Heroes and Hero Worship

Heroes and Hero Worship

Thomas Carlyle

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Contents

[May 5, 1840.] LECTURE I. 1

[May 8, 1840.] LECTURE II. 57

[May 12, 1840.] LECTURE III. 107

[May 15, 1840.] LECTURE IV. 157

[May 19, 1840.] LECTURE V. 209

[May 22, 1840.] LECTURE VI. 265

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ii

[May 5, 1840.]LECTURE I.

The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Pa-ganism: Scandinavian Mythology.We have undertaken to discourse here fora little on Great Men, their manner of ap-pearance in our world’s business, how theyhave shaped themselves in the world’s history,what ideas men formed of them, what workthey did;—on Heroes, namely, and on theirreception and performance; what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs. Tooevidently this is a large topic; deserving quiteother treatment than we can expect to give itat present. A large topic; indeed, an illim-itable one; wide as Universal History itself.For, as I take it, Universal History, the historyof what man has accomplished in this world,is at bottom the History of the Great Menwho have worked here. They were the leadersof men, these great ones; the modellers, pat-terns, and in a wide sense creators, of what-soever the general mass of men contrived todo or to attain; all things that we see stand-

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2 Heroes and Hero Worship

ing accomplished in the world are properly theouter material result, the practical realizationand embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt inthe Great Men sent into the world: the soul ofthe whole world’s history, it may justly be con-sidered, were the history of these. Too clearlyit is a topic we shall do no justice to in thisplace!

One comfort is, that Great Men, taken upin any way, are profitable company. We can-not look, however imperfectly, upon a greatman, without gaining something by him. Heis the living light-fountain, which it is goodand pleasant to be near. The light which en-lightens, which has enlightened the darknessof the world; and this not as a kindled lamponly, but rather as a natural luminary shiningby the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain,as I say, of native original insight, of manhoodand heroic nobleness;—in whose radiance allsouls feel that it is well with them. On anyterms whatsoever, you will not grudge to wan-der in such neighborhood for a while. TheseSix classes of Heroes, chosen out of widely dis-tant countries and epochs, and in mere ex-ternal figure differing altogether, ought, if welook faithfully at them, to illustrate severalthings for us. Could we see them well, weshould get some glimpses into the very mar-row of the world’s history. How happy, couldI but, in any measure, in such times as these,make manifest to you the meanings of Hero-ism; the divine relation (for I may well call itsuch) which in all times unites a Great Man toother men; and thus, as it were, not exhaust

The Hero as Divinity 3

my subject, but so much as break ground onit! At all events, I must make the attempt.

It is well said, in every sense, that a man’sreligion is the chief fact with regard to him. Aman’s, or a nation of men’s. By religion I donot mean here the church-creed which he pro-fesses, the articles of faith which he will signand, in words or otherwise, assert; not thiswholly, in many cases not this at all. We seemen of all kinds of professed creeds attain toalmost all degrees of worth or worthlessnessunder each or any of them. This is not whatI call religion, this profession and assertion;which is often only a profession and assertionfrom the outworks of the man, from the mereargumentative region of him, if even so deepas that. But the thing a man does practicallybelieve (and this is often enough without as-serting it even to himself, much less to others);the thing a man does practically lay to heart,and know for certain, concerning his vital re-lations to this mysterious Universe, and hisduty and destiny there, that is in all cases theprimary thing for him, and creatively deter-mines all the rest. That is his religion; or, itmay be, his mere scepticism and no-religion:the manner it is in which he feels himself tobe spiritually related to the Unseen World orNo-World; and I say, if you tell me what thatis, you tell me to a very great extent what theman is, what the kind of things he will do is.Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore,first of all, What religion they had? Was itHeathenism,—plurality of gods, mere sensu-ous representation of this Mystery of Life, and


for chief recognized element therein PhysicalForce? Was it Christianism; faith in an In-visible, not as real only, but as the only real-ity; Time, through every meanest moment ofit, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Forcedisplaced by a nobler supremacy, that of Ho-liness? Was it Scepticism, uncertainty andinquiry whether there was an Unseen World,any Mystery of Life except a mad one;—doubtas to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat de-nial? Answering of this question is giving usthe soul of the history of the man or nation.The thoughts they had were the parents of theactions they did; their feelings were parentsof their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiri-tual in them that determined the outward andactual;—their religion, as I say, was the greatfact about them. In these Discourses, limitedas we are, it will be good to direct our surveychiefly to that religious phasis of the matter.That once known well, all is known. We havechosen as the first Hero in our series Odin thecentral figure of Scandinavian Paganism; anemblem to us of a most extensive province ofthings. Let us look for a little at the Hero asDivinity, the oldest primary form of Heroism.

Surely it seems a very strange-lookingthing this Paganism; almost inconceivable tous in these days. A bewildering, inextrica-ble jungle of delusions, confusions, falsehoods,and absurdities, covering the whole field ofLife! A thing that fills us with astonishment,almost, if it were possible, with incredulity,—for truly it is not easy to understand thatsane men could ever calmly, with their eyes


open, believe and live by such a set of doc-trines. That men should have worshippedtheir poor fellow-man as a God, and not himonly, but stocks and stones, and all mannerof animate and inanimate objects; and fash-ioned for themselves such a distracted chaosof hallucinations by way of Theory of the Uni-verse: all this looks like an incredible fable.Nevertheless it is a clear fact that they did it.Such hideous inextricable jungle of miswor-ships, misbeliefs, men, made as we are, didactually hold by, and live at home in. This isstrange. Yes, we may pause in sorrow and si-lence over the depths of darkness that are inman; if we rejoice in the heights of purer vi-sion he has attained to. Such things were andare in man; in all men; in us too.

Some speculators have a short way of ac-counting for the Pagan religion: mere quack-ery, priestcraft, and dupery, say they; no saneman ever did believe it,—merely contrived topersuade other men, not worthy of the nameof sane, to believe it! It will be often our dutyto protest against this sort of hypothesis aboutmen’s doings and history; and I here, on thevery threshold, protest against it in referenceto Paganism, and to all other isms by whichman has ever for a length of time striven towalk in this world. They have all had a truthin them, or men would not have taken themup. Quackery and dupery do abound; in re-ligions, above all in the more advanced de-caying stages of religions, they have fearfullyabounded: but quackery was never the origi-nating influence in such things; it was not the


health and life of such things, but their dis-ease, the sure precursor of their being aboutto die! Let us never forget this. It seems tome a most mournful hypothesis, that of quack-ery giving birth to any faith even in savagemen. Quackery gives birth to nothing; givesdeath to all things. We shall not see into thetrue heart of anything, if we look merely atthe quackeries of it; if we do not reject thequackeries altogether; as mere diseases, cor-ruptions, with which our and all men’s soleduty is to have done with them, to sweep themout of our thoughts as out of our practice. Maneverywhere is the born enemy of lies. I findGrand Lamaism itself to have a kind of truthin it. Read the candid, clear-sighted, rathersceptical Mr. Turner’s Account of his Embassyto that country, and see. They have their be-lief, these poor Thibet people, that Providencesends down always an Incarnation of Himselfinto every generation. At bottom some beliefin a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, beliefthat there is a Greatest Man; that he is dis-coverable; that, once discovered, we ought totreat him with an obedience which knows nobounds! This is the truth of Grand Lamaism;the “discoverability” is the only error here.The Thibet priests have methods of their ownof discovering what Man is Greatest, fit to besupreme over them. Bad methods: but arethey so much worse than our methods,—of un-derstanding him to be always the eldest-bornof a certain genealogy? Alas, it is a difficultthing to find good methods for!—We shall be-gin to have a chance of understanding Pagan-


ism, when we first admit that to its followersit was, at one time, earnestly true. Let us con-sider it very certain that men did believe inPaganism; 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 re-spectable, attributes such things to Allegory.It was a play of poetic minds, say thesetheorists; a shadowing forth, in allegoricalfable, in personification and visual form, ofwhat such poetic minds had known and feltof this Universe. Which agrees, add they,with a primary law of human nature, stilleverywhere observably at work, though inless important things, That what a man feelsintensely, he struggles to speak out of him, tosee represented before him in visual shape,and as if with a kind of life and historicalreality in it. Now doubtless there is such alaw, and it is one of the deepest in humannature; neither need we doubt that it didoperate fundamentally in this business. Thehypothesis which ascribes Paganism whollyor mostly to this agency, I call a little morerespectable; but I cannot yet call it the truehypothesis. Think, would we believe, andtake with us as our life-guidance, an allegory,a poetic sport? Not sport but earnest is whatwe should require. It is a most earnest thingto be alive in this world; to die is not sport fora man. Man’s life never was a sport to him;it was a stern reality, altogether a seriousmatter to be alive!


I find, therefore, that though these Alle-gory theorists are on the way towards truthin this matter, they have not reached it either.Pagan Religion is indeed an Allegory, a Sym-bol of what men felt and knew about the Uni-verse; and all Religions are symbols of that,altering always as that alters: but it seems tome a radical perversion, and even inversion,of the business, to put that forward as the ori-gin and moving cause, when it was rather theresult and termination. To get beautiful al-legories, a perfect poetic symbol, was not thewant of men; but to know what they wereto believe about this Universe, what coursethey were to steer in it; what, in this myste-rious Life of theirs, they had to hope and tofear, to do and to forbear doing. The Pilgrim’sProgress is an Allegory, and a beautiful, justand serious one: but consider whether Bun-yan’s Allegory could have preceded the Faith itsymbolizes! The Faith had to be already there,standing believed by everybody;—of which theAllegory could then become a shadow; and,with all its seriousness, we may say a sportfulshadow, a mere play of the Fancy, in compar-ison with that awful Fact and scientific cer-tainty which it poetically strives to emblem.The Allegory is the product of the certainty,not the producer of it; not in Bunyan’s norin any other case. For Paganism, therefore,we have still to inquire, Whence came thatscientific certainty, the parent of such a be-wildered heap of allegories, errors and confu-sions? How was it, what was it?

Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend


“explaining,” in this place, or in any place,such a phenomenon as that far-distant dis-tracted cloudy imbroglio of Paganism,—morelike a cloud-field than a distant continent offirm land and facts! It is no longer a real-ity, yet it was one. We ought to understandthat this seeming cloud-field was once a real-ity; that not poetic allegory, least of all thatdupery and deception was the origin of it.Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, neverrisked their soul’s life on allegories: men in alltimes, especially in early earnest times, havehad an instinct for detecting quacks, for de-testing quacks. Let us try if, leaving out boththe quack theory and the allegory one, and lis-tening with affectionate attention to that far-off confused rumor of the Pagan ages, we can-not ascertain so much as this at least, Thatthere was a kind of fact at the heart of them;that they too were not mendacious and dis-tracted, but in their own poor way true andsane!

You remember that fancy of Plato’s, of aman who had grown to maturity in some darkdistance, and was brought on a sudden intothe upper air to see the sun rise. What wouldhis wonder be, his rapt astonishment at thesight we daily witness with indifference! Withthe free open sense of a child, yet with theripe faculty of a man, his whole heart wouldbe kindled by that sight, he would discern itwell to be Godlike, his soul would fall downin worship before it. Now, just such a child-like greatness was in the primitive nations.The first Pagan Thinker among rude men, the


first man that began to think, was preciselythis child-man of Plato’s. Simple, open as achild, yet with the depth and strength of aman. Nature had as yet no name to him; hehad not yet united under a name the infinitevariety of sights, sounds, shapes and motions,which we now collectively name Universe, Na-ture, or the like,—and so with a name dismissit from us. To the wild deep-hearted man allwas yet new, not veiled under names or formu-las; it stood naked, flashing in on him there,beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was tothis man, what to the Thinker and Prophetit forever is, preternatural. This green flow-ery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains,rivers, many-sounding seas;—that great deepsea of azure that swims overhead; the windssweeping through it; the black cloud fashion-ing itself together, now pouring out fire, nowhail and rain; what is it? Ay, what? At bot-tom we do not yet know; we can never knowat all. It is not by our superior insight thatwe escape the difficulty; it is by our superiorlevity, our inattention, our want of insight. Itis by not thinking that we cease to wonder atit. Hardened round us, encasing wholly everynotion we form, is a wrappage of traditions,hearsays, mere words. We call that fire of theblack thunder-cloud “electricity,” and lecturelearnedly about it, and grind the like of it outof glass and silk: but what is it? What madeit? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Sciencehas done much for us; but it is a poor sciencethat would hide from us the great deep sa-cred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can


never penetrate, on which all science swimsas a mere superficial film. This world, afterall our science and sciences, is still a miracle;wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, towhosoever will think of it.

That great mystery of time, were thereno other; the illimitable, silent, never-restingthing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift,silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, onwhich we and all the Universe swim like exha-lations, like apparitions which are, and thenare not: this is forever very literally a mira-cle; a thing to strike us dumb,—for we haveno word to speak about it. This Universe,ah me—what could the wild man know of it;what can we yet know? That it is a Force, andthousand-fold Complexity of Forces; a Forcewhich is not we. That is all; it is not we, itis altogether different from us. Force, Force,everywhere Force; we ourselves a mysteriousForce in the centre of that. “There is not aleaf rotting on the highway but has Force init; how else could it rot?” Nay surely, to theAtheistic Thinker, if such a one were possi-ble, it must be a miracle too, this huge il-limitable whirlwind of Force, which envelopsus here; never-resting whirlwind, high as Im-mensity, old as Eternity. What is it? God’sCreation, the religious people answer; it isthe Almighty God’s! Atheistic science babblespoorly of it, with scientific nomenclatures, ex-periments and what not, as if it were a poordead thing, to be bottled up in Leyden jars andsold over counters: but the natural sense ofman, in all times, if he will honestly apply his


sense, proclaims it to be a living thing,—ah,an unspeakable, godlike thing; towards whichthe best attitude for us, after never so muchscience, is awe, devout prostration and humil-ity of soul; worship if not in words, then insilence.

But now I remark farther: What in sucha time as ours it requires a Prophet or Poetto teach us, namely, the stripping-off of thosepoor undevout wrappages, nomenclatures andscientific hearsays,—this, the ancient earnestsoul, as yet unencumbered with these things,did for itself. The world, which is now divineonly to the gifted, was then divine to whoso-ever would turn his eye upon it. He stoodbare before it face to face. “All was Godlikeor God:”—Jean Paul still finds it so; the gi-ant Jean Paul, who has power to escape outof hearsays: but there then were no hearsays.Canopus shining down over the desert, withits blue diamond brightness (that wild bluespirit-like brightness, far brighter than weever witness here), would pierce into the heartof the wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it wasguiding through the solitary waste there. Tohis wild heart, with all feelings in it, with nospeech for any feeling, it might seem a littleeye, that Canopus, glancing out on him fromthe great deep Eternity; revealing the innerSplendor to him. Cannot we understand howthese men worshipped Canopus; became whatwe call Sabeans, worshipping the stars? Suchis to me the secret of all forms of Paganism.Worship is transcendent wonder; wonder forwhich there is now no limit or measure; that


is worship. To these primeval men, all thingsand everything they saw exist beside themwere an emblem of the Godlike, of some God.

And look what perennial fibre of truthwas in that. To us also, through every star,through every blade of grass, is not a Godmade visible, if we will open our minds andeyes? We do not worship in that way now: butis it not reckoned still a merit, proof of whatwe call a “poetic nature,” that we recognizehow every object has a divine beauty in it; howevery object still verily is “a window throughwhich we may look into Infinitude itself”? Hethat can discern the loveliness of things, wecall him Poet! Painter, Man of Genius, gifted,lovable. These poor Sabeans did even whathe does,—in their own fashion. That they didit, in what fashion soever, was a merit: betterthan what the entirely stupid man did, whatthe horse and camel did,—namely, nothing!

But now if all things whatsoever that welook upon are emblems to us of the HighestGod, I add that more so than any of them isman such an emblem. You have heard of St.Chrysostom’s celebrated saying in referenceto the Shekinah, or Ark of Testimony, visi-ble Revelation of God, among the Hebrews:“The true Shekinah is Man!” Yes, it is evenso: this is no vain phrase; it is veritably so.The essence of our being, the mystery in usthat calls itself “I,”—ah, what words have wefor such things?—is a breath of Heaven; theHighest Being reveals himself in man. Thisbody, these faculties, this life of ours, is it notall as a vesture for that Unnamed? “There is


but one Temple in the Universe,” says the de-vout Novalis, “and that is the Body of Man.Nothing is holier shall that high form. Bend-ing before men is a reverence done to this Rev-elation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven whenwe lay our hand on a human body!” Thissounds much like a mere flourish of rhetoric;but it is not so. If well meditated, it will turnout to be a scientific fact; the expression, insuch words as can be had, of the actual truthof the thing. We are the miracle of miracles,—the great inscrutable mystery of God. We can-not understand it, we know not how to speakof it; but we may feel and know, if we like, thatit is verily so.

Well; these truths were once more readilyfelt than now. The young generations of theworld, who had in them the freshness of youngchildren, and yet the depth of earnest men,who did not think that they had finished off allthings in Heaven and Earth by merely givingthem scientific names, but had to gaze directat them there, with awe and wonder: they feltbetter what of divinity is in man and Nature;they, without being mad, could worship Na-ture, and man more than anything else in Na-ture. Worship, that is, as I said above, admirewithout limit: this, in the full use of their fac-ulties, with all sincerity of heart, they coulddo. I consider Hero-worship to be the grandmodifying element in that ancient system ofthought. What I called the perplexed jungleof Paganism sprang, we may say, out of manyroots: every admiration, adoration of a staror natural object, was a root or fibre of a root;


but Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; thetap-root, from which in a great degree all therest were nourished and grown.

And now if worship even of a star had somemeaning in it, how much more might that of aHero! Worship of a Hero is transcendent ad-miration of a Great Man. I say great men arestill admirable; I say there is, at bottom, noth-ing else admirable! No nobler feeling thanthis of admiration for one higher than him-self dwells in the breast of man. It is to thishour, and at all hours, the vivifying influencein man’s life. Religion I find stand upon it;not Paganism only, but far higher and truerreligions,—all religion hitherto known. Hero-worship, heartfelt prostrate admiration, sub-mission, burning, boundless, for a noblest god-like Form of Man,—is not that the germ ofChristianity itself? The greatest of all Heroesis One—whom we do not name here! Let sa-cred silence meditate that sacred matter; youwill find it the ultimate perfection of a princi-ple extant throughout man’s whole history onearth.

Or coming into lower, less unspeakableprovinces, is not all Loyalty akin to religiousFaith also? Faith is loyalty to some inspiredTeacher, some spiritual Hero. And whattherefore is loyalty proper, the life-breath ofall society, but an effluence of Hero-worship,submissive admiration for the truly great? So-ciety is founded on Hero-worship. All dig-nities of rank, on which human associationrests, are what we may call a Heroarchy (Gov-ernment of Heroes),—or a Hierarchy, for it


is “sacred” enough withal! The Duke meansDux, Leader; King is Kon-ning, Kan-ning,Man that knows or cans. Society everywhereis some representation, not insupportably in-accurate, of a graduated Worship of Heroes—reverence and obedience done to men reallygreat and wise. Not insupportably inaccurate,I say! They are all as bank-notes, these socialdignitaries, all representing gold;—and sev-eral of them, alas, always are forged notes. Wecan do with some forged false notes; with agood many even; but not with all, or the mostof them forged! No: there have to come revo-lutions then; cries of Democracy, Liberty andEquality, and I know not what:—the notes be-ing all false, and no gold to be had for them,people take to crying in their despair thatthere is no gold, that there never was any!“Gold,” Hero-worship, is nevertheless, as itwas always and everywhere, and cannot ceasetill man himself ceases.

I am well aware that in these days Hero-worship, the thing I call Hero-worship, pro-fesses to have gone out, and finally ceased.This, for reasons which it will be worth whilesome time to inquire into, is an age that as itwere denies the existence of great men; deniesthe desirableness of great men. Show our crit-ics a great man, a Luther for example, theybegin to what they call “account” for him; notto worship him, but take the dimensions ofhim,—and bring him out to be a little kindof man! He was the “creature of the Time,”they say; the Time called him forth, the Timedid everything, he nothing—but what we the


little critic could have done too! This seemsto me but melancholy work. The Time callforth? Alas, we have known Times call loudlyenough for their great man; but not find himwhen they called! He was not there; Prov-idence had not sent him; the Time, callingits loudest, had to go down to confusion andwreck because he would not come when called.

For if we will think of it, no Time need havegone to ruin, could it have found a man greatenough, a man wise and good enough: wisdomto discern truly what the Time wanted, valorto lead it on the right road thither; these arethe salvation of any Time. But I liken commonlanguid Times, with their unbelief, distress,perplexity, with their languid doubting char-acters and embarrassed circumstances, impo-tently crumbling down into ever worse dis-tress towards final ruin;—all this I liken todry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning outof Heaven that shall kindle it. The greatman, with his free force direct out of God’sown hand, is the lightning. His word is thewise healing word which all can believe in.All blazes round him now, when he has oncestruck on it, into fire like his own. The drymouldering sticks are thought to have calledhim forth. They did want him greatly; butas to calling him forth—! Those are criticsof small vision, I think, who cry: “See, is itnot the sticks that made the fire?” No sadderproof can be given by a man of his own lit-tleness than disbelief in great men. There isno sadder symptom of a generation than suchgeneral blindness to the spiritual lightning,


with faith only in the heap of barren dead fuel.It is the last consummation of unbelief. Inall epochs of the world’s history, we shall findthe Great Man to have been the indispensablesavior of his epoch;—the lightning, withoutwhich the fuel never would have burnt. TheHistory of the World, I said already, was theBiography of Great Men.

