con- tributed 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 JSdda, no man will now ever know ; its THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 'THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 39 prover, 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 mes- sage 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 how strangely ! I called it a small light shining and shaping in the high vortex of Norse darkness. Yet the darkness itself was 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 further ! The living doctrine grows, grows like a Banyan-tree ; the first seed is the essential thing : any branch strikes it- self 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 like- ness?" Critics trace some affinity in some Norse mythuses, of the creation and suchlike, with those of the Hindoos. The cow Adumbla, " licking the rime from the rocks," has a kind of Hindoo look, A Hindoo 40 LECTURES ON HEROES cow, transported into frosty countries. Probable 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 nay, every true thinker to this hour is a kind of Odin, teaches men his way of thought, spreads a shadow of his own likeness ovei 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 prophesies we have, as the Voluspa in the 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 their songs chiefly that survive. In later centuries, I sup- pose, they would go on singing, poetically symbolizing j 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 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 Ice- land 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 THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 41 down his brows " in veritable Norse rage : " grasps his hammer till the '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 toward the north." Hermoder rides on ; leaps hell-gate, Hela's gate ; does see Balder and speak with him : Balder cannot be delivered. Inexor- able ! Hela will not, for Odin or any god, give him up. The beautiful and gentle has to remain there. His wife had voluteered to go with him, to die with him. They shall forever remain there. He sends his ring to Odin ; Nanna, his wife, sends her thimble to Frigga, as a remembrance Ah me ! For indeed valor is the fountain of pity too 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 essay on Thor, that the old Norse heart finds its friend in the thunger-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 loves this Thor and his ham- mer-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 henchmen and attendant is Thialfi, manual labor. Thor himself engages in all manner of rough manual work, scorns no business for 42 LECTURES ON HEROES. its plebeianism ; is ever and anon traveling to the country of the Jotuns, harrying those chaotic frost-mon- sters, subduing them, at least straightening and dam- aging 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. Hy- mir 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 needing only to be tamed down ; into Shakespeares, Dantes, Goethes! It is all gone now, that old Norse work 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. Hynde Etin and still more decisively Red Etin of Ireland, in the Scottish ballads, these are both derived from Norseland ; Etin is evi- dently a Jotun. Nay, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a twig too of this same world-tree ; there seems no doubt of that. Hamlet, Amleth, I find, is really a mythic per- sonage ; and his tragedy, of the poisoned father, pois- oned asleep by drops in his ear and the rest, is a Norse my thus! Old Saxo, as his wont was, made it a Danish history ; Shakespeare, out of Saxo, made it what we see. That is a twig of the world-tree that has THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 43 grown, I think by nature or accident that one has grown ! In fact, these old ."N"orse songs have a truth in them, an inward perennial truth and greatness 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 a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All deep souls see into that the Hindoo mythologist, the German philosopher the Shakespeare, the earnest thinker, wherever he may be : " We are such stuff as dreams are made of ! " One of Thor's expeditions, to Utgard (the outer gar- den, central seat of Jotun-land), is remarkable in this respect. Thialfi was with him and Loke. After vari- ous adventures, they entered upon giant-land; wan- dered 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 44 LEOTUnES Oft HEROES. noise had been only the snoring of a certain enormous but peaceable giant, the giant Skrymir, who lay peace- ably sleeping near by ; and this that they took for a house was merely his glove, thrown aside there ; the door was the glove-wrist ; the little closet they had fled into was the thumb ! Such a glove 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 thunderbolt blow, of force to rend rocks. The giant merely awoke ; rubbed his chee'k 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 dropped ? " 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 THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 45 Strength could not ; he bent up the creature's back, could not raise its feet off the ground, could at the ut- most 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 yet be not so much ashamed ; there was deception of appearance in it. That horn you tried to drink was the sea ; you did make it ebb ; but who could drink that, the bottomless ! The cat you would have lifted why, that is the midyard- 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 wom$n, she was 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 look at these three valleys ; your three strokes made these ! " Thor looked at his attendant Jotun : itwasSkrymir it was, say Norse critics, the old chaotic rocky earth in person and that glove-house was some earth-cavern ! But Skrymir had vanished ; Utgard with its skyhigh 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 ! " 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 shaped far better ! A great broad brobdignag grin of true humor is in this 46 LKCTURBS ON UEROE8. 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 ragncvrok, consummation, or twilight of the gods. It is in the 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 vic- tory 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 hig'her supreme god and justice to reign among men. Curious this law of mu- tation, 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 last my thus 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 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 THE HERO AS DIVINITY. 47 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 1023, at Stickelstad, near that Drontheim, where the chief cathedral of the north has now stood for many centuries, dedicated gratefully to his memory as 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 stepped 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 re- markable, 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 and when they looked again, he was nowhere to be found. This is the last appearance of Ttor on the 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 "fit to be " seen ! " There is something pathetic, tragic for me in this last voice of paganism. Thor is vanished, the whole Norse 48 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 word, 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 im- pressive consecration of valor (so we may defie it), suf- ficed 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 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 con- sciously, brings us into closer and clearer relation with the past 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 true and is a precious possession. In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our com- mon human nature that has been developing itself. The actual true is the sum of all these ; not anyone 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 con- stitute the true religion." THE HEHO AS PROPHET. 49 LECTUBE II.* THE HERO AS PROPHET MAHOMET ISLAM. FROM the first rude times of paganism among the Scandinavians in the north, we advance to a very dif- ferent epoch of religion, among a very different people : Mahometanism among the Arabs. A great change ; what a change and progress is in- dicated here, in the universal condition and thoughts of men ! The hero is now regarded as a god among his fellow- men ; 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 his- tory of the world there will not again be any man, never so great, whom his fellow-men will take for a god. Nay we might rationally ask, did any set of human beings ever really think the man they saw there standing beside them a god, the maker of this world ? Perhaps not ; it was usually some man they remem- bered, or 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 dif- ficult to know what he is, or how to account of him and receive him ! The most significant feature in the *pelivered Friday, May 8, 1840, 50 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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^s 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 to fall prostrate before the great man, into 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 this we waste away as an idle artificial firework, sent to amuse us a little, and sink it into ashes, wreck and in effectuality: 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 deliquium of love and admira- tion, was not good ; but such unreasoning, nay irration- al supercilious no-love at all is perhaps still worse! It is a thing forever changing, this of hero-worship : different in each age, difficult to dp well in any age. THE HERO AS PROPHET. 51 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 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 im- postor, 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 sup- position. 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 sanctignecl here. 52 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 skepticism ; 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 prop- erties of mortar, burned clay and what else he 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, be verily in communion with nature and the truth of things, or nature will answer him, No, not at all ! Speciosities are specious ah me ! 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 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 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 a shallow braggart conscious sincerity ; often/* THE HERO AS PROPHET. 53 est 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 ^sincerity ; for what man can walk accurately by the law of truth for one day '* No, the great man does not boast him- self sincere, far from that ; perhaps does not ask him- self 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 ! 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 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 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 he lives, and has to live, in daily communion with that. Hear- says cannot hide it from him ; he is blind, homeless, 1 Miserable, following hearsays; ^glares in upon him. Really his utterances, are they not a kind of "reve- lation" 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? 54 LECTURES ON HEROES. The " inspiration of the Almighty giveth him under- standing : " 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 mes- sage 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 kindle the world ; the world's Maker had ordered it so. Neither can the faults, imperfections, insincerities even, or Ma- homet, 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 de- tails of the business hide the real center of it. Faults ? The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. Headers 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 ac- cording 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, repentance the most divine ? The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin that is death; the heart so conscious is di- vorced from sincerity, humility and fact ; is dead : it is "pure" as dead dry sand is pure. David's life ancj THE HERO AS PROPHET. 55 history, as written for us in those psalms of his, I con- sider 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 toward 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 strug- gle onward ; now fallen, deep-abased ; and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleeding heart, he has to rise again, struggle again still onward. That his struggle 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 vendure : 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 56 LECTURES ON IIEROUS. 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 noblemindedness, 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 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 earn- estness of the Jews they seem to combine something graceful, brilliant, which is not Jewish. They had " poetic contests " among them before the time of Ma- homet. Sale says, at Ocadh, in the south of Arabia, there were yearly fairs, and there, when the merchan- dising was done, poets sang for prizes the wild people gathered to hear that. One Jewish quality these Arabs manifest ; the out- come of many or of all high qualities : what we may call religiosity. From of old they had been zealous worshipers, according to their light. They worshiped the stars, as Sabeans; worshiped many natural objects recognized them as symbols, immediate manifesta- tions, of the Maker of nature. It was wrong ; and yet not wholly wrong. All God's works are still in ;i THE HERO AS PROPHET. 57 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 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 noblemindedness had dwelt in these rustic thoughtful peoples? Biblical critics seem agreed that our own " 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 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 reconcile- ment. There is the seeing eye, the mildly understand- ing heart. So true everyway ; true eyesight and vision for all things ; material things no less than spiritual : the horse " hast thou clothed his neck with thunder f " He " 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 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. To the idolatrous Arabs one of the most ancient 58 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 mis- taken, as the oldest, most honored temple in his time; that is, some half century before our era. Silvestre de Sarv says there is some likelihood that the black stone is an aerolite. In that case, some man might see it fall out of heaven ! It stands now beside the well Zem- zem ; the Caabah is built over both. A well is in all places a beautiful affecting object, gushing out like life from the hard earth still more so in those hot dry countries, where it is the first condition of being. The well Zemzem has its name from the bubling sound of the waters, 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 this night to glitter again under the stars. An authentic frag- ment of the oldest past. It is the keblah of all Moslem : from Delhi all onward to Morocco, the eyes of innum- erable praying men are turned toward it, five times, this day and all days : one of the notablest centers 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 THE HERO AS PROPHET. 59 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, be- come 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 ac- complish other objects which depend on meeting to- gether. Mec.ca 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, for- warders of those eastern and western products; im- porters 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 gov- ernors 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 idol- atry assembled in common adoration held mainly by the inward indissoluble bond of common blood and lan- guage. 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 ap- pear to have been in a tottering state ; much was get- ting into confusion and fermentation among them. 60 LECTURES ON HEROES. Obscure tidings of the most important event ever trans- acted in this world, the life and death of the Divine Man in Judea, at once the symptom and cause of im- measurable 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 Kore- ish 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 suchlike; in his eighteenth year one finds him a fighter following his uncle in war. But perhaps the most significant of all his journe} T s is one we find noted as of some years' earlier date; a THE HERO AS PROPHET. 61 journey to the fairs of Syria. The young man here first came in contact with a quite foreign world 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. Prob- ably enough it is greatly exaggerated, this of the ~Nes- torian 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 Ma- homet. 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 02 LECTURES ON HEROES. alone there, deep down in the bosom of the wilderness ; has to grow up so alone with nature and his own thoughts. But, from an early age, he had been remarked as a thoughtful man. His companions named him " Al Amin, the faithful." A man of truth and fidelity; true in what he did, in what he spoke and thought. They noted that 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 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 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 I somehow like too that vein on the brow, which swelled up black when he was in anger : like the " horse-shoe vein " in Scott's red gaunt- let. 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, passion- ate, 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 traveled in hsr business, again to the fairs of Syria ; how he managed all, as one can well understand, with fidelity, adroitness ; how her grati- tude, her regard for him grew : the story of their mar- riage is altogether a graceful intelligible one, as told us THE HERO AS PROPHET. 63 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 unexceptional, entirely quiet and commonplace way, till the heat of his years was done. He was forty before he talked of any mis- sion from heaven. All his irregularities, real and sup- posed 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 get- ting old, the prurient heat of his life all burned out and peace growing to be the chief thing this world could give him, did he start on the u 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 lut 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 him- self 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 sincerity, as we named it, has in very truth something of divine. The word of 64 LECTURES ON HEROES. such a man is a voice direct from nature's own heart. Men do and must listen to that as to nothing else 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 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 dwelled 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 infinite moment ; all other things of no moment whatever in comparison. The jargon of argu- mentative 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 and omega of his whole heroism, that he looks through the shows of things into things. Use and wont, re- spectable 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 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 him. He there has to answer it, or perish miserably. Now, even now, or else though all eternity THE HERO AS PROPHET. 65 never ! Answer it; ihou must find an answer ambi- tion ? What could all Arabia do for this man ; with the crown of Greek Heraclius, of Persian Chosroes, and all crowns in the earth 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 the hell beneath. All crowns and sovereignties whatsoever, where would 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 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 not 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 Eamad- han, 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 heav- en he had now found it all oufr; 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 66 LECTURES ON HEROES. shadow of Him ; a transitory garment veiling the eternal splendor. "Allah akbar, God is great " and then also "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 things he sends to us, were it death and worse than death, shall be good, shall be best ; we re- sign ourselves to God. "If this be Islam," says Goethe, " do we not all live in Islam f " 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 necessity will make him submit 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 preten- sion of scanning .this great God's-world in his small fraction of a brain ; to know that it had verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a just law, that the soul of it was good that his part in it was to con- form to the law of the whole, and in devout silence follow that ; not questioning it, obeying it as unques- tionable. I say, this is yet the only true morality known. A man is right and invincible, virtuous and on the road toward 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 and surely his first chance of co-operating with 'it, or get- ting into the course of it, is to know Avith 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 Chris- tianity for Islam is definable as a confused form of THE HERO AS PROPHET. 67 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 re- vealed to our earth. Such light has 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 who of us yet can know what to call it ? It is the " inspiration of the Almighty that giveth us understanding." To know ; to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic act of which the best logics can but babble on the surface. " Is not be- lief the true god-announcing miracle ? " says Novalis. 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 dark- ness ; that he therefore was bound to make known the same to all creatures : -his is what was meant by " Mahomet is the prophet of God ; " this too is not without its true meaning. 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 68 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 infinitelj T , the moment another soul will believe in it." It is boundless favor. He never forgot this good Kadijah. Long afterward, Ayesha his 3 r oung favorite wife, a woman who indeed distinguished her- self 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 ?" " 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 ! " Seid, his slave, also believed in him ; these with his young cousin Ali, Abu Thalab'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 fol- lowers. His progress was slow enough. His encour- agement to go on, was altogether the usual encourage- ment 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, im- patient of the silence, started up and exclaimed in pas-' sionate fierce language, that he would ! The assembly, THE HERO AS PROPHET. 69 among whom was Abu Thaleb, All'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 All, one cannot but like him. A noble-minded creature, as he shows himself, now and always afterward ; full of affection, of fiery daring. Something chivalrous in him ; brave as a lion ; yet with a grace, a truth and aifection worthy of Christian knighthood. He died by assassin- ation 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 offense 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 offense to everybody : who is this that pretends to be wiser than we all ; that rebukes us all, as mere fools and worshipers 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 r i " 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 70 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 w. 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 Jiis 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. Ma- homet 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 con- tinuance possible at Mecca for him any longer, Ma- homet fled to the place then called Yathreb, where he had gained some adherents ; the place they now call THE HERO AS PROPHET. 71 Medina, or " Medinat al Ncibi, the city of the prophet," from that circumstance. It lay some 200 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, 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, en- compassed with danger : unless he could find hope in his own heart, the outward face of things was but hope- less for him. It is so with all men in the like case. Hitherto Mahomet had professed to publish his relig- ion 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 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 mur- der : 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 pro- pagated itself peaceably in the way of preaching and conviction. Yet withal, if we take this for an argu- ment 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 72 LECTURES ON HEROES. starting, is precisely in & 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 he take a sword and try to pro- pagate with that, will do little for him. You must first get your sword ! On the whole, a thing will pro- pagate itself as it can. We do not find, of the Chris- tian 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 im- plement it has, or can lay hold of. "We will let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight and to the utter- most 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 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 the whole rubbish she silently absorbs shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish. The yellow wheat is growing there ; the good earth is silent about all the rest has silently THE HERO AS PROPHET. 73 turned all the rest to some benefit too, and makes no complaint about it! So every where 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 is 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 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 scientific theorem of the universe ; which 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 we call pure or impure, is not with her the final question. ]STot 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 insin- cere 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 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 ^ Jiomoiousian and homoousion, the head full of worthless noise, the heart 74 LECTURES ON HEROES. empty and dead ! The truth of it is embedded in por- tentous 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, ru- mors and hypotheses of Greeks and Jews, with their idle wiredrawings, 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 " these are wood, I tell you ! They can do nothing for you ; they are an impotent blasphemous pretence ; 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 : "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 the world ; co-operating with them, not vainly withstanding them : 1 know, to this day, no better definition of duty than that same. All that is right includes itself in this of co-operating THE HERO AS PROPHET. 