Such small critics do what they can to pro-mote unbelief and universal spiritual paral-ysis: but happily they cannot always com-pletely succeed. In all times it is possiblefor a man to arise great enough to feel thatthey and their doctrines are chimeras and cob-webs. And what is notable, in no time what-ever can they entirely eradicate out of liv-ing men’s hearts a certain altogether pecu-liar reverence for Great Men; genuine admi-ration, loyalty, adoration, however dim andperverted it may be. Hero-worship enduresforever while man endures. Boswell vener-ates his Johnson, right truly even in the Eigh-teenth century. The unbelieving French be-lieve in their Voltaire; and burst out roundhim into very curious Hero-worship, in thatlast act of his life when they “stifle him underroses.” It has always seemed to me extremelycurious this of Voltaire. Truly, if Christian-ity be the highest instance of Hero-worship,then we may find here in Voltaireism one ofthe lowest! He whose life was that of a kindof Antichrist, does again on this side exhibit acurious contrast. No people ever were so lit-tle prone to admire at all as those French ofVoltaire. Persiflage was the character of their


whole mind; adoration had nowhere a place init. Yet see! The old man of Ferney comes up toParis; an old, tottering, infirm man of eighty-four years. They feel that he too is a kind ofHero; that he has spent his life in opposing er-ror and injustice, delivering Calases, unmask-ing hypocrites in high places;—in short thathe too, though in a strange way, has foughtlike a valiant man. They feel withal that, ifpersiflage be the great thing, there never wassuch a persifleur. He is the realized ideal ofevery one of them; the thing they are all want-ing to be; of all Frenchmen the most French.He is properly their god,—such god as theyare fit for. Accordingly all persons, from theQueen Antoinette to the Douanier at the PorteSt. Denis, do they not worship him? Peo-ple of quality disguise themselves as tavern-waiters. The Maitre de Poste, with a broadoath, orders his Postilion, “Va bon train; thouart driving M. de Voltaire.” At Paris his car-riage is “the nucleus of a comet, whose trainfills whole streets.” The ladies pluck a hair ortwo from his fur, to keep it as a sacred relic.There was nothing highest, beautifulest, no-blest in all France, that did not feel this manto be higher, beautifuler, nobler.

Yes, from Norse Odin to English SamuelJohnson, from the divine Founder of Chris-tianity to the withered Pontiff of Encyclope-dism, in all times and places, the Hero hasbeen worshipped. It will ever be so. We alllove great men; love, venerate and bow downsubmissive before great men: nay can we hon-estly bow down to anything else? Ah, does not


every true man feel that he is himself madehigher by doing reverence to what is reallyabove him? No nobler or more blessed feelingdwells in man’s heart. And to me it is verycheering to consider that no sceptical logic,or general triviality, insincerity and aridity ofany Time and its influences can destroy thisnoble inborn loyalty and worship that is inman. In times of unbelief, which soon haveto become times of revolution, much down-rushing, sorrowful decay and ruin is visible toeverybody. For myself in these days, I seemto see in this indestructibility of Hero-worshipthe everlasting adamant lower than which theconfused wreck of revolutionary things cannotfall. The confused wreck of things crumblingand even crashing and tumbling all round usin these revolutionary ages, will get down sofar; no farther. It is an eternal corner-stone,from which they can begin to build themselvesup again. That man, in some sense or other,worships Heroes; that we all of us reverenceand must ever reverence Great Men: this is,to me, the living rock amid all rushings-downwhatsoever;—the one fixed point in modernrevolutionary history, otherwise as if bottom-less and shoreless.

So much of truth, only under an ancientobsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true,do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Na-ture is still divine, the revelation of the work-ings of God; the Hero is still worshipable: this,under poor cramped incipient forms, is whatall Pagan religions have struggled, as theycould, to set forth. I think Scandinavian Pa-


ganism, to us here, is more interesting thanany other. It is, for one thing, the latest; itcontinued in these regions of Europe till theeleventh century: eight hundred years ago theNorwegians were still worshippers of Odin. Itis interesting also as the creed of our fathers;the men whose blood still runs in our veins,whom doubtless we still resemble in so manyways. Strange: they did believe that, whilewe believe so differently. Let us look a little atthis poor Norse creed, for many reasons. Wehave tolerable means to do it; for there is an-other point of interest in these Scandinavianmythologies: that they have been preserved sowell.

In that strange island Iceland,—burst up,the geologists say, by fire from the bottom ofthe sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava;swallowed many months of every year in blacktempests, yet with a wild gleaming beautyin summertime; towering up there, stern andgrim, in the North Ocean with its snow jokuls,roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid vol-canic chasms, like the waste chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;—where of all places weleast looked for Literature or written memo-rials, the record of these things was writtendown. On the seabord of this wild land is arim of grassy country, where cattle can sub-sist, and men by means of them and of whatthe sea yields; and it seems they were poeticmen these, men who had deep thoughts inthem, and uttered musically their thoughts.Much would be lost, had Iceland not beenburst up from the sea, not been discovered


by the Northmen! The old Norse Poets weremany of them natives of Iceland.

Saemund, one of the early ChristianPriests there, who perhaps had a lingeringfondness for Paganism, collected certain oftheir old Pagan songs, just about becoming ob-solete then,—Poems or Chants of a mythic,prophetic, mostly all of a religious charac-ter: that is what Norse critics call the El-der or Poetic Edda. Edda, a word of uncer-tain etymology, is thought to signify Ances-tress. Snorro Sturleson, an Iceland gentle-man, an extremely notable personage, edu-cated by this Saemund’s grandson, took inhand next, near a century afterwards, to puttogether, among several other books he wrote,a kind of Prose Synopsis of the whole Mythol-ogy; elucidated by new fragments of tradi-tionary verse. A work constructed really withgreat ingenuity, native talent, what one mightcall unconscious art; altogether a perspicuousclear work, pleasant reading still: this is theYounger or Prose Edda. By these and the nu-merous other Sagas, mostly Icelandic, withthe commentaries, Icelandic or not, which goon zealously in the North to this day, it is pos-sible to gain some direct insight even yet; andsee that old Norse system of Belief, as it were,face to face. Let us forget that it is erroneousReligion; let us look at it as old Thought, andtry if we cannot sympathize with it somewhat.

The primary characteristic of this oldNorthland Mythology I find to be Imper-sonation 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 nowlecture of as Science, they wondered at, andfell down in awe before, as Religion The darkhostile Powers of Nature they figure to them-selves as “Jotuns,” Giants, huge shaggy be-ings of a demonic character. Frost, Fire,Sea-tempest; these are Jotuns. The friendlyPowers again, as Summer-heat, the Sun, areGods. The empire of this Universe is dividedbetween these two; they dwell apart, in peren-nial internecine feud. The Gods dwell above inAsgard, the Garden of the Asen, or Divinities;Jotunheim, a distant dark chaotic land, is thehome of the Jotuns.

Curious all this; and not idle or inane,if we will look at the foundation of it! Thepower of Fire, or Flame, for instance, whichwe designate by some trivial chemical name,thereby hiding from ourselves the essentialcharacter of wonder that dwells in it as in allthings, is with these old Northmen, Loke, amost swift subtle Demon, of the brood of theJotuns. The savages of the Ladrones Islandstoo (say some Spanish voyagers) thought Fire,which they never had seen before, was a devilor god, that bit you sharply when you touchedit, and that lived upon dry wood. From ustoo no Chemistry, if it had not Stupidity tohelp it, would hide that Flame is a wonder.What is Flame?—Frost the old Norse Seer dis-cerns to be a monstrous hoary Jotun, the Gi-ant Thrym, Hrym; or Rime, the old word nownearly obsolete here, but still used in Scotlandto signify hoar-frost. Rime was not then as


now a dead chemical thing, but a living Jo-tun or Devil; the monstrous Jotun Rime drovehome his Horses at night, sat “combing theirmanes,”—which Horses were Hail-Clouds, orfleet Frost-Winds. His Cows—No, not his, buta kinsman’s, the Giant Hymir’s Cows are Ice-bergs: this Hymir “looks at the rocks” with hisdevil-eye, and they split in the glance of it.

Thunder was not then mere Electricity,vitreous or resinous; it was the God Don-ner (Thunder) or Thor,—God also of benef-icent Summer-heat. The thunder was hiswrath: the gathering of the black clouds isthe drawing down of Thor’s angry brows; thefire-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 inhis red beard,”—that is the rustling storm-blast before the thunder begins. Balder again,the White God, the beautiful, the just and be-nignant (whom the early Christian Mission-aries found to resemble Christ), is the Sun,beautifullest of visible things; wondrous too,and divine still, after all our Astronomies andAlmanacs! But perhaps the notablest god wehear tell of is one of whom Grimm the Ger-man Etymologist finds trace: the God Wun-sch, or Wish. The God Wish; who could giveus all that we wished! Is not this the sincerestand yet rudest voice of the spirit of man? Therudest ideal that man ever formed; which stillshows itself in the latest forms of our spiritualculture. Higher considerations have to teachus that the God Wish is not the true God.


Of the other Gods or Jotuns I will mentiononly for etymology’s sake, that Sea-tempest isthe Jotun Aegir, a very dangerous Jotun;—and now to this day, on our river Trent, as Ilearn, the Nottingham bargemen, when theRiver is in a certain flooded state (a kind ofbackwater, or eddying swirl it has, very dan-gerous to them), call it Eager; they cry out,“Have a care, there is the Eager coming!” Cu-rious; that word surviving, like the peak ofa submerged world! The oldest Nottinghambargemen had believed in the God Aegir. In-deed our English blood too in good part is Dan-ish, Norse; or rather, at bottom, Danish andNorse and Saxon have no distinction, excepta superficial one,—as of Heathen and Chris-tian, or the like. But all over our Island weare mingled largely with Danes proper,—fromthe incessant invasions there were: and this,of course, in a greater proportion along theeast coast; and greatest of all, as I find, inthe North Country. From the Humber up-wards, all over Scotland, the Speech of thecommon people is still in a singular degreeIcelandic; its Germanism has still a pecu-liar Norse tinge. They too are “Normans,”Northmen,—if that be any great beauty!—

Of the chief god, Odin, we shall speakby and by. Mark at present so much; whatthe essence of Scandinavian and indeed ofall Paganism is: a recognition of the forcesof Nature as godlike, stupendous, personalAgencies,—as Gods and Demons. Not incon-ceivable to us. It is the infant Thought ofman opening itself, with awe and wonder, on


this ever-stupendous Universe. To me thereis in the Norse system something very gen-uine, very great and manlike. A broad sim-plicity, rusticity, so very different from thelight gracefulness of the old Greek Pagan-ism, distinguishes this Scandinavian System.It is Thought; the genuine Thought of deep,rude, earnest minds, fairly opened to thethings about them; a face-to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of the things,—the firstcharacteristic of all good Thought in all times.Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as in theGreek Paganism; a certain homely truthful-ness and rustic strength, a great rude sincer-ity, discloses itself here. It is strange, afterour beautiful Apollo statues and clear smil-ing mythuses, to come down upon the NorseGods “brewing ale” to hold their feast with Ae-gir, the Sea-Jotun; sending out Thor to get thecaldron for them in the Jotun country; Thor,after many adventures, clapping the Pot onhis head, like a huge hat, and walking offwith it,—quite lost in it, the ears of the Potreaching down to his heels! A kind of vacanthugeness, large awkward gianthood, charac-terizes that Norse system; enormous force,as yet altogether untutored, stalking helplesswith large uncertain strides. Consider onlytheir primary mythus of the Creation. TheGods, having got the Giant Ymer slain, a Gi-ant made by “warm wind,” and much confusedwork, out of the conflict of Frost and Fire,—determined on constructing a world with him.His blood made the Sea; his flesh was theLand, the Rocks his bones; of his eyebrows


they formed Asgard their Gods’-dwelling; hisskull was the great blue vault of Immensity,and the brains of it became the Clouds. Whata Hyper-Brobdignagian business! UntamedThought, great, giantlike, enormous;—to betamed in due time into the compact greatness,not giantlike, but godlike and stronger thangianthood, of the Shakspeares, the Goethes!—Spiritually as well as bodily these men are ourprogenitors.

I like, too, that representation they have ofthe tree Igdrasil. All Life is figured by themas a Tree. Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of Existence,has its roots deep down in the kingdoms ofHela or Death; its trunk reaches up heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the whole Uni-verse: it is the Tree of Existence. At the footof it, in the Death-kingdom, sit Three Nornas,Fates,—the Past, Present, Future; wateringits roots from the Sacred Well. Its “boughs,”with their buddings and disleafings?—events,things suffered, things done, catastrophes,—stretch through all lands and times. Is notevery leaf of it a biography, every fibre therean act or word? Its boughs are Historiesof Nations. The rustle of it is the noise ofHuman Existence, onwards from of old. Itgrows there, the breath of Human Passionrustling through it;—or storm tost, the storm-wind howling through it like the voice of allthe gods. It is Igdrasil, the Tree of Exis-tence. It is the past, the present, and the fu-ture; what was done, what is doing, what willbe done; “the infinite conjugation of the verbTo do.” Considering how human things cir-


culate, each inextricably in communion withall,—how the word I speak to you to-day isborrowed, not from Ulfila the Moesogoth only,but from all men since the first man beganto speak,—I find no similitude so true as thisof a Tree. Beautiful; altogether beautiful andgreat. The “Machine of the Universe,”—alas,do but think of that in contrast!

Well, it is strange enough this old Norseview of Nature; different enough from whatwe believe of Nature. Whence it speciallycame, one would not like to be compelled tosay very minutely! One thing we may say:It came from the thoughts of Norse men;—from the thought, above all, of the first Norseman who had an original power of thinking.The First Norse “man of genius,” as we shouldcall him! Innumerable men had passed by,across this Universe, with a dumb vague won-der, such as the very animals may feel; or witha painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, suchas men only feel;—till the great Thinker came,the original man, the Seer; whose shaped spo-ken Thought awakes the slumbering capabil-ity of all into Thought. It is ever the waywith the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. Whathe says, all men were not far from saying,were longing to say. The Thoughts of all startup, as from painful enchanted sleep, round hisThought; answering to it, Yes, even so! Joyfulto men as the dawning of day from night;—is it not, indeed, the awakening for them fromno-being into being, from death into life? Westill 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 unex-pected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God!—Thought once awakened does not again slum-ber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought;grows, in man after man, generation aftergeneration,—till its full stature is reached,and such System of Thought can grow no far-ther; but must give place to another.

For the Norse people, the Man now namedOdin, and Chief Norse God, we fancy, wassuch a man. A Teacher, and Captain of souland of body; a Hero, of worth immeasur-able; admiration for whom, transcending theknown bounds, became adoration. Has he notthe power of articulate Thinking; and manyother powers, as yet miraculous? So, withboundless gratitude, would the rude Norseheart feel. Has he not solved for them thesphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assur-ance to them of their own destiny there? Byhim they know now what they have to do here,what to look for hereafter. Existence has be-come articulate, melodious by him; he firsthas made Life alive!—We may call this Odin,the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or what-ever name the First Norse Thinker bore whilehe was a man among men. His view of theUniverse once promulgated, a like view startsinto being in all minds; grows, keeps evergrowing, while it continues credible there. Inall minds it lay written, but invisibly, as insympathetic ink; at his word it starts into vis-ibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world,the great event, parent of all others, is it notthe arrival of a Thinker in the world!—


One other thing we must not forget; it willexplain, a little, the confusion of these NorseEddas. They are not one coherent System ofThought; but properly the summation of sev-eral successive systems. All this of the oldNorse Belief which is flung out for us, in onelevel of distance in the Edda, like a picturepainted on the same canvas, does not at allstand so in the reality. It stands rather at allmanner of distances and depths, of successivegenerations since the Belief first began. AllScandinavian thinkers, since the first of them,contributed to that Scandinavian System ofThought; in ever-new elaboration and addi-tion, it is the combined work of them all. Whathistory it had, how it changed from shapeto shape, by one thinker’s contribution afteranother, till it got to the full final shape wesee it under in the Edda, no man will nowever know: its Councils of Trebizond, Coun-cils of Trent, Athanasiuses, Dantes, Luthers,are sunk without echo in the dark night! Onlythat it had such a history we can all know.Wheresover a thinker appeared, there in thething he thought of was a contribution, acces-sion, a change or revolution made. Alas, thegrandest “revolution” of all, the one made bythe man Odin himself, is not this too sunkfor us like the rest! Of Odin what history?Strange rather to reflect that he had a history!That this Odin, in his wild Norse vesture,with his wild beard and eyes, his rude Norsespeech and ways, was a man like us; withour sorrows, joys, with our limbs, features;—intrinsically all one as we: and did such a


work! But the work, much of it, has perished;the worker, all to the name. “Wednesday,” menwill say to-morrow; Odin’s day! Of Odin thereexists no history; no document of it; no guessabout it worth repeating.

Snorro indeed, in the quietest manner, al-most in a brief business style, writes down,in his Heimskringla, how Odin was a heroicPrince, in the Black-Sea region, with TwelvePeers, and a great people straitened for room.How he led these Asen (Asiatics) of his out ofAsia; settled them in the North parts of Eu-rope, by warlike conquest; invented Letters,Poetry and so forth,—and came by and by tobe worshipped as Chief God by these Scandi-navians, his Twelve Peers made into TwelveSons of his own, Gods like himself: Snorrohas no doubt of this. Saxo Grammaticus,a very curious Northman of that same cen-tury, is still more unhesitating; scruples notto find out a historical fact in every individualmythus, and writes it down as a terrestrialevent in Denmark or elsewhere. Torfaeus,learned and cautious, some centuries later, as-signs by calculation a date for it: Odin, hesays, came into Europe about the Year 70 be-fore Christ. Of all which, as grounded on mereuncertainties, found to be untenable now, Ineed say nothing. Far, very far beyond theYear 70! Odin’s date, adventures, whole ter-restrial history, figure and environment aresunk from us forever into unknown thousandsof years.

Nay Grimm, the German Antiquary, goesso far as to deny that any man Odin ever ex-


isted. He proves it by etymology. The wordWuotan, which is the original form of Odin,a word spread, as name of their chief Divin-ity, over all the Teutonic Nations everywhere;this word, which connects itself, according toGrimm, with the Latin vadere, with the En-glish wade and such like,—means primarilyMovement, Source of Movement, Power; andis the fit name of the highest god, not of anyman. The word signifies Divinity, he says,among the old Saxon, German and all Teu-tonic Nations; the adjectives formed from it allsignify divine, supreme, or something pertain-ing to the chief god. Like enough! We mustbow to Grimm in matters etymological. Letus consider it fixed that Wuotan means Wad-ing, force of Movement. And now still, whathinders it from being the name of a HeroicMan and Mover, as well as of a god? As forthe adjectives, and words formed from it,—did not the Spaniards in their universal ad-miration for Lope, get into the habit of saying“a Lope flower,” “a Lope dama,” if the floweror woman were of surpassing beauty? Hadthis lasted, Lope would have grown, in Spain,to be an adjective signifying godlike also. In-deed, Adam Smith, in his Essay on Language,surmises that all adjectives whatsoever wereformed precisely in that way: some very greenthing, chiefly notable for its greenness, got theappellative name Green, and then the nextthing remarkable for that quality, a tree forinstance, was named the green tree,—as westill say “the steam coach,” “four-horse coach,”or the like. All primary adjectives, according


to Smith, were formed in this way; were atfirst substantives and things. We cannot anni-hilate a man for etymologies like that! Surelythere was a First Teacher and Captain; surelythere must have been an Odin, palpable tothe sense at one time; no adjective, but a realHero of flesh and blood! The voice of all tradi-tion, history or echo of history, agrees with allthat thought will teach one about it, to assureus of this.

How the man Odin came to be considered agod, the chief god?—that surely is a questionwhich nobody would wish to dogmatize upon.I have said, his people knew no limits to theiradmiration of him; they had as yet no scale tomeasure admiration by. Fancy your own gen-erous heart’s-love of some greatest man ex-panding till it transcended all bounds, till itfilled and overflowed the whole field of yourthought! Or what if this man Odin,—sincea great deep soul, with the afflatus and mys-terious tide of vision and impulse rushing onhim he knows not whence, is ever an enigma,a kind of terror and wonder to himself,—should have felt that perhaps he was divine;that he was some effluence of the “Wuotan,”“Movement”, Supreme Power and Divinity, ofwhom to his rapt vision all Nature was theawful Flame-image; that some effluence ofWuotan dwelt here in him! He was not nec-essarily false; he was but mistaken, speakingthe truest he knew. A great soul, any sin-cere soul, knows not what he is,—alternatesbetween the highest height and the lowestdepth; can, of all things, the least measure—


Himself! What others take him for, and whathe guesses that he may be; these two itemsstrangely act on one another, help to deter-mine one another. With all men reverently ad-miring him; with his own wild soul full of no-ble ardors and affections, of whirlwind chaoticdarkness and glorious new light; a divine Uni-verse bursting all into godlike beauty roundhim, and no man to whom the like ever hadbefallen, what could he think himself to be?“Wuotan?” All men answered, “Wuotan!”—

And then consider what mere Time willdo in such cases; how if a man was greatwhile living, he becomes tenfold greater whendead. What an enormous camera-obscuramagnifier is Tradition! How a thing growsin the human Memory, in the human Imag-ination, when love, worship and all that liesin the human Heart, is there to encourageit. And in the darkness, in the entire igno-rance; without date or document, no book,no Arundel-marble; only here and there somedumb monumental cairn. Why, in thirty orforty years, were there no books, any greatman would grow mythic, the contemporarieswho had seen him, being once all dead. Andin three hundred years, and in three thou-sand years—! To attempt theorizing on suchmatters would profit little: they are matterswhich refuse to be theoremed and diagramed;which Logic ought to know that she cannotspeak of. Enough for us to discern, far in theuttermost distance, some gleam as of a smallreal light shining in the centre of that enor-mous camera-obscure image; to discern that


the centre of it all was not a madness andnothing, but a sanity and something.

This light, kindled in the great dark vor-tex of the Norse Mind, dark but living, wait-ing only for light; this is to me the centre ofthe whole. How such light will then shine out,and with wondrous thousand-fold expansionspread itself, in forms and colors, depends noton it, so much as on the National Mind re-cipient of it. The colors and forms of yourlight will be those of the cut-glass it has toshine through.—Curious to think how, for ev-ery man, any the truest fact is modelled by thenature of the man! I said, The earnest man,speaking to his brother men, must alwayshave stated what seemed to him a fact, a realAppearance of Nature. But the way in whichsuch Appearance or fact shaped itself,—whatsort of fact it became for him,—was and ismodified by his own laws of thinking; deep,subtle, but universal, ever-operating laws.The world of Nature, for every man, is theFantasy of Himself. this world is the multi-plex “Image of his own Dream.” Who knowsto what unnamable subtleties of spiritual lawall these Pagan Fables owe their shape! Thenumber Twelve, divisiblest of all, which couldbe halved, quartered, parted into three, intosix, the most remarkable number,—this wasenough to determine the Signs of the Zodiac,the number of Odin’s Sons, and innumerableother Twelves. Any vague rumor of numberhad a tendency to settle itself into Twelve. Sowith regard to every other matter. And quiteunconsciously too,—with no notion of building


up “Allegories “! But the fresh clear glance ofthose First Ages would be prompt in discern-ing the secret relations of things, and whollyopen to obey these. Schiller finds in the Ces-tus of Venus an everlasting aesthetic truth asto the nature of all Beauty; curious:—but heis careful not to insinuate that the old GreekMythists had any notion of lecturing about the“Philosophy of Criticism”!—On the whole, wemust leave those boundless regions. Cannotwe conceive that Odin was a reality? Error in-deed, error enough: but sheer falsehood, idlefables, allegory aforethought,—we will not be-lieve that our Fathers believed in these.

Odin’s Runes are a significant feature ofhim. Runes, and the miracles of “magic” heworked by them, make a great feature in tra-dition. Runes are the Scandinavian Alphabet;suppose Odin to have been the inventor of Let-ters, as well as “magic,” among that people! Itis the greatest invention man has ever made!this of marking down the unseen thought thatis in him by written characters. It is a kindof second speech, almost as miraculous as thefirst. You remember the astonishment andincredulity of Atahualpa the Peruvian King;how he made the Spanish Soldier who wasguarding him scratch Dios on his thumb-nail,that he might try the next soldier with it, toascertain whether such a miracle was possi-ble. If Odin brought Letters among his people,he might work magic enough!

Writing by Runes has some air of beingoriginal among the Norsemen: not a Phoeni-cian Alphabet, but a native Scandinavian one.


Snorro tells us farther that Odin invented Po-etry; the music of human speech, as well asthat miraculous runic marking of it. Trans-port yourselves into the early childhood of na-tions; the first beautiful morning-light of ourEurope, when all yet lay in fresh young ra-diance as of a great sunrise, and our Europewas first beginning to think, to be! Wonder,hope; infinite radiance of hope and wonder,as of a young child’s thoughts, in the heartsof these strong men! Strong sons of Nature;and here was not only a wild Captain andFighter; discerning with his wild flashing eyeswhat to do, with his wild lion-heart daringand doing it; but a Poet too, all that we meanby a Poet, Prophet, great devout Thinker andInventor,—as the truly Great Man ever is. AHero is a Hero at all points; in the soul andthought of him first of all. This Odin, inhis rude semi-articulate way, had a word tospeak. A great heart laid open to take in thisgreat Universe, and man’s Life here, and ut-ter a great word about it. A Hero, as I say,in his own rude manner; a wise, gifted, noble-hearted man. And now, if we still admire sucha man beyond all others, what must thesewild Norse souls, first awakened into think-ing, have made of him! To them, as yet with-out names for it, he was noble and noblest;Hero, Prophet, God; Wuotan, the greatest ofall. Thought is Thought, however it speakor spell itself. Intrinsically, I conjecture, thisOdin must have been of the same sort of stuffas the greatest kind of men. A great thoughtin the wild deep heart of him! The rough


words he articulated, are they not the rudi-mental roots of those English words we stilluse? He worked so, in that obscure element.But he was as a light kindled in it; a lightof Intellect, rude Nobleness of heart, the onlykind of lights we have yet; a Hero, as I say:and he had to shine there, and make his ob-scure element a little lighter,—as is still thetask of us all.

We will fancy him to be the Type Norse-man; the finest Teuton whom that race hadyet produced. The rude Norse heart burstup into boundless admiration round him; intoadoration. He is as a root of so many greatthings; the fruit of him is found growing fromdeep thousands of years, over the whole fieldof Teutonic Life. Our own Wednesday, as Isaid, is it not still Odin’s Day? Wednesbury,Wansborough, Wanstead, Wandsworth: Odingrew into England too, these are still leavesfrom that root! He was the Chief God to all theTeutonic Peoples; their Pattern Norseman;—in such way did they admire their PatternNorseman; that was the fortune he had in theworld.

Thus if the man Odin himself have van-ished utterly, there is this huge Shadow of himwhich still projects itself over the whole His-tory of his People. For this Odin once admit-ted to be God, we can understand well thatthe whole Scandinavian Scheme of Nature,or dim No-scheme, whatever it might beforehave been, would now begin to develop itselfaltogether differently, and grow thenceforthin a new manner. What this Odin saw into,


and taught with his runes and his rhymes, thewhole Teutonic People laid to heart and car-ried forward. His way of thought became theirway of thought:—such, under new conditions,is the history of every great thinker still.In gigantic confused lineaments, like someenormous camera-obscure shadow thrown up-wards from the dead deeps of the Past, andcovering the whole Northern Heaven, is notthat Scandinavian Mythology in some sort thePortraiture of this man Odin? The giganticimage of his natural face, legible or not legiblethere, expanded and confused in that manner!Ah, Thought, I say, is always Thought. Nogreat man lives in vain. The History of theworld is but the Biography of great men.

To me there is something very touching inthis primeval figure of Heroism; in such art-less, helpless, but hearty entire reception of aHero by his fellow-men. Never so helpless inshape, it is the noblest of feelings, and a feel-ing in some shape or other perennial as manhimself. If I could show in any measure, whatI feel deeply for a long time now, That it is thevital element of manhood, the soul of man’shistory here in our world,—it would be thechief use of this discoursing at present. Wedo not now call our great men Gods, nor ad-mire without limit; ah no, with limit enough!But if we have no great men, or do not admireat all,—that were a still worse case.

This poor Scandinavian Hero-worship,that whole Norse way of looking at the Uni-verse, and adjusting oneself there, has an in-destructible merit for us. A rude childlike way


of recognizing the divineness of Nature, thedivineness of Man; most rude, yet heartfelt,robust, giantlike; betokening what a giant ofa man this child would yet grow to!—It wasa truth, and is none. Is it not as the half-dumb stifled voice of the long-buried gener-ations of our own Fathers, calling out of thedepths of ages to us, in whose veins their bloodstill runs: “This then, this is what we made ofthe world: this is all the image and notion wecould form to ourselves of this great mysteryof a Life and Universe. Despise it not. Youare raised high above it, to large free scopeof vision; but you too are not yet at the top.No, your notion too, so much enlarged, is buta partial, imperfect one; that matter is a thingno man will ever, in time or out of time, com-prehend; after thousands of years of ever-newexpansion, man will find himself but strug-gling to comprehend again a part of it: thething is larger shall man, not to be compre-hended by him; an Infinite thing!”

The essence of the Scandinavian, as in-deed of all Pagan Mythologies, we found to berecognition of the divineness of Nature; sin-cere communion of man with the mysteriousinvisible Powers visibly seen at work in theworld round him. This, I should say, is moresincerely done in the Scandinavian than inany Mythology I know. Sincerity is the greatcharacteristic of it. Superior sincerity (far su-perior) consoles us for the total want of oldGrecian grace. Sincerity, I think, is betterthan grace. I feel that these old Northmenwore looking into Nature with open eye and


soul: most earnest, honest; childlike, and yetmanlike; with a great-hearted simplicity anddepth and freshness, in a true, loving, ad-miring, unfearing way. A right valiant, trueold race of men. Such recognition of Natureone finds to be the chief element of Pagan-ism; recognition of Man, and his Moral Duty,though this too is not wanting, comes to bethe chief element only in purer forms of re-ligion. Here, indeed, is a great distinction andepoch in Human Beliefs; a great landmark inthe religious development of Mankind. Manfirst puts himself in relation with Nature andher Powers, wonders and worships over those;not till a later epoch does he discern that allPower is Moral, that the grand point is thedistinction for him of Good and Evil, of Thoushalt and Thou shalt not.

With regard to all these fabulous delin-eations in the Edda, I will remark, moreover,as indeed was already hinted, that most prob-ably they must have been of much newer date;most probably, even from the first, were com-paratively idle for the old Norsemen, and asit were a kind of Poetic sport. Allegory andPoetic Delineation, as I said above, cannot bereligious Faith; the Faith itself must first bethere, then Allegory enough will gather roundit, as the fit body round its soul. The NorseFaith, I can well suppose, like other Faiths,was most active while it lay mainly in thesilent state, and had not yet much to say aboutitself, still less to sing.

Among those shadowy Edda matters, amidall that fantastic congeries of assertions, and


traditions, in their musical Mythologies, themain practical belief a man could have wasprobably not much more than this: of theValkyrs and the Hall of Odin; of an inflexi-ble Destiny; and that the one thing needfulfor a man was to be brave. The Valkyrs areChoosers of the Slain: a Destiny inexorable,which it is useless trying to bend or soften,has appointed who is to be slain; this was afundamental point for the Norse believer;—asindeed it is for all earnest men everywhere,for a Mahomet, a Luther, for a Napoleon too.It lies at the basis this for every such man; itis the woof out of which his whole system ofthought is woven. The Valkyrs; and then thatthese Choosers lead the brave to a heavenlyHall of Odin; only the base and slavish beingthrust elsewhither, into the realms of Hela theDeath-goddess: I take this to have been thesoul of the whole Norse Belief. They under-stood in their heart that it was indispensableto be brave; that Odin would have no favorfor them, but despise and thrust them out, ifthey were not brave. Consider too whetherthere is not something in this! It is an ever-lasting duty, valid in our day as in that, theduty of being brave. Valor is still value. Thefirst duty for a man is still that of subduingFear. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot actat all till then. A man’s acts are slavish, nottrue but specious; his very thoughts are false,he thinks too as a slave and coward, till hehave got Fear under his feet. Odin’s creed, ifwe disentangle the real kernel of it, is true tothis hour. A man shall and must be valiant; he


must march forward, and quit himself like aman,—trusting imperturbably in the appoint-ment and choice of the upper Powers; and, onthe whole, not fear at all. Now and always,the completeness of his victory over Fear willdetermine how much of a man he is.

It is doubtless very savage that kind ofvalor of the old Northmen. Snorro tells usthey thought it a shame and misery not todie in battle; and if natural death seemed tobe coming on, they would cut wounds in theirflesh, that Odin might receive them as war-riors slain. Old kings, about to die, had theirbody laid into a ship; the ship sent forth, withsails set and slow fire burning it; that, onceout at sea, it might blaze up in flame, and insuch manner bury worthily the old hero, atonce in the sky and in the ocean! Wild bloodyvalor; yet valor of its kind; better, I say, thannone. In the old Sea-kings too, what an in-domitable rugged energy! Silent, with closedlips, as I fancy them, unconscious that theywere specially brave; defying the wild oceanwith its monsters, and all men and things;—progenitors of our own Blakes and Nelsons!No Homer sang these Norse Sea-kings; butAgamemnon’s was a small audacity, and ofsmall fruit in the world, to some of them;—to Hrolf ’s of Normandy, for instance! Hrolf, orRollo Duke of Normandy, the wild Sea-king,has a share in governing England at this hour.

Nor was it altogether nothing, even thatwild sea-roving and battling, through so manygenerations. It needed to be ascertainedwhich was the strongest kind of men; who


were to be ruler over whom. Among theNorthland Sovereigns, too, I find some whogot the title Wood-cutter; Forest-felling Kings.Much lies in that. I suppose at bottom manyof them were forest-fellers as well as fight-ers, though the Skalds talk mainly of thelatter,—misleading certain critics not a little;for no nation of men could ever live by fightingalone; there could not produce enough comeout of that! I suppose the right good fighterwas oftenest also the right good forest-feller,—the right good improver, discerner, doer andworker in every kind; for true valor, differ-ent enough from ferocity, is the basis of all.A more legitimate kind of valor that; showingitself against the untamed Forests and darkbrute Powers of Nature, to conquer Nature forus. In the same direction have not we their de-scendants since carried it far? May such valorlast forever with us!

That the man Odin, speaking with a Hero’svoice and heart, as with an impressivenessout of Heaven, told his People the infinite im-portance of Valor, how man thereby became agod; and that his People, feeling a responseto it in their own hearts, believed this mes-sage of his, and thought it a message out ofHeaven, and him a Divinity for telling it them:this seems to me the primary seed-grain ofthe Norse Religion, from which all manner ofmythologies, symbolic practices, speculations,allegories, songs and sagas would naturallygrow. Grow,—how strangely! I called it asmall light shining and shaping in the hugevortex of Norse darkness. Yet the darkness it-


self was alive; consider that. It was the eagerinarticulate uninstructed Mind of the wholeNorse People, longing only to become articu-late, to go on articulating ever farther! Theliving doctrine grows, grows;—like a Banyan-tree; the first seed is the essential thing: anybranch strikes itself down into the earth, be-comes a new root; and so, in endless com-plexity, we have a whole wood, a whole jun-gle, one seed the parent of it all. Was notthe whole Norse Religion, accordingly, in somesense, what we called “the enormous shadowof this man’s likeness”? Critics trace someaffinity in some Norse mythuses, of the Cre-ation and such like, with those of the Hin-doos. The Cow Adumbla, “licking the rimefrom the rocks,” has a kind of Hindoo look.A Hindoo Cow, transported into frosty coun-tries. Probably enough; indeed we may sayundoubtedly, these things will have a kin-dred with the remotest lands, with the earli-est times. Thought does not die, but only ischanged. The first man that began to thinkin this Planet of ours, he was the beginnerof all. And then the second man, and thethird man;—nay, every true Thinker to thishour is a kind of Odin, teaches men his way ofthought, spreads a shadow of his own likenessover sections of the History of the World.

Of the distinctive poetic character or meritof this Norse Mythology I have not room tospeak; nor does it concern us much. Somewild Prophecies we have, as the Voluspa in theElder Edda; of a rapt, earnest, sibylline sort.But they were comparatively an idle adjunct


of the matter, men who as it were but toyedwith the matter, these later Skalds; and it istheir songs chiefly that survive. In later cen-turies, I suppose, they would go on singing, po-etically symbolizing, as our modern Painterspaint, when it was no longer from the inner-most heart, or not from the heart at all. Thisis everywhere to be well kept in mind.

Gray’s fragments of Norse Lore, at anyrate, will give one no notion of it;—any morethan Pope will of Homer. It is no square-built gloomy palace of black ashlar marble,shrouded in awe and horror, as Gray gives itus: no; rough as the North rocks, as the Ice-land deserts, it is; with a heartiness, home-liness, even a tint of good humor and robustmirth in the middle of these fearful things.The strong old Norse heart did not go upontheatrical sublimities; they had not time totremble. I like much their robust simplicity;their veracity, directness of conception. Thor“draws down his brows” in a veritable Norserage; “grasps his hammer till the knucklesgrow white.” Beautiful traits of pity too, anhonest pity. Balder “the white God” dies; thebeautiful, benignant; he is the Sungod. Theytry all Nature for a remedy; but he is dead.Frigga, his mother, sends Hermoder to seekor see him: nine days and nine nights he ridesthrough gloomy deep valleys, a labyrinth ofgloom; arrives at the Bridge with its gold roof:the Keeper says, “Yes, Balder did pass here;but the Kingdom of the Dead is down yonder,far towards the North.” Hermoder rides on;leaps Hell-gate, Hela’s gate; does see Balder,


and speak with him: Balder cannot be deliv-ered. Inexorable! Hela will not, for Odin orany God, give him up. The beautiful and gen-tle has to remain there. His Wife had volun-teered to go with him, to die with him. Theyshall forever remain there. He sends his ringto Odin; Nanna his wife sends her thimble toFrigga, as a remembrance.—Ah me!—

For indeed Valor is the fountain of Pitytoo;—of Truth, and all that is great and goodin man. The robust homely vigor of theNorse heart attaches one much, in these de-lineations. Is it not a trait of right hon-est strength, says Uhland, who has writtena fine Essay on Thor, that the old Norseheart finds its friend in the Thunder-god?That it is not frightened away by his thun-der; but finds that Summer-heat, the beauti-ful noble summer, must and will have thun-der withal! The Norse heart loves this Thorand his hammer-bolt; sports with him. Thoris Summer-heat: the god of Peaceable Indus-try as well as Thunder. He is the Peasant’sfriend; his true henchman and attendant isThialfi, Manual Labor. Thor himself engagesin all manner of rough manual work, scornsno business for its plebeianism; is ever andanon travelling to the country of the Jotuns,harrying those chaotic Frost-monsters, subdu-ing them, at least straitening and damagingthem. There is a great broad humor in someof these things.

Thor, as we saw above, goes to Jotun-land,to seek Hymir’s Caldron, that the Gods maybrew beer. Hymir the huge Giant enters, his


gray beard all full of hoar-frost; splits pillarswith the very glance of his eye; Thor, aftermuch rough tumult, snatches the Pot, claps iton his head; the “handles of it reach down tohis heels.” The Norse Skald has a kind of lov-ing sport with Thor. This is the Hymir whosecattle, the critics have discovered, are Ice-bergs. Huge untutored Brobdignag genius,—needing only to be tamed down; into Shaks-peares, Dantes, Goethes! It is all gone now,that old Norse work,—Thor the Thunder-godchanged into Jack the Giant-killer: but themind that made it is here yet. How strangelythings grow, and die, and do not die! There aretwigs of that great world-tree of Norse Beliefstill curiously traceable. This poor Jack of theNursery, with his miraculous shoes of swift-ness, coat of darkness, sword of sharpness,he is one. Hynde Etin, and still more deci-sively Red Etin of Ireland, in the Scottish Bal-lads, these are both derived from Norseland;Etin is evidently a Jotun. Nay, Shakspeare’sHamlet is a twig too of this same world-tree;there seems no doubt of that. Hamlet, Am-leth I find, is really a mythic personage; andhis Tragedy, of the poisoned Father, poisonedasleep by drops in his ear, and the rest, is aNorse mythus! Old Saxo, as his wont was,made it a Danish history; Shakspeare, out ofSaxo, made it what we see. That is a twigof the world-tree that has grown, I think;—by nature or accident that one has grown!

In fact, these old Norse songs have atruth in them, an inward perennial truth andgreatness,—as, indeed, all must have that can


very long preserve itself by tradition alone. Itis a greatness not of mere body and giganticbulk, but a rude greatness of soul. There is asublime uncomplaining melancholy traceablein these old hearts. A great free glance intothe very deeps of thought. They seem to haveseen, these brave old Northmen, what Med-itation has taught all men in all ages, Thatthis world is after all but a show,—a phe-nomenon or appearance, no real thing. Alldeep souls see into that,—the Hindoo Mythol-ogist, the German Philosopher,–the Shaks-peare, the earnest Thinker, wherever he maybe:

“We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!”

One of Thor’s expeditions, to Utgard (theOuter Garden, central seat of Jotun-land),is remarkable in this respect. Thialfi waswith him, and Loke. After various adven-tures, they entered upon Giant-land; wan-dered over plains, wild uncultivated places,among stones and trees. At nightfall theynoticed a house; and as the door, which in-deed formed one whole side of the house, wasopen, they entered. It was a simple habita-tion; one large hall, altogether empty. Theystayed there. Suddenly in the dead of thenight loud noises alarmed them. Thor graspedhis hammer; stood in the door, prepared forfight. His companions within ran hither andthither in their terror, seeking some outlet inthat rude hall; they found a little closet at last,and took refuge there. Neither had Thor anybattle: for, lo, in the morning it turned out


that the noise had been only the snoring of acertain enormous but peaceable Giant, the Gi-ant Skrymir, who lay peaceably sleeping nearby; and this that they took for a house wasmerely his Glove, thrown aside there; the doorwas the Glove-wrist; the little closet they hadfled into was the Thumb! Such a glove;—I re-mark too that it had not fingers as ours have,but only a thumb, and the rest undivided: amost ancient, rustic glove!

Skrymir now carried their portmanteau allday; Thor, however, had his own suspicions,did not like the ways of Skrymir; determinedat night to put an end to him as he slept. Rais-ing his hammer, he struck down into the Gi-ant’s face a right thunder-bolt blow, of force torend rocks. The Giant merely awoke; rubbedhis cheek, and said, Did a leaf fall? AgainThor struck, so soon as Skrymir again slept;a better blow than before; but the Giant onlymurmured, Was that a grain of sand? Thor’sthird stroke was with both his hands (the“knuckles white” I suppose), and seemed todint deep into Skrymir’s visage; but he merelychecked his snore, and remarked, There mustbe sparrows roosting in this tree, I think;what is that they have dropt?—At the gate ofUtgard, a place so high that you had to “strainyour neck bending back to see the top of it,”Skrymir went his ways. Thor and his com-panions were admitted; invited to take sharein the games going on. To Thor, for his part,they handed a Drinking-horn; it was a com-mon feat, they told him, to drink this dry atone draught. Long and fiercely, three times


over, Thor drank; but made hardly any im-pression. He was a weak child, they told him:could he lift that Cat he saw there? Smallas the feat seemed, Thor with his whole god-like strength could not; he bent up the crea-ture’s back, could not raise its feet off theground, could at the utmost raise one foot.Why, you are no man, said the Utgard people;there is an Old Woman that will wrestle you!Thor, heartily ashamed, seized this haggardOld Woman; but could not throw her.

And now, on their quitting Utgard, thechief Jotun, escorting them politely a littleway, said to Thor: “You are beaten then:—yet be not so much ashamed; there was de-ception of appearance in it. That Horn youtried to drink was the Sea; you did make itebb; but who could drink that, the bottomless!The Cat you would have lifted,—why, that isthe Midgard-snake, the Great World-serpent,which, tail in mouth, girds and keeps up thewhole created world; had you torn that up,the world must have rushed to ruin! As forthe Old Woman, she was Time, Old Age, Du-ration: with her what can wrestle? No mannor no god with her; gods or men, she pre-vails over all! And then those three strokesyou struck,—look at these three valleys; yourthree strokes made these!” Thor looked at hisattendant Jotun: it was Skrymir;—it was, sayNorse critics, the old chaotic rocky Earth inperson, and that glove-house was some Earth-cavern! But Skrymir had vanished; Utgardwith its sky-high gates, when Thor graspedhis 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 en-tirely devout: but as a mythus is there not realantique Norse gold in it? More true metal,rough from the Mimer-stithy, than in manya famed Greek Mythus shaped far better! Agreat broad Brobdignag grin of true humor isin this Skrymir; mirth resting on earnestnessand 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 othershape, out of the American Backwoods.