75 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. Homoiousion, 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 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 propo- sitions, 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 mere dead ) in various senses, for this which was 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 Koran, or 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 Chris- tians 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, 76 LECTURES ox HEROES. has the voice of this book, at all moments, kept sound- ing through the ears and the hearts of so many men. "We hear of Mahometan doctors that had read it seventy thousand times ! Yery curious : if one sought for " discrepancies of national taste," here surely were the most eminent in- stance 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, in- condite ; endless iterations, long-windedness, entangle- ment ; most crude, incondite 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 disad- vantages : 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 promul- gation ; much of it, they say, on shoulder-blades of mutton, flung pell-mell into a chest : and they pub- lished it, without any discoverable order as to time or otherwise 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 trans- lation 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 HERO AS PROPHET. 7? the earth ; as a well-written book, or indeed as a look at all ; and not a bewildered rhapsody ; 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 con- fused 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 authorcraft are of small amount to that. One would say the primary character of the Koran is this of its genuineness, of its being a bonajide book. Pri- deaux, 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 prepense; of conscious deceit generally, or perhaps at all 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 in- tensity 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 78 LECTURES ON HEROES. shapes itself into no form of composition, is stated in no sequence, method, or coherence they are not shaped at all, these thoughts of his ; flung out un- shaped, as they struggle and tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate state. We said " stupid : " yet natural stupidity is by no means the character of Ma- homet's book ; it is natural uncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking ; in the haste and press- ure of continual fighting, has not time to mature him- self 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 suc- cessive utterances of a soul in that mood, colored by the various vicissitudes of twenty-three years; now well uttered, now worse : this is the Koran. For we are to consider Mahomet, through these twenty-three years, as the center of a world wholly in conflict. Battles with the Kornish 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 ; 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 uni- verse an awful fact and reality. He has faults enough. The man was an uncultured semi-barbarous son of nature, much of the Beelojiln still clinging to him : we THE HERO AS PJtOPHET. 79 must take him for that. But for a wretched simula- crum, a hungry impostor without eyes or heart, prac- ticing fora 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 nay, at bottom, it alone can give rise to merit of any kind. Curiously, through these incondite masses of tradition, vitupera- tion, 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 en- thusiastic 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 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 re- peating 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. 80 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 sees the truth of them ; this is to me a highly interest- ing 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 sin- cerity 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 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 ; " ap- pointed paths in it ;" you can live in it, go to and fro on it. 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 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 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, THE HERO AS PROPHET. 81 God has withdrawn the wind, they lie dead and can- not 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 j made you having no compassion on one another how had it been then ! This is a great direct thought, a glance at first-hand into the very fact of things. Eude 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 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 tactual manifestation of God's power and presence 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 on that plate of ground, the mountains are set on that to 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 82 LECTURES ON HEROES. in the inane. Allah withdraws his hand from it and it ceases to be. The universal empire of Allah, pres- ence 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 saleable, curious, good for propelling steam-ships! With our sciences and cyclopedias, we are apt to forget the 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, con- tentious, empty a thistle in late autumn. The best science, without this, is but as the dead timber ; it is not the growing tree and forest which gives ever-new 1 timber, among other things ! Man cannot know either, unless he can 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 in- dulgences, criminal to us, which he permitted, were not of his appointment; he found them practiced, un- questioned 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 T1IE HERO AS PfiOPtiET. 83 pleasure, recompense 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 daydrudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the 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 nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the f rugalest ; 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 hunger of any sort or these wild Arab men, fighting and jostling twenty-three years at his hand, in close contact with him always, would not have rev- erencecl him so ! They were wild men, bursting ever 84 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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, } r ou 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, counseling, ordering in the midst of them : they must have seen what kind of a man he was, let him be called what you like! No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting. During twenty- three 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, toward its Maker. We cannot say that his religion made him 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, everyway sincere, and } r et 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. Ma- homet 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 the old gray-haired man melting in tears ! " What do you see ?" said she. " You see a friend weeping over his friend." 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 THE HERO AS PXOPHET. 85 such an occasion. Mahomet ordered them to be paid : " Better be in shame now," said he, ' than at the day of judgement." You remember Kadijah, and the " no, by Allah ! " Traits of that kind show u the genuine man, the brother of us all, brought visible through twelve centuries 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 wilder- ness ; does not pretend to be what he is not. There is no ostentatious pride in him ; but neith er 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 him- self, "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 har- vest ? 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! Everywhere he fixes the 86 LECTURES ON HEROES. matter in his eye ; he sees it : his heart, now and then, is as if struck dumb by the greatness of it. "As- suredly," he says : that word, in the Koran, is writ- ten down sometimes as a sentence by itself : "As- suredly." No dilettantism in this Mahomet ; it is a business of reprobation and salvation with him, of time and eter- nity : 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 open to truth " living in a vain show." Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, sparks of the divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death. The very falsehoods of Ma- homet 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 cleanly 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 toward what is just and true. The sublime forgiveness of Christanity, turning of the other cheek when the one has been smitten, is not here : you 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. THE HERO AS PROPHET. 87 Mahomet insists not on the propriety of giving alms, \ but on the necessity of it: he marks do\vn by law how / much you are to give, and it is at your peril if you neg- lect. The tenth part of a man's annual income, what- ever that may be, is the 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 so. Mahomet's paradise is sensual, his hell sensual : true ; in the one and the other there is enough that shocks all spirtual feeling in us. But we are to recollect that the Arabs already had it so ; that Mahomet, in what- ever 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 for- gotten that the highest joys even there shall be spirit- ual ; the poor presence of the highest, this shall infi- nitely transcend all other joys. He says, "Your saluta- tion shall be peace." Salam, have peace 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 Ma- homet'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 88 LECTURES ON UEROtiS. of his delineations, in " 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 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, than by a certain healthy manful instinct, which is as good. But there is another thing to be said about the Ma- hometan 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 judgement 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 infinite moment to him and never die or end at all; that man, with his little life, reaches upward high as heaven, downward low as hell and in his three-score years of time holds an eternity fearfully THE HERO AS PROPHET. 89 and wonderfully hidden : all this had burned itself, as in flame-characters into the wild Arab soul. Asm flame and lightning, it stands written there; awful, unspeakable, ever present to him. With bursting earnestness, with a fierce savage sincerity, halt, artic- ulating, 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, ulti- mate pleasure of the one and of the other ; and sum- ming all up by addition and subtraction into a net re- sult, ask you, whether on the whole the right does not preponderate considerably ? No ; it is not better to do the one than the other ; the one is to the other as life is to death as heaven is to hell. The one must in no- wise be done, the other in nowise left undone. You shall not measure them ; they are incommeasurable : 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-bal- ance for weighing hay and thistles on, pleasures and pains on : If you ask me which gives, Mahomet or they, * the beggarlier and falser view of man and his des- tinies in this universe, I will answer : It is not Ma- homet ! On the whole, we will repeat that this religion of Mahomet's is a kind of Christianity ; has a genuine ele- ment of what is spiritually highest looking through it, not to be hidden by all its imperfections. The Scandi- 90 LECTURES ON HEROES. navian god Wish, the god of all rude men 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 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 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 messenger, along with his answer : " There is no God but God." Allah alcbar, Islam, sounds through the souls and whole daily existence, of these dusky millions. Zealous mis- sionaries preach it abroad among Malays, black Pap- uans, brutal idolaters displacing what is worse, noth- ing 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 afterward, Arabia is at Grenada on this hand, at Delhi on that glancing in valor and splendor and the light of genius, Arabia shines through long ages over a great section THE HERO AS PROPHET. 91 of the world. Belief is great, live-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 it is not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed black unnotice- able sand ; but lo, the sand proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Grenada ! I said, the great man was always as lightening out of heaven the rest of men waited for him like fuel and then they too would flame. LECTURES ON HEROES. LECTUKE III * THE HEKO AS POET DANTE SHAKESPEAKE. THE HERO as divinity, the hero as prophet, are pro- ductions 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 question- able, 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 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 many different names, in dif- ferent times and places, do we give to great men ; ac- cording 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 unimpor- tant to be understood, that the different sphere consti- *Delivered Tuesday, May 12, 1840. THK HERO AS POET. 93 tutes 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 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 poli- tician, the thinker, legislator, philosopher 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. Napo- leon has words in him which are like Austerlitz battles. Louis XIV'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 pros- per at all withoujt 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. Shakespeare one knows not what 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 mold. Varieties of aptitude doubtless ; 94 LECTURES ON HEROES. but infinitely more of circumstance ; and far oftenest it is the 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 thence- forth that and nothing else. And if, as Addison com- plains, 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 it cannot be con- sidered that aptitude of nature alone has been con- sulted here either ! 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 inexplicable 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 this matter, shall permit and bid is, as we said, the most important fact about the world. Poet and prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them. In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous ; votes means both prophet and poet ; and indeed at all times, prophet and poet, well understood, have much kindred of meaning. Funda- mentally 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. " The open secret " open to all, seen by almost none ! That divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all beings, " the divine idea of the THE HERO AS POET. 95 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 vesture, the embodiment that renders it visible. This divine mys- tery 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 dia- lect, as the realized thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace matter as if, says the satirist, it were a dead thing, which some upholsterer had put together ! It could do no good, at present, to 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 a failure to live at all, if we live otherwise ! But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the vates, whether prophet or poet, has pene- trated 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 that sacred mystery which he more than others lives ever present with. While others forget it, he knows it 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, hear is no hearsay, but a direct insight and be- lief; 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 vates, first of all, in virtue of being sincere. So far poet and prophet, participators in the " open secret," are one. 96 LECTURES ON HEROES. With respect to their distinction again: the vates prophet, we might say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as good and evil, duty and prohibition ; the vates poet on what the Germans call the a3sthetic side, as beautiful, and the like. The one I we may call a revealer of what we are to do, the other lof what we are to love. But indeed these two provin- ces 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 high- est 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 " dressed finer than earthly princes, springing up there in the humble furrow-field; a beautiful 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 true beautiful ; which however, I have said somewhere, " differs from the false as heaven does from Yauxhall ! " So much for the distinction and identity of poet and prophet. 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 THE HERO AS POET. 97 poets when we 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 Shakespeare can embody, out of Saxo Gram- maticus, the story of " Hamlet " as Shakespeare 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 defin- ition must be more or less arbitary. A man that has 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 so far above the general level of poets will, to such and such critics, seem a universal poet ; as he ought to do. And }^et 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 Shakespeare or Homer of them can be remembered forever a day comes when he too is not ! Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a differ- ence 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 infinitude in him ; communicates an unendlichkeit, a certain char- acter of "infinitude," to whatsoever he delineates. This, though not very precise, yet on so vague a matter is worth remembering : if well meditated, some mean- ing will gradually be found in it. For my own part, \ 98 LECTURES ON HEROES. find considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction of poetry being 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 musical, musical not in word only, but in heart and substance, in all the thoughts and utter- ances of it, in the whole conception of it, then it will be poetical ; if not, not. Musical : how much lies in that! A. 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 melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coher- ence 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 the rhythm or tune to which the people there sing what they have to say ! Accent is a kind of chanting ; all men have accent of their own though they only notice that of others. Observe too how all passionate language does of itself become musical 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 THE HERO AS POET. 99 of the inner structure of nature ; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call musical thought. The poet is he who 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 leing everywhere music, if you can only reach it. The votes poet, with his melodious apocalypse of nature, seems to hold a poor rank among us, in com- parison with the votes 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 ! 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 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 higher / not altogether that our reverence for these qualties, as manifested in our like, is getting lower. This is worth taking thought of. Skeptical dilettantism, the curse of these ages, a curse which will last forever, does indeed in this the highest province of human things, as in all provinces, 100 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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, fatal- est 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 liim: yet is he not obeyed, worshiped 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 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, incom- mensurable with all others. Do not we feel it so? But now, were dilettantism, skepticism, triviality, and all that sorrowful brood, cast out of us 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 things so that a man acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the other non-extant ; what a new livelier feeling toward 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 beat- ified ? Shakespeare and Dante are saints of poetry ; really, if we will think of it, canonized, so that it is impiety to meddle with them. The unguided instinct of the world, working across all these perverse impedi- ments, has arrived at such result, Dante and Shakes, THE HERO AS POET. 101 peare 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 transcend- entalism, a glory as of complete perfection, invests these two. They are canonized, through 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. We will look a little at these two, the poet Dante and the poet Shakespeare : 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 com- mentary 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 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 laural wound round it ; the deathless sorrow and pain, the known victory which is also deathless 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 founda- tion of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle affection as 103 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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, im- placable, 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 dis- dain of the thing that is eating out his heart as if it were withal a mean insignificant thing, as if he whom /t had power to torture and strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and life-long unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection all converted into indignation : an implacable indig- nation : slow, equable, silent, like that of a god ! The eye too, it looks out : in a kind of 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 unfathom- able 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 no inconsiderable insight into certain prov- inces 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 scho- lastics. 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 dis- tant: the small clear light, most luminous for what is near, breaks itself into singular chiaroscuro striking on THE HERO AS POET. 103 what is far off. This was Dante's learning from the schools. In life, he had gone through the usual des- tinies ; been twice out campaigning as a soldier for the Forentine 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 rig- orous 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 excepted among neighbors 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 centu- ries (for there will be ten of them and more) had no " Divina Commedia "to hear ! "We will complain of noth- ing. A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante ; and he, struggling like a man led toward death and crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give him the 104 LECTURES ON UEROE8. 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 burned alive. Burned alive ; so it stands, they say : a very curious civic document. Another curious document, some con- siderable 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 1 cannot return without calling myself guilty, I will never return, 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, 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 bis gloom and taciturnity, he answered in no THE HERO AS POET. 105 courtier-like way. Delia Scala stood among his cour- tiers, with mimes and buffoons (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, like to like" 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 suc- ceed 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 im- press itself on him ; that awful reality over which, after all, this time- world, with its Florences and banish- ments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence thou shall never see : but hell and purgatory and hea- ven thou shall surely see ! What is Florence, Can della Scala, and the world and life altogether ? 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 bodi- less, it is the one fact important for all men but to Dante, in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape ; he no more doubted of the Malebolge pool, that it all lay there with its gloomy circles, with its alti guai, and that he himself should see it, then we 106 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 ^ngth into "mystic unfathomable song ;" and this his Divine Comedy," the most remarkable of all modern oooks, 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,$? tu segui tua stella " 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 heaven ! " 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 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 broken-hearted rather, as is said. He lies buried in his death-city Kavenna: Ilic 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 sen- THE BEttO AS POET. 107 tence 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 old poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right poems are ; that whatsoever is not sung is properly no poem, but a piece of prose cramped into jingling lines to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part ! What we want to get at is the thought the man had, if he had any : why should he twist it into jingle, if he could speak it out plainly ? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of mel- ody, 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 whose speech is song. Preten- ders to this are many ; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is for the most part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business, that of reading rhyme ! Khyme that had no inward necessity to be rhymed it ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle, what it was aiming at. I would advise all men who 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, alto- gether an insincere and offensive thing. I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his " Divine Comedy " that it is, in all senses, genuinely a 108 LECTURES ON song. In the very sound of it there is a canto fermo it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his simple terza rima, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along naturally with a sort of 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 sincerit\% makes it musical go 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, inferno, purgatorio, 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 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, " Eccovi V uom cK e stato aW inferno, See, there is the man that was in hell ! ? ' Ah yes, he had been in hell in hell enough, in long severe sorrow and strug- gle ; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come out 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 true effort, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is thought. In all ways we are " to become perfect through suffer- ing" But as I say, no work known to me is so elab- orated 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 ; THE HERO AS POET. 109 every compartment of it is worked out, with intense earnestness, into truth, into clear visuality. Each an- swers 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, ren- dered forever rhythmically visible there. No light task ; a right intense one : but a task which is done. Perhaps one would say, 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 great- ness has, in all senses, concentered itself into fiery ejn- phasis and depth. He is world-great not because he is world-wide, but because he is world-deep. Through J 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 : red pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron glow ing through the dim immensity of gloom so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and for- . ever ! 