That is also a very striking conceptionthat of the Ragnarok, Consummation, or Twi-light of the Gods. It is in the Voluspa Song;seemingly a very old, prophetic idea. TheGods and Jotuns, the divine Powers and thechaotic brute ones, after long contest and par-tial victory by the former, meet at last inuniversal world-embracing wrestle and duel;World-serpent against Thor, strength againststrength; mutually extinctive; and ruin, “twi-light” sinking into darkness, swallows the cre-ated Universe. The old Universe with itsGods is sunk; but it is not final death: thereis to be a new Heaven and a new Earth;a higher supreme God, and Justice to reignamong men. Curious: this law of mutation,which also is a law written in man’s inmostthought, had been deciphered by these oldearnest Thinkers in their rude style; and how,


though all dies, and even gods die, yet alldeath is but a phoenix fire-death, and new-birth into the Greater and the Better! It isthe fundamental Law of Being for a creaturemade of Time, living in this Place of Hope. Allearnest men have seen into it; may still seeinto it.

And now, connected with this, let us glanceat the last mythus of the appearance of Thor;and end there. I fancy it to be the latest indate of all these fables; a sorrowing protestagainst the advance of Christianity,—set forthreproachfully by some Conservative Pagan.King Olaf has been harshly blamed for hisover-zeal in introducing Christianity; surelyI should have blamed him far more for anunder-zeal in that! He paid dear enough forit; he died by the revolt of his Pagan people, inbattle, in the year 1033, at Stickelstad, nearthat Drontheim, where the chief Cathedral ofthe North has now stood for many centuries,dedicated gratefully to his memory as SaintOlaf. The mythus about Thor is to this effect.King Olaf, the Christian Reform King, is sail-ing with fit escort along the shore of Norway,from haven to haven; dispensing justice, ordoing other royal work: on leaving a certainhaven, it is found that a stranger, of graveeyes and aspect, red beard, of stately robustfigure, has stept in. The courtiers addresshim; his answers surprise by their pertinencyand depth: at length he is brought to the King.The stranger’s conversation here is not lessremarkable, as they sail along the beautifulshore; but after some time, he addresses King


Olaf thus: “Yes, King Olaf, it is all beautiful,with the sun shining on it there; green, fruit-ful, a right fair home for you; and many a soreday had Thor, many a wild fight with the rockJotuns, before he could make it so. And nowyou seem minded to put away Thor. King Olaf,have a care!” said the stranger, drawing downhis brows;—and when they looked again, hewas nowhere to be found.—This is the last ap-pearance of Thor on the stage of this world!

Do we not see well enough how the Fablemight arise, without unveracity on the partof any one? It is the way most Gods havecome to appear among men: thus, if in Pin-dar’s time “Neptune was seen once at the Ne-mean Games,” what was this Neptune too buta “stranger of noble grave aspect,”—fit to be“seen”! There is something pathetic, tragic forme in this last voice of Paganism. Thor is van-ished, the whole Norse world has vanished;and will not return ever again. In like fash-ion to that, pass away the highest things. Allthings that have been in this world, all thingsthat are or will be in it, have to vanish: wehave our sad farewell to give them.

That Norse Religion, a rude but earnest,sternly impressive Consecration of Valor (sowe may define it), sufficed for these old valiantNorthmen. Consecration of Valor is not a badthing! We will take it for good, so far as it goes.Neither is there no use in knowing somethingabout this old Paganism of our Fathers. Un-consciously, and combined with higher things,it is in us yet, that old Faith withal! To knowit consciously, brings us into closer and clearer


relation with the Past,—with our own posses-sions in the Past. For the whole Past, as I keeprepeating, is the possession of the Present; thePast had always something true, and is a pre-cious possession. In a different time, in a dif-ferent place, it is always some other side ofour common Human Nature that has been de-veloping itself. The actual True is the sumof all these; not any one of them by itselfconstitutes what of Human Nature is hith-erto developed. Better to know them all thanmisknow them. “To which of these Three Reli-gions do you specially adhere?” inquires Meis-ter of his Teacher. “To all the Three!” answersthe other: “To all the Three; for they by theirunion first constitute the True Religion.”


[May 8, 1840.]LECTURE II.

The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet:Islam.From the first rude times of Paganism amongthe Scandinavians in the North, we advanceto a very different epoch of religion, among avery different people: Mahometanism amongthe Arabs. A great change; what a changeand progress is indicated here, in the univer-sal condition and thoughts of men!

The Hero is not now regarded as aGod among his fellowmen; but as one God-inspired, as a Prophet. It is the second phasisof Hero-worship: the first or oldest, we maysay, has passed away without return; in thehistory of the world there will not again beany man, never so great, whom his fellowmenwill take for a god. Nay we might rationallyask, Did any set of human beings ever reallythink the man they saw there standing besidethem a god, the maker of this world? Per-haps not: it was usually some man they re-membered, or had seen. But neither can this

57


any more be. The Great Man is not recognizedhenceforth as a god any more.

It was a rude gross error, that of countingthe Great Man a god. Yet let us say that it is atall times difficult to know what he is, or howto account of him and receive him! The mostsignificant feature in the history of an epoch isthe manner it has of welcoming a Great Man.Ever, to the true instincts of men, there issomething godlike in him. Whether they shalltake him to be a god, to be a prophet, or whatthey shall take him to be? that is ever a grandquestion; by their way of answering that, weshall see, as through a little window, into thevery heart of these men’s spiritual condition.For at bottom the Great Man, as he comesfrom the hand of Nature, is ever the samekind of thing: Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns; Ihope to make it appear that these are all orig-inally of one stuff; that only by the world’s re-ception of them, and the shapes they assume,are they so immeasurably diverse. The wor-ship of Odin astonishes us,—to fall prostratebefore the Great Man, into deliquium of loveand wonder over him, and feel in their heartsthat he was a denizen of the skies, a god! Thiswas imperfect enough: but to welcome, for ex-ample, a Burns as we did, was that what wecan call perfect? The most precious gift thatHeaven can give to the Earth; a man of “ge-nius” as we call it; the Soul of a Man actu-ally sent down from the skies with a God’s-message to us,—this we waste away as an idleartificial firework, sent to amuse us a little,and sink it into ashes, wreck and ineffectu-

The Hero as Prophet 59

ality: such reception of a Great Man I do notcall very perfect either! Looking into the heartof the thing, one may perhaps call that ofBurns a still uglier phenomenon, betokeningstill sadder imperfections in mankind’s ways,than the Scandinavian method itself! To fallinto mere unreasoning deliquium of love andadmiration, was not good; but such unreason-ing, nay irrational supercilious no-love at allis perhaps still worse!—It is a thing foreverchanging, this of Hero-worship: different ineach age, difficult to do well in any age. In-deed, the heart of the whole business of theage, one may say, is to do it well.

We have chosen Mahomet not as the mosteminent Prophet; but as the one we are freestto speak of. He is by no means the truestof Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one.Farther, as there is no danger of our becom-ing, any of us, Mahometans, I mean to sayall the good of him I justly can. It is theway to get at his secret: let us try to under-stand what he meant with the world; whatthe world meant and means with him, willthen be a more answerable question. Our cur-rent hypothesis about Mahomet, that he wasa scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate,that his religion is a mere mass of quack-ery and fatuity, begins really to be now un-tenable to any one. The lies, which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, aredisgraceful to ourselves only. When Pocockeinquired of Grotius, Where the proof was ofthat story of the pigeon, trained to pick peasfrom Mahomet’s ear, and pass for an angel dic-


tating to him? Grotius answered that therewas no proof! It is really time to dismissall that. The word this man spoke has beenthe life-guidance now of a hundred and eightymillions of men these twelve hundred years.These hundred and eighty millions were madeby God as well as we. A greater number ofGod’s creatures believe in Mahomet’s word atthis hour, than in any other word whatever.Are we to suppose that it was a miserablepiece of spiritual legerdemain, this which somany creatures of the Almighty have lived byand died by? I, for my part, cannot form anysuch supposition. I will believe most thingssooner than that. One would be entirely at aloss what to think of this world at all, if quack-ery so grew and were sanctioned here.

Alas, such theories are very lamentable.If we would attain to knowledge of anythingin God’s true Creation, let us disbelieve themwholly! They are the product of an Age ofScepticism: they indicate the saddest spiri-tual paralysis, and mere death-life of the soulsof men: more godless theory, I think, wasnever promulgated in this Earth. A false manfound a religion? Why, a false man cannotbuild a brick house! If he do not know andfollow truly the properties of mortar, burntclay and what else be works in, it is no housethat he makes, but a rubbish-heap. It will notstand for twelve centuries, to lodge a hundredand eighty millions; it will fall straightway. Aman must conform himself to Nature’s laws,be verily in communion with Nature and thetruth of things, or Nature will answer him,


No, not at all! Speciosities are specious—ahme!—a Cagliostro, many Cagliostros, promi-nent world-leaders, do prosper by their quack-ery, 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. Naturebursts up in fire-flames, French Revolutionsand such like, proclaiming with terrible verac-ity that forged notes are forged.

But of a Great Man especially, of him Iwill venture to assert that it is incredible heshould have been other than true. It seemsto me the primary foundation of him, and ofall that can lie in him, this. No Mirabeau,Napoleon, Burns, Cromwell, no man adequateto do anything, but is first of all in rightearnest about it; what I call a sincere man.I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuinesincerity, is the first characteristic of all menin any way heroic. Not the sincerity that callsitself sincere; ah no, that is a very poor mat-ter indeed;—a shallow braggart conscious sin-cerity; oftenest self-conceit mainly. The GreatMan’s sincerity is of the kind he cannot speakof, is not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he isconscious rather of insincerity; for what mancan walk accurately by the law of truth for oneday? No, the Great Man does not boast him-self sincere, far from that; perhaps does notask himself if he is so: I would say rather, hissincerity does not depend on himself; he can-not help being sincere! The great Fact of Exis-tence is great to him. Fly as he will, he cannotget 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, realas Death, is this Universe to him. Though allmen should forget its truth, and walk in a vainshow, he cannot. At all moments the Flame-image glares in upon him; undeniable, there,there!—I wish you to take this as my primarydefinition of a Great Man. A little man mayhave this, it is competent to all men that Godhas made: but a Great Man cannot be withoutit.

Such a man is what we call an originalman; he comes to us at first-hand. A mes-senger he, sent from the Infinite Unknownwith tidings to us. We may call him Poet,Prophet, God;—in one way or other, we all feelthat the words he utters are as no other man’swords. Direct from the Inner Fact of things;—he lives, and has to live, in daily communionwith that. Hearsays cannot hide it from him;he is blind, homeless, miserable, followinghearsays; it glares in upon him. Really his ut-terances, are they not a kind of “revelation;”—what we must call such for want of some othername? It is from the heart of the world thathe comes; he is portion of the primal realityof things. God has made many revelations:but this man too, has not God made him, thelatest and newest of all? The “inspiration ofthe Almighty giveth him understanding:” wemust listen before all to him.

This Mahomet, then, we will in no wiseconsider as an Inanity and Theatricality, apoor conscious ambitious schemer; we can-not conceive him so. The rude message hedelivered was a real one withal; an earnest


confused voice from the unknown Deep. Theman’s words were not false, nor his workingshere below; no Inanity and Simulacrum; afiery mass of Life cast up from the great bo-som of Nature herself. To kindle the world;the world’s Maker had ordered it so. Nei-ther can the faults, imperfections, insinceri-ties even, of Mahomet, if such were never sowell proved against him, shake this primaryfact about him.

On the whole, we make too much of faults;the details of the business hide the real centreof it. Faults? The greatest of faults, I shouldsay, is to be conscious of none. Readers of theBible above all, one would think, might knowbetter. Who is called there “the man accordingto God’s own heart”? David, the Hebrew King,had fallen into sins enough; blackest crimes;there was no want of sins. And thereupon theunbelievers sneer and ask, Is this your manaccording to God’s heart? The sneer, I mustsay, seems to me but a shallow one. What arefaults, what are the outward details of a life;if the inner secret of it, the remorse, tempta-tions, true, often-baffled, never-ended strug-gle of it, be forgotten? “It is not in man thatwalketh to direct his steps.” Of all acts, is not,for a man, repentance the most divine? Thedeadliest sin, I say, were that same supercil-ious consciousness of no sin;—that is death;the heart so conscious is divorced from sin-cerity, humility and fact; is dead: it is “pure”as dead dry sand is pure. David’s life andhistory, as written for us in those Psalms ofhis, I consider to be the truest emblem ever


given of a man’s moral progress and warfarehere below. All earnest souls will ever dis-cern in it the faithful struggle of an earnesthuman soul towards what is good and best.Struggle often baffled, sore baffled, down asinto entire wreck; yet a struggle never ended;ever, with tears, repentance, true unconquer-able purpose, begun anew. Poor human na-ture! Is not a man’s walking, in truth, alwaysthat: “a succession of falls”? Man can do noother. In this wild element of a Life, he hasto struggle onwards; now fallen, deep-abased;and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleed-ing heart, he has to rise again, struggle againstill onwards. That his struggle be a faith-ful unconquerable one: that is the questionof questions. We will put up with many saddetails, if the soul of it were true. Details bythemselves will never teach us what it is. I be-lieve we misestimate Mahomet’s faults evenas faults: but the secret of him will never begot by dwelling there. We will leave all thisbehind us; and assuring ourselves that he didmean some true thing, ask candidly what itwas or might be.

These Arabs Mahomet was born amongare certainly a notable people. Their coun-try itself is notable; the fit habitation for sucha race. Savage inaccessible rock-mountains,great grim deserts, alternating with beautifulstrips of verdure: wherever water is, there isgreenness, beauty; odoriferous balm-shrubs,date-trees, frankincense-trees. Consider thatwide waste horizon of sand, empty, silent, likea sand-sea, dividing habitable place from hab-


itable. You are all alone there, left alone withthe Universe; by day a fierce sun blazing downon it with intolerable radiance; by night thegreat deep Heaven with its stars. Such acountry is fit for a swift-handed, deep-heartedrace of men. There is something most ag-ile, active, and yet most meditative, enthu-siastic in the Arab character. The Persiansare called the French of the East; we will callthe Arabs Oriental Italians. A gifted noblepeople; a people of wild strong feelings, andof iron restraint over these: the characteris-tic of noble-mindedness, of genius. The wildBedouin welcomes the stranger to his tent, asone having right to all that is there; were ithis worst enemy, he will slay his foal to treathim, will serve him with sacred hospitality forthree days, will set him fairly on his way;—and then, by another law as sacred, kill him ifhe can. In words too as in action. They are nota loquacious people, taciturn rather; but elo-quent, gifted when they do speak. An earnest,truthful kind of men. They are, as we know,of Jewish kindred: but with that deadly terri-ble earnestness of the Jews they seem to com-bine something graceful, brilliant, which isnot Jewish. They had “Poetic contests” amongthem before the time of Mahomet. Sale says,at Ocadh, in the South of Arabia, there wereyearly fairs, and there, when the merchandis-ing was done, Poets sang for prizes:—the wildpeople gathered to hear that.

One Jewish quality these Arabs manifest;the outcome of many or of all high qualities:what we may call religiosity. From of old they


had been zealous worshippers, according totheir light. They worshipped the stars, asSabeans; worshipped many natural objects,—recognized them as symbols, immediate man-ifestations, of the Maker of Nature. It waswrong; and yet not wholly wrong. All God’sworks are still in a sense symbols of God. Dowe not, as I urged, still account it a merit torecognize a certain inexhaustible significance,“poetic beauty” as we name it, in all naturalobjects whatsoever? A man is a poet, and hon-ored, for doing that, and speaking or singingit,—a kind of diluted worship. They had manyProphets, these Arabs; Teachers each to histribe, each according to the light he had. Butindeed, have we not from of old the noblestof proofs, still palpable to every one of us, ofwhat devoutness and noble-mindedness haddwelt in these rustic thoughtful peoples? Bib-lical critics seem agreed that our own Book ofJob was written in that region of the world. Icall that, apart from all theories about it, oneof the grandest things ever written with pen.One feels, indeed, as if it were not Hebrew;such a noble universality, different from no-ble patriotism or sectarianism, reigns in it. Anoble Book; all men’s Book! It is our first, old-est statement of the never-ending Problem,—man’s destiny, and God’s ways with him herein this earth. And all in such free flowing out-lines; grand in its sincerity, in its simplicity; inits epic melody, and repose of reconcilement.There is the seeing eye, the mildly under-standing heart. So true every way; true eye-sight and vision for all things; material things


no less than spiritual: the Horse,—“hast thouclothed his neck with thunder?”—he “laughsat the shaking of the spear!” Such livinglikenesses were never since drawn. Sublimesorrow, sublime reconciliation; oldest choralmelody as of the heart of mankind;—so soft,and great; as the summer midnight, as theworld with its seas and stars! There is noth-ing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, ofequal literary merit.—

To the idolatrous Arabs one of the mostancient universal objects of worship was thatBlack Stone, still kept in the building calledCaabah, at Mecca. Diodorus Siculus men-tions this Caabah in a way not to be mis-taken, as the oldest, most honored templein his time; that is, some half-century be-fore our Era. Silvestre de Sacy says there issome likelihood that the Black Stone is anaerolite. In that case, some man might seeit fall out of Heaven! It stands now besidethe Well Zemzem; the Caabah is built overboth. A Well is in all places a beautiful af-fecting object, gushing out like life from thehard earth;—still more so in those hot drycountries, where it is the first condition of be-ing. The Well Zemzem has its name from thebubbling sound of the waters, zem-zem; theythink it is the Well which Hagar found withher little Ishmael in the wilderness: the aero-lite and it have been sacred now, and had aCaabah over them, for thousands of years. Acurious object, that Caabah! There it standsat this hour, in the black cloth-covering theSultan sends it yearly; “twenty-seven cubits


high;” with circuit, with double circuit of pil-lars, with festoon-rows of lamps and quaintornaments: the lamps will be lighted againthis night,—to glitter again under the stars.An authentic fragment of the oldest Past. Itis the Keblah of all Moslem: from Delhi allonwards to Morocco, the eyes of innumerablepraying men are turned towards it, five times,this day and all days: one of the notablest cen-tres in the Habitation of Men.

It had been from the sacredness attachedto this Caabah Stone and Hagar’s Well, fromthe pilgrimings of all tribes of Arabs thither,that Mecca took its rise as a Town. A greattown once, though much decayed now. It hasno natural advantage for a town; stands ina sandy hollow amid bare barren hills, ata distance from the sea; its provisions, itsvery bread, have to be imported. But somany pilgrims needed lodgings: and then allplaces of pilgrimage do, from the first, be-come places of trade. The first day pilgrimsmeet, merchants have also met: where mensee themselves assembled for one object, theyfind that they can accomplish other objectswhich depend on meeting together. Mecca be-came the Fair of all Arabia. And thereby in-deed the chief staple and warehouse of what-ever Commerce there was between the In-dian and the Western countries, Syria, Egypt,even Italy. It had at one time a populationof 100,000; buyers, forwarders of those East-ern and Western products; importers for theirown behoof of provisions and corn. The gov-ernment was a kind of irregular aristocratic


republic, not without a touch of theocracy. TenMen of a chief tribe, chosen in some roughway, were Governors of Mecca, and Keepersof the Caabah. The Koreish were the chieftribe in Mahomet’s time; his own family wasof that tribe. The rest of the Nation, frac-tioned and cut asunder by deserts, lived un-der similar rude patriarchal governments byone or several: herdsmen, carriers, traders,generally robbers too; being oftenest at warone with another, or with all: held together byno open bond, if it were not this meeting atthe Caabah, where all forms of Arab Idolatryassembled in common adoration;–held mainlyby the inward indissoluble bond of a com-mon blood and language. In this way hadthe Arabs lived for long ages, unnoticed bythe world; a people of great qualities, uncon-sciously waiting for the day when they shouldbecome notable to all the world. Their Idola-tries appear to have been in a tottering state;much was getting into confusion and fermen-tation among them. Obscure tidings of themost important Event ever transacted in thisworld, the Life and Death of the Divine Manin Judea, at once the symptom and causeof immeasurable change to all people in theworld, had in the course of centuries reachedinto Arabia too; and could not but, of itself,have produced fermentation there.

It was among this Arab people, so circum-stanced, in the year 570 of our Era, that theman Mahomet was born. He was of the fam-ily of Hashem, of the Koreish tribe as we said;though poor, connected with the chief persons


of his country. Almost at his birth he losthis Father; at the age of six years his Mothertoo, a woman noted for her beauty, her worthand sense: he fell to the charge of his Grand-father, an old man, a hundred years old. Agood old man: Mahomet’s Father, Abdallah,had been his youngest favorite son. He saw inMahomet, with his old life-worn eyes, a cen-tury old, the lost Abdallah come back again,all that was left of Abdallah. He loved the lit-tle orphan Boy greatly; used to say, They musttake care of that beautiful little Boy, nothingin their kindred was more precious than he.At his death, while the boy was still but twoyears old, he left him in charge to Abu Thalebthe eldest of the Uncles, as to him that nowwas head of the house. By this Uncle, a justand rational man as everything betokens, Ma-homet was brought up in the best Arab way.

Mahomet, as he grew up, accompanied hisUncle on trading journeys and such like; in hiseighteenth year one finds him a fighter follow-ing his Uncle in war. But perhaps the mostsignificant of all his journeys is one we findnoted as of some years’ earlier date: a journeyto the Fairs of Syria. The young man here firstcame in contact with a quite foreign world,—with one foreign element of endless momentto him: the Christian Religion. I know notwhat to make of that “Sergius, the NestorianMonk,” whom Abu Thaleb and he are saidto have lodged with; or how much any monkcould have taught one still so young. Proba-bly enough it is greatly exaggerated, this ofthe Nestorian Monk. Mahomet was only four-


teen; had no language but his own: much inSyria must have been a strange unintelligiblewhirlpool to him. But the eyes of the lad wereopen; glimpses of many things would doubt-less be taken in, and lie very enigmatic asyet, which were to ripen in a strange way intoviews, into beliefs and insights one day. Thesejourneys to Syria were probably the beginningof much to Mahomet.

One other circumstance we must not for-get: that he had no school-learning; of thething we call school-learning none at all. Theart of writing was but just introduced intoArabia; it seems to be the true opinion thatMahomet never could write! Life in theDesert, with its experiences, was all his ed-ucation. What of this infinite Universe he,from his dim place, with his own eyes andthoughts, could take in, so much and no moreof it was he to know. Curious, if we will re-flect on it, this of having no books. Except bywhat he could see for himself, or hear of byuncertain rumor of speech in the obscure Ara-bian Desert, he could know nothing. The wis-dom that had been before him or at a distancefrom him in the world, was in a manner asgood as not there for him. Of the great brothersouls, flame-beacons through so many landsand times, no one directly communicates withthis great soul. He is alone there, deep downin the bosom of the Wilderness; has to grow upso,—alone with Nature and his own Thoughts.

But, from an early age, he had been re-marked as a thoughtful man. His companionsnamed him “Al Amin, The Faithful.” A man of


truth and fidelity; true in what he did, in whathe spake and thought. They noted that he al-ways meant something. A man rather taci-turn in speech; silent when there was nothingto be said; but pertinent, wise, sincere, whenhe did speak; always throwing light on thematter. This is the only sort of speech worthspeaking! Through life we find him to havebeen regarded as an altogether solid, broth-erly, genuine man. A serious, sincere charac-ter; yet amiable, cordial, companionable, jo-cose even;—a good laugh in him withal: thereare men whose laugh is as untrue as anythingabout them; who cannot laugh. One hears ofMahomet’s beauty: his fine sagacious honestface, brown florid complexion, beaming blackeyes;—I somehow like too that vein on thebrow, which swelled up black when he wasin anger: like the “horseshoe vein” in Scott’sRedgauntlet. It was a kind of feature in theHashem family, this black swelling vein in thebrow; Mahomet had it prominent, as wouldappear. A spontaneous, passionate, yet just,true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fireand light; of wild worth, all uncultured; work-ing out his life-task in the depths of the Desertthere.

How he was placed with Kadijah, a richWidow, as her Steward, and travelled in herbusiness, again to the Fairs of Syria; how hemanaged all, as one can well understand, withfidelity, adroitness; how her gratitude, her re-gard for him grew: the story of their marriageis altogether a graceful intelligible one, as toldus by the Arab authors. He was twenty-five;


she forty, though still beautiful. He seemsto have lived in a most affectionate, peace-able, wholesome way with this wedded bene-factress; loving her truly, and her alone. Itgoes greatly against the impostor theory, thefact that he lived in this entirely unexception-able, entirely quiet and commonplace way, tillthe heat of his years was done. He was fortybefore he talked of any mission from Heaven.All his irregularities, real and supposed, datefrom after his fiftieth year, when the goodKadijah died. All his “ambition,” seemingly,had been, hitherto, to live an honest life; his“fame,” the mere good opinion of neighborsthat knew him, had been sufficient hitherto.Not till he was already getting old, the pruri-ent heat of his life all burnt out, and peacegrowing to be the chief thing this world couldgive him, did he start on the “career of ambi-tion;” and, belying all his past character andexistence, set up as a wretched empty char-latan to acquire what he could now no longerenjoy! For my share, I have no faith whateverin that.

Ah no: this deep-hearted Son of theWilderness, with his beaming black eyes andopen social deep soul, had other thoughts inhim than ambition. A silent great soul; hewas one of those who cannot but be in earnest;whom Nature herself has appointed to be sin-cere. While others walk in formulas andhearsays, contented enough to dwell there,this man could not screen himself in formu-las; he was alone with his own soul and thereality of things. The great Mystery of Exis-


tence, as I said, glared in upon him, with itsterrors, with its splendors; no hearsays couldhide that unspeakable fact, “Here am I!” Suchsincerity, as we named it, has in very truthsomething of divine. The word of such a manis a Voice direct from Nature’s own Heart.Men do and must listen to that as to nothingelse;—all else is wind in comparison. Fromof old, a thousand thoughts, in his pilgrim-ings and wanderings, had been in this man:What am I? What is this unfathomable ThingI live in, which men name Universe? What isLife; what is Death? What am I to believe?What am I to do? The grim rocks of MountHara, of Mount Sinai, the stern sandy soli-tudes answered not. The great Heaven rollingsilent overhead, with its blue-glancing stars,answered not. There was no answer. Theman’s own soul, and what of God’s inspirationdwelt there, had to answer!

It is the thing which all men have to askthemselves; which we too have to ask, and an-swer. This wild man felt it to be of infinitemoment; all other things of no moment what-ever in comparison. The jargon of argumen-tative Greek Sects, vague traditions of Jews,the stupid routine of Arab Idolatry: there wasno answer in these. A Hero, as I repeat, hasthis first distinction, which indeed we maycall first and last, the Alpha and Omega ofhis whole Heroism, That he looks through theshows of things into things. Use and wont,respectable hearsay, respectable formula: allthese are good, or are not good. There issomething behind and beyond all these, which


all these must correspond with, be the im-age of, or they are—Idolatries; “bits of blackwood pretending to be God;” to the earnestsoul a mockery and abomination. Idolatriesnever so gilded, waited on by heads of the Ko-reish, will do nothing for this man. Thoughall men walk by them, what good is it? Thegreat Reality stands glaring there upon him.He there has to answer it, or perish miser-ably. Now, even now, or else through all Eter-nity never! Answer it; thou must find ananswer.—Ambition? What could all Arabia dofor this man; with the crown of Greek Hera-clius, of Persian Chosroes, and all crowns inthe Earth;—what could they all do for him? Itwas not of the Earth he wanted to hear tell; itwas of the Heaven above and of the Hell be-neath. All crowns and sovereignties whatso-ever, where would they in a few brief years be?To be Sheik of Mecca or Arabia, and have a bitof gilt wood put into your hand,—will that beone’s salvation? I decidedly think, not. Wewill leave it altogether, this impostor hypoth-esis, as not credible; not very tolerable even,worthy chiefly of dismissal by us.

Mahomet had been wont to retire yearly,during the month Ramadhan, into solitudeand silence; as indeed was the Arab custom;a praiseworthy custom, which such a man,above all, would find natural and useful. Com-muning with his own heart, in the silenceof the mountains; himself silent; open to the“small still voices:” it was a right natural cus-tom! Mahomet was in his fortieth year, whenhaving withdrawn to a cavern in Mount Hara,


near Mecca, during this Ramadhan, to passthe month in prayer, and meditation on thosegreat questions, he one day told his wife Kadi-jah, who with his household was with him ornear him this year, That by the unspeakablespecial favor of Heaven he had now found itall out; was in doubt and darkness no longer,but saw it all. That all these Idols and Formu-las were nothing, miserable bits of wood; thatthere was One God in and over all; and wemust leave all Idols, and look to Him. ThatGod is great; and that there is nothing elsegreat! He is the Reality. Wooden Idols are notreal; He is real. He made us at first, sustainsus yet; we and all things are but the shadowof Him; a transitory garment veiling the Eter-nal Splendor. “Allah akbar, God is great;”—and then also “Islam,” That we must submit toGod. That our whole strength lies in resignedsubmission to Him, whatsoever He do to us.For this world, and for the other! The thingHe sends to us, were it death and worse thandeath, shall be good, shall be best; we resignourselves to God.—

“If this be Islam,” says Goethe, “do we notall live in Islam?” Yes, all of us that haveany moral life; we all live so. It has everbeen held the highest wisdom for a man notmerely to submit to Necessity,—Necessity willmake him submit,—but to know and believewell that the stern thing which Necessity hadordered was the wisest, the best, the thingwanted there. To cease his frantic preten-sion of scanning this great God’s-World in hissmall fraction of a brain; to know that it had


verily, though deep beyond his soundings, aJust Law, that the soul of it was Good;—thathis part in it was to conform to the Law of theWhole, and in devout silence follow that; notquestioning it, obeying it as unquestionable.

I say, this is yet the only true moralityknown. A man is right and invincible, virtu-ous and on the road towards sure conquest,precisely while he joins himself to the greatdeep Law of the World, in spite of all su-perficial laws, temporary appearances, profit-and-loss calculations; he is victorious whilehe co-operates with that great central Law,not victorious otherwise:—and surely his firstchance of co-operating with it, or getting intothe course of it, is to know with his whole soulthat it is; that it is good, and alone good! Thisis the soul of Islam; it is properly the soul ofChristianity;—for Islam is definable as a con-fused form of Christianity; had Christianitynot been, neither had it been. Christianityalso commands us, before all, to be resigned toGod. We are to take no counsel with flesh andblood; give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrowsand wishes: to know that we know nothing;that the worst and cruelest to our eyes is notwhat it seems; that we have to receive what-soever befalls us as sent from God above, andsay, It is good and wise, God is great! “ThoughHe slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” Islammeans in its way Denial of Self, Annihilationof Self. This is yet the highest Wisdom thatHeaven has revealed to our Earth.

Such light had come, as it could, to illu-minate the darkness of this wild Arab soul.


A confused dazzling splendor as of life andHeaven, in the great darkness which threat-ened to be death: he called it revelationand the angel Gabriel;—who of us yet canknow what to call it? It is the “inspirationof the Almighty” that giveth us understand-ing. To know; to get into the truth of any-thing, is ever a mystic act,—of which the bestLogics can but babble on the surface. “Isnot Belief the true god-announcing Miracle?”says Novalis.—That Mahomet’s whole soul,set in flame with this grand Truth vouch-safed him, should feel as if it were impor-tant and the only important thing, was verynatural. That Providence had unspeakablyhonored him by revealing it, saving him fromdeath and darkness; that he therefore wasbound to make known the same to all crea-tures: this is what was meant by “Mahomet isthe Prophet of God;” this too is not without itstrue meaning.—

The good Kadijah, we can fancy, listenedto him with wonder, with doubt: at lengthshe answered: Yes, it was true this that hesaid. One can fancy too the boundless grat-itude of Mahomet; and how of all the kind-nesses she had done him, this of believing theearnest struggling word he now spoke was thegreatest. “It is certain,” says Novalis, “myConviction gains infinitely, the moment an-other soul will believe in it.” It is a bound-less favor.—He never forgot this good Kadijah.Long afterwards, Ayesha his young favoritewife, a woman who indeed distinguished her-self among the Moslem, by all manner of qual-


ities, through her whole long life; this youngbrilliant Ayesha was, one day, questioninghim: “Now am not I better than Kadijah? Shewas a widow; old, and had lost her looks: youlove me better than you did her?”—“No, by Al-lah!” answered Mahomet: “No, by Allah! Shebelieved in me when none else would believe.In the whole world I had but one friend, andshe was that!”—Seid, his Slave, also believedin him; these with his young Cousin Ali, AbuThaleb’s son, were his first converts.

He spoke of his Doctrine to this man andthat; but the most treated it with ridicule,with indifference; in three years, I think,he had gained but thirteen followers. Hisprogress was slow enough. His encourage-ment to go on, was altogether the usual en-couragement that such a man in such a casemeets. After some three years of small suc-cess, he invited forty of his chief kindred toan entertainment; and there stood up andtold them what his pretension was: that hehad this thing to promulgate abroad to allmen; that it was the highest thing, the onething: which of them would second him inthat? Amid the doubt and silence of all, youngAli, as yet a lad of sixteen, impatient of thesilence, started up, and exclaimed in passion-ate fierce language, That he would! The as-sembly, among whom was Abu Thaleb, Ali’sFather, could not be unfriendly to Mahomet;yet the sight there, of one unlettered elderlyman, with a lad of sixteen, deciding on suchan enterprise against all mankind, appearedridiculous to them; the assembly broke up in


laughter. Nevertheless it proved not a laugh-able thing; it was a very serious thing! As forthis young Ali, one cannot but like him. Anoble-minded creature, as he shows himself,now and always afterwards; full of affection,of fiery daring. Something chivalrous in him;brave as a lion; yet with a grace, a truth andaffection worthy of Christian knighthood. Hedied by assassination in the Mosque at Bag-dad; a death occasioned by his own generousfairness, 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 sothey two in the same hour might appear be-fore God, and see which side of that quarrelwas the just one!

Mahomet naturally gave offence to the Ko-reish, Keepers of the Caabah, superinten-dents of the Idols. One or two men of influencehad joined him: the thing spread slowly, butit was spreading. Naturally he gave offenceto everybody: Who is this that pretends to bewiser than we all; that rebukes us all, as merefools and worshippers of wood! Abu Thalebthe good Uncle spoke with him: Could he notbe silent about all that; believe it all for him-self, and not trouble others, anger the chiefmen, endanger himself and them all, talkingof it? Mahomet answered: If the Sun stoodon his right hand and the Moon on his left,ordering him to hold his peace, he could notobey! No: there was something in this Truthhe had got which was of Nature herself; equalin rank to Sun, or Moon, or whatsoever thing


Nature had made. It would speak itself there,so long as the Almighty allowed it, in spite ofSun and Moon, and all Koreish and all menand things. It must do that, and could do noother. Mahomet answered so; and, they say,“burst into tears.” Burst into tears: he feltthat Abu Thaleb was good to him; that thetask he had got was no soft, but a stern andgreat one.

He went on speaking to who would listento him; publishing his Doctrine among the pil-grims as they came to Mecca; gaining adher-ents in this place and that. Continual con-tradiction, hatred, open or secret danger at-tended him. His powerful relations protectedMahomet himself; but by and by, on his ownadvice, all his adherents had to quit Mecca,and seek refuge in Abyssinia over the sea.The Koreish grew ever angrier; laid plots, andswore oaths among them, to put Mahomet todeath with their own hands. Abu Thaleb wasdead, the good Kadijah was dead. Mahometis not solicitous of sympathy from us; but hisoutlook at this time was one of the dismalest.He had to hide in caverns, escape in disguise;fly hither and thither; homeless, in continualperil of his life. More than once it seemed allover with him; more than once it turned on astraw, some rider’s horse taking fright or thelike, whether Mahomet and his Doctrine hadnot ended there, and not been heard of at all.But it was not to end so.

In the thirteenth year of his mission, find-ing his enemies all banded against him, fortysworn men, one out of every tribe, waiting


to take his life, and no continuance possibleat Mecca for him any longer, Mahomet fledto the place then called Yathreb, where hehad gained some adherents; the place theynow call Medina, or “Medinat al Nabi, theCity of the Prophet,” from that circumstance.It lay some two hundred miles off, throughrocks and deserts; not without great difficulty,in such mood as we may fancy, he escapedthither, and found welcome. The whole Eastdates its era from this Flight, hegira as theyname it: the Year 1 of this Hegira is 622 of ourEra, the fifty-third of Mahomet’s life. He wasnow becoming an old man; his friends sinkinground him one by one; his path desolate, en-compassed with danger: unless he could findhope in his own heart, the outward face ofthings was but hopeless for him. It is so withall men in the like case. Hitherto Mahomethad professed to publish his Religion by theway of preaching and persuasion alone. Butnow, driven foully out of his native country,since unjust men had not only given no ear tohis earnest Heaven’s-message, the deep cry ofhis heart, but would not even let him live if hekept speaking it,—the wild Son of the Desertresolved to defend himself, like a man andArab. If the Koreish will have it so, they shallhave it. Tidings, felt to be of infinite momentto them and all men, they would not listen tothese; would trample them down by sheer vi-olence, steel and murder: well, let steel tryit then! Ten years more this Mahomet had;all of fighting of breathless impetuous toil andstruggle; with what result we know.


Much has been said of Mahomet’s propa-gating his Religion by the sword. It is nodoubt far nobler what we have to boast of theChristian Religion, that it propagated itselfpeaceably in the way of preaching and convic-tion. 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 in-deed: but where will you get your sword! Ev-ery new opinion, at its starting, is precisely ina minority of one. In one man’s head alone,there it dwells as yet. One man alone ofthe whole world believes it; there is one managainst all men. That he take a sword, and tryto propagate with that, will do little for him.You must first get your sword! On the whole, athing will propagate itself as it can. We do notfind, of the Christian Religion either, that italways disdained the sword, when once it hadgot one. Charlemagne’s conversion of the Sax-ons was not by preaching. I care little aboutthe sword: I will allow a thing to struggle foritself in this world, with any sword or tongueor implement it has, or can lay hold of. Wewill let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight,and to the uttermost bestir itself, and do, beakand claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure thatit will, in the long-run, conquer nothing whichdoes not deserve to be conquered. What is bet-ter than itself, it cannot put away, but onlywhat is worse. In this great Duel, Nature her-self is umpire, and can do no wrong: the thingwhich is deepest-rooted in Nature, what wecall truest, that thing and not the other willbe found growing at last.


Here however, in reference to much thatthere is in Mahomet and his success, we areto remember what an umpire Nature is; whata greatness, composure of depth and tolerancethere is in her. You take wheat to cast intothe Earth’s bosom; your wheat may be mixedwith chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings,dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter:you cast it into the kind just Earth; she growsthe wheat,—the whole rubbish she silentlyabsorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rub-bish. The yellow wheat is growing there; thegood Earth is silent about all the rest,—hassilently 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 inher truth. She requires of a thing only thatit be genuine of heart; she will protect it if so;will not, if not so. There is a soul of truth inall the things she ever gave harbor to. Alas, isnot this the history of all highest Truth thatcomes or ever came into the world? The bodyof them all is imperfection, an element of lightin darkness: to us they have to come embodiedin mere Logic, in some merely scientific The-orem of the Universe; which cannot be com-plete; which cannot but be found, one day, in-complete, erroneous, and so die and disappear.The body of all Truth dies; and yet in all, Isay, there is a soul which never dies; whichin new and ever-nobler embodiment lives im-mortal as man himself! It is the way withNature. The genuine essence of Truth neverdies. That it be genuine, a voice from the great


Deep of Nature, there is the point at Nature’sjudgment-seat. What we call pure or impure,is not with her the final question. Not howmuch chaff is in you; but whether you haveany wheat. Pure? I might say to many a man:Yes, you are pure; pure enough; but you arechaff,—insincere hypothesis, hearsay, formal-ity; you never were in contact with the greatheart of the Universe at all; you are properlyneither pure nor impure; you are nothing, Na-ture has no business with you.

Mahomet’s Creed we called a kind of Chris-tianity; and really, if we look at the wild raptearnestness with which it was believed andlaid to heart, I should say a better kind thanthat of those miserable Syrian Sects, withtheir vain janglings about Homoiousion andHomoousion, the head full of worthless noise,the heart empty and dead! The truth of itis embedded in portentous error and false-hood; but the truth of it makes it be believed,not the falsehood: it succeeded by its truth.A bastard kind of Christianity, but a livingkind; with a heart-life in it; not dead, chop-ping barren logic merely! Out of all that rub-bish of Arab idolatries, argumentative theolo-gies, traditions, subtleties, rumors and hy-potheses of Greeks and Jews, with their idlewire-drawings, this wild man of the Desert,with his wild sincere heart, earnest as deathand life, with his great flashing natural eye-sight, had seen into the kernel of the mat-ter. Idolatry is nothing: these Wooden Idolsof yours, “ye rub them with oil and wax, andthe flies stick on them,”—these are wood, I


tell you! They can do nothing for you; theyare an impotent blasphemous presence; a hor-ror and abomination, if ye knew them. Godalone 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 thebest for you; that howsoever sore to flesh andblood, you will find it the wisest, best: you arebound to take it so; in this world and in thenext, you have no other thing that you can do!

And now if the wild idolatrous men did be-lieve this, and with their fiery hearts lay holdof it to do it, in what form soever it came tothem, I say it was well worthy of being be-lieved. In one form or the other, I say it is stillthe one thing worthy of being believed by allmen. Man does hereby become the high-priestof this Temple of a World. He is in harmonywith the Decrees of the Author of this World;cooperating with them, not vainly withstand-ing them: I know, to this day, no better defini-tion of Duty than that same. All that is rightincludes itself in this of co-operating with thereal Tendency of the World: you succeed bythis (the World’s Tendency will succeed), youare good, and in the right course there. Ho-moiousion, Homoousion, vain logical jangle,then or before or at any time, may jangle it-self out, and go whither and how it likes: thisis the thing it all struggles to mean, if it wouldmean anything. If it do not succeed in mean-ing this, it means nothing. Not that Abstrac-tions, logical Propositions, be correctly wordedor incorrectly; but that living concrete Sons ofAdam do lay this to heart: that is the impor-


tant point. Islam devoured all these vain jan-gling Sects; and I think had right to do so. Itwas a Reality, direct from the great Heart ofNature once more. Arab idolatries, Syrian for-mulas, whatsoever was not equally real, hadto go up in flame,—mere dead fuel, in varioussenses, for this which was fire.

It was during these wild warfarings andstrugglings, especially after the Flight toMecca, that Mahomet dictated at intervalshis Sacred Book, which they name Koran, orReading, “Thing to be read.” This is the Workhe and his disciples made so much of, ask-ing all the world, Is not that a miracle? TheMahometans regard their Koran with a rev-erence which few Christians pay even to theirBible. It is admitted every where as the stan-dard of all law and all practice; the thing to begone upon in speculation and life; the messagesent direct out of Heaven, which this Earthhas to conform to, and walk by; the thing tobe read. Their Judges decide by it; all Moslemare bound to study it, seek in it for the light oftheir life. They have mosques where it is allread daily; thirty relays of priests take it upin succession, get through the whole each day.There, for twelve hundred years, has the voiceof this Book, at all moments, kept soundingthrough the ears and the hearts of so manymen. We hear of Mahometan Doctors that hadread it seventy thousand times!

Very curious: if one sought for “discrep-ancies of national taste,” here surely werethe most eminent instance of that! Wealso can read the Koran; our Translation


of it, by Sale, is known to be a very fairone. I must say, it is as toilsome readingas I ever undertook. A wearisome confusedjumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations,long-windedness, entanglement; most crude,incondite;—insupportable stupidity, in short!Nothing but a sense of duty could carry anyEuropean through the Koran. We read init, as we might in the State-Paper Office,unreadable masses of lumber, that perhapswe may get some glimpses of a remarkableman. It is true we have it under disadvan-tages: the Arabs see more method in it thanwe. Mahomet’s followers found the Koranlying all in fractions, as it had been writ-ten down at first promulgation; much of it,they say, on shoulder-blades of mutton, flungpell-mell into a chest: and they publishedit, without any discoverable order as to timeor otherwise;—merely trying, as would seem,and this not very strictly, to put the longestchapters first. The real beginning of it, inthat way, lies almost at the end: for the ear-liest portions were the shortest. Read in itshistorical sequence it perhaps would not be sobad. 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 hasbeen lost in the Translation here. Yet withevery allowance, one feels it difficult to seehow any mortal ever could consider this Ko-ran as a Book written in Heaven, too good forthe Earth; as a well-written book, or indeed asa book at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody;written, so far as writing goes, as badly as al-


most any book ever was! So much for nationaldiscrepancies, and the standard of taste.