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 110 LECTURES ON HEROES. giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke ; it is " as the sails sink, the mast being suddenly broken." Or that poor Brunetto Latini, with the cotto aspetto, " face 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 judgement, through eternity. And how Farinata rises ; and how Caval- cante falls at hearing of his son and the past tense "fue ! " The very movements in Dante have some- thing 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 would not have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it, unless he had, what we may call, sympathized with it had sym- pathy in him to bestow on objects. He must have been 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. THE HERO AS POET. HI Is it even of business, a matter to be done ? The gifted man is he who sees the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside as surplusage : it is his faculty too, the man of business' faculty, that he discern the true likeness, not the false superficial one, of the thing he has got to work in. And how much of 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. Raph- ael, the painter tell us, is the best of all portrait-paint- ers 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 everywhere noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her lover, what quali- ties 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 : delta bella persona die mifu tolta; and how, even in the pit of woe, it is a solace that he will never part from her ! Saddest trag- edy in these alii guai. And the racking winds, in that aer oruno, whirl them away again, to wail forever ! 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 " Divine Comedy's " being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial 112 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 sentimentality, or little better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that of Dante. It is a ten- derness, a trembling, longing, pitying love : like the wail of ^Eolean harps, soft, soft ; like a child's young heart and then that stern, sore-saddened heart ! These longings of his toward his Beatrice ; their meeting to- gether in the paradisoj his gazing in her pure trans- figured eyes, her that had been purified by death so lohg, separated from him so far one likens it to the song of angles ; it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of a human soul. For the 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 as in- deed, what are they but the inverse or converse of his love ! "A dio spiacenti ed #' nemici sui, hateful to God and to the enemies of Grod : " lofty scorn, un- appeasable silent reprobation and aversion ; "Non ra- yionam di lor, we will not speak of them, look only and pass." Or think of this : u They have not the Jiope to die, non han speranza dimorte" 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 die; "that destiny itself could not doom him not to die." Such works are in this man. For rigor, THE HERO AS POET. 1]3 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 prefering the inferno to the two other parts of the "Divina Commedia." Such preference belongs, I imagine, to our general By ronism of taste and is like to be a transient feeling. The purgatorio and paradiso, especially the former, one would almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing ihskpurya- torio, " 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 tremolar deW 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 so- journ 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 deni- zens of that mount of pain all say to him. " Tell my Giovanna to pray for me," my daughter Giovanna; u I think her mother loves me no more ! " They toil pain- fully up by that winding steep, " bent down like cor- bels of a building," some of them 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 114 * LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 sup- port one another, are indispensable to one another. The paradiso, a kind of inarticulate music to me, is the redeeming side of the inferno ; the 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 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 were so ; the real world, as it i called and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely higher fact of a world. At bottom, the one was as 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 some critic in a future age, like those Scandinavian ones the other day, who had ceased altogether to think as Dante did, may find this too all an " allegory," perhaps an idle allegory ! It is a sub- lime embodiment, or sublimest, of the soul of Chris- tianity. It expresses, as in huge world- wide architect- ural emblems, how the Christian Dante felt good and THE HERO AS POET. 115 evil to be the two polar elements of this creation, on which it all turns ; that these two differ not by prefer- ability of one to the other, but by incompatibility ab- solute and infinite ; that the one is excellent and high as light and heaven, the other hideous, black as Gehen- na and the pit of hell ! Everlasting justice, yet with penitence, with everlasting pity 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 practi- cally 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 recognised as a veracious expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling of man toward the uni- verse ; veracious, true once, and still not without worth for us. But mark here the difference of paganism and Christianism; one great difference. Paganism em- blemed 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 the sensuous nature : a rude helpless utterance of the first thought of men the chief recognized virtue, courage, superi- ority to fear. The other was not for the sensuous nat- ure, but for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect only ! 116 L KCTUH ES ON IIKRO KS. And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent cent- uries, in a very strange way, found a voice. The "Divina Comraedia " 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 how little of all he does is properly his work! All past inventive men work there with him 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 ! The noblest idea made real hitherto among men, is sung, and em- blemed-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 gen- THE HERO AS POET. 117 erations 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 sin- cerity, is like an antique prophet too ; his words, like theirs, come from his very heart. One need not won- der 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 cathe- drals, pontificalities, brass and stone, and outer arrange- ment 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 is, verit- ably present face to face with every open soul of us ; and Greece, where is it f 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 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 song, and sung-forth fitly somewhat therefrom, has worked in the depths of our 118 LECTURES ON HEROES. existence; feeding through long times the \\te-root8 of all excellent human things whatsoever in a way that " utilities " will not succeed well in calculating ! We will not estimate the sun by the quantity of gas-light 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 ? JS"ot so : his arena is far more restricted ; but also it is far nobler, clearer perhaps not less but more impor- tant. Mahomet speaks to great masses of men, in the coarse dialect adapted to such ; a dialect filled with in- consistencies, crudities, follies: on the great masses alone can he act and there with good and with evil strangely blended. Dante speaks with 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 sur- vive 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 we can judge of their effect there, that a man and his work are measured. Effect? Influence ? Utility ? Let a man 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. THE HERO AS POET. 119 which are a kind of distilled newspapers ; or not em- bodied so at all 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 further- ance from the Arabian caliph, then no matter how many scimiters he drew, how many gold piasters pocketed and what uproar and blaring he made in this world he was but a loud sounding inanity and futility ; at bottom, he was not at all. Let us honor the great empire of 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. 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 Shakespeare, 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 Shakespeare 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 ; Shakespeare, 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 Shakespeare. 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- 120 LECTURES ON HEROES. enduring record of it. Two fit men : Dante, deep, I fierce as the central fire of the world ; Shakespeare, [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 Shakespeare, had the Warwickshire squire not prosecuted him for deer-steal- ing, 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 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 irrecognizably, on all men ! It is all a tree: circulation of sap and influences, mutual com- munication 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 ! In some sense it may be said that this glorious Eliza- bethan era with its Shakespeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had preceded it, is. itself THE HERO AS POET. 121 utable to the Catholicism of the middle ages. The Christian faith, which was the theme of Dante's song, had produced this practical life which Shakespeare was to sing. For religion then, as it now and al\\ 7 ays 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 Shakespeare, 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 parlia- ment. 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 Shakespeare into being? No dining at Freemasons' tavern, opening subscription-lists, selling of shares, and infinite other jangling and true or false endeavoring ! This Elizabethan era, and all its nobleness and blessed- ness, came without proclamation, preparation of ours. Priceless Shakespeare was the free gift of nature ; given altogether silently 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 Shakespeare 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 Shakespeare is the chief of all poets hitherto ; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the 122 LECTURES ON HEROttS. 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 Shakespeare's dramas there is, apart from all other "faculties" as they are called, an understanding manifested, equal to that in Bacon's "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 Shakespeare's dramatic materials, we could fashion such a result ! The built house seems all so fit every- way as it should be, as if it came there by its own law and the nature of things we forget the rude disor- derly 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 Shakespeare in this : he dis- cerns, 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 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 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 beginning, the true sequence and ending? To find out this, you task the whole force of insight that is in the man. He must understand the THE HERO AS POET, 123 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, 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, especi- ally of men, that Shakespeare is great. All the great- ness of the man comes out decisively here. It is un- exampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare. 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 seeing the thing sufficiently? The word that will describe the thing, follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not Shakespeare's morality, his valor, candor, tolerance, truthfulness ; his whole victor- ious strength and greatness, which can triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world ! No twisted, poor convex-concave mirror, re- flecting all objects with its own convexities and con- cavities ; a perfectly level mirror 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 Corio- lanus ; sets them all forth to us in their round complete- ness ; loving just, the equal brother of all. Novum (yrganum and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order ; earthly, material, poor 124 LEGTVRK8 ON 11FAIOES. in comparison with this. Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe, alone, since the days of Shakespeare, reminds, me of it. Of him too you say that he saw the object ; you may say what he himself says of Shakespeare : "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 em- bodiments. 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 geni- ally relate yourself to them you can, at lowest, hold your peace about them, turn away your own and others' face from them, till the hour come for practi- cally exterminating and extinguishing them ! At bot- tom, 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 per- haps 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 ac- cidents, 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, See. If you THE HERO AS POET. 125 cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other and name yourself a poet ; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or specu- lation, all manner of hope, The crabbed old school- master used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, " But are ye sure he's not a dunce f " 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 Shakespeare'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, etc., 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 tome, 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 names ; that man's spirit- ual nature, the vital force which dwells in him, is es-/ sentially one and indivisible; that what we call imag- ination, fancy, understanding and so forth, are but! different figures of the same power of insight, all in- 12G LECTURES ON HEROES. dissolubly 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 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 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 without, morality intellect were impossible for him; a thoroughly immoral man could not know anything at all ! To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathize with it; that is, be 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, f will lie recorded in his knowledge. Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the pu- sillanimous forever a sealed book : what such can know of nature is mean, superficial, small ; for uses of the day merely. But does not the very fox know some- thing of nature ? Exactly so : it knows where the geese lodge! The human reynard, very frequent every- where 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 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 THE HERO AS POET. 127 courage, promptitude, practicality, and other suitable vulpine gifts and graces, he would catch no geese. We may say of the fox too, that his moral ity and insight are of the same dimensions ; different faces of the same in- ternal unity of vulpine life! These things are worth stating ; for the contrary of them acts with manifold very baleful perversion, in this time : wfcat limitations, modifications they require, your own candor will sup- piy- If I say, therefore, that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare'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 beau- tifully 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. Shakespeare's art is not artifice ; the noblest worth of it is not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows up from the deeps of natureT" through this noble sincere soul, who is a voice of nature. The latest generations of men will find new meanings "new harmonies with the infinite structure of the uni- verse ; 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 a part of herself. Such a man's works, whatsoever he with utmost con- scious exertion and forethought shall accomplish, grow up withal ^consciously, from the unknown deeps in him as the oak tree grows from the earth's bosom, as the mountains and waters shape themselves ; with a sym- metry grounded on nature's own laws, conformable to all truth whatsoever. How much in Shakespeare lies hid ; his sorrows, his silent struggles known to himself; 128 LECTURES ON HEROES. much that was not known at all, not speakable at all; like roots, like sap and forces working underground ! Speech is great ; but silence is greater. Withal the joyful tranquility of this man is notable. I will not blame Dante for his misery : it is as battle without victory ; but true battle the first indispensa- ble thing. Yet I call Shakespeare greater than Dante, in that he fought truly, and did conquer. Doubt it not, he had his own sorrows : those sonnets of his will even testify expressly in what deep waters he had waded, and swum struggling for his life 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- writ ing, and not fall in with sorrows by the way ? Or, still better, how could a man delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Mac- beth, so many suffering heroic hearts, if his own heroic heart had never suffered ? And now, in contrast with all this, observe his mirthfulness, his genuine overflow- ing love of laughter ! You would say, in no point does he exaggerate but only in laughter. Fiery objurgations, words that pierce and burn, are to be found in Shakes- pear ; 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 ; would you say, with his whole heart laughs. And then, if not always the finest, it is always a geni- al laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No man who can laugh, what we call THE HERO AS POET. 129 laughing, will laugh at these things. It is some poor character only 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 Shakespeare 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 Shakespeare'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 Hamlet in " Wilhelm Meister," is ! A thing which might, one day, be done. August Wil- helm Schlegel has a remark on his historical plays, " Henry V," and others, which is worth remembering. He calls them a kind of national epic. Marl borough, you recollect, said he knew no English history but what he had learned from Shakespeare. 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; 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 Shakespeare's. The description of the hosts: the worn-out, jaded English ; the dread hour, big with destiny, when the battle shall begin; and then that 130 LECTURES ON HEROES. deathless valor: "Ye good yeomen whose limbs were made in England ! " There is a noble patriotism in it far other than the "indifference" you some- times hear ascribed to Shakespeare. 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 \vill say, of Shakespeare'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, com- paratively 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, " There is 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, Shakespeare had to write for the Globe play- house: 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 condi- tions. The sculptor cannot set his own free thought be- fore us ; but his thought as he could translate it into the stone that was given, with the tools that were given. Disjecta membra are all that we find of any poet, or of any man. Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakespeare THE HERO AS POET. 131 may recognize that he too was a Prophet in his way ; of an insight analogous to the prophet, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to this man al- so 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 seen. But the man sang; did not preach, except musically. We called Dante the melodious priest of middle-age Cathol- icism. May we not call Shakespeare the still more melodious priest of a 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 thousandfold hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all nature ; which let all men worship as they can ! We may say without offense, that there rises a kind of universal psalm out of this Shakespeare 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 ! I cannot call this Shakespeare a " skeptic," as some do ; his indifference to creeds and theological quarrels of his time mislead- ing them. No : neither unpatriotic, though he says little about his patriotism ; nor skeptic, 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 Shakes- peare, has brought us? For myself, I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness in the fact of such a 132 LECTURES ON HEROES man sent into this earth. Is he not an eye to us all; a blessed heaven-sent bringer of light ? And at bot- tom, was it not perhaps far better that this Shakes- peare, everyway an unconscious man, was conscious of no heavenly message? He did not feel, like Mahom- et, 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 make it a questionable step for me here and now to say, as I have done, that Ma- homet 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 ob- solete, while this Shakespeare, this Dante may still be young while this Shakespeare 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 ^Eschylus or Homer, why should he not, for veracity and universality, last like them ? He is 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 not to be so conscious ! Alas, poor Mahomet ; all that he was conscious of was a mere error ; a futility and triviality 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 THE HERO AS POET. 133 which he thought to be great, but by action, by feelings, by a history which were great ! His Koran has become a stupid piece of prolix absurdity ; A\ r e 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 ^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 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 Shakespeare has actualy 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 sur- render rather than him ? Consider now, if they asked us, Will you give up your Indian empire or your Shakes- peare, you English ; never have had any Indian em- pire, or never have had any Shakespeare ? 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 Shakes- peare ! Indian empire will go, at any rate, some day ; 134 LECTURES ON HEROES. but this Shakespeare does not go, he lasts forever with us ; we cannot give up our Shakespeare ! 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 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 parlia- ments, can dethrone! This King Shakespeare does he not shine, in crowded sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs ; ^destructible ; really more valuable in that point of view than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We can fancy him as radiant aloft over the nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. From Paramat- ta, from New York, wheresoever, under what sort of parish constable soever, English men and women are, they will say to one another : " Yes, this Shakespeare 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. THE HERO AS POET. 135 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, scat- tered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity at all ; yet the noble Italy is actually one : Italy produced its Dante ; Italy can speak ! The czar of all the Kussias, he is strong, with so many bayonets, Cossacks and cannons ; and does a great feat in keep- ing such a tract of earth politically together ; but he cannot yet speak. Something great in him, but he is a dumb greatness. He has 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 arid Cossacks will 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. We must here end what we had to say of the hero poet. 136 LECTURES ON HEROES. LECTURE IV.* THE HERO AS PRIEST LUTHER REFORMATION KNOX PURITANISM. 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 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 proph- et ; 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 capt- ains : 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 un- seen heaven ; interpreting, even as the prophet did and in a more familiar manner unfolding the same to men. The unseen heaven the " open secret of the universe " which so few have an eye for ! He is the prophet shorn of his more awful splendor ; burning *Delivered Friday, May 15, 1840. THE HERO AS PRIEST. 137 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 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 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, spriest first of all? He appeals to heaven's invisible justice against earth's visible force ; knows that it, the invis- ible, is strong and alone strong. He is a believer in the divine truth of things; a seer, seeing through the 138 LECTURES ON HKROES. shows of things ; a worshiper, 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 Shakespeare 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 mild- ness, what is he but the product and ultimate adjust- ment of reform, or prophecy, with its fierceness ? No wild Saint Dominies and Theba'id Eremites, there had been no melodious Dante ; rough practical endeavor, Scandinavian and other, from Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila to Cranmer, enabled Shakespeare to speak. Nay the finished poet, I remark sometimes, is a symp- tom 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 music ; be tamed and taught by our poets, as the rude creatures were by their Orpheus of old. Or failing this rhythmic musical way, how good were it could we get so much as into the equable way ; I mean, if 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 in- T8E HERO AS PRIEST. 