Yet I should say, it was not unintelligiblehow the Arabs might so love it. When onceyou get this confused coil of a Koran fairly offyour hands, and have it behind you at a dis-tance, the essential type of it begins to discloseitself; and in this there is a merit quite otherthan the literary one. If a book come from theheart, it will contrive to reach other hearts;all art and author-craft are of small amountto that. One would say the primary charac-ter of the Koran is this of its genuineness, ofits being a bona-fide book. Prideaux, I know,and others have represented it as a mere bun-dle of juggleries; chapter after chapter got upto excuse and varnish the author’s successivesins, forward his ambitions and quackeries:but really it is time to dismiss all that. Ido not assert Mahomet’s continual sincerity:who is continually sincere? But I confess Ican make nothing of the critic, in these times,who would accuse him of deceit prepense; ofconscious deceit generally, or perhaps at all;—still more, of living in a mere element of con-scious deceit, and writing this Koran as aforger and juggler would have done! Everycandid eye, I think, will read the Koran farotherwise than so. It is the confused fermentof a great rude human soul; rude, untutored,that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest,struggling vehemently to utter itself in words.With a kind of breathless intensity he strivesto utter himself; the thoughts crowd on himpell-mell: for very multitude of things to say,


he can get nothing said. The meaning thatis in him shapes itself into no form of com-position, is stated in no sequence, method, orcoherence;—they are not shaped at all, thesethoughts of his; flung out unshaped, as theystruggle and tumble there, in their chaoticinarticulate state. We said “stupid:” yet nat-ural stupidity is by no means the character ofMahomet’s Book; it is natural uncultivationrather. The man has not studied speaking;in the haste and pressure of continual fight-ing, has not time to mature himself into fitspeech. The panting breathless haste and ve-hemence of a man struggling in the thick ofbattle for life and salvation; this is the moodhe is in! A headlong haste; for very magnitudeof meaning, he cannot get himself articulatedinto words. The successive utterances of asoul in that mood, colored by the various vicis-situdes of three-and-twenty years; now welluttered, now worse: this is the Koran.

For we are to consider Mahomet, throughthese three-and-twenty years, as the centreof a world wholly in conflict. Battles withthe Koreish and Heathen, quarrels amonghis own people, backslidings of his own wildheart; all this kept him in a perpetual whirl,his soul knowing rest no more. In wakefulnights, as one may fancy, the wild soul of theman, tossing amid these vortices, would hailany light of a decision for them as a veri-table light from Heaven; any making-up ofhis mind, so blessed, indispensable for himthere, would seem the inspiration of a Gabriel.Forger and juggler? No, no! This great fiery


heart, seething, simmering like a great fur-nace of thoughts, was not a juggler’s. His Lifewas a Fact to him; this God’s Universe an aw-ful Fact and Reality. He has faults enough.The man was an uncultured semi-barbarousSon of Nature, much of the Bedouin still cling-ing to him: we must take him for that. But fora wretched Simulacrum, a hungry Impostorwithout eyes or heart, practicing for a mess ofpottage such blasphemous swindlery, forgeryof celestial documents, continual high-treasonagainst his Maker and Self, we will not andcannot take him.

Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me themerit of the Koran; what had rendered it pre-cious to the wild Arab men. It is, after all,the first and last merit in a book; gives rise tomerits of all kinds,—nay, at bottom, it alonecan give rise to merit of any kind. Curi-ously, through these incondite masses of tra-dition, vituperation, complaint, ejaculation inthe Koran, a vein of true direct insight, ofwhat we might almost call poetry, is foundstraggling. The body of the Book is made upof mere tradition, and as it were vehement en-thusiastic extempore preaching. He returnsforever to the old stories of the Prophets asthey went current in the Arab memory: howProphet after Prophet, the Prophet Abraham,the Prophet Hud, the Prophet Moses, Chris-tian and other real and fabulous Prophets,had come to this Tribe and to that, warningmen of their sin; and been received by themeven as he Mahomet was,—which is a greatsolace 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, inhis forlorn garret, might con over the Biogra-phies of Authors in that way! This is the greatstaple of the Koran. But curiously, throughall this, comes ever and anon some glance asof the real thinker and seer. He has actuallyan eye for the world, this Mahomet: with acertain directness and rugged vigor, he bringshome still, to our heart, the thing his ownheart has been opened to. I make but little ofhis praises of Allah, which many praise; theyare borrowed I suppose mainly from the He-brew, at least they are far surpassed there.But the eye that flashes direct into the heartof things, and sees the truth of them; this is tome a highly interesting object. Great Nature’sown gift; which she bestows on all; but whichonly one in the thousand does not cast sorrow-fully away: it is what I call sincerity of vision;the test of a sincere heart.

Mahomet can work no miracles; he oftenanswers impatiently: I can work no mira-cles. I? “I am a Public Preacher;” appointedto preach this doctrine to all creatures. Yetthe world, as we can see, had really from ofold been all one great miracle to him. Lookover the world, says he; is it not wonderful,the work of Allah; wholly “a sign to you,” ifyour eyes were open! This Earth, God made itfor you; “appointed paths in it;” you can live init, go to and fro on it.—The clouds in the drycountry of Arabia, to Mahomet they are verywonderful: Great clouds, he says, born in the


deep bosom of the Upper Immensity, where dothey come from! They hang there, the greatblack 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; service-able dumb creatures; they change the grassinto milk; you have your clothing from them,very strange creatures; they come rankinghome at evening-time, “and,” adds he, “andare a credit to you!” Ships also,—he talksoften about ships: Huge moving mountains,they spread out their cloth wings, go bound-ing through the water there, Heaven’s winddriving them; anon they lie motionless, Godhas withdrawn the wind, they lie dead, andcannot stir! Miracles? cries he: What mira-cle would you have? Are not you yourselvesthere? God made you, “shaped you out of a lit-tle clay.” Ye were small once; a few years agoye were not at all. Ye have beauty, strength,thoughts, “ye have compassion on one an-other.” Old age comes on you, and gray hairs;your strength fades into feebleness; ye sinkdown, and again are not. “Ye have compassionon one another:” this struck me much: Allahmight have made you having no compassionon one another,—how had it been then! Thisis a great direct thought, a glance at first-hand into the very fact of things. Rude ves-tiges of poetic genius, of whatsoever is bestand truest, are visible in this man. A stronguntutored intellect; eyesight, heart: a strongwild 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, aswe said once before, all great thinkers, therude Scandinavians themselves, in one wayor other, have contrived to see: That this sosolid-looking material world is, at bottom, invery deed, Nothing; is a visual and factualManifestation of God’s power and presence,—a shadow hung out by Him on the bosom ofthe void Infinite; nothing more. The moun-tains, he says, these great rock-mountains,they shall dissipate themselves “like clouds;”melt into the Blue as clouds do, and not be! Hefigures the Earth, in the Arab fashion, Saletells us, as an immense Plain or flat Plateof ground, the mountains are set on that tosteady it. At the Last Day they shall dis-appear “like clouds;” the whole Earth shallgo spinning, whirl itself off into wreck, andas dust and vapor vanish in the Inane. Al-lah withdraws his hand from it, and it ceasesto 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 allthings whatsoever, was continually clear tothis man. What a modern talks of by thename, Forces of Nature, Laws of Nature; anddoes not figure as a divine thing; not even asone thing at all, but as a set of things, undi-vine enough,—salable, curious, good for pro-pelling steamships! With our Sciences andCyclopaedias, we are apt to forget the divine-ness, in those laboratories of ours. We ought


not to forget it! That once well forgotten, Iknow not what else were worth remembering.Most sciences, I think were then a very deadthing; withered, contentious, empty;—a this-tle in late autumn. The best science, withoutthis, is but as the dead timber; it is not thegrowing tree and forest,—which gives ever-new timber, among other things! Man cannotknow either, unless he can worship in someway. His knowledge is a pedantry, and deadthistle, otherwise.

Much has been said and written about thesensuality of Mahomet’s Religion; more thanwas just. The indulgences, criminal to us,which he permitted, were not of his appoint-ment; he found them practiced, unquestionedfrom immemorial time in Arabia; what he didwas to curtail them, restrict them, not on onebut on many sides. His Religion is not an easyone: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict com-plex formulas, prayers five times a day, andabstinence from wine, it did not “succeed bybeing an easy religion.” As if indeed any re-ligion, or cause holding of religion, could suc-ceed by that! It is a calumny on men to saythat they are roused to heroic action by ease,hope of pleasure, recompense,—sugar-plumsof any kind, in this world or the next! Inthe meanest mortal there lies something no-bler. The poor swearing soldier, hired to beshot, has his “honor of a soldier,” differentfrom drill-regulations and the shilling a day.It is not to taste sweet things, but to do nobleand true things, and vindicate himself underGod’s Heaven as a god-made Man, that the


poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show himthe way of doing that, the dullest day-drudgekindles into a hero. They wrong man greatlywho say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty,abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allure-ments that act on the heart of man. Kindlethe inner genial life of him, you have a flamethat burns up all lower considerations. Nothappiness, but something higher: one seesthis even in the frivolous classes, with their“point of honor” and the like. Not by flatteringour appetites; no, by awakening the Heroicthat slumbers in every heart, can any Religiongain followers.

Mahomet himself, after all that can besaid about him, was not a sensual man. Weshall err widely if we consider this man asa common voluptuary, intent mainly on baseenjoyments,—nay on enjoyments of any kind.His household was of the frugalest; his com-mon diet barley-bread and water: sometimesfor months there was not a fire once lighted onhis hearth. They record with just pride thathe would mend his own shoes, patch his owncloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man;careless of what vulgar men toil for. Not a badman, I should say; something better in himthan hunger of any sort,—or these wild Arabmen, fighting and jostling three-and-twentyyears at his hand, in close contact with himalways, would not have reverenced him so!They were wild men, bursting ever and anoninto quarrel, into all kinds of fierce sincerity;without right worth and manhood, no mancould have commanded them. They called him


Prophet, you say? Why, he stood there faceto face with them; bare, not enshrined in anymystery; visibly clouting his own cloak, cob-bling his own shoes; fighting, counselling, or-dering in the midst of them: they must haveseen what kind of a man he was, let him becalled what you like! No emperor with histiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of hisown clouting. During three-and-twenty yearsof rough actual trial. I find something of a ver-itable Hero necessary for that, of itself.

His last words are a prayer; broken ejac-ulations of a heart struggling up, in trem-bling hope, towards its Maker. We cannotsay that his religion made him worse; it madehim better; good, not bad. Generous thingsare recorded of him: when he lost his Daugh-ter, the thing he answers is, in his own di-alect, every way sincere, and yet equivalent tothat of Christians, “The Lord giveth, and theLord taketh away; blessed be the name of theLord.” He answered in like manner of Seid,his emancipated well-beloved Slave, the sec-ond of the believers. Seid had fallen in theWar of Tabuc, the first of Mahomet’s fightingswith the Greeks. Mahomet said, It was well;Seid had done his Master’s work, Seid hadnow gone to his Master: it was all well withSeid. Yet Seid’s daughter found him weepingover the body;—the old gray-haired man melt-ing in tears! “What do I see?” said she.—“Yousee a friend weeping over his friend.”—Hewent out for the last time into the mosque, twodays before his death; asked, If he had injuredany man? Let his own back bear the stripes.


If he owed any man? A voice answered, “Yes,me three drachms,” borrowed on such an occa-sion. Mahomet ordered them to be paid: “Bet-ter be in shame now,” said he, “than at the Dayof Judgment.”—You remember Kadijah, andthe “No, by Allah!” Traits of that kind showus 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 free-dom from cant. He is a rough self-helping sonof the wilderness; does not pretend to be whathe is not. There is no ostentatious pride inhim; but neither does he go much upon hu-mility: he is there as he can be, in cloak andshoes of his own clouting; speaks plainly toall manner of Persian Kings, Greek Emperors,what it is they are bound to do; knows wellenough, about himself, “the respect due untothee.” In a life-and-death war with Bedouins,cruel things could not fail; but neither are actsof mercy, of noble natural pity and generos-ity wanting. Mahomet makes no apology forthe one, no boast of the other. They were eachthe 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 inhim; he does not mince matters! The War ofTabuc is a thing he often speaks of: his menrefused, many of them, to march on that occa-sion; pleaded the heat of the weather, the har-vest, and so forth; he can never forget that.Your harvest? It lasts for a day. What willbecome 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 thejust measure of your deeds at that Great Day.They will be weighed out to you; ye shall nothave short weight!—Everywhere he fixes thematter in his eye; he sees it: his heart, nowand then, is as if struck dumb by the great-ness of it. “Assuredly,” he says: that word,in the Koran, is written down sometimes asa sentence by itself: “Assuredly.”

No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is abusiness of Reprobation and Salvation withhim, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadlyearnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis,speculation, a kind of amateur-search forTruth, toying and coquetting with Truth: thisis the sorest sin. The root of all other imagin-able sins. It consists in the heart and soul ofthe man never having been open to Truth;—“living in a vain show.” Such a man not onlyutters and produces falsehoods, but is him-self a falsehood. The rational moral principle,spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, inquiet paralysis of life-death. The very false-hoods of Mahomet are truer than the truthsof such a man. He is the insincere man:smooth-polished, respectable in some timesand places; inoffensive, says nothing harsh toanybody; most cleanly,—just as carbonic acidis, which is death and poison.

We will not praise Mahomet’s moral pre-cepts as always of the superfinest sort; yet itcan be said that there is always a tendencyto good in them; that they are the true dic-tates of a heart aiming towards what is just


and true. The sublime forgiveness of Chris-tianity, turning of the other cheek when theone has been smitten, is not here: you are torevenge yourself, but it is to be in measure,not overmuch, or beyond justice. On the otherhand, Islam, like any great Faith, and insightinto the essence of man, is a perfect equalizerof men: the soul of one believer outweighs allearthly kingships; all men, according to Is-lam too, are equal. Mahomet insists not onthe propriety of giving alms, but on the neces-sity of it: he marks down by law how muchyou are to give, and it is at your peril if youneglect. The tenth part of a man’s annualincome, whatever that may be, is the prop-erty of the poor, of those that are afflicted andneed help. Good all this: the natural voice ofhumanity, of pity and equity dwelling in theheart of this wild Son of Nature speaks so.

Mahomet’s Paradise is sensual, his Hellsensual: true; in the one and the other thereis enough that shocks all spiritual feeling inus. But we are to recollect that the Arabsalready had it so; that Mahomet, in what-ever he changed of it, softened and diminishedall this. The worst sensualities, too, are thework of doctors, followers of his, not his work.In the Koran there is really very little saidabout the joys of Paradise; they are intimatedrather than insisted on. Nor is it forgottenthat the highest joys even there shall be spir-itual; the pure Presence of the Highest, thisshall infinitely transcend all other joys. Hesays, “Your salutation shall be, Peace.” Salam,Have Peace!—the thing that all rational souls


long for, and seek, vainly here below, as theone blessing. “Ye shall sit on seats, facing oneanother: all grudges shall be taken away outof your hearts.” All grudges! Ye shall love oneanother freely; for each of you, in the eyes ofhis brothers, there will be Heaven enough!

In reference to this of the sensual Paradiseand Mahomet’s sensuality, the sorest chapterof all for us, there were many things to besaid; which it is not convenient to enter uponhere. Two remarks only I shall make, andtherewith leave it to your candor. The firstis furnished me by Goethe; it is a casual hintof his which seems well worth taking note of.In one of his Delineations, in Meister’s Trav-els it is, the hero comes upon a Society of menwith very strange ways, one of which was this:“We require,” says the Master, “that each ofour people shall restrict himself in one direc-tion,” shall go right against his desire in onematter, and make himself do the thing he doesnot wish, “should we allow him the greaterlatitude on all other sides.” There seems tome a great justness in this. Enjoying thingswhich are pleasant; that is not the evil: it isthe reducing of our moral self to slavery bythem that is. Let a man assert withal thathe is king over his habitudes; that he couldand would shake them off, on cause shown:this is an excellent law. The Month Ramad-han for the Moslem, much in Mahomet’s Re-ligion, much in his own Life, bears in that di-rection; if not by forethought, or clear purposeof moral improvement on his part, then by acertain healthy manful instinct, which is as


good.But there is another thing to be said

about the Mahometan Heaven and Hell. Thisnamely, that, however gross and materialthey may be, they are an emblem of an ev-erlasting truth, not always so well remem-bered elsewhere. That gross sensual Paradiseof his; that horrible flaming Hell; the greatenormous Day of Judgment he perpetually in-sists on: what is all this but a rude shadow, inthe rude Bedouin imagination, of that grandspiritual Fact, and Beginning of Facts, whichit is ill for us too if we do not all know and feel:the Infinite Nature of Duty? That man’s ac-tions here are of infinite moment to him, andnever die or end at all; that man, with hislittle life, reaches upwards high as Heaven,downwards low as Hell, and in his threescoreyears of Time holds an Eternity fearfully andwonderfully hidden: all this had burnt it-self, as in flame-characters, into the wild Arabsoul. As in flame and lightning, it stands writ-ten there; awful, unspeakable, ever presentto him. With bursting earnestness, with afierce savage sincerity, half-articulating, notable to articulate, he strives to speak it, bodiesit forth in that Heaven and that Hell. Bodiedforth in what way you will, it is the first ofall truths. It is venerable under all embod-iments. What is the chief end of man herebelow? Mahomet has answered this ques-tion, in a way that might put some of us toshame! He does not, like a Bentham, a Pa-ley, take Right and Wrong, and calculate theprofit and loss, ultimate pleasure of the one


and of the other; and summing all up by ad-dition and subtraction into a net result, askyou, Whether on the whole the Right does notpreponderate considerably? No; it is not betterto do the one than the other; the one is to theother as life is to death,—as Heaven is to Hell.The one must in nowise be done, the otherin nowise left undone. You shall not mea-sure them; they are incommensurable: theone is death eternal to a man, the other is lifeeternal. Benthamee Utility, virtue by Profitand Loss; reducing this God’s-world to a deadbrute Steam-engine, the infinite celestial Soulof Man to a kind of Hay-balance for weighinghay and thistles on, pleasures and pains on:—If you ask me which gives, Mahomet or they,the beggarlier and falser view of Man and hisDestinies in this Universe, I will answer, it isnot Mahomet!—

On the whole, we will repeat that this Re-ligion of Mahomet’s is a kind of Christianity;has a genuine element of what is spirituallyhighest looking through it, not to be hidden byall its imperfections. The Scandinavian GodWish, the god of all rude men,—this has beenenlarged into a Heaven by Mahomet; but aHeaven symbolical of sacred Duty, and to beearned by faith and well-doing, by valiant ac-tion, and a divine patience which is still morevaliant. It is Scandinavian Paganism, anda truly celestial element superadded to that.Call it not false; look not at the falsehood ofit, look at the truth of it. For these twelvecenturies, 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 re-ligion heartily believed. These Arabs believetheir religion, and try to live by it! No Chris-tians, since the early ages, or only perhapsthe English Puritans in modern times, haveever stood by their Faith as the Moslem doby theirs,—believing it wholly, fronting Timewith it, and Eternity with it. This night thewatchman on the streets of Cairo when hecries, “Who goes?” will hear from the passen-ger, along with his answer, “There is no Godbut God.” Allah akbar, Islam, sounds throughthe souls, and whole daily existence, of thesedusky millions. Zealous missionaries preachit abroad among Malays, black Papuans, bru-tal Idolaters;—displacing what is worse, noth-ing that is better or good.

To the Arab Nation it was as a birth fromdarkness into light; Arabia first became aliveby means of it. A poor shepherd people, roam-ing unnoticed in its deserts since the creationof the world: a Hero-Prophet was sent down tothem with a word they could believe: see, theunnoticed becomes world-notable, the smallhas grown world-great; within one century af-terwards, Arabia is at Grenada on this hand,at Delhi on that;—glancing in valor and splen-dor and the light of genius, Arabia shinesthrough long ages over a great section of theworld. Belief is great, life-giving. The historyof a Nation becomes fruitful, soul-elevating,great, so soon as it believes. These Arabs,the man Mahomet, and that one century,—is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark,on a world of what seemed black unnotice-


able sand; but lo, the sand proves explo-sive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhito Grenada! I said, the Great Man was al-ways as lightning out of Heaven; the rest ofmen waited for him like fuel, and then theytoo would flame.


[May 12, 1840.]LECTURE III.

The Hero as Poet. Dante: Shaks-peare.The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, areproductions of old ages; not to be repeated inthe new. They presuppose a certain rudenessof conception, which the progress of mere sci-entific knowledge puts an end to. There needsto be, as it were, a world vacant, or almostvacant of scientific forms, if men in their lov-ing wonder are to fancy their fellow-man ei-ther a god or one speaking with the voice ofa god. Divinity and Prophet are past. Weare now to see our Hero in the less ambi-tious, but also less questionable, character ofPoet; a character which does not pass. ThePoet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages;whom all ages possess, when once he is pro-duced, whom the newest age as the oldest mayproduce;—and will produce, always when Na-ture pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul; inno age is it other than possible that he may beshaped into a Poet.