139 evitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never want- ing : the very things that were once indispensable furtherances become obstructions ; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us a business often of enor- mous 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 com- pletely satisfactory in all parts of it to the highly -dis- cursive acute intellect of Dante, one of the greatest in the world had in the course of another century be- come dubitable to common intellects ; become deniable ; and is now, to every one of us, flatly incredible, obso- lete as Odin's theorem ! To Dante, human existence, and God's ways with men, were all well represented by those malebolges, purgatorios; to Luther not well. How was this? Why could not Dante's Catholicism continue ; but Luther's Protestantism must needs fol- low ? Alas, nothing will 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, that 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 ani- verse which is an infinite universe, and can never be 140 LECTURES ON HEROES. embraced wholly or finally by any view or theorem, in any conceivable enlargment : he enlarges somewhat, I say, finds somewhat that was credible to his grand- father 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 man- kind we see it summed up into great historical amounts revolutions, new epochs. Dante's mountain of pur- gatory does not stand " in the ocean of the other hem- isphere," 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 ail systems of belief, and systems of practice that spring from these. If we add now the melancholy fact, that when be- lief 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 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 ramlone. Every such man is a daily contribu- tor to the inevitable downfall. Whatsoever work he does, dishonestly, with an eye to the outward look of it, is a new offense, parent of new miseries to some- body or other. Offenses accumulate till they become insupportable ; and are then violently burst through, cleared off as by explosion. Dante's sublime Catholi- cism, incredible now in theory, and defaced still worse by faithless, doubting and dishonest practice, has to be torn asunder by a Luther ; Shakespeare's noble feudal- THE HttHO AS PRIEST. 141 ism, as beautiful as it once looked and was, has to end in a French revolution. The accumulation of offenses is, as we say, too literally exploded, blasted asunder vol- canically ; 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 crea- tion on a wider scale. Odinism was valor Christian- ism was humility, a nobler kind of valor. ISTo thought that ever dwelt honestly as true in the heart of man but was an honest insight into God's truth on man's part and 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, Scandivavians, 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 Eussian 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 hy- pothesis. Such incredible hypothesis we have seen maintained with fierce emphasis ; and this or the other poor in- 142 LECTURES ON HEROES. dividual man, with his sect of individual men, march- ing as over the dead bodies of all men, toward sure victory : but when he too, with his hypothesis and ul- timate infalible credo, sank into the ditch and became _ji dead body, what was to be said ? 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 mis- know 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 scimiter, Thor's strong hammer smiting down 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. 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 idol- atry 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 worshiping of dead idols as the divinity, is a thing they cannot away with, but have to denounce continually and brand with THE HERO AS PRIEST. 143 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 Ediolon, a thing seen, a symbol. It is not God, but a symbol of God ; and perhaps one may question whether any of 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 was God ; but that God was emblemed by it, that God was in it someway or other. And now in this sense, one may ask, "Is not all worship whatsoever a worship by sym- bols, by eidola, or things seen ? " Whether seen, ren- dered 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 sub- stantial difference. It is still a thing seen, significant of godhead; an idol. The most rigorous puritan has his confession of faith and intellectual represen- tation 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 eidola, things seen. All worship whatsoever must proceed by symbols, by idols we may say, all idolatry is comparative and the worst idolatry is only 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 sug- gested itself to his own thought and came out of him in words to others, as the thing. The rudest heathen 144 LECTURES ON IIEROES. that worshiped Canopus, or the Caabah black stone, he, as we saw, was superior to the horse that worshiped nothing at all ! Nay there was a kind of lasting merit in that poor act of his ; analogous to what is still mer- itorious in poets : recognition of a certain endless divine beauty and significance in stars and all natural objects whatsoever. Why should the prophet so mer- cilessly condemn him ? The poorest mortal worship- ing his fetich, 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 ~be honestly full of it, the whole space of his dark narrow mind illuminated thereby ; in one word, let him entirely believe in his fetich 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 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 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 fetich ; 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 THE HERO AS PRIEST. 145 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 sincere' men. I do not wonder that the earnest man de- nounces this, brands it, prosecutes it with inextinguish- able aversion. He and it, all good and it, are at death- feud. Blamable idolatry is 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 prop- erty 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 speech- less 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 1 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 146 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 learned, among other things, that he must never trust any pope, or spiritual hero-captain, any more ! Whereby, is not spiritual union, all hierarchy and sub- ordination among men, henceforth an impossibility ? So we hear it said. Now I need not deny that Prot- estantism 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 revo- lution 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 hist- ory branches out. For the spiritual will always body itself forth in the temporal history of men ; the spirit- ual is the beginning of the temporal. And now, sure enough, the cry is everywhere for liberty and equality, independence and so forth ; instead of 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 sover- eigns, temporal and spiritual, I see nothing possible but an anarchy ; the hatef ulest of things. But I find Prot- estantism, whatever anarchic democracy it have pro- duced, to be the beginning of new genuine sovereignty a,nd order. I find it to be a revolt against /afci sover- THE HERO AS PRIEST. 147 eigns ; the painful but indispensable first preparative for 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 if many a poor Hogstraten, Tetzel and Dr. Eck had now become slaves in it. Liberty of judg- ment ? 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 judg- ment of his ; he will reign and believe there, by the grace of God alone ! The sorriest sophistical Bellar- mine, preaching sightless faith and passive obedience, must first, by some kind of conviction, have abdicated his right to be convinced. His " private judgment " indicated that, as the advisablest step he could take. The right of private judgment will subsist, in full force, wherever true men subsist. A true m&nbelieves 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 be- believes," will naturally manage it in some other way. Protestanism said to this latter, "Woe! " and to the former, " Well done ! " At bottom, it was no new saving ; it was a return to all old sayings that ever had 148 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 he and all true followers of Odinism. They, by their private judgment, had "judged" 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, isola- tion ; 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 toward 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 things or he would believe tliem 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 and there, in the long run, it is as good as certain. For observe one thing, a thing too often left out of view, or rather altogether lost sight of, in this con- troversy : That it is not necessary a man should him- self have discovered the truth he is to believe in and never so 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 and with boundless gratitude to that other! The merit of THE HERO AS PRIEST. 149 originality is not novelty ; it is sincerity. The believ- ing 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 toward one goal ; all of it is 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-subsist- ent, original, true, or what we call it, is surely the farthest in the world from indisposing him to rever- ence and believe other men's truth ! It only disposes r necessitates and invincibly compels him to dis believe 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 ! See, accordingly, was not Luther himself rever- enced as a true pope, or spiritual father, being verily such? Napoleon, from amid boundless revolt of san- sculottism, became a king. Hero worship never dies, 150 LECTURES ON HEROES. nor can die. Loyalty and sovereignty are everlasting in the world and there is this in them, that they are grounded not on garnitures and semblances, but on re- alities 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 po- tentates, 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 behoved men to quit simulacra and return to fact ; cost what it might, that did behove to be done. With spurious popes, and believers having no private judgment quacks pretend- ing to command over dupes 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 at right-Singles to one another ! In all this wild revolutionary work, from Protestantism downward, 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 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 cannot help being. That were the right sort of worshipers for heroes : never could the truly better be so reverenced as where _all were true and good ! But we must hasten to Luther and his life. THE HERO AS PRIEST. 151 Luther's birthplace was Eisleben in Saxony ; he came into the world there on November 10, 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 Martin 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-neces- saries for her narrow hut or household ; in the whole world, that day, there was not a more entirely unim- portant-looking pair of people than this miner and his wife. And yet what were all emperors, popes and po- tentates, 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 of which it is fit that we 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 ! 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 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 152 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 realities, and keep acquainted with them, at what- ever 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 a right Thor once more, with his thunder-hammer, to smite asunder ugly enough 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 pro- mote 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 nine- teen years of age. Alexis and he had been to see the old Luther people at Mansfeldt ; were got back again near Erfurt, when a thunderstorm came on ; the bolt struck Alexis, he fell dead at Luther's feet. "What is this life of ours gone in a moment, burned up like a scroll, into the blank eternity ! What are all earthly preferments, chancellorships, kingships? They lie shrunk together 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 dissuas- THE HERO AS PRIEST. 153 ions 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, ich ~bin einfrommerMoncligewesen; faith- fully, 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, in- creased 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 new interest for poor Lu- ther that, at this time, he lived in terror of the unspeak- able 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 ; 154 LECTURES ON HEROES. a more credible hypothesis. He gradually got him- self 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 determine 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, unfoldirtg 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 valu- able person ; made him professor in his new university of Wittenberg, preacher too at Wittenberg ; in both Avhich 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 hither, as I said, on mission from his convent. Pope Julius II 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 what we know ! Many thoughts it must have given the man ; many which we have no record of, which per- haps he did not himself know how to utter. This Rome, this scene of false priests, clothed not in the THE HERO AS PRIEST. 155 beauty of holiness, but in far other vesture, is 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 provi- dence and God on high, to deal with them ! A modest quiet man ; not prompt he to attack irreverently per- sons 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 highpriesthood did come athwart him : afar off at Wittenberg he, Luther, could not get lived in honesty for it ; he remonstrated, resisted, came to ex- tremity ; was struck at, struck again and so it came to wager of battle between them ! This is worth attend- ing 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 156 LECTURES ON IIKROE8. say nothing at all, I think, of that sorrowfulest of theories, of its being some mean shopkeeper grudge, of the Augustine monk against the domim'can, 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 Tetsel, sent out carelessly in the way of trade, by Leo X 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 ar- rived at Wittenberg and drove his scandalous trade there. Luther's flock bought indulgencies ; in the con- fessional 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 center of the little space of ground that was his own and no other man's, had to step forth against indulgencies and declare aloud that they were a futility and sorrowful mockery, that no man's sins could be pardoned by 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 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. The elegant pagan pope THK HERO AS PRIEST. 157 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 fire. He dooms the monk's writings to be burned by the hangman and his body to be sent bound to Rome probably for a simi- lar 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 in- stantly in a stone dungeon " three feet wide, six feet high, seven feet long ; " burned the true voice of him out of this world ; choked it in smoke and fire. That was not well done ! I, for one, pardon Luther for now altogether revolt- ing 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 it. You will do what you see good next : this is what I do. It was on December 10, 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 Wittenburg." Wittenburg looked 158 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 ! The Diet of Worms, Luther's appearance there on April 17, 1521, may be considered as the greatest scene in modern European history ; the point, indeed, from which the whole sebsequent history of civilization takes THE HERO AS PRIEST. 159 its rise. After multiplied negotiations, disputations, it had come to this. The young Emperor Charles V, with all the princes of Germany, papal nuncios, digni- taries 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 re- cant : "Whosoever denieth me before men!" they cried to him as in a kind of solemn petition and ad- juration. 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 of 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 upon it; unguarded anger, blindness, many things doubtless which it were a bless- ing for him could he abolish altogether. But as to what stood on sound truth and the word of God, he 160 LECTURES OF HEROES. 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 ! " It "is, as we say, the greatest moment in the modern his- tory of men. English puritanism, England and its parliaments, Americas, and vast work these two centur- ies ; French revolution, Europe and its work ever v where 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 par- oxysm, to cast the falsehoods out of me, and be cured and live ? ..- 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, un- deniable ; but after all, what has Luther or his cause to do with them ? It seems strange reasoning to charge the reformer with all this. When Hercules turned the purifying river into King Augeas' stables, I have no doubt the confusion that resulted was considerable all around : but I think it was not Hercules' blame ; it was some other's blame ! The reformation might bring what results it liked when it came, but the re- formation simply could not help coming. To all popes and popes' advocates, expostulating, lamenting and ac- cusing, 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 HERO AS PRIEST. 161 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 we dare not ! The thing is 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 it we can have no far- ther trade ! Luther and his Protestantism is not re- sponsible 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? No ! At what cost soever, without counting of costs, this thing behoved to be done. Union, organiza- tion spiritual and material, a far nobler than any pope- dom 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-binding 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 specuIaT" tion that popery is on the increase, building new chapels and so forth, may pass for one of the idlest 1 62 LECTURES ON HEROES. ever started. Very curious : to count up a few popish chapels, listen to a few Protestant logic-choppings to much dull-droning drowsy inanity that still calls itself Protestant, and say : See, Protestantism is dead ; popeism is more alive than it, will be alive after it ! Drowsy inanities, not a few, that call themselves Pro- testant are' dead ; but 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 consider- able signs of life ! Nay, at bottom, what else is alive but Protestantism ? The life of most else that one meets is a galvanic one merely 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 ; 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, thith- er on the beach ; for minutes you cannot tell,how it is go- ing; look in half an hour where it is; 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. And withal this oscillation has a meaning. The poor old pope- hood 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 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. THE HERO AS PRIEST. 163 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. 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 con- troversy did not get to fighting so long as he was there. To me is the 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 revolu- tionists. Luther continued, in a good degree, sovereign of this greatest revolution : all Protestants, of what rank or function soever, looking much to him for guid- ance : and he held it peaceable, continued firm at center 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 silence, of tolerance and moderation, among others, are very not- able 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 164 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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, sim- plicity : a rugged sterling sense and strength. He flashes out illumination from him ; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter . Good humor too, nay tender affection, noble- ness, and depth : this man could have been a poet too ! He had to work an epic poem, not write one. I call him a great thinker ; as indeed his greatness of heart already betokens that. Rich ter says of Luther's words, "his words are half- battles." They may be called so. The essential qual- ity of him was, that he could light and conquer ; that he was a right piece of human valor. No more valiant man, no mortal heart to be called 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 THE HERO AS PRIEST. 165 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 con- flicts. Luther sat translating one of the psalms ; he was worn down with long labor, with sickness, absti- nence 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 specter 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 de- fiant, 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. Fearless enough ! " The devil is aware," writes he on one oc- casion, " 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 " 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 ! At the same time, they err greatly who imagine that this man's courage was ferocity, mere coarse disobed- ient 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 166 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 stronger foe 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, Avhich 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 Cow- per 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 " 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 follows, in awe- struck thought, the flight of her little soul through those unknown realms. Awestruck; most heartfelt, we can see ; and sincere for after all dogmatic creeds THE HERO AS PRIEST. 167 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 ; 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 dumb, gaunt, huge who supports all that 2 " 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. 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 the meek earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it once again ; the bread of man ! 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 ! 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, gen- uine ; 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. 1G8 LECTURES ON 1IEROES. Luther's face is to me expressive of him ; in Kran- ach's best portraits I find the true Luther. A true plebeian face ; with its huge crag-like brows and bones, the emblem of rugged energy ; at first, almost a repul- sive 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 dis- credit of him ! I will call this Luther a true great man ; great in intellect, in courage, affection and in- tegrity; one of our most lovable and precious men. Great, not as a hewn obelisk ; but as an Alpine mount- ain 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 THE &ERO AS PRIEST. 169 Soon dwindled into a rather barren affair : not a relig- ion or faith, but rather now a theological jangling of argument, the proper seat of it not the heart ; the es- sence of it skeptical contension: which indeed has jangled more and more, down to Yoltaireism itself through Gustavus-Adolphus contentions onward 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 carne 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 re- markable 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 de- fective 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 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 1 ^0 L KCTURfiS Oft 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 ; worshiping in what they thought the true, not the idolatrous way. They clubbed their small means together ; hired a ship, the little ship May- flower and made ready to set sail. In deal's " History of the Puritans "* 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. Hah ! These men, I think, had a work ! The weak thing, weaker than a child, be- comes strong one day, if it be a true thing. Puritan- ism was only despicable, laughable then ; but nobody can manage to laugh at it now. Puritanism has got weapons and sinews ; it has fire-arms, war-navies ; it has cunning in its ten fingers, strength in its right arm ; it can steer ships, fell forests, remove mountains *Neal (London, 1755), i. 490. THE HERO AS PRfEST. 171 it is one of the strongest things under the 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, dissen- sions, massacrings ; a people in the last state of rude- ness 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 how to divide what they fleeced from these poor drudges ; but obliged, as the Columbian 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 ; 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 inter- nal 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, } T et attainable from earth 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 believing nation. There needs not a great soul to make a hero ; there needs a god-creatured soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul ! The like has been seen, we find. The like will 172 LECTURES ON HEROES. be again seen, under wider forms than the Presbyte- rian : there can be no lasting good done till then. Impossible ! say some. Possible ? Has it not 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 ! But to return: this that Knoxdid 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 as life is. The people began to 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 there came out, after fifty years struggling, what we call the "glorious rev- olution," a habeas corpus act, free parliaments, and much else ! 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 Crom wells, Knoxes, poor peasant covenanters, TUW HERO AS PRIEST. 1*3 wrestling, battling for very life, in rough miry places, have to struggle, and suffer, and fall, greatly censured, bemired before a beautiful revolution of eighty-eight can step over them in official pumps and silk stockings, with universal three-times-three I 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 for- giveness ! 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, there 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 too look through the rumors and controversies enveloping the man, into the man him- self. 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 become conspicu- ous. He was the son of poor parents; had got a col- 174 LECTURES ON IlKHOES. lege education ; become a priest ; adopted the refor- mation, 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 ; preach- ing when any body of persons wished to hear his doc- trine : 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 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 which gifts and heart one of their number, John Knox the name of him, had : Had he not? said the preacher, appealing to all the audience : what then is 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 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 baptised withal. He " burst into tears." Our primary characteristic of a hero, that he is sin- cere, applies emphatically to Knox. It is not denied anywhere that this, whatever might be his other quali- ties 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 THE HERO AS PRIKST. 175 and deceptive nonentity. However feeble, forlorn the reality may seem, on that and that only 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 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 "a pented firedd"& piece of wood, I tell you, with paint on it ! She is fitter for swimming, I think, than for being worshiped, 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, pented bredd: wor- ship 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 pented bredds r pretending to be real, are fitter to swim than to be worshiped ! This Knox cannot live but by fact : he clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. He is an in- stance 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 a narrow, inconsiderable man, as compared with Luther : but in heartfelt instinctive adherence to truth, in sincerity, as we say, he has no superio'r ; 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 176 LECTURES ON HEROES. face of man." He resembles, more than any of the moderns, an old Hebrew prophet. The same inflexi- bility, 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 cen- tury. 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 cir- cumstances 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 deli- cate 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 mak- himself agreeable! "Better that women weep," said Morton, " than that bearded men be forced to weep." Knox was the constitutional opposition-party in Scot- land : 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 but the still more hap- THE HERO AS PRIEST. 177 less country, if she were made happy ! Mary herself was not without sharpness enough, among her other qualities : " Who are you," said she once, " that pre- sume to school the nobles and sovereign of this realm ? " "Madam, a subject born within the same," answered he. Eeasonably answered! If the "subject" have truth to speak, it is not the " subject's " footing that will fail him here. "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 ^essential ; 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 toler- able ! 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 suchlike, 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 could rebuke queens and had such weight among those proud turbulent nobles, proud enough \yhatever else they were; and coukl mainta.in to the, 178 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 dark- ness 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 border. Order is truth 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 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, twitch- ing one another's rochets and at last flourishing their crosiers like quarter-staves, it is a great sight for him everyway ! 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 eyes most of all. An honest-hearted, brotherly man ; brother to the high, brother also to the low ; sincere THE HERO AS PRIEST. 179 in his sympathy with both. He had his pipe of Bour deaux 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 "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 ! 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 upward 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 offense 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 the- ocracy. This indeed is properly the sum of his offeses, the essential sin ; for which what pardon can there be? It is most true, he did, at bottom, consciously or uncon? 180 LECTURES ON HKROES. sciously, 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, 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 expost- ulated that it was not secular property, that it was spiritual property, and should be turned to true churchly uses, education, schools, worship; 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 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 prophets, 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") toward 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 THE HERO AS PRIEST. 181 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 intro- duced. There will never be wanting Regent Murrays enough to shrug their shoulders, and say, "A de- vout 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 ! 183 LECTURES ON UE110ES. LECTUEE Y .* THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS JOHNSON, ROUSSEAU, BURNS. HERO GODS, prophets, poets, priests are forms of hero- ism that belong to the old ages, make their appear- ance in the remotest times ; s6me of them have ceased to be possible long since, and cannot any more show themselves in this world. The hero as man of letters, again, of which class we are to speak to-day, is alto- gether a product of these new ages ; and so long as the wondrous art of writing, or of ready-writing which we call 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 cent- ury in the world yet. Never, till about a hundred- years ago, was there seen any fignre 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 wis- dom of a heroic soul never till then, in that naked man- ner. 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 na- *Delivered Tuesday, May 19, J84Q, THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. ] 83 tions and generations who would, or would not give- him bread while living is a rather curious spectacle ! Few shapes of heroism can be more unexpected. Alas, the hero from of old has had to cramp him- self 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 John- son, 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 ; this perhaps, as before hinted, will one day seem a still absurd er phasis of things ! Meanwhile, since it is the spiritual always that deter mines 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 sig- nifiant 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 our- selves live and work. There are genuine men of letters, and not genuine ; as in every kind there in a genuine and a spurious. If 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 j 184 LECTURES ON HEROES. all that a man in any case, can do. I say inspired ; for what we call "originality," "sincerity," "genius," the heroic quality we have no good name for, signifies Jbbat. 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 but the weak many know not the fact, and are untrue to it, in most times ; the strong few are strong, heroic, perennial, be- cause 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, ^J^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 : " Ueber das wesen des GeleJirten, On the nature of the literary man." Fichte, in con- formity 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, especi- ally we ourselves and all persons, are as a kind of vest- ure 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 bot- tom of all appearance." To the mass of men no such divine idea is recognizable in the world ; they live mearly, says Fichte, among the superficialities, prac- ticalities and shows of the world, not dreaming that there is anything divine under them, But the man of THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 185 letters is sent hither specially that he may discern for himself, and make manifest to us, this same divine idea : in every new generation in 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 tfe-at present no name for: The unspeakable divine significance, full of splendor, of wonder and ter- ror, that lies in the being of every man, of every thing 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 un- folding the godlike to men : men of letters are a per- petual priesthood, from age to age, teaching all men that a God is still present in their life ; that all "appear- ance," 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, acknowleged or not by the world, a sacred ness : he is the light of the world ; the world's priest : guiding it, like a sacred pillar of fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of time. Fichte discriminates with sharp zeal the true literary man, what we here call the hero as man of letters, from multitudes of false unheroic. Whoever lives not wholly in this divine idea, or living partially in it, strug- gles not, as for the one good, to live wholly in it 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, stumper" Or at best, if he belong to the 186 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 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 workman- ship and temple of a God. Illuminated all, not in fierce impure fire-splendor as of Mahomet, but in mild celes- tial radiance ; really a prophesy in these most un- prophetic times ; to my mind, 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 dis- course 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 knowl- edge 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, THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 1 8? 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; smuggling as under mountains of impediment, and could not unfold themselves into clearness, or victori- ous interpretation on that " divine idea. " It is rather the tombs of three literary heroes that I have to show you. There are the monumental heaps, under which three spiritual giants lie buried. Yery 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 ar- ranged forces of society fulfill their work ; how many powerful forces are seen working in a wasteful, chaotic, altogether unarranged manner. It is too just a com- plaint, 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 disorganization ; a sort of heart, from which, and to which, all other con- fusion 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. 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 1S8 LECTURES ON HKROK8. of these three literary heroes was, that they found their business and position such a chaos. On the beaten road there is tolerable traveling ; but it is sore work, and many have to perish, fashioning a path though 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 civ- ilized world there is a pulpit, environed with all man- ner of complex dignified appurtenances and further- ances, 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 to- tal 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 he do his work right, whoever do it wrong ; that the eye report not falsely, for then all the other mem- bers 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 im- portance ; 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 THK 1LKRO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 189 of all things man has devised. Odin's runes were the first form of the work of a hero ; books, written words, are still miraculous runes, the latest form ! In books lies the 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 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 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 miracles as runes were fabled to do? They persuade men. Not the wretch- edest 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 foolisn theorem of life, stamped into those young brains, comes out as a solid practice one day. Consider whether any 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 book 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, loo LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 yon- der; 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, priv- ileges, encouragements and named it universitas, or school of all sciences : the university of Paris, in its essential characters, was there. The model of all sub- sequent universities ; which down even to these days, THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 191 for six centuries now, have gone on to found them- selves. Such, I conceive, was the origin of univers- ities. It is clear, however, that with this simple circum- stance, facility of getting books, the whole conditions of the business from top to bottom were changed. Once invent printing, you metamorphosed all univers- ities, or superseded them ! The teacher needed not now to gather men personally round him, that he might 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 ! Doubtless there is still peculiar virtue in speech ; even writers of books may still, in some circumstances, find it convenient to speak also witness our present meet- ing here ! There is, one would say, and must ever re- main 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 prac- tice : 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 uni- versity, or final highest school can do for us, is still but what the first school began doing teach us to read. "We learn to ready in various languages, in various sciences ; we learn the alphabet and letters of all man- ner 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, 192 LECTURES ON HEROES. i 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 intro- duction of books. The church is the working recog- nized 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 o? printing, the preaching of the voice was the natural sole method of performing this. But now with books ! 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? 1 many a time say, the writers of newspapers, pamphlets, poems, books, these are the real working effective church of a modern country. JSTay 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 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 beaut\ r ; as the 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 en- durances of a brother man ! He has verily touched our hearts as with u live co&lfrom the altar. Perhaps there is no worship more authentic. THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 193 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 com- mon. 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 skeptic his mock- ery of the false, a love and worship of the true. How much more the sphere-harmony of a Shakespeare, of a Goethe ; the cathedral-music of a Milton ! They are something too, those humble genuine lark-notes of a Burns 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 working may be said to be whereof such 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. Witen- agemote, old parliament was a great thing. The affairs of the nation were there deliberated and decided ; what we were to 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, out of parliament altogether ? Burke said there were three estates in parliament ; but, 194 LECTURES ON HEROES. in the reporters' gallery yonder, there sat & fourth estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying ; it is a literal fact 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 every-day 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 there. Add only, that whatso- ever power exists will have itself, by and by, organized ; working secretly under bandages, obscurations, ob- structions, it will never rest till it get to work free, unencumbered, visible to all. Democracy virtually ex- tant will insist on becoming palpably extant. 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 from the daily newspaper to the sacred Hebrew book, what have they not done, what are they not doing ! 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 thought of man ; the true thaumat- "urgic virtue ; by which man works all things whatso- THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 195 ever. All that he does and brings to pass, is the vest- ure 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 a huge immeasurable spirit of a thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, palaces, parliaments, hack- ney coaches, Katherine docks and the rest of it ! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick. The thing we called " bits of paper with traces of black ink," is the purest embodi- ment 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 senatus academicus and much else, has been admitted for a good while ; and recognized often enough, in late times, with a sort of sentimental tri- umph and wonderment. It seems to me, the senti- mental by and by will have to give place to the prac- tical. If men of letters 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 con- clude that men of letters will not always wander like unrecognized unregulated Ishmaelites among us! Whatsoever thing, as I said above, has virtual un- noticed power will cast off its wrappages, bandages and step forth one day with palpably articulated, uni- versally 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 making of it right what a business, for long times to come ! 196 LECTURES ON HEROES. Sure enough, this what 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 further- ance and regulation, grounded the most accurately on the actual facts of their position and of the world's position I should beg to say that the problem far ex- ceeded 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 um- pire 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 parlia- mentary 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 toward 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 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 neces- sary developement of the spirit of Christianity. It was itself founded on poverty, on sorrow, contradic- tion, 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 bare- THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 197 foot, in coarse woollen cloak with a rope round your loins and be despised of all the world, was no beauti- ful business 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 3 It- is needful for him, at all rates, to know that outward profit, that success of any kind is 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 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 ele- ment ? What if our men of letters, men setting up to be spiritual heroes, were still then, as they now are, a kind of " involuntary monastic order ; " bound still to this same ugly poverty till they had tried what was in it too, till they had learned to make it to 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 assignor of them, all settled how is the Burns to be recognized that merits these ? He must pass through the ordeal and prove himself. 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 198 LECTURES ON HEROES. lower classes of society, toward 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 dis- tracted atoms, one cancelling the other ; one of the thousand arriving saved, nine hundred and ninety-nine lost by the way ; your royal Johnson languishing in- active 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 worst regulation. The best, alas, is far from us ! And yet there can be no doubt but it is coming ; ad- vancing on us, as yet hidden in the bosom of centuries : this is a prophesy one can risk. For so soon as men get to discern the importance of a thing, they do in- fallibly 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 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 ; and of you too, , if you do not look to it ! " The result to individual men of letters is not the mo- THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 199 mentous 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, \\hether it will set its light on high places, to walk thereby ; or trample it under foot and scatter it in all ways of wild waste (not with- out 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 call 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 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 200 LECTURES ON HEROE& the higher, that they may still more distinguish them- selves forward and forward : it appears to be out of these that the official persons and incipient governors, are taken. These are they whom they 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 have some understanding without which no man can ! Neither is understanding a tool, as we are too apt to figure ; "it is & hand which can handle any tool." Try these men : they are of all others the best worth trying. Surely there is no kind of government, constitution, revolution, social apparatus or arrangement, that I know of in this world, so prom- ising 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 ! 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 THE tttsno AS MAN of 1 LETTEUS. 201 s 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! 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 in- organic chaos and leave his own life and faculty lying there, as a partial contribution toward 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 spiritual paralysis, so we may name it, of the age in w-hich his life lay; whereby his life too, do what he might, was half -paralyzed ! The eighteenth was a *!, jttical century ; in which little word there is a whole Pandora's box of miseries. Skepticism means not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt ; all sorts of mfidelity, 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 an age of heroes ! The very possibility of heroism had been, as 202 LECTURES ON HEROES. it were, formerly abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever ; triviality, formulism and commonplace were come forever. The " age of mira- cles " had been, or perhaps- had not been ; but it was lot any longer. An effete world ; wherein wonder, greatness, godhood could not now dwell in one word, a godless w r orld ! How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time compared not with the Christian Shakes- peares and Miltons, but with the old pagan Skalds, with any species of believing men ! The living 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-machine. " Tree " and " machine : " contrast these two things. I, for my share, declare the world to be no machine ! I say that it does 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 par- liamentary majorities ; and, on the whole, that it is not a machine at all ! The old Norse heathen had a truer notion of God's-world than these poor machine- skeptics : the old heathen Norse were sincere men. But for these poor skeptics there was no sincerity, no truth. Half-truth and hearsay was called truth. Truth, for most men, meant plausibility ; to be meas- ured 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 character- istic of that century. For the common man, unless happily he stood below his century and belonged to THE HRRO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 203 another prior one, it was impossible to be a believer, a hero ; he lay buried, unconscious, under these bale- ful influences. To the strongest man, on I} 7 with in- finite 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 ! Skepticism is the name we give to all this ; as the chief symptom, as the chief origin of all this. Con- cerning which so much were to be said ! It would take many discourses, not a small fraction of one dis- course, to state what one feels about that eighteenth century and its ways. As indeed this and the like of this, which we now call skepticism, is precisely the black malady and like-foe, against which all teaching and discoursing since man's life began has directed it- self : 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. Skepticism, for that century, we must consider as the decay of old ways of believing, the preparation afar off for new better and wider ways an inevitable thing. We will not blame men for it ; we will lament their hard fate. We will understand that destruction of old forms is not de- struction of everlasting substances ; that skepticism, 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 offense against the man Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe him. Bentharn himself 204 LECTURES ON HEROES. and even the creed of Bentham, seems to me compar- atively worthy of praise. It is a determinate being what all the world, in a cowardly half-and-half man- ner, 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 toward new faith. It was a laying-down of cant ; a saying to one- self: u 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 ! " Benthanism has something complete, manful, in such fearless com- mittal of itself to what it finds true ; you may call it heroic, though a heroism with its 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 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 I will not disparage heathenism by calling it a heathen error that men could fall into. It is not true ; it is false at the very heart of it. A man who THE HERO A8 MAN OF LETTERS. 205 thinks SO will think 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 not forgetting witchcraft itself ! Witch- craft worshiped at least a living devil; but this wor- ships 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 despic- able caputmortuum the mechanical hull, all soul fled out of it. How can a man act heroically ? The "doctine 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 which does in- deed frightfully punish itself. The man, I say, is be- come spiritually a paralytic man ; this godlike universe a dead mechanical steam-engine, all working by mo- tives, 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 man's mind. It is a mysterious indescribable process, that of getting to believe 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 be- lieve that! All manner of doubts, inquiry, (SKtyis as it is named, about all manner of objects, dwells in every reasonable mind. It is the mystic working of 206 LECTURES ON HEROES. the mind, on the object it is getting to know and be- lieve. Belief comes out of all this, above ground, like the tree from its hidden roots. But now if, even on common things, we require that a man keep his doubts 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 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 overturn the tree and instead of green boughs, leaves and fruits, show us ugly taloned roots turned up into the air and no growth, only death and misery going on ! For the skepticism, 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; dextrous 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 skepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, so abounds with quacks as the eighteenth? Consider THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 207 them, with their tumid sentimental vaporing about virtue, benevolence the wretched quack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head of them 1 Few men were with- out 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 wrapped and bandaged ; he " has crawled out in great bodily suffering," and so on 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 strang- est mimetic life, half-hero, half-quack, all along. For indeed the world is full of dupes ; and you will have to gain the 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 accumu- late 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 skeptical world. An insincere world ; a godless un- truth of a world ! It is out of this, as I consider, that the whole tribe of social pestilences, Frence revolutions, chartisms and what not, have derived their being 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 1 208 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 spectacles off his eyes and honestly look, to know! For such a man the unbe- lieving century, with its unblessed products, is already past : a new century is already come. The old un- blessed 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 huzzahing at its heels, he can say, composedly stepping aside : " Thou art not true ; thou art not extant, only semblant ; go thy way ! " Yes, hollow formulism, gross Benthanism and other unheroic atheistic insincerity is visibly and even rap- _idly declining. An unbelieving eighteenth century is but an exception such as now and then occurs. I prophesy that the world will once more become sin- cere j a believing world ; with 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 fore verm ore ! 