107


Hero, Prophet, Poet,—many differentnames, in different times, and places, do wegive to Great Men; according to varieties wenote in them, according to the sphere in whichthey have displayed themselves! We mightgive many more names, on this same princi-ple. I will remark again, however, as a factnot unimportant to be understood, that thedifferent sphere constitutes the grand originof such distinction; that the Hero can be Poet,Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, ac-cording to the kind of world he finds himselfborn into. I confess, I have no notion of atruly great man that could not be all sortsof men. The Poet who could merely sit ona chair, and compose stanzas, would nevermake a stanza worth much. He could not singthe Heroic warrior, unless he himself were atleast a Heroic warrior too. I fancy there isin him the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator,Philosopher;—in one or the other degree, hecould have been, he is all these. So too I can-not understand how a Mirabeau, with thatgreat glowing heart, with the fire that wasin it, with the bursting tears that were in it,could not have written verses, tragedies, po-ems, and touched all hearts in that way, hadhis course of life and education led him thith-erward. The grand fundamental character isthat of Great Man; that the man be great.Napoleon has words in him which are likeAusterlitz Battles. Louis Fourteenth’s Mar-shals are a kind of poetical men withal; thethings Turenne says are full of sagacity andgeniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. The

The Hero as Poet 109

great heart, the clear deep-seeing eye: there itlies; no man whatever, in what province so-ever, can prosper at all without these. Pe-trarch and Boccaccio did diplomatic messages,it seems, quite well: one can easily believeit; they had done things a little harder thanthese! Burns, a gifted song-writer, might havemade a still better Mirabeau. Shakspeare,—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, morethan all other men, in the self-same mould.Varieties of aptitude doubtless; but infinitelymore of circumstance; and far oftenest it is thelatter only that are looked to. But it is as withcommon men in the learning of trades. Youtake any man, as yet a vague capability of aman, who could be any kind of craftsman; andmake him into a smith, a carpenter, a mason:he is then and thenceforth that and nothingelse. And if, as Addison complains, you some-times see a street-porter, staggering under hisload on spindle-shanks, and near at hand atailor with the frame of a Samson handling abit of cloth and small Whitechapel needle,—it cannot be considered that aptitude of Na-ture alone has been consulted here either!—The Great Man also, to what shall he bebound apprentice? Given your Hero, is he tobecome Conqueror, King, Philosopher, Poet?It is an inexplicably complex controversial-calculation between the world and him! Hewill read the world and its laws; the worldwith its laws will be there to be read. What


the world, on this matter, shall permit and bidis, as we said, the most important fact aboutthe world.—

Poet and Prophet differ greatly in ourloose modern notions of them. In someold languages, again, the titles are synony-mous; Vates means both Prophet and Poet:and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet,well understood, have much kindred of mean-ing. Fundamentally indeed they are still thesame; in this most important respect espe-cially, That they have penetrated both of theminto the sacred mystery of the Universe; whatGoethe calls “the open secret.” “Which is thegreat secret?” asks one.—“The open secret,”—open to all, seen by almost none! That di-vine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Be-ings, “the Divine Idea of the World, that whichlies at the bottom of Appearance,” as Fichtestyles it; of which all Appearance, from thestarry sky to the grass of the field, but espe-cially the Appearance of Man and his work,is but the vesture, the embodiment that ren-ders it visible. This divine mystery is inall times and in all places; veritably is. Inmost times and places it is greatly overlooked;and the Universe, definable always in one orthe other dialect, as the realized Thought ofGod, is considered a trivial, inert, common-place matter,—as if, says the Satirist, it werea dead thing, which some upholsterer had puttogether! It could do no good, at present, tospeak much about this; but it is a pity for ev-ery one of us if we do not know it, live ever inthe knowledge of it. Really a most mournful


pity;—a failure to live at all, if we live other-wise!

But now, I say, whoever may forget this di-vine mystery, the Vates, whether Prophet orPoet, has penetrated into it; is a man senthither to make it more impressively known tous. That always is his message; he is to re-veal that to us,—that sacred mystery whichhe more than others lives ever present with.While others forget it, he knows it;—I mightsay, he has been driven to know it; withoutconsent asked of him, he finds himself livingin it, bound to live in it. Once more, hereis no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and Be-lief; this man too could not help being a sin-cere man! Whosoever may live in the showsof things, it is for him a necessity of natureto live in the very fact of things. A man oncemore, in earnest with the Universe, though allothers were but toying with it. He is a Vates,first of all, in virtue of being sincere. So farPoet and Prophet, participators in the “opensecret,” are one.

With respect to their distinction again:The Vates Prophet, we might say, has seizedthat sacred mystery rather on the moral side,as Good and Evil, Duty and Prohibition; theVates Poet on what the Germans call the aes-thetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. Theone we may call a revealer of what we areto do, the other of what we are to love. Butindeed these two provinces run into one an-other, and cannot be disjoined. The Prophettoo has his eye on what we are to love: howelse shall he know what it is we are to do? The


highest Voice ever heard on this earth saidwithal, “Consider the lilies of the field; theytoil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomonin all his glory was not arrayed like one ofthese.” A glance, that, into the deepest deepof Beauty. “The lilies of the field,”—dressedfiner than earthly princes, springing up therein the humble furrow-field; a beautiful eyelooking out on you, from the great inner Seaof Beauty! How could the rude Earth makethese, if her Essence, rugged as she looks andis, were not inwardly Beauty? In this point ofview, too, a saying of Goethe’s, which has stag-gered several, may have meaning: “The Beau-tiful,” he intimates, “is higher than the Good;the Beautiful includes in it the Good.” Thetrue Beautiful; which however, I have saidsomewhere, “differs from the false as Heavendoes from Vauxhall!” So much for the distinc-tion and identity of Poet and Prophet.—

In ancient and also in modern periods wefind a few Poets who are accounted perfect;whom it were a kind of treason to find faultwith. This is noteworthy; this is right: yetin strictness it is only an illusion. At bot-tom, clearly enough, there is no perfect Poet!A vein of Poetry exists in the hearts of allmen; no man is made altogether of Poetry.We are all poets when we read a poem well.The “imagination that shudders at the Hell ofDante,” is not that the same faculty, weakerin degree, as Dante’s own? No one but Shaks-peare can embody, out of Saxo Grammaticus,the story of Hamlet as Shakspeare did: butevery one models some kind of story out of


it; every one embodies it better or worse. Weneed not spend time in defining. Where thereis no specific difference, as between round andsquare, all definition must be more or less ar-bitrary. A man that has so much more of thepoetic element developed in him as to havebecome noticeable, will be called Poet by hisneighbors. World-Poets too, those whom weare to take for perfect Poets, are settled bycritics in the same way. One who rises so farabove the general level of Poets will, to suchand such critics, seem a Universal Poet; ashe ought to do. And yet it is, and must be,an arbitrary distinction. All Poets, all men,have some touches of the Universal; no man iswholly made of that. Most Poets are very soonforgotten: but not the noblest Shakspeare orHomer of them can be remembered forever;—a day comes when he too is not!

Nevertheless, you will say, there must bea difference between true Poetry and trueSpeech not poetical: what is the difference?On this point many things have been writ-ten, especially by late German Critics, someof which are not very intelligible at first. Theysay, for example, that the Poet has an infini-tude in him; communicates an Unendlichkeit,a certain character of “infinitude,” to whatso-ever he delineates. This, though not very pre-cise, yet on so vague a matter is worth remem-bering: if well meditated, some meaning willgradually be found in it. For my own part, Ifind considerable meaning in the old vulgardistinction of Poetry being metrical, havingmusic in it, being a Song. Truly, if pressed to


give a definition, one might say this as soon asanything else: If your delineation be authenti-cally musical, musical not in word only, but inheart and substance, in all the thoughts andutterances 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 isone spoken by a mind that has penetrated intothe inmost heart of the thing; detected the in-most mystery of it, namely the melody thatlies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coher-ence which is its soul, whereby it exists, andhas a right to be, here in this world. All in-most things, we may say, are melodious; natu-rally utter themselves in Song. The meaningof Song goes deep. Who is there that, in logicalwords, can express the effect music has on us?A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech,which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, andlets us for moments gaze into that!

Nay all speech, even the commonestspeech, has something of song in it: nota parish in the world but has its parish-accent;—the rhythm or tune to which the peo-ple there sing what they have to say! Accentis a kind of chanting; all men have accent oftheir own,—though they only notice that ofothers. Observe too how all passionate lan-guage does of itself become musical,—with afiner music than the mere accent; the speechof a man even in zealous anger becomes achant, a song. All deep things are Song. Itseems somehow the very central essence ofus, Song; as if all the rest were but wrap-pages and hulls! The primal element of us;


of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabledof Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling theyhad of the inner structure of Nature; thatthe soul of all her voices and utterances wasperfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will callmusical Thought. The Poet is he who thinksin that manner. At bottom, it turns still onpower of intellect; it is a man’s sincerity anddepth of vision that makes him a Poet. Seedeep enough, and you see musically; the heartof Nature being everywhere music, if you canonly reach it.

The Vates Poet, with his melodious Apoc-alypse of Nature, seems to hold a poor rankamong us, in comparison with the VatesProphet; his function, and our esteem of himfor his function, alike slight. The Hero takenas Divinity; the Hero taken as Prophet; thennext the Hero taken only as Poet: does itnot look as if our estimate of the Great Man,epoch after epoch, were continually diminish-ing? We take him first for a god, then forone god-inspired; and now in the next stageof it, his most miraculous word gains from usonly the recognition that he is a Poet, beauti-ful verse-maker, man of genius, or such like!—It looks so; but I persuade myself that intrin-sically it is not so. If we consider well, it willperhaps appear that in man still there is thesame altogether peculiar admiration for theHeroic Gift, by what name soever called, thatthere at any time was.

I should say, if we do not now reckon aGreat Man literally divine, it is that our no-tions of God, of the supreme unattainable


Fountain of Splendor, Wisdom and Heroism,are ever rising higher; not altogether that ourreverence for these qualities, as manifested inour like, is getting lower. This is worth takingthought of. Sceptical Dilettantism, the curseof these ages, a curse which will not last for-ever, does indeed in this the highest provinceof human things, as in all provinces, makesad work; and our reverence for great men,all crippled, blinded, paralytic as it is, comesout in poor plight, hardly recognizable. Menworship the shows of great men; the most dis-believe that there is any reality of great mento worship. The dreariest, fatalest faith; be-lieving which, one would literally despair ofhuman things. Nevertheless look, for exam-ple, at Napoleon! A Corsican lieutenant ofartillery; that is the show of him: yet is henot obeyed, worshipped after his sort, as allthe Tiaraed and Diademed of the world puttogether could not be? High Duchesses, andostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish rus-tic, Burns;—a strange feeling dwelling in eachthat they never heard a man like this; that,on the whole, this is the man! In the se-cret heart of these people it still dimly revealsitself, though there is no accredited way ofuttering it at present, that this rustic, withhis black brows and flashing sun-eyes, andstrange words moving laughter and tears, isof a dignity far beyond all others, incommen-surable with all others. Do not we feel it so?But now, were Dilettantism, Scepticism, Triv-iality, and all that sorrowful brood, cast outof us,—as, by God’s blessing, they shall one


day be; were faith in the shows of things en-tirely swept out, replaced by clear faith in thethings, so that a man acted on the impulse ofthat only, and counted the other non-extant;what a new livelier feeling towards this Burnswere it!

Nay here in these ages, such as they are,have we not two mere Poets, if not deified, yetwe may say beatified? Shakspeare and Danteare Saints of Poetry; really, if we will thinkof it, canonized, so that it is impiety to med-dle with them. The unguided instinct of theworld, working across all these perverse im-pediments, has arrived at such result. Danteand Shakspeare are a peculiar Two. Theydwell apart, in a kind of royal solitude; noneequal, none second to them: in the generalfeeling of the world, a certain transcenden-talism, a glory as of complete perfection, in-vests these two. They are canonized, thoughno Pope or Cardinals took hand in doing it!Such, in spite of every perverting influence, inthe most unheroic times, is still our indestruc-tible reverence for heroism.—We will look alittle at these Two, the Poet Dante and thePoet Shakspeare: what little it is permittedus to say here of the Hero as Poet will mostfitly arrange itself in that fashion.

Many volumes have been written by wayof commentary on Dante and his Book; yet,on the whole, with no great result. His Biog-raphy is, as it were, irrecoverably lost for us.An unimportant, wandering, sorrow-strickenman, not much note was taken of him whilehe lived; and the most of that has vanished, in


the long space that now intervenes. It is fivecenturies since he ceased writing and livinghere. After all commentaries, the Book itselfis mainly what we know of him. The Book;—and one might add that Portrait commonly at-tributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, youcannot help inclining to think genuine, who-ever 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 thesimple laurel wound round it; the deathlesssorrow and pain, the known victory which isalso deathless;—significant of the whole his-tory of Dante! I think it is the mournfulestface that ever was painted from reality; analtogether tragic, heart-affecting face. Thereis in it, as foundation of it, the softness, ten-derness, gentle affection as of a child; but allthis is as if congealed into sharp contradic-tion, into abnegation, isolation, proud hope-less pain. A soft ethereal soul looking outso stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as fromimprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it isa silent pain too, a silent scornful one: the lipis curled in a kind of godlike disdain of thething that is eating out his heart,—as if itwere withal a mean insignificant thing, as ifhe whom it had power to torture and stranglewere greater than it. The face of one whollyin protest, and lifelong unsurrendering battle,against the world. Affection all converted intoindignation: an implacable indignation; slow,equable, silent, like that of a god! The eye too,it looks out as in a kind of surprise, a kindof inquiry, Why the world was of such a sort?


This is Dante: so he looks, this “voice of tensilent centuries,” and sings us “his mystic un-fathomable song.”

The little that we know of Dante’s Lifecorresponds well enough with this Portraitand this Book. He was born at Florence, inthe upper class of society, in the year 1265.His education was the best then going; muchschool-divinity, Aristotelean logic, some Latinclassics,—no inconsiderable insight into cer-tain provinces of things: and Dante, with hisearnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt,learned better than most all that was learn-able. He has a clear cultivated understand-ing, and of great subtlety; this best fruit of ed-ucation he had contrived to realize from thesescholastics. He knows accurately and wellwhat lies close to him; but, in such a time,without printed books or free intercourse, hecould not know well what was distant: thesmall clear light, most luminous for what isnear, breaks itself into singular chiaroscurostriking on what is far off. This was Dante’slearning from the schools. In life, he had gonethrough the usual destinies; been twice outcampaigning as a soldier for the FlorentineState, been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifthyear, by natural gradation of talent and ser-vice, become one of the Chief Magistrates ofFlorence. He had met in boyhood a certainBeatrice Portinari, a beautiful little girl of hisown age and rank, and grown up thenceforthin partial sight of her, in some distant inter-course with her. All readers know his grace-ful 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 greatfigure in Dante’s Poem; seems to have made agreat figure in his life. Of all beings it mightseem as if she, held apart from him, far apartat last in the dim Eternity, were the only onehe had ever with his whole strength of affec-tion loved. She died: Dante himself was wed-ded; but it seems not happily, far from happily.I fancy, the rigorous earnest man, with hiskeen excitabilities, was not altogether easy tomake happy.

We will not complain of Dante’s miseries:had all gone right with him as he wished it, hemight have been Prior, Podesta, or whatsoeverthey call it, of Florence, well accepted amongneighbors,—and the world had wanted one ofthe most notable words ever spoken or sung.Florence would have had another prosperousLord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries con-tinued voiceless, and the ten other listeningcenturies (for there will be ten of them andmore) had no Divina Commedia to hear! Wewill complain of nothing. A nobler destiny wasappointed for this Dante; and he, strugglinglike a man led towards death and crucifixion,could not help fulfilling it. Give him the choiceof his happiness! He knew not, more than wedo, what was really happy, what was reallymiserable.

In Dante’s Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline,Bianchi-Neri, or some other confused distur-bances rose to such a height, that Dante,whose party had seemed the stronger, waswith his friends cast unexpectedly forth into


banishment; doomed thenceforth to a life ofwoe and wandering. His property was all con-fiscated and more; he had the fiercest feelingthat it was entirely unjust, nefarious in thesight of God and man. He tried what was inhim to get reinstated; tried even by warlikesurprisal, with arms in his hand: but it wouldnot do; bad only had become worse. Thereis a record, I believe, still extant in the Flo-rence Archives, dooming this Dante, whereso-ever caught, to be burnt alive. Burnt alive; soit stands, they say: a very curious civic docu-ment. Another curious document, some con-siderable number of years later, is a Letter ofDante’s to the Florentine Magistrates, writ-ten in answer to a milder proposal of theirs,that he should return on condition of apolo-gizing and paying a fine. He answers, withfixed stern pride: “If I cannot return withoutcalling myself guilty, I will never return, nun-quam revertar.”

For Dante there was now no home in thisworld. He wandered from patron to patron,from place to place; proving, in his own bitterwords, “How hard is the path, Come e durocalle.” The wretched are not cheerful com-pany. Dante, poor and banished, with hisproud earnest nature, with his moody humors,was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch re-ports of him that being at Can della Scala’scourt, and blamed one day for his gloom andtaciturnity, he answered in no courtier-likeway. Della Scala stood among his courtiers,with mimes and buffoons (nebulones ac histri-ones) making him heartily merry; when turn-


ing to Dante, he said: “Is it not strange, now,that this poor fool should make himself so en-tertaining; while you, a wise man, sit thereday after day, and have nothing to amuse uswith at all?” Dante answered bitterly: “No,not strange; your Highness is to recollect theProverb, Like to Like;”—given the amuser, theamusee must also be given! Such a man, withhis proud silent ways, with his sarcasms andsorrows, was not made to succeed at court.By degrees, it came to be evident to him thathe had no longer any resting-place, or hope ofbenefit, in this earth. The earthly world hadcast him forth, to wander, wander; no livingheart to love him now; for his sore miseriesthere was no solace here.

The deeper naturally would the EternalWorld impress itself on him; that awful re-ality over which, after all, this Time-world,with its Florences and banishments, only flut-ters as an unreal shadow. Florence thoushalt never see: but Hell and Purgatory andHeaven thou shalt surely see! What is Flo-rence, Can della Scala, and the World and Lifealtogether? Eternity: thither, of a truth, notelsewhither, art thou and all things bound!The great soul of Dante, homeless on earth,made its home more and more in that awfulother world. Naturally his thoughts broodedon that, as on the one fact important for him.Bodied or bodiless, it is the one fact impor-tant for all men:—but to Dante, in that age,it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientificshape; he no more doubted of that MalebolgePool, that it all lay there with its gloomy cir-


cles, with its alti guai, and that he himselfshould see it, than we doubt that we shouldsee Constantinople if we went thither. Dante’sheart, long filled with this, brooding over it inspeechless thought and awe, bursts forth atlength into “mystic unfathomable song;” andthis his Divine Comedy, the most remarkableof all modern Books, is the result.

It must have been a great solacement toDante, and was, as we can see, a proudthought for him at times, That he, here in ex-ile, could do this work; that no Florence, norno man or men, could hinder him from do-ing it, or even much help him in doing it. Heknew too, partly, that it was great; the great-est a man could do. “If thou follow thy star,Se tu segui tua stella,”—so could the Hero, inhis forsakenness, in his extreme need, stillsay to himself: “Follow thou thy star, thoushalt not fail of a glorious haven!” The la-bor of writing, we find, and indeed could knowotherwise, was great and painful for him; hesays, This Book, “which has made me lean formany years.” Ah yes, it was won, all of it,with pain and sore toil,—not in sport, but ingrim earnest. His Book, as indeed most goodBooks are, has been written, in many senses,with his heart’s blood. It is his whole his-tory, this Book. He died after finishing it; notyet very old, at the age of fifty-six;—broken-hearted rather, as is said. He lies buried in hisdeath-city Ravenna: Hic claudor Dantes pa-triis extorris ab oris. The Florentines beggedback his body, in a century after; the Ravennapeople 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. Co-leridge remarks very pertinently somewhere,that wherever you find a sentence musicallyworded, of true rhythm and melody in thewords, there is something deep and good inthe meaning too. For body and soul, wordand idea, go strangely together here as every-where. Song: we said before, it was the Heroicof Speech! All old Poems, Homer’s and therest, are authentically Songs. I would say, instrictness, that all right Poems are; that what-soever is not sung is properly no Poem, but apiece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,—tothe great injury of the grammar, to the greatgrief of the reader, for most part! What wewants to get at is the thought the man had, ifhe had any: why should he twist it into jin-gle, if he could speak it out plainly? It is onlywhen the heart of him is rapt into true pas-sion of melody, and the very tones of him, ac-cording to Coleridge’s remark, become musi-cal by the greatness, depth and music of histhoughts, that we can give him right to rhymeand sing; that we call him a Poet, and listen tohim as the Heroic of Speakers,—whose speechis Song. Pretenders to this are many; and toan earnest reader, I doubt, it is for most parta very melancholy, not to say an insupport-able business, that of reading rhyme! Rhymethat had no inward necessity to be rhymed;—it ought to have told us plainly, without anyjingle, what it was aiming at. I would advise


all men who can speak their thought, not tosing it; to understand that, in a serious time,among serious men, there is no vocation inthem for singing it. Precisely as we love thetrue song, and are charmed by it as by some-thing divine, so shall we hate the false song,and account it a mere wooden noise, a thinghollow, superfluous, altogether an insincereand offensive thing.

I give Dante my highest praise when I sayof his Divine Comedy that it is, in all senses,genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it thereis a canto fermo; it proceeds as by a chant.The language, his simple terza rima, doubt-less helped him in this. One reads along nat-urally with a sort of lilt. But I add, that itcould not be otherwise; for the essence andmaterial of the work are themselves rhyth-mic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincer-ity, makes it musical;—go deep enough, thereis music everywhere. A true inward symme-try, what one calls an architectural harmony,reigns in it, proportionates it all: architec-tural; which also partakes of the character ofmusic. The three kingdoms, Inferno, Purga-torio, Paradiso, look out on one another likecompartments of a great edifice; a great super-natural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern,solemn, awful; Dante’s World of Souls! It is,at bottom, the sincerest of all Poems; sincer-ity, here too„ we find to be the measure ofworth. It came deep out of the author’s heartof hearts; and it goes deep, and through longgenerations, into ours. The people of Verona,when they saw him on the streets, used to


say, “Eccovi l’ uom ch’ e stato all’ Inferno, See,there is the man that was in Hell!” Ah yes,he had been in Hell;—in Hell enough, in longsevere sorrow and struggle; as the like of himis pretty sure to have been. Commedias thatcome out divine are not accomplished other-wise. Thought, true labor of any kind, high-est virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain?Born as out of the black whirlwind;—true ef-fort, in fact, as of a captive struggling to freehimself: that is Thought. In all ways we are“to become perfect through suffering.”—But,as I say, no work known to me is so elabo-rated as this of Dante’s. It has all been as ifmolten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. Ithad made him “lean” for many years. Not thegeneral whole only; every compartment of itis worked out, with intense earnestness, intotruth, into clear visuality. Each answers tothe other; each fits in its place, like a marblestone accurately hewn and polished. It is thesoul of Dante, and in this the soul of the mid-dle ages, rendered forever rhythmically visi-ble there. No light task; a right intense one:but a task which is done.