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 " worlds " being " saved " in any other way. That mania of saving worlds is itself a piece of the eighteenth century with its windy sentimentalism. THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 209 Let us not follow it too far. For the saving of the 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 ! In brief, for the world's sake and for our own, we will rejoice greatly that skepticism, in- sincerity, mechanical atheism, with all their poison- dews, are going and as good as gone. 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 revo- lution which we define to be a truth once more, though a truth clad in hellfire ! 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 burned out of one's way : poor Johnson's were far more difficult to burn. The Strong man will ever find 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 four-pence- 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 210 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 mount- ains 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 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 dis- tinguishes them from the poor artificial mass of their contemporaries ; and renders them worthy to be con- sidered as speakers, in some measure, of the everlast- ing 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 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 arti- fice ; 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 kindjier element what might he not THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 211 have been 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 ! 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 work out of him, or less ; but his effort against the world's work could never have been a light one. Nat- ure, 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 in- separably 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 stripped off, which is his own natural skin ! In this manner 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, raw^ boned 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 212 LECTURES ON HEROES. the rawboned servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with his dim eyes, with what thoughts pitches them out of the window ! Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will ; but not beggar}^ : we cannot stand beggary ! Rude stubborn self-help here ; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of nobleness and manf ulness withal. It is a type of the man's life, this pitching away of the shoes. An original man not a second-hand, borrow ing or beg- ging 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 on the reality and substance which nature gives us, not on the semblance, on the thing she has given another than us ! And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there ever soul more tenderly affection- ate, loyally submissive to what was really higher than _he? Great souls are always loyally submissive, rever- ent 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 nat- ure the obedient man ; that only in a world of heroes was there loyal obedience to the heroic." The essence of ofiginality is not that it be new : Johnson believed altogether in the old ; he found the old opinions cred- ible for him, fit for him ; and 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, lie stood by the old formu- las ; the happier was it for him that he could so stand : but in all formulas that he could stand by, there needed to be a most genuine substance. Very curious how, THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 213 in that poor paper-age, so barren, artificial, thick-quilted with pedantries, hearsays, the great fact of this uni- verse glared in, forever wondftftul, indubitable, un- speakable, 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 worshiped in the era of Voltaire, is to me a venerable place. It was in virtue of his 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 nay every true product of nature will infallibly shape itself ; we may say all arti- ficial things are, at the starting of them, true. "What we call " formulas " are not in their origin bad ; they are indispensably good. Formula is method, habitude ; found wherever man is found. Formulas fashion them- selves as paths do, as beaten highways, leading to ward 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 poet ; he has articulated the dim- struggling thought that dwelled 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 man travels naturally in the footsteps of his ioregoer, it is the easiest method. In the footsteps of his foregoer ; yet with improvements, with changes where sack seein good ; at all events with enlarge- 214 LECTURES ON IIKROES. ments, the path ever widening itself as more travel it till at last there is a broad highway whereon the whole world may travel and drive. While there re- mains 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 full of substance ; you may call them the skin, the articulation into shape, into limbs and skin, of a substance that is already there : they had not been there otherwise. Idols, as we said, are not idolatrous till they become doubtful, empty for the worshiper's heart. Much as we talk against formulas, I hope no one of us is ignor- ant withal of the significance of true formulas ; that they were and will ever be, the indispensablest furnit- ure of our habitation in this world. Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his " sincer- ity." He has no suspicion of his being particularly anything ! A hard-struggling, wea^-hearted man, or " scholar " as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live without stealing ! A noble unconsciousness is in him. He does not " engrave 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 msincere ! 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. THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 215 ever present to him fearful and wonderful, on this hand and on that. He has a basis of sincerity ; un- recognized, because never questioned or capable of question. Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell, Napoleon : all the great men I ever heard of have this as the pri- mary material of them. Innumerable commonplace men are debating, are talking everywhere their com- monplace 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 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 heart-sm- cerity in both ; and see with pleasure how neither of them remains ineffectual. Neither of them is as chaff sown ; in both of them is something which the seed- field will grow. Johnson was a prophet to his people ; preached a gospel to them as all like him always do. The high- est 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 do it I 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 you were miser- able then, powerless, mad : how could you do or work at all ? Such gospel Johnson preached and taught coupled, theoretically and practically, with this other great gospel, u Clear your mind of cant!" Have no trade with cant : stand on the cold mud in the frosty 216 LECTURES ON H URGES. weather, but let it be in your own real torn shoes : " that will be better for you," as Mahomet says ! I call this, I call these two things 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 be- come obsolete. I find in Johnson's book the indisput- ablest traces of a great intellect and great heart ever welcome, under what obstructions and perversions soever. They are sincere words, those of his ; he means things by them. A wondrous buckram style the best he could get to then ; a measured grandiloquence, step- ping or rather stalking along in a very solemn way, grown obsolete now ; sometimes a tumid size of phrase- ology not in proportion to the contents of it : all this you will put up with. For the phraseology, tumid or not, has always something within it. So many beauti- ful styles and books, with nothing in them a man is a malefactor to the world who writes such ! They are the avoidable kind ! Had Johnson left nothing but his " 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 dic- tionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural noble- ness ; 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, glutton- THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 21 7 ous creature ; and 'was so in many senses. Yet the fact of his reverence for Johnson will ever remain note- worthy. 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 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 valet-soul ! He expects his hero to advance in royal stage-trappings, with measured steps, trains borne behind him, trumpets sounding before him. It should stand rather, no man can be a grand-mon- arque to his valet-de-chambre. Strip your Louis Quatorze of his king-gear, and there is left nothing but a poor forked raddish with a head fantastically carved admir- able to no valet. The valet does not know a hero when he sees him ! Alas, no : it requires a kind of hero to do that and one of the world's wants, in this as in other senses, is for most part want of such. On the whole, shajl we not say, that Boswell's ad- miration was well bestowed ; that he could have found no soul in all England so worthy of bending down be- fore ? Shall we not say, of this great mornful Johnson too, that he guided his difficult confused existence wisely ; led it well, like a right valiant man ! That waste chaos of authorship by trade ; that waste chaos of skepticism 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 218 LECTURES ON BEROU8. 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 no wise strike his flag." Brave old Samuel : ultimus Roman- orum ! Of Kousseau and his heroism I cannot say so much. He is not what I call a strong man. A morbid, excit- able, spasmodic man; at best, intense rather than strong. He had not " the talent of silence," an invalu- able 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 smoke till you have made it into fire 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 charac- teristic of true greatness. A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength ! A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits ; though six men can- not hold him then. He that can walk under the heav- iest 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 hold his peace, till the time comes 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 its bony brows; deep, straight-set eyes, in which there is something be- wildered-looking bewildered, peering with lynx- eagerness. A face full of misery, even ignoble misery THE HERO AS MAN Of 1 LETTERS. 219 and also of the antagonism against that ; something mean, plebeian there, redeemed only by intensity : the face of what is called a fanatic a sadly contracted hero ! We name him here because, with all his draw- backs and they are many, he has the first and chief characteristic of a hero : he is heartily in earnest. In earnest, if ever man was ; as none of these French philosophers were. Kay, one would say, of an earnest- ness 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 possessed him like demons ; hurried him so about, drove him over steep places ! The fault and misery of Rousseau was what we easily name by a single word, 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' experience of him. She took Jean Jacques to the theater ; he bargaining for a strict in- cognito "lie 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 in- dignation ; gloomed all evening, spoke 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 nat- ure 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 220 LWOTVRB8 ON HEROES. 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. u 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 ! " 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 amphitheater looks on with entertainment : but the gladiator is in agonies and dying. And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passion- ate appeals to mothers, with his control-social, with his celebrations of nature, even of savage life in nature, did once more touch upon reality, struggle toward re- ality ; was doing the function of a prophet to his time. As Tie 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, skepticism and persiflage, there has arisen in this man the ineradicable feeling and knowledge that this life of ours is true; not a skepticism, theorem, or persiflage, but a fact, an awful reality. Nature has 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 THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 221 as clearly as he could. Nay what are all errors and perversities of his, even those stealings of ribbons, aim- less confused miseries and vagabondisms, if we will in- terpret 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 toler- ance 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 operatic ; a kind of rosepink, artificial bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it is universal, among the French since his time. Madame de Stael has some- thing of it ; St. Pierre ; and down onward to the present astonishing convulsionary "literature of despera- tion," it is everywhere abundant. That same rosepink is not the right hue. Look at a Shakespeare, at a Goethe, even at a Walter Scott ! He who has once seen into this, has seen the difference of the true and the sham-true, and will discriminate them ever after- ward. 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, 222 LECTURES ON HmOE8. that of Kousseau. 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 anyway possible, that such a man should not have been set in flat hos- tility with the world. He could be cooped into garrets, laughed at as a maniac, left to starve like a wild-beast in his cage but he could not be hindered from setting the world on fire. The French revolution found its evangelists in Kousseau. His semi-delirious specula- tions on the miseries of civilized life, the preferability of the savage to the civilized, and suchlike, helped well to produce a whole delirium in France generally. True you may well ask, what could the world, the govern- ors 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 guillotine a great many of them! Enough now of Rousseau. It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbe- lieving, second-hand eighteenth century, that of a hero starting up, among the artificial pasteboard figures and productions, in the guise of Robert Burns. Like a little well in the rocky desert places 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 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 HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 223 The tragedy of Burn'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 than Burns'. Among those second-hand acting-figures, 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 diffi- culties. 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 them. The letters " threw us all into tears : " figure it. The brave father, I say always a silent hero and poet ; without whom the son had never been a speaking one! Burns' schoolmaster came afterward to London, learned what good society was ; but declares that in no meet- ing of men did he ever enjoy better discourse than at the hearth of this peasant. And this poor " seven acres of nursery-ground " 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 un^ equal battle all his days. But he stood to it valiantly; a wise, faithful, unconquerable man swallowing-down how many sore sufferings daily into silence ; fighting like an unseen hero nobody publishing newspaper 224 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 and indeed of many generations of such as him. This Burns appeared under every disadvantage : un- instructed, 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 al- ready become universally recognized as being, or cap- able 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 : whereso- ever a Saxon dialect is spoken, it begins to be under- stood, 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 rock, yet with wells of living softness in it ! A wild impetuous whirlwind of passion and faculty slumbered quiet there ; such heavenly melody dwelling in the heart of it. A noble rough genuineness ; homely, rustic, honest ; true sim- plicity of strength ; with its lightning-fire, with its soft dewy pity like the old JSTorse Thor, the peasant- god! Burns' 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 THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 225 speech ; a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter, sense and heart ; far pleasanter to hear there, stripped cutting peats in the bog, or suchlike, than he ever afterward knew him. I can well believe it. This basis of mirth ("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 laughs at the shaking of the spear. But indeed, hope, mirth, of the sort like Burns', are they not the outcome properly of warm generous affection 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 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' gifts, expressed in conversation, are the theme of all that ever heard him. All kinds of gifts : from the gracefulest utter- ances of courtesy, to the highest fire of passionate speech ; loud floods of mirth, soft waitings 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 226 LECTURES ON, HEROES. 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 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 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 ! But if we look at his general force of soul, his healthy robustness everyway, the rugged down- rightness, penetration, generous valor and manful ness that was in him 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 the intrinsically. There is the same burly thick-necked strength of body as of soul built in both cases, on what the old marquis calls a fond gaillard. By nature, by course of breeding, indeed by nation, Mirabeau has much more of bluster ; a noisy, forward, unresting man. But the characteris- tic of Mirabeau too is veracity and sense, power of true 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 affec- THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 22? dons. Wit, wild laughter, energy, directness, sincer- ity : 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 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 t/iinking-f acuity, the greatest in this land, we have no need ; you are to gauge beer there ; for that only are you wanted. Very notable and worth men- tioning, though Ave know what is to be said and an- swered ! 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 imthinking man, the man who cannot think and see; but only grope, and hallucinate, and missee the nature of the thing he works with ? He missees it, mistakes it as we say ; takes it for one thing, and it is another thing and leaves him standing like a futility there ! He is the fatal man ; unuttera- bly fatal, put in the high places of men. " Why com- plain of this ?" say some : " Strength is mournfully denied its arena ; that was true from the old." Doubt- less ; and the worse for the arena, answer I ! Com- plaining profits little ; stating of the truth may profit. That a Europe, with its French revolution just break- ing out, finds no need of a Burns except for gauging beer is a thing I, for one, cannot rejoice at ! 228 LECTURES ON UKROES. Once more We have to say here, that the chief quality of Burns is the 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 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 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. John- son had his Boswell for worshiper. Rousseau had worshipers enough : princes calling on him in his mean garret ; the great, the beautiful doing reverence to the poor moonstruck man. For himself a most por- tentous 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 star- vation at home." For his worshipers 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 these generations are very first-rate? 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 tkinks and sees in the world. The world can alter tho THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. 229 manner of that ; can either have it as blessed continu- ous summer sunshine, or unblessed black thunder and tornado with unspeakable difference of profit for the world ! The manner of it is very alterable ; the mat- ter 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 name or welcome we give him or it, is a point that concerns ourselves mainly. 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. My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns' history 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 com- mon lionism t 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 plow- man ; he is flying to the West Indies to escape dis- grace and a jail. This month he is a ruined peasant, his wages 7 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 ! Adversary is sometimes hard upon a man ; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a 230 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 affec- tation : he feels that he there is the manKobert Burns ; that the "rank is but the guinea-stamp;" that the celebrity is but the candle-light, which will show 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 worse man; a wretched inflated windbag inflated till he burst and become a dead lion ; for whom, as some one has said, "there is no resurrection of the body;" worse than a living dog ! 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 lion ism 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 solitary enough now. It is tragical to think of ! These men came but to see him ; it was out of no sym- pathy with him, nor no hatred to him. They came to get a little amusement : they got their amusement and the hero's life went for it! Kichter says, in the land 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 THE HERO AS KING. 231 LECTUKE VI * THE HERO AS KING. CROMWELL, NAPOLEON MODERN REVOLUTIONISM. 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 there welfare in doing so, may be reckoned the most important of great men. He is practically the summary for us of 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 com- mand over us, to furnish us with constant practical teaching, to tell us for the day and hour what we are to do. He is called rex, regulator, roi: our own name is still better ; king, konning, which means can-mug, able-man. Numerous considerations, pointing toward deep, questionable, and indeed unfathomable regions, present themselves here: on the most of which we must reso- lutely for the present forbear to speak at all. As Burke said that perhaps fair trial by jury was the soul of government, and that all legislation, adminis- tration, parliamentary debating, and the rest of it, went on, in "order to bring twelve impartial men into a jury-box " so, by much stronger reason, may I say *Delivered Friday, May 22, 1840. 232 LECTURES ON HEROES. here, that the finding of your ableman and getting him invested with the symbols of ability, with dignity, worship (worth-ship), royalty, kinghood, or whatever we call it, so that he may actually have room to guide according to his faculty of doing it is the business, well or ill accomplished, of all social procedure what- soever in this world ! Hustings speeches, parliament- ary motions, reform bills, French revolutions, all mean at heart this ; or else nothing. Find in any country the ablest man that exists there ; raise him to the su- preme place, and loyally reverence him : you have a perfect government for that co'untry ; 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 tells us to do must be precisely the wisest, fittest, that we could anywhere or anyhow learn the thing which it will in all ways behove us, with right royal thankfulness, and nothing doubting, to do! Our doing and life were then, so far as govern- ment 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 meager product of reality " in this poor world of ours. We will esteem him no wise man ; we will esteem him a sickly, discon- tented, 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 THE HERO AS KING. 233 to wreck ! Infallibly. No bricklayer builds a wall perfectly perpendicular, mathematically this is not pos- sible ; 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 sways 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 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 ! This is the history of all rebellions, French revolu- tions, social explosions in ancient or modern times. You have put the too viable man at the head of af- fairs ! The too ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man. You have forgotten that there is any rule, or natural neces- sity whatever, of putting the able man there. Brick must lie on brick as it may and can. Unable simula- crum of ability, quack, in a word, must adjust himself with quack, in all manner of administration of human things which accordingly lie unadministered, ferment- ing into unmeasured masses of failure, of indigent misery : in the outward, and in the in ward 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 ! Much sorry stuff, written some hundred years ago or more, about the " divine right of kings," molders unread now in the public libraries of this country. Far be it from us to disturb the calm process by which 234 LECTURES ON HEROES. it is disappearing harmlessly from the earth, in those repositories ! At the same time, not to let the in> mense rubbish go without leaving us, as it ought, some soul of it behind I will say that it did mean some- thing ; something true, which it is important for us and all men to keep in mind. To assert that in what- ever man you chose to lay hold of (by this or the other plan of clutching at him) ; and clapped a round piece of metal on the head of and called king there straight- way came to reside a divine virtue, so that he became a kind of god and a divinity inspired him with faculty and right to rule over you to all lengths ; this 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 skeptical 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 be- tween 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 THE HERO AS KING. 235 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 unbeliving century, than that of a " divine right " in people called kings. I say, find me the true fanning, king, or able man and he has a divine right over me. That we knew in some tolerable measure how to find him arid 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 guide of the spiritual, from which all practice has its rise. This too is a true saying, That the Icing is head of the church. 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 able man to seek and not knowing in what manner to proceed about it ! That is the world's sad predica- ment in these times of ours. They are times of revo- lution 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 end, we can hope. It were truer to say, the beginning was three centuries farther back : in the reformation of Luther. That the thing which still called itself Christian church had be- come 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 not now do : here lay the vital malady. The in- ward being wrong, all outward went ever more and 236 LECTURES oft HEROES. more wrong. Belief died away ; all was doubt, dis- belief. The builder cast 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 is a God's-truth in the business of God-created men ; and all is not a kind of grimace, an " expediency," diplomacy, one knows not what ! From that first necessary assertion of Luther's, "You, self-styled papa, you are no father in God at all ; you are a chimera, who I know not how to name in polite language!" From that onward to the shout which rose round Camille Desmoulins in the Palais-Royal, "aux armes /" when the people had burst up against all manner of chimeras I find a natural historical se- quence. That shout too, so frightful, half infernal, was a great matter. Once more the voice of awakened nations 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 di- plomacy ! Infernal yes, since they would not have it otherwise. Infernal, since not celestial or terrestrial ! Hollowness, insincerity 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! 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 mad; that the French revolution was a general act of insan- ity, a temporary conversion of France and large sect- ions of the world into a kind of bedlam. The event TBK HERO AS KTNG. 237 had risen and raged ; but was a madness and nonentity gone now happily into the region of dreams and the picturesque ! To such confortable philosophers, the three days of July 1830 must have been a surprising phenomenon. Here is the French nation risen again, in musketry and death struggle, out shooting and be- ing 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 little better than Racine's, dying because Louis XIV 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 axes 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 every- where 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 ; tes- tifying once more that nature is jy/^ternatural ; if not mu bee ^wlfl 238 LECTURES ON HEROES. divine, then diabolic ; that semblance is not reality ; that it has to become reality, or the world will take fire under it burn it into what it is, namely nothing I 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 learn it soonest. Long confused generations be- fore it be learned ; peace impossible till it be ! The earnest man, surrounded as ever, with a world of in- consistencies, can await patiently, patiently strive to do 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 enor- mous difficulties lie there, and how fast, fearful fast, in all countries, the inexorable demand for solution of them is pressing on 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 wor- ship " 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, soci- eties that men ever insituted, 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 con- flagration. 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, V. THE HERO AS KING. 239 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 : I can tell her, she may give up the trade altogether, then ; we cannot do without great men ! 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 wor- ship, reverence for such authorities, has proved false, is itself a falsehood ; no more of it ! "We have had such forgeries, we will now trust nothing. So many base plated coins parring in the market, the belief has now become common that no gold any longer exists 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 transition from false to true. Considered as the whole truth, it is false alto- gether the product of entire skeptical blindness, as yet only struggling to see. Hero worship exists for- ever 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 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 it- self, are still possible^ n^y still inevitable. 240 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 dis- order 'I 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 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 making of order f 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 tragi- cal for us all to be concerned in image-breaking and down-pulling ; for the great man, more a man than we, it is doubly tragical. Thus too all human things, maddest French sanscu- lottisms, do and must work toward order. I say, there is not a man in them, raging in the thickest of the madness, but is impelled withal, at all moments, toward order. His very life means that ; disorder is disso- lution, death. No chaos but it seeks a center to re- volve round. While man is man, some Cromwell or Napoleon is the necessary finish of a sansculottism. 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 right, take it on the great scale, is found to mean divine might withal ! While old false formulas are getting trampled every- where into destruction, new genuine, substances unex- pectedly unfold themselves indestructible. In rebel- THE HERO AS KING. 241 lious ages, when kingship itself seems dead and abol- ished, 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 exhib- ited 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 belong 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 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 hearers of 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 then 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 unalter- able 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 242 LECTURES ON HEROES. go by the old descent regulations ; nay that their sal- vation will lie in extending and improving these. Like a weak man, he drives with spasmodic vehemence toward 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 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 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 praising only the spirit which had rendered that inevitable ! All sub- stances clothe themselves in forms : but there are suit- able true forms, and then there are untrue unsuitable. As the briefest definition, one might say, forms which grow round in substance, if we rightly understand that, will correspond to the real nature and purport of it, will be true, good ; forms which are consciously 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 in, offense? In the mere drawing-room, whatsoever courtesies you see to be grimaces, prompted by no spontaneous reality within ? are a thing you wish to THE HERO AS KING. 243 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 ioform itself into utterence at all, and preferred formless si- lence to any utterance there possible 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 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 to be ac- cepted it is hateful, unendurable. It is what the old prophets called " idolatry," worshiping of hollow 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 such forms insupportable ; tramp- led on such forms we have to excuse it for saying, No forms 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 soul into the earnest 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 due semblance by and by, if it be real. No fear of that; actually no fear at all, Criyn the. 244 LECTURES ON 1IKROES. living man, there will be found clothes for him; he A\ill find himself clothes. But the suit of clothes pretending that it is both clothes and man! We "cannot fight the French" by three hundred thousand red uniforms ; there must be men in the inside of them ! Semblance, I assert, must actually not divorce itself from reality. If semblance do 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 Puri- tans, their cause or themselves were little likely to have justice done them. Charles II 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 hun^ on gibbets 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 habeas corpus, our free representation of the people ; acknowledgement, wide as the world, that all men are, or else must, shall and will become, what we call free men 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. THE HERO AS KING. 245 And indeed, as these things became gradually mani- fest, the character of the Puritans began to clear itself. Their memories were, one after another, taken down from the gibbet ; nay a certain portion of them are now, in these days, as good as canonized. Eliot, Hamp- den, Pym, nay Ludlow, Hutchmson, Yane 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 ttirtufe ; turn- ing 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 unnat- ural product of a century like the eighteenth. As we said of the valet, so of the skeptic : he does not know a hero when he sees him ! The valet expected purple mantles, gilt scepters, body-guards and flourishes of trumpets : the skeptic of the eighteenth century looks for regulated respectable formulas, " principles," or else he may call them ; a style of speech ancj 246 LECTURES ON 11KROES. conduct which has got to seem " respectable," which can plead for itself in a handsome articulate manner and gain the suffrages of an enlightened skeptical eighteenth century ! It is, at bottom, the same thing that both the valet and he expect ; the garnitures of some acknowledged royalty, which then they will ac- knowledge ! The king coming to them in the rugged 'zmformulistic state shall be no king. For my own share, far be it from me to say or in- sinuate a word of disparagement against such characters as Hampden, Eliot, Pym; whom I believe to have been right worthy and useful men. I have read dili- gently what books and documents about them I could come at 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, philos- ophies, parliamentary eloquences, ship-moneys, mon- archies of man ; a most constitutional, unblamable, dignified set of men. But the heart remains cold be- fore 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 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 nitches of honor : the rugged outcast Cromwell, he is the man of them all in THE HERO AS KING. 217 whom one still finds human stuff. The great savago Baresark: he could write no euphemistic "Monarchy of Man;" did not speak, did not work with glib regu- larity ; had no straight story to tell for himself any- where. 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 toler- ance 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 skepticism, 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 Puri- tans came forward with Calvanistic incredible creeds, anti-Laudisms, Westminister confessions ; deman ding, chiefly of all, that they should have liberty to worship in their own way. Liberty to tax themselves : that was the thing they should have demanded ! It was superstition, fanaticism, disgraceful ignorance of con- stitutional philosophy to insist on the other thing ! Liberty to 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 money in what shape soever, before deciding to revolt against his government. Ours is a most confused 248 LECTURES ON UEROES. world ; in which a good man will be thankful to see any kind of government maintain itself in a not insup- portable 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. Taxgatherer ? Money ? He will say : " Take my money, since you can, and it is so desirable to you ; take it and take yourself away with it : and leave me alone to my work here /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 worshiping 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 an- nihilated. 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 defense of that !" 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 hunger alone produced even the French revolution ; no, but the feeling of the insupportable all-pervading falsehood which had now embodied itself in hunger, in universal material scarcity and .nonentity, and thereby become 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 me.rx THE HERO AS KING. 249 who believe in no reality at all, how shall a real human soul, the intensest of all realities, as it were the voice of this world's Maker still speaking to us be intelligi- ble ! What it cannot reduce into constitutional doc- trines 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 shipmoney will be the theme of much constitutional eloquence, striving to be fervid 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 Crom- well's falsity has been incredible to me. Nay I cannot believe the like, of any great man whatever. Multi- tudes of great men figure in history as false, selfish men; but if we will consider it, they are \>w.t 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 conscience in it, the essence of all real souls, great or small ? 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 250 LECTURES ON HKROES. him? A prince of liars and no lie spoken by him. Not one that I could yet get sight of. It is like Po- cocke asking Grotius : " Where is your proof ot Ma- homet's pigeon ? " No proof ! 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 it- self. What little we know of his earlier obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it not all be- token an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man ? His nervous melancholic temperament indicates rather a seriousness too deep for him. Of those stories of " specters ; " of the white specter in broad daylight, predicting that he should be king of England, we are not bound to believe much probably no more than of the other black specter, or devil in person, to whom the officer saw him sell himself before Worcester fight ! But the mournful, over-sensitive, 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 mid- night; 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 stub- born 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, THE BEHO AS KINO. 251 abandons all this : not much above twenty, he is mar- ried, settled as an altogether grave and quiet man. " He pays back what money he had won at gambling," says the story he does not think any gain of that kind could be really 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 truth of things 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 in- dustrious farmer, is it not altogether as that of a true and devout man ? He has renounced the world and its ways ; 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 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 thither, by walking well through his humble course in this world. He courts no notice : what could notice here do for him ? " Ever in his great task-master's eye." It is striking, too, how he comes out once into public view ; he, since no other is willing to come : in resist- ance 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 set- tled, he returns back into obscurity, to his Bible and his plow. " Gain influence ? " His influence is the most legitimate ; derived from personal knowledge of him, as a just, religious, reasonable and determined 252 LBUTURttB ON HKROK8. 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 pre- served 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, wor- shiping not God but their own "love locks," frivolities and formalities, living quite apart from contemplations of God, living 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 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 I, had no way of making any tenable arrangement with him. The large Pres- byterian 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 THK HERO AS KING. 253 Charles, in those final Hampden court negotiations, shows himself as a man fatally incapable of being dealt with. A man who, once for all, could not and would not understand whose thought did not in any meas- ure represent to him the real fact of the matter ; nay worse, whose 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 name of kingship, he still, finding himself treated with outward respect as a king, fancied that he might play off party against party, and smug- gle himself into his old power by deceiving both. Alas, they both discovered that he was deceiving them. A man whose 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, unbeliev- able again and again. Not so Cromwell : " For all our fighting," says he, "we are to have a little bit of paper?" No! In fact, everywhere we have to note the decisive practical eye of this man ; how he drives toward the pratical and practicable : has a genuine insight into what 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 per- sons, and choose substantial yeomen, whose heart was in the work, to be soldiers for them : this is advice by a man who saw. Fact answers, if you see into fact! Cromwell's ironsides were the embodiment of this 254 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 Crom- well'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 "for the king ; " but we, for our share, cannot understand that. To us it is no dilettante work, no sleek offlciality : 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 the infernal element in man called forth, to try it by that ! Do that therefore ; since that is the thing to be done. The successes of Cromwell seem to me a very natural thing! Since he was not shot in battle, they were an inevit- able 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 ! Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a man, to fall into skepticism, into dilettantism, insincerity ; not to know a 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 vulpine intellect. That a true king be sent them is of small use ; they do not know him when THE HERO AS KINO. 255 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 com- paratively nothing. The wild rude sincerity, direct from nature, is not glib in answering from the witness- box : in your sm&ll-debt pie-powder court, he is scouted as a counterfeit. The vulpine intellect" detects" him. For being a man worth any thousand men, the re sponse your Knox, your Cromwell gets, is an argu- ment 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 noth- ing 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 in- deed are many : but, of all dupes, there is none so fa- tally 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 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 vale* 2-56 LKCTURK8 ON HKROK8. 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? Bal- lot-boxes, suffrages, French revolutions 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 natural property of the quack and of the father of quacks and quackeries! Misery, confusion, unve- racity are alone possible there. By ballot-boxes we alter thejlgure of our quack; but the substance of him continues. The valet-world has to be governed by the sham-hero, by the king merely 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 had we ballot-boxes clattering at every street-corner, there were no remedy in these. Poor Cromwell great Cromwell ! The inarticulate prophet ; prophet who could not speak. Rude, con- fused, 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! Con- sider 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 work- ing 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 TEE HERO AS KING. 257 sympathy he had with things the quantity of insight he would yet get into the heart of things, the mastery he would yet get over things : this was his hypochon- dria. 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 Hack enveloping him wide as the world. It is the character of a prophetic man ; a man with his whole soul 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 lived silent ; a great unnamed sea of thought round him all his days ; and in his way of life little call to attempt 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 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 logicising; it is seeming and ascertaining. Virtue, vir-tus, manhood, Am?hood, is not fair-spoken immaculate regularity ; it is first of all, what the Germans well name it, tugend (taugend, dow-'mg or dough-tmess), courage and the faculty to do. This basis of the matter Cromwell had in him. One understands moreover how, though he could not speak in parliament, he might preach, rhapsodic preach- ing ; above all, how he might be great in extempore prayer. These are the free outpouring utterances of what was in the heart : method is not required in them; 258 LECTURES ON HEROES. . 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 sol- diers of Christ, as they felt themselves to be ; a little band of Christian brothers, who had drawn the sword against a great black devoring world not Christian, but mammonish, devilish they cry to God in their straits, in their extreme need, not to forsake the cause that was His. The light which now rose upon them how could a human soul, by any means at all, get better light ? Was not the purpose so formed like to be pre- cisely 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 dark- ness ; the pillar of fire by night, that was to guide them on their desolate perilous way. Was it not such ? Can a man's soul, to this hour, get guidance by any other method than intrinsically by that same devout prostration of the earnest struggling soul before the Highest, the Giver of all light; be such prayer a spoken, articulate, or be it a voiceless, inarticulate one ? There is no other method. " Hypocrisy ?" One be- gins 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 j they never were alone with the truth THE HERO AS KING. 259 of a thing at all. Cromwell's prayers were likely to bo " eloquent,' 5 and much more than that. His was tho heart of a man who 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 mean something, and men wished to know what. He disregarded eloquence, nay despised and disliked it ; spoke always without premedi- tation 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 premedita- tive 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 Ms, heard him even say so, and behold he turns out to have been meaning 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 simpty of a superior man ? Such $ man must have reticences in him. If he walks wearing his heart upon his sleeve for daws to pick at, his jour- ney will not extend far ! There is no use for any man's 200 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 in- quiries made : your rule is, to leave the inquirer unin- formed 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 &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 anymore; 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 ; im- perfect, what we call an error. But would it be a kindness always, is it a duty always or often, to disturb llx-iii in that? Many a man, doing loud work in the world, st;mds only on some thin traditionality, con- ventionality; 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 linger." THE HERO AS KING. 261 And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how much more in all departments of practice ! He that cannot withal 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? 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 ? 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 suchlike. The first is what I might call substituting the goal of their career for the course and starting-point of it. The vulgar historian of a Crom- well fancies that he had determined on being protector of England, at the time when he was plowing the marsh lands of Cambridgeshire. His career lay all mapped out : a programme of the whole drama ; which he then step by step dramatically unfolded, with all manner of cunning, deceptive dramaturgy, as he went on the hollow, scheming T^o^r??, 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 262 LECTURES ON HEROES. own life ? Short way ahead of us it is all dim ; an un- wound skein of possibilities, of apprehensions, attempt- abilities, vague looming hopes. This Cromwell bad not his life lying all in that fashion of programme, 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 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 stood requires in- deed a rare faculty ; rare, nay impossible. A very Shakespeare for faculty ; or more than Shakespeare ; who could enact a brother man's biography, see with the brother man's eyes at all points of his course what things lie saw ; in short, 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 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 exagerate 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 pro- ducing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts an*} THE HERO AS KING. 263 claims ; struggling to force everybody, as it were beg- ging 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 wretched est sights seen under this sun. A 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 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 sub- stance 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 him other than he already was. Till his hair was grown gray ; and life from the downhill slope was all seen to be limited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurable matter how it went he had been content to plow 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 be- yond the need of gilding. Death, judgment a.nd eter 264 LECTURES ON HEROES. nity : these already lay as the background of whatso- ever 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 ail 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 huzzahing mobs, keep your red-tape clerks, your influentialities, your important businesses. Leave me alone, leave me alone ; there is 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 wrapped up in its thoughts, in its sorrows what could paradings and ribbons in the hat, do for it? Ah yes, 1 will say again : the great 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 silence. The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his de- partment; 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 root*; which had all turned into leaves and boughs which must soon wither and be no. forest. Woe for us if we had nothing but what we can 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. I hope we English will long THE HERO AS KING. 265 maintain our 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 become a most green forest with- out 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 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 continent of my thought hither- to ; 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 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 ? " But now, by the way of counterpoise to this of silence, let me say that there are two kinds of am- bition; 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 con- sisting in this : To unfold your self, to work what 266 LECTURES ON HEROES. thing you have the faculty for. It is a necessity for the human being, the first law of our existence. Cole- ridge beautifully remarks that the infant learns to speak by this necessity it feels. We will say therefore : " To decide about ambition, whether it is bad or not, you have two things to take into view. Not the cov- eting of the place alone, but the fitness of the man for the place withal : " that is the question. Perhaps the place was 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 ? " Hopef uler perhaps had he not so clearly 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. Nature, I say, has provided amply that the silent great man shall strive to speak withal ; 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 judgement 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 utter- ance and determination to act ; casting all sorrows and misgivings under his feet, counting all affliction and contradiction small the whole dark element of his ex- THE HERO AS KIN&. 267 istence 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, whipped, set on pil- lories, their ears cropped off, God's gospel cause trod- den 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 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 it- self ; 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 plows and hastened thither. He spoke there 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 on and on, till the cause triumphed, its once so formid- able enemies all swept from before it and the dawn of hope had become clear light of victory and certainty. That he stood there as the strongest soul of England, the undisputed hero of all England 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 realized. Those that were highest in Christ's church, the devoutest wisest men, were to 268 LECTURES ON rule the land : in some considerable degree, it might be so and should be so. Was it not true, God's truth ? And if true, was it not then the very thing to do ? The strongest practical intellect in England dared to an- swer, 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 was history, I think, shows it only this once in such a de- gree. I account it the culminating point of Protest- antism ; 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 high- est good to England and all lands, an attainable fact ! Well, I must say, the vulpine intellect, with its knowingness, its alertness and expertness in "detect- ing 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 wel- come. He had adherents by the hundred or the ten ; opponents by the million. Had England rallied all round him why, then, England might have been a 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 ; " 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 BEttO AS KING. 260 the matter begins to stagnate ; and this problem is be- coming to all men a palpably hopeless one* But with regard to Cromwell and his purposes : Hume and a multitude following him, come upon me here with an admission that Cromwell 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; extens- ively applied since 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 lion-hearted son ; Antaeus-like, his strengh is got by 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 ivork doubtless with many a 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 270 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 ! Hypo- crite, 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 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 away with it ! Let us remark; meanwhile, how indispensable every- where a king is, in all movements of men. It is strik- ingly 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 be- ing the case. But there was no great Cromwell among them ; poor tremulous, hesitating, diplomatic Argyles and suchlike ; 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, splen- did 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 / THE HERO AS RING* 271 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 live 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 call him so or not. Precisely here, however, lies the rub for Cromwell. His other procedings have all found advocates, and stand generally justified ; but this dismissal of the rump parliament and the assumption of the protector- ship, 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 pratical ques- tion arose, what was to be done with it ? How will you govern these nations, which providence in a won- drous way has given up to your disposal ? Clearly those hundred surviving members of the long parlia- ment, who sit there as supreme authority, cannot con- tinue forever to sit. What is to be done ? It was a 272 LECTURES ON HEROES. 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 parlia- ment 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. Per- haps 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 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 three-score of you left there, debating in these days. Tell us what we shall do ; not in the way of formula, but of practicable fact ! THE HERO AS KING. 273 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 dis- solve and disperse ; that when it came to the point of actually dispersing, they again for the tenth or twen- tieth time, adjourned it and Cromwell's patience failed him. But we will take the favorablest hy- pothesis ever started for the parliament ; the favor- ablest, 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 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 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 them an unquestionable thing. Reform bill, free suffrage of Englishmen ? Why, the royalists themselves, silenced indeed but not exterminated, perhaps outnumber us ; the great numer- ical 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, 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 Lucile. By Owen Meredith. Maid of Sker. By R. D. Blackmore. Man and Wife. By Wilkie Collins. Man in the Iron Mask. By Alex- andre Dumas. Martin Chuzzlewit. By Chartes Dickens. Mary St. John. By Rosa N. Carey, Master of Ballantrao, The. By R. L. Stevenson. Master of the Ceremonies, The. By G. M. Fenn. Masterman Beady. By Captain Marryat. Merle's Crusade. By Rosa N. Micah Clarke. By A. Conan Doyle. Michael Strogoff. By Jules Verne. Middlexuarch. By George Eliot. Midshipman Easy. By Captain Marryat. Mill on the Floss. By George Eliot. Molly Bawn. By The Duchess. Moonstone, The. By Wilkie Col- lins. Mosses from an Old Manse. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mysterious Island, The. By Jules Verne. Natural Law in the Spiritual World. By Henry Drummond. Nellie's Memories. By Rosa N. Carey. Newcomes, The. By William M. Thackeray. Nicholas Nickleby. By Charlea Dickens. No Name. By Wilkie Collins. Not Like Other Girls. By Rosa N. Curey. Old Curiosity Shop. By Charles Dickens. Old Ma'm'selle's Secret. By E. Marlitt. Old Myddelton's Money. By Mary Cecil Hay. Oliver Twist. By Charles Dickens. Only the Governess. By Rosa N. Carey. For sale by all Booksellers, or wVH be sent post-paid on receipt of price by Vte publtnlw, 4.. Z. BURTt New York. BURT'S HOME LIBRARY. TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY VOLUMES. Uniform Cloth Binding. Price 75 cents per Copy, On the Heights. By Berthold Auerbach. Our Bessie. By Rosa N. Carey. Our Mutual Friend. By Charles Dickens. Pair of Blue Eyes, A. By Thomas Hardy. Past and Present. By Thomas Carlyle. Pathfinder, The. By James Feni- more Cooper. Pere Goriot. By Honore de Balzac. Phantom Rickshaw, The. By Rudyard Kipling. Phra, the Phoenician. By Edwin L.Arnold. Picciola. By X. B. Saintine. Pickwick Papers. By Charles Dickens. Pilgrim's Progress . By John Bun- yan. Pilot, The. By James Fenimore Cooper. Pioneers, The. By James Fenimore Cooper. Prairie, The. By James Fenimore Cooper. Pride and Prejudice. By Jane Austen. Prime Minister, The. By Anthony Trollope. Princess of Thule, A. ByWm. Black. Professor, The. By Charlotte Bronte. Put Yourself in His Place. By Charles Reade. Queen Hortense. By Louisa Muhl- bach. Queenie's Whim. By Rosa N. Ca- KaJp the Heir. By Anthony Trollope. Eed Rover. By James Fenimore Cooper. Reproach of Annesley. By Max- well Grey. Reveries of a Bachelor. By Ik. Marvel. Bhoda Flemf ng. By George Mere- dith, le to Khiva, A. By Captain Fred Burnaby. Rienzi. By Bulwer-Lytton. Robinson Crusoe. By Daniel De- foe. Rob Roy. By Sir Walter Scott. Romance of a Poor Young Man. By Octave Feuillet. Romance of Two Worlds. By Marie Corelli. Romola. By George Eliot. Rory O'More. By Samuel Lover. By Thomas Car- By Nathan- Sartor Resartus. lyle. Scarlet Letter, The. iel Hawthorne. Scottish Chiefs. By Jane Porter. Search for Basil Lyndhurst. By Rosa N. Carey. Second Wife, The. By E. Marlitt. Self-Help. By Samuel Smiles. Sense and Sensibility. By Jane Austen. Sesame and Lilies. By John Rus- kin. Shadow of the Sword. By Robert Buchanan. Shirley. By Charlotte Bronte. Silas Marner. By George Eliot. Silence of Dean Maitland. By Maxwell Grey. Sketch-Book, The. By Washing- ton Irving. Social Departure, A. By Sara Jeannette Duncan. Soldiers Three, etc. By Rudyard Kipling. Spring-haven. By R. D. Blackmore. Spy, The. By James Fenimore Cooper. St. Katharine's by the Tower. By Walter Besant. For saU by all Booksellers, or will be sent post-paid on receipt of price by Me publisher. 4. It- -PP#Z> New York, BURTS HOME LIBRARY. TWO HTTNDBED AND FIFTY VOLUMES. Uniform Cloth Binding. Price 75 cents per Copy. Story of an African Farm. By Olive Schreiner. Swiss Family Robinson. By Jean Rudolph Wyss. Tale of Two Cities. By Charles Dickens. Talisman, The. By Sir Walter Scott. Tartarin of Tarascon. By Al- phonse Daudet. Tempest Tossed. By Theodore Tilton. Ten Years Later. By Alexandre Dumas. Terrible Temptation, A. By Charles Reade. Thaddeus of Warsaw. By Jane Porter. Thelma. By Marie Corelli. Three Guardsmen. By Alexandre Dumas. Three Men in a Boat. By Jerome K. Jerome. Tom Brown at Oxford. By Thomas Hughes. Tom Brown's School Days. By Thomas Hughes. Tom Burke of " Ours." By Charles Lever. Tour of the World in Eighty Days, A. By Jules Verne. Treasure Island. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Twenty Thousand Leagues Un- der the Sea. By Jules Verne. Twenty Years After. By Alexan- dre Dumas. Twice Told Tales. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Two Admirals. By James Feni- more Cooper. Two Chiefs of Dunboy. By James A. Froude. Two on a Tower. By Thomas Hardy. Two Years Before the Hast. By R. H. Dana, Jr. TJarda. By George Ebers. Uncle Max. By Rosa N. Carey. Uncle Tom's Cabin. By Harriet Beecher Stowe. Undine and Other Tales. By De la Motte Fouque. Vanity Fair. By William M. Thack- eray. Vicar of Wakefleld. By Oliver Goldsmith. Villette. By Charlotte Bronte. Virginians, The. By Willliam M. Thackeray. Vicomte de Bragelonne. By Alex- andre Dumas. Vivian Grey. By Benjamin Dis- raeli. Water Witch, The. By James Fenimore Cooper. Waverly. By Sir Walter Scott. Wee Wine. By Rosa N. Carey. By Charles Kings- Westward Ho I We Two. By Edna Lyall. By George By J. M. By A. Co- By Susan By Smile What's Mine's Mine. Macdonald. When a Man's Single. Barrie. White Company, The. nan Doyle. Wide, Wide World. Warner. Widow Lerouge, The. Gaboriau. Wilhelm Meister's Apprentice- ship. ByGoethe (Carlyle). Wing-and-Wing. By James Fenl- more Cooper. Woman in White, The. By Wilkie Collins. Won by VI aiting. By Edna Lyall. Wooing- O't. By Mrs. Alexander. World Went Very Well Then. The. By Walter Besant. Wormwood. By Marie Corelli. Wreck of the Q-rosvenor, 4?he. By W. Clark Russell. Zenobia. By William Ware. For sale by all Booksellers, or wUl he sent post-paM on receipt of price by the publisher, A. L. BUMT, New York. THE HENH SERIES FOR BOYS. Uniform Cloth Binding. Price $1.00. "Wherever English ; s spoken one imagines that Mr. Plenty's name is known. One cannot enter a scnoolroom or look at a boy's bookshelf without seeing half- a-dozen of his familiar volumes. Mr. Henty is no doubt the most successful \v i-iter for boys, and the one to whose new volumes they look forward every Christmas with most pleasure. Review of Reviews. Bonnie Prince Charlie. A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden. By G. A. HENTY. With Illustrations by Gordon Browne. Price $1.00. With Clive in India; or, The Beginnings of An Empire. By G. A. HENTY. With Illustrations by Gordon Browne. Price $1.00. The Dragon and the Raven; or, The Days of King Alfred. By G. A. HENTY. With Illustrations by C. J. Staniland, R.I. Price $1.00. The Young Carthaginian. A Story of the Times of Han- nibal. By G. A. HENTY. With Illustrations by C. J. Staniland, R.I. Price $1.00. The Lion of the Nortli. A Tale of Gustavus Adolphus and the Wars of Religion. By G. A. HENTY. With Illustrations by John Schonberg. Price $1.00. With Lee in Virginia. A Story of the American Civil War. By G. A. HENTY. With Illustrations by Gordon Browne. Price $1.00. By England's Aid; or, The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604). By G. A. HENTY. With Illustrations by Alfred Pearse. Price $1.00. By Pike and Dyke. A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Re- public. By G. A. HENTY. With Illustrations by Maynard Brown. Price $1.00. Captain Bayley's Heir. A Tale of the Gold Fields of Cali- fornia. By G. A. HENTY. With Illustrations by H. M. Paget. Price $1.00. Under Drake's Flag. A Tale of the Spanish Main. By G. A. HENTY. With Illustrations by Gordon Browne. Price $1.00. In Freedom's Cause. A Story of Wallace and Bruce. By G. A. HENTY. With Illustrations by Gordon Browne. Price $1.00. In the Iteign of Terror. The Adventures of a Westminster Boy. By G. A. HENTY. With Illustrations by J. Schonberg. Price $1.00. For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of price by the publisher, \ . I,. HURT, 97 Reade Street, New York. TH E ALGER SERIES for BOYS "Uniform with. This Volume. This series affords wholesome reading for boys and girls, and all the volumes are extremely interesting. Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette. JOE'S LUCK ; or, A Brave Boy's Adventurer in California. By HORATIO ALGER, JR. JULIAN MORTIMER : or, A Brave Boy's Struggles for Home and Fortune. By HARRY CASTLEMON. ADRIFT IN THE WILDS ; or, The Adventures of Two Ship, wrecked Boys. By EDWARD S. ELLIS. FRANK FOWLER, THE CASH BOY. By HORATIO ALGER, JR. GUY HARRIS, THE RUNAWAY. By HARRY CASTLEMON. THE SLATE-PICKER ; A Story of a Boy's Life in the Coal Mines. By HARRY PRENTICE. TOM TEMPLE'S CAREER. By HORATIO ALGER, JR. TOM, THE READY ; or, Up from the Lowest. By RANDOLPH HILL. THE CASTAWAYS ; or, On the Florida Reefs. By JAMES OTIS. CAPTAIN KIDD'S GOLD. The True Story of an Adventurous Sailor Boy. By JAMES FRANKLIN FITTS. TOM THATCHER'S FORTUNE. By HORATIO ALGER, JR. LOST IN THE CANON. The Story of Sam Willett's Adventures, on the Great Colorado of the West. By ALFRED R. CALHOUN. A YOUNG HERO ; or, Fighting to Win. By EDWARD S. ELLIS. THE ERRAND BOY ; or, How Phil Brent Won Success. By HORATIO ALGER, JR. THE ISLAND TREASURE ; or, Harry Darrel's Fortune. By FRANK H. CONVERSE. A RUNAWAY BRIG ; or, An Accidental Cruise. By JAMES OTIS. A JAUNT THROUGH JAVA. The Story of a Journey to the Sacred Mountain by Two American Boys. By E. S. ELLIS. CAPTURED BY APES ; or. How Philip Garland Became King of Apeland. By HARRY PRENTICE. TOM THE BOOT-BLACK ; or, The Road to Success, By HORATIO ALGER. JR. ROY GILBERT'S SEARCH. A Tale of the Great Lakes. By WILLIAM P. CHIPMAN. THE TREASURE-FINDERS. A Boy's Adventures in Nicara- uga. By JAMKS OTIS. BUDD BOYD'S TRIUMPH; or, The Boy Firm of Fox Island. By WILLIAM P. CHIPMAN. TONY, THE HERO ; or, A Brave Boy's Adventures with a Tramp. By HORATIO ALQER, JR. CAPTURED BY ZULUS. A Story of Trapping in Africa. By HARRY PHENTH^K. THE TRAIN BOY. By HORATIO ALGER, JR. DAN THE NEWSBOY. By HORATIO ALGER, JR. SEARCH FOR THE SILVER CITY. A Story of Adventure in Yucatan. By JAMES OTIS. THE BOY CRUISERS ; or, Paddling in Florida. By ST. GEORGE RATH BORNE. The above starlet are printed on extra paper, and bound In Handsome Cloth Binding, in all respects uniform with this volume, at $1.OO per copy. For tale by all Bookxetter*, or will be tent jwtit-pald an receipt ofpric*. by th r. 4? L. B VRT, 66 Reade St., New for*, m& Etiquette, Health and Beauty. Comprising " THE USAGES o* THE BEST SOCIETY," a manua 1 of social etiquette, and " TALKS WITH HOMELY GIRLS ON HEALTH AND BEAUTY," containing chapters upon the general care of the health, and the preservation and cultivation ol beauty hi the complexion, hands, etc. By FRANCES STEVENS and FRANCES M. SMITH. Cloth, 12mo, price $1.00. ** It is a handy volume to be lying on the table for reference." Zio' Heratd* \ The National Standard Dictionary. A pronouncing lexicon ol the English Language, containing 40,000 words, and illustrated with 700 wood-cuts, to which is added an appendix of useful and valuable Information. 600 pages. Cloth, 12mo, price $1.00. "A convenient and useful book. Clear in typography, convenient in siz. It contains copjous definitions, syllabio divisions, the accentuation and pro- nunciation of each word, and an appendix of reference matter of nearly 100 frages is added, making it the best cheap dictionary we have ever seen." Courier-Journal, Louiswlle. The Usages of the Best Society. A manual of social etiquette, By FRANCES STEVENS. Cloth, 16mo, price 50 cents. " Will be found useful by all who wish to obtain instruction on platters relat- ing to social usa?e and society." Demorest's Magazine, A Handy Dictionary of Synonyms, with which are combined the words opposite in meaning. For the use of those who would speak or write the English language fluently and correctly. By H. C. FAULKNER, Cloth, 16mo, price 50 cents. 44 Will be found of great value to those who are not experienced in speech 01 With pen." -Brooklyn Eagle. Talks With Homely Girls on Health and Beauty. Their Pres- ervation and Cultivation, By FRANCES M. SMITH. Cloth, 16mo f price 50 cents. ** She recommends no practices which are not in accord with hygienic laws, o that her book is really a valuable little guide." Peterson's Magazine. A Handy Classical and Mythological Dictionary. For popn lar use, with 70 illustrations. By H. C. FAULKNER Cloth, ifimo, price 50 cents. " It is often convenient to have a small book at hand in order to find out th meaning of the classical allusions of the day, when it is troublesome and cum bersome to consult a larger work. This tasteful volume fills the desired pur pose. It explains the allusions, pronounces the hard names, and pteturet nany of the mythological heroes." Providence Journal. Famous People of All Ages. Who they were, when they lived, and why they are famous. By W. H. VAN ORDEN. Cloth, 16mo, price 50 cents. " An excellent hand-book, giving in a compact form biographies of the pep- sons in whom the student and writer would naturally take most interest." New York Tribune. _* For talebyatt Booksellers, or will be tent post-paid on receipt of price, by tM pub (j JRd* /Street* ][ew Torlf. afl Friendly Chats With Girls. A series of talks on manners, duty, fcehavior and social customs. Containing sensible advice and counsel on a great variety of important matters which girls should know. By MRS. M. A. KIDDER. Illustrated. Cloth, 16mo, price 50 cents. " Every girl that reads and understands this little book will be all the wiser and prettier for it, and she will learn that excellent secret that true beauty omes from within, and is not for sale at the dressmaker's or the apothecary's." Boston Beacon. The Art f Letter Writing. A manual of polite correspond ance, containing the correct forms for all letters of a commercial. Social, or ceremonial nature, with copious explanatory chapters on Arrangement, grammatical forms, punctuation, etc., etc. By JENNIX TAYLOR WANDLE. Cloth, 16mo, price 50 cents. ** These little works on letter- writing are not to be despised. Theyofteu Emulate ambition, and it is a much better sign for a person who has had fe\* School advantages to be seen consulting an authoritative volume of this kind, than to see him plunging heedlessly into letter-writing with all his ignorance clinging around mm." .AT. Y. Telegram. Ladies' Fancy Work. New Revised Edition, giving designs and plain directions for all kinds of Fancy Needle- Work. Edited by JENNY JUNE. 700 illustrations. Paper cover, price 50 cents. " I have examined carefully the beautifully printed manuals edited by Mrs. Croly [Jenny June], whose work here, as elsewhere, is as careful and thorough as she has taught us to expect. They will be invaluable to all needle- workers, and deserve the success they will most undoubtedly obtain." Mrs. Helen Knitting ana Crochet. A guide to the use of the Needle and the Hook. Edited by JENNY JUNE. 200 illustrations. Paper cover, price 50 cents. **...! cannot think of a more useful present for young housekeepers and mothers, who can gain much important information from these books to aid in decorating their homes and to trim their clothing tastefully. "Mrs. Henry Ward Beeper. Needle-Work. A manual of stitches and studies in embroidery and drawn work. Edited by JENNY JUNE. 200 illustrations. Paper cover, price 50 cents. , 44 1 do not hesitate to pronounce Mrs. Croly's works on Needle- Work and Knitting and Crochet the best manuals on those subjects that I have ever seen. Wiey are charming reading, us well as useful guides to housewife and needle Woman." Marion Norland. > Letters and Monograms. For marking on Silk, Linen and othei fabrics, for individuals and household use. Edited by JENNY JUNK. 1,000 illustrations. Paper cover, price 50 cents. 44 1 am greatly pleased with the Manuals of Art Needle- Work so charmingly dited by Mrs. Croly [Jenny June]. Mrs. Croly's manuals will reveal treasures to many a woman who distrusts herself, but soon the worker will take courage as her perceptions are cultivated, and with patience and holding fast to the truths in nature, ' patterns ' will come of themselves to fit the uses intended. Embroidery, however, is a real enjoyment to me, and I am glad to aid all fforts to popularize such work." Mrs. Qen. Fremont. For tale by all Booksellers, or will be sent post-paid on receipt of price, by the jnfr 4. *. ami gradual A Dictionary of American Politics. Comprising accounts of Political Parties, Measures and Men ; Explanations of the Constitu- tion ; Divisions and Practical Workings of the Government, together with Political Phrases, Familiar Names of Persons and Places, Note- worthy Sayings, etc., etc. By EVERIT BROWN and ALBERT STRAUSS. 565 pages. Cloth, 12mo, price $1.00. Ptper, 50 cents. SENATOR JOHN SHERMAN says : "I have to acknowledge the receipt of a copy of your ' Dictionary of American Politics.' I have looked over it, and find it a very excellent book of reference, which every American family ought to have." Boys' Useful Pastimes. Pleasant and profitable amusement for spare hours in the use of tools. By PROF. ROBERT GRIFFITH, A. M. 800 illustrations. Cloth, 12mo, price $1.00. " The author has devised a happy plan for diverting the surplus energy of the boy from frivolous or mischievous channels into activities that interest him, while at the same time they train him to mechanical and artistic skill and better adapt him for success in life." .Boston Journal. What Every One Should Know. A cyclopedia of Practical Information, containing complete directions for making and doing over 5,000 things necessary in business, the trades, the shop, the home, the farm, and the kitchen, giving in plain language recipes, prescriptions, mediciaes, manufacturing processes, trade secrets, chemical preparations, mechanical appliances, aid to injured, busi- ness information, law, home decorations, art work, fancy work, agriculture, fruit culture, stock-raising, and hundreds of other useful hints and helps needed in our daily wants. By S. H. BURT. 516 pages. Cloth, 12mo, price $1.00. " A mass of information in a handy form, easy of access whenever occasion demands." Inter- Ocean < Chicago. Readers Reference Hand-Book. Comprising " A HANDY CLAS- SICAL AND MYTHOLOGICAL DICTIONARY " of brief and concise explan- ations of ancient mythological, historical and geographical allusions commonly met with in literature and art, also " FAMOUS PEOPLE OF ALL AGES," a manual of condensed biographies of the most notable men and women who .ever lived. By H. C. FAULKNER and W. H. VAN ORDEN. Cloth, 12mo, price $1.00. " This book will serve a useful purpose to many readers, and will save time lost in consulting dictionaries of larger scope." The Churchman, Writers' Reference Hand-Book. Comprising a manua of the " ART OF CORRESPONDENCE," with correct forms for letters of a commercial, social and ceremonial nature, and with copious explana- tory matter. Also " A HANDY DICTIONARY OF SYNONYMS," with which are combined the words apposite in meaning. Prepared to facilitate fluency and exactness in writing. By JENNIE TAYLOB WANDLE and H. C. FAULKNER. Cloth, 12mo, price $1.00. " Crowded full and even running over with proper and effective words must be the writer who will not occasionally find this work of great convenience and assistance to him." The Delineator. For sale by all Booksellers , or will be sent pott-paid on receipt of price, by the pv&- lie/Mr t 4-. f" WRT, 09 Jta