Perhaps one would say, intensity, with themuch that depends on it, is the prevailingcharacter of Dante’s genius. Dante does notcome before us as a large catholic mind; ratheras a narrow, and even sectarian mind: it ispartly the fruit of his age and position, butpartly too of his own nature. His greatnesshas, in all senses, concentred itself into fieryemphasis and depth. He is world-great notbecause he is worldwide, but because he is


world-deep. Through all objects he piercesas it were down into the heart of Being. Iknow nothing so intense as Dante. Consider,for example, to begin with the outermost de-velopment of his intensity, consider how hepaints. He has a great power of vision; seizesthe very type of a thing; presents that andnothing more. You remember that first viewhe gets of the Hall of Dite: red pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim im-mensity of gloom;—so vivid, so distinct, visi-ble at once and forever! It is as an emblemof the whole genius of Dante. There is abrevity, an abrupt precision in him: Tacitusis not briefer, more condensed; and then inDante it seems a natural condensation, spon-taneous to the man. One smiting word; andthen there is silence, nothing more said. Hissilence is more eloquent than words. It isstrange with what a sharp decisive grace hesnatches the true likeness of a matter: cutsinto the matter as with a pen of fire. Plu-tus, the blustering giant, collapses at Virgil’srebuke; it is “as the sails sink, the mast be-ing suddenly broken.” Or that poor BrunettoLatini, with the cotto aspetto, “face baked,”parched brown and lean; and the “fiery snow”that falls on them there, a “fiery snow withoutwind,” slow, deliberate, never-ending! Or thelids of those Tombs; square sarcophaguses,in that silent dim-burning Hall, each withits Soul in torment; the lids laid open there;they are to be shut at the Day of Judgment,through Eternity. And how Farinata rises;and how Cavalcante falls—at hearing of his


Son, and the past tense “fue”! The very move-ments in Dante have something brief; swift,decisive, almost military. It is of the inmostessence of his genius this sort of painting. Thefiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent,passionate, with its quick abrupt movements,its silent “pale rages,” speaks itself in thesethings.

For though this of painting is one of theoutermost developments of a man, it comeslike all else from the essential faculty of him;it is physiognomical of the whole man. Finda man whose words paint you a likeness, youhave found a man worth something; mark hismanner of doing it, as very characteristic ofhim. In the first place, he could not have dis-cerned the object at all, or seen the vital typeof it, unless he had, what we may call, sym-pathized with it,—had sympathy in him to be-stow on objects. He must have been sincereabout it too; sincere and sympathetic: a manwithout worth cannot give you the likenessof any object; he dwells in vague outward-ness, fallacy and trivial hearsay, about all ob-jects. And indeed may we not say that intel-lect altogether expresses itself in this powerof discerning what an object is? Whatsoeverof faculty a man’s mind may have will comeout here. Is it even of business, a matter tobe done? The gifted man is he who sees theessential point, and leaves all the rest asideas surplusage: it is his faculty too, the manof business’s faculty, that he discern the truelikeness, not the false superficial one, of thething he has got to work in. And how much


of morality is in the kind of insight we get ofanything; “the eye seeing in all things what itbrought with it the faculty of seeing”! To themean eye all things are trivial, as certainlyas to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael,the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No most gifted eye can ex-haust the significance of any object. In thecommonest human face there lies more thanRaphael will take away with him.

Dante’s painting is not graphic only, brief,true, and of a vividness as of fire in dark night;taken on the wider scale, it is every way noble,and the outcome of a great soul. Francescaand her Lover, what qualities in that! A thingwoven as out of rainbows, on a ground of eter-nal black. A small flute-voice of infinite wailspeaks there, into our very heart of hearts. Atouch of womanhood in it too: della bella per-sona, che mi fu tolta; and how, even in the Pitof woe, it is a solace that he will never partfrom her! Saddest tragedy in these alti guai.And the racking winds, in that aer bruno,whirl them away again, to wail forever!—Strange to think: Dante was the friend ofthis poor Francesca’s father; Francesca her-self may have sat upon the Poet’s knee, as abright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yetalso infinite rigor of law: it is so Nature ismade; it is so Dante discerned that she wasmade. What a paltry notion is that of his Di-vine Comedy’s being a poor splenetic impotentterrestrial libel; putting those into Hell whomhe could not be avenged upon on earth! I sup-pose if ever pity, tender as a mother’s, was in


the heart of any man, it was in Dante’s. But aman who does not know rigor cannot pity ei-ther. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic,—sentimentality, or little better. I know not inthe world an affection equal to that of Dante.It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pity-ing love: like the wail of AEolian harps, soft,soft; like a child’s young heart;—and then thatstern, sore-saddened heart! These longingsof his towards his Beatrice; their meeting to-gether in the Paradiso; his gazing in her puretransfigured eyes, her that had been purifiedby death so long, separated from him so far:—one likens it to the song of angels; it is amongthe purest utterances of affection, perhaps thevery purest, that ever came out of a humansoul.

For the intense Dante is intense in allthings; he has got into the essence of all. Hisintellectual insight as painter, on occasion tooas reasoner, is but the result of all other sortsof intensity. Morally great, above all, we mustcall him; it is the beginning of all. His scorn,his grief are as transcendent as his love;—asindeed, what are they but the inverse or con-verse of his love? “A Dio spiacenti ed a’ nemicisui, Hateful to God and to the enemies of God:“lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reprobationand aversion; “Non ragionam di lor, We willnot speak of them, look only and pass.” Orthink of this; “They have not the hope to die,Non han speranza di morte.” One day, it hadrisen sternly benign on the scathed heart ofDante, that he, wretched, never-resting, wornas he was, would full surely die; “that Destiny


itself could not doom him not to die.” Suchwords are in this man. For rigor, earnestnessand depth, he is not to be paralleled in themodern world; to seek his parallel we must gointo the Hebrew Bible, and live with the an-tique Prophets there.

I do not agree with much modern criticism,in greatly preferring the Inferno to the twoother parts of the Divine Commedia. Suchpreference belongs, I imagine, to our generalByronism of taste, and is like to be a tran-sient feeling. Thc Purgatorio and Paradiso,especially the former, one would almost say, iseven more excellent than it. It is a noble thingthat Purgatorio, “Mountain of Purification;”an emblem of the noblest conception of thatage. If sin is so fatal, and Hell is and mustbe so rigorous, awful, yet in Repentance too isman purified; Repentance is the grand Chris-tian act. It is beautiful how Dante works itout. The tremolar dell’ onde, that “trembling”of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleamof morning, dawning afar on the wanderingTwo, is as the type of an altered mood. Hopehas now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in com-pany still with heavy sorrow. The obscure so-journ of demons and reprobate is underfoot; asoft breathing of penitence mounts higher andhigher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. “Prayfor me,” the denizens of that Mount of Painall say to him. “Tell my Giovanna to prayfor me,” my daughter Giovanna; “I think hermother loves me no more!” They toil painfullyup by that winding steep, “bent down like cor-bels of a building,” some of them,—crushed


together so “for the sin of pride;” yet never-theless in years, in ages and aeons, they shallhave 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; thewhole Mountain shakes with joy, and a psalmof praise rises, when one soul has perfectedrepentance and got its sin and misery left be-hind! I call all this a noble embodiment of atrue noble thought.

But indeed the Three compartments mutu-ally support one another, are indispensable toone another. The Paradiso, a kind of inarticu-late music to me, is the redeeming side of theInferno; the Inferno without it were untrue.All three make up the true Unseen World, asfigured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages;a thing forever memorable, forever true in theessence of it, to all men. It was perhaps de-lineated in no human soul with such depthof veracity as in this of Dante’s; a man sentto sing it, to keep it long memorable. Verynotable with what brief simplicity he passesout of the every-day reality, into the Invisibleone; and in the second or third stanza, we findourselves in the World of Spirits; and dwellthere, as among things palpable, indubitable!To Dante they were so; the real world, as itis called, and its facts, was but the thresholdto an infinitely higher Fact of a World. At bot-tom, the one was as preternatural as the other.Has not each man a soul? He will not only bea spirit, but is one. To the earnest Dante it isall one visible Fact; he believes it, sees it; isthe 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 representationof his Belief about this Universe:—some Criticin a future age, like those Scandinavian onesthe other day, who has ceased altogether tothink as Dante did, may find this too all an“Allegory,” perhaps an idle Allegory! It is asublime embodiment, or sublimest, of the soulof Christianity. It expresses, as in huge world-wide architectural emblems, how the Chris-tian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the twopolar elements of this Creation, on which itall turns; that these two differ not by prefer-ability of one to the other, but by incompat-ibility absolute and infinite; that the one isexcellent and high as light and Heaven, theother hideous, black as Gehenna and the Pitof Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Pen-itence, with everlasting Pity,—all Christian-ism, as Dante and the Middle Ages had it,is emblemed here. Emblemed: and yet, as Iurged the other day, with what entire truthof purpose; how unconscious of any emblem-ing! Hell, Purgatory, Paradise: these thingswere not fashioned as emblems; was there,in our Modern European Mind, any thoughtat all of their being emblems! Were they notindubitable awful facts; the whole heart ofman taking them for practically true, all Na-ture everywhere confirming them? So is italways in these things. Men do not believean Allegory. The future Critic, whatever hisnew thought may be, who considers this ofDante to have been all got up as an Allegory,


will commit one sore mistake!–Paganism werecognized as a veracious expression of theearnest awe-struck feeling of man towards theUniverse; veracious, true once, and still notwithout worth for us. But mark here the dif-ference of Paganism and Christianism; onegreat difference. Paganism emblemed chieflythe Operations of Nature; the destinies, ef-forts, combinations, vicissitudes of things andmen in this world; Christianism emblemedthe Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law ofMan. One was for the sensuous nature: arude helpless utterance of the first Thoughtof men,—the chief recognized virtue, Courage,Superiority to Fear. The other was not for thesensuous nature, but for the moral. What aprogress is here, if in that one respect only!—

And so in this Dante, as we said, hadten silent centuries, in a very strange way,found a voice. The Divina Commedia is ofDante’s writing; yet in truth it belongs to tenChristian centuries, only the finishing of itis Dante’s. So always. The craftsman there,the smith with that metal of his, with thesetools, with these cunning methods,—how lit-tle of all he does is properly his work! All pastinventive men work there with him;—as in-deed with all of us, in all things. Dante is thespokesman of the Middle Ages; the Thoughtthey lived by stands here, in everlasting mu-sic. These sublime ideas of his, terrible andbeautiful, are the fruit of the Christian Med-itation of all the good men who had gone be-fore him. Precious they; but also is not he pre-cious? 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 hu-man souls, and of the highest thing that Eu-rope had hitherto realized for itself? Chris-tianism, as Dante sings it, is another than Pa-ganism in the rude Norse mind; another than“Bastard Christianism” half-articulately spo-ken in the Arab Desert, seven hundred yearsbefore!—The noblest idea made real hithertoamong men, is sung, and emblemed forthabidingly, by one of the noblest men. In theone sense and in the other, are we not rightglad to possess it? As I calculate, it may lastyet for long thousands of years. For the thingthat is uttered from the inmost parts of aman’s soul, differs altogether from what is ut-tered by the outer part. The outer is of the day,under the empire of mode; the outer passesaway, in swift endless changes; the inmost isthe same yesterday, to-day and forever. Truesouls, in all generations of the world, who lookon this Dante, will find a brotherhood in him;the deep sincerity of his thoughts, his woesand hopes, will speak likewise to their sincer-ity; they will feel that this Dante too was abrother. Napoleon in Saint Helena is charmedwith the genial veracity of old Homer. The old-est Hebrew Prophet, under a vesture the mostdiverse from ours, does yet, because he speaksfrom the heart of man, speak to all men’shearts. It is the one sole secret of continuinglong memorable. Dante, for depth of sincerity,is like an antique Prophet too; his words, liketheirs, come from his very heart. One need


not wonder if it were predicted that his Poemmight be the most enduring thing our Europehas yet made; for nothing so endures as atruly spoken word. All cathedrals, pontificali-ties, brass and stone, and outer arrangementnever so lasting, are brief in comparison to anunfathomable heart-song like this: one feelsas if it might survive, still of importance tomen, when these had all sunk into new irrec-ognizable combinations, and had ceased indi-vidually to be. Europe has made much; greatcities, great empires, encyclopaedias, creeds,bodies of opinion and practice: but it has madelittle of the class of Dante’s Thought. Homeryet is veritably present face to face with everyopen soul of us; and Greece, where is it? Des-olate for thousands of years; away, vanished;a bewildered heap of stones and rubbish, thelife and existence of it all gone. Like a dream;like the dust of King Agamemnon! Greecewas; Greece, except in the words it spoke, isnot.

The uses of this Dante? We will not saymuch about his “uses.” A human soul whohas once got into that primal element of Song,and sung forth fitly somewhat therefrom, hasworked in the depths of our existence; feed-ing through long times the life-roots of all ex-cellent human things whatsoever,—in a waythat “utilities” will not succeed well in calcu-lating! We will not estimate the Sun by thequantity of gaslight it saves us; Dante shallbe invaluable, or of no value. One remark Imay make: the contrast in this respect be-tween the Hero-Poet and the Hero-Prophet.


In a hundred years, Mahomet, as we saw, hadhis Arabians at Grenada and at Delhi; Dante’sItalians seem to be yet very much where theywere. Shall we say, then, Dante’s effect onthe world was small in comparison? Not so:his arena is far more restricted; but also itis far nobler, clearer;—perhaps not less butmore important. Mahomet speaks to greatmasses of men, in the coarse dialect adaptedto such; a dialect filled with inconsistencies,crudities, follies: on the great masses alonecan he act, and there with good and with evilstrangely blended. Dante speaks to the noble,the pure and great, in all times and places.Neither does he grow obsolete, as the otherdoes. Dante burns as a pure star, fixed therein the firmament, at which the great and thehigh of all ages kindle themselves: he is thepossession of all the chosen of the world foruncounted time. Dante, one calculates, maylong survive Mahomet. In this way the bal-ance may be made straight again.

But, at any rate, it is not by what is calledtheir effect on the world, by what we can judgeof their effect there, that a man and his workare measured. Effect? Influence? Utility? Leta man do his work; the fruit of it is the careof Another than he. It will grow its own fruit;and whether embodied in Caliph Thrones andArabian Conquests, so that it “fills all Morn-ing and Evening Newspapers,” and all Histo-ries, which are a kind of distilled Newspapers;or not embodied so at all;—what matters that?That is not the real fruit of it! The ArabianCaliph, in so far only as he did something, was


something. If the great Cause of Man, andMan’s work in God’s Earth, got no furtherancefrom the Arabian Caliph, then no matter howmany scimetars he drew, how many gold pi-asters pocketed, and what uproar and blaringhe made in this world,—he was but a loud-sounding inanity and futility; at bottom, hewas not at all. Let us honor the great empireof Silence, once more! The boundless treasurywhich we do not jingle in our pockets, or countup and present before men! It is perhaps, ofall things, the usefulest for each of us to do, inthese loud times.—

As Dante, the Italian man, was sent intoour world to embody musically the Religionof the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Mod-ern Europe, its Inner Life; so Shakspeare, wemay say, embodies for us the Outer Life of ourEurope as developed then, its chivalries, cour-tesies, humors, ambitions, what practical wayof thinking, acting, looking at the world, menthen had. As in Homer we may still construeOld Greece; so in Shakspeare and Dante, af-ter thousands of years, what our modern Eu-rope was, in Faith and in Practice, will still belegible. Dante has given us the Faith or soul;Shakspeare, in a not less noble way, has givenus the Practice or body. This latter also wewere to have; a man was sent for it, the manShakspeare. Just when that chivalry way oflife had reached its last finish, and was onthe point of breaking down into slow or swiftdissolution, as we now see it everywhere, thisother sovereign Poet, with his seeing eye, withhis perennial singing voice, was sent to take


note of it, to give long-enduring record of it.Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce as the centralfire of the world; Shakspeare, wide, placid,far-seeing, as the Sun, the upper light of theworld. Italy produced the one world-voice; weEnglish had the honor of producing the other.

Curious enough how, as it were by mere ac-cident, this man came to us. I think always, sogreat, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is thisShakspeare, had the Warwickshire Squire notprosecuted him for deer-stealing, we had per-haps never heard of him as a Poet! The woodsand skies, the rustic Life of Man in Stratfordthere, had been enough for this man! Butindeed that strange outbudding of our wholeEnglish Existence, which we call the Eliza-bethan Era, did not it too come as of its ownaccord? The “Tree Igdrasil” buds and with-ers by its own laws,—too deep for our scan-ning. Yet it does bud and wither, and everybough and leaf of it is there, by fixed eter-nal laws; not a Sir Thomas Lucy but comesat the hour fit for him. Curious, I say, and notsufficiently considered: how everything doesco-operate with all; not a leaf rotting on thehighway but is indissoluble portion of solarand stellar systems; no thought, word or act ofman but has sprung withal out of all men, andworks sooner or later, recognizably or irrecog-nizable, on all men! It is all a Tree: circulationof sap and influences, mutual communicationof every minutest leaf with the lowest talon ofa root, with every other greatest and minutestportion of the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, thathas its roots down in the Kingdoms of Hela


and Death, and whose boughs overspread thehighest Heaven!—

In some sense it may be said that this glo-rious Elizabethan Era with its Shakspeare,as the outcome and flowerage of all whichhad preceded it, is itself attributable to theCatholicism of the Middle Ages. The Chris-tian Faith, which was the theme of Dante’sSong, had produced this Practical Life whichShakspeare was to sing. For Religion then,as it now and always is, was the soul of Prac-tice; the primary vital fact in men’s life. Andremark here, as rather curious, that Middle-Age Catholicism was abolished, so far as Actsof Parliament could abolish it, before Shak-speare, the noblest product of it, made hisappearance. He did make his appearancenevertheless. Nature at her own time, withCatholicism or what else might be necessary,sent him forth; taking small thought of Actsof Parliament. King Henrys, Queen Eliz-abeths go their way; and Nature too goeshers. Acts of Parliament, on the whole,are small, notwithstanding the noise theymake. What Act of Parliament, debate at St.Stephen’s, on the hustings or elsewhere, wasit that brought this Shakspeare into being?No dining at Freemason’s Tavern, openingsubscription-lists, selling of shares, and infi-nite other jangling and true or false endeav-oring! This Elizabethan Era, and all its no-bleness and blessedness, came without procla-mation, preparation of ours. Priceless Shaks-peare was the free gift of Nature; given alto-gether silently;—received altogether silently,


as if it had been a thing of little account. Andyet, very literally, it is a priceless thing. Oneshould look at that side of matters too.

Of this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps theopinion one sometimes hears a little idola-trously expressed is, in fact, the right one; Ithink the best judgment not of this countryonly, but of Europe at large, is slowly point-ing to the conclusion, that Shakspeare is thechief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest in-tellect who, in our recorded world, has leftrecord of himself in the way of Literature. Onthe whole, I know not such a power of vision,such a faculty of thought, if we take all thecharacters of it, in any other man. Such acalmness of depth; placid joyous strength; allthings imaged in that great soul of his so trueand clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea!It has been said, that in the constructing ofShakspeare’s Dramas there is, apart from allother “faculties” as they are called, an under-standing manifested, equal to that in Bacon’sNovum Organum That is true; and it is not atruth that strikes every one. It would becomemore apparent if we tried, any of us for him-self, how, out of Shakspeare’s dramatic ma-terials, we could fashion such a result! Thebuilt house seems all so fit,—every way asit should be, as if it came there by its ownlaw and the nature of things,—we forget therude disorderly quarry it was shaped from.The very perfection of the house, as if Na-ture herself had made it, hides the builder’smerit. Perfect, more perfect than any otherman, we may call Shakspeare in this: he dis-


cerns, knows as by instinct, what condition heworks under, what his materials are, what hisown force and its relation to them is. It isnot a transitory glance of insight that will suf-fice; it is deliberate illumination of the wholematter; it is a calmly seeing eye; a great intel-lect, in short. How a man, of some wide thingthat he has witnessed, will construct a narra-tive, what kind of picture and delineation hewill give of it,—is the best measure you couldget of what intellect is in the man. Which cir-cumstance is vital and shall stand prominent;which unessential, fit to be suppressed; whereis the true beginning, the true sequence andending? To find out this, you task the wholeforce of insight that is in the man. He mustunderstand the thing; according to the depthof his understanding, will the fitness of his an-swer be. You will try him so. Does like joinitself to like; does the spirit of method stirin that confusion, so that its embroilment be-comes order? Can the man say, Fiat lux, Letthere be light; and out of chaos make a world?Precisely as there is light in himself, will heaccomplish this.

Or indeed we may say again, it is in whatI called Portrait-painting, delineating of menand things, especially of men, that Shaks-peare is great. All the greatness of the mancomes out decisively here. It is unexampled, Ithink, that calm creative perspicacity of Shak-speare. The thing he looks at reveals not thisor that face of it, but its inmost heart, andgeneric secret: it dissolves itself as in light be-fore him, so that he discerns the perfect struc-


ture of it. Creative, we said: poetic creation,what is this too but seeing the thing suffi-ciently? The word that will describe the thing,follows of itself from such clear intense sightof the thing. And is not Shakspeare’s moral-ity, his valor, candor, tolerance, truthfulness;his whole victorious strength and greatness,which can triumph over such obstructions,visible there too? Great as the world. Notwisted, poor convex-concave mirror, reflect-ing all objects with its own convexities andconcavities; a perfectly level mirror;—that isto say withal, if we will understand it, a manjustly related to all things and men, a goodman. It is truly a lordly spectacle how thisgreat soul takes in all kinds of men and ob-jects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Cori-olanus; sets them all forth to us in their roundcompleteness; loving, just, the equal brotherof all. Novum Organum, and all the intellectyou will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondaryorder; earthy, material, poor in comparisonwith this. Among modern men, one finds, instrictness, almost nothing of the same rank.Goethe alone, since the days of Shakspeare,reminds me of it. Of him too you say that hesaw the object; you may say what he himselfsays of Shakspeare: “His characters are likewatches with dial-plates of transparent crys-tal; they show you the hour like others, andthe inward mechanism also is all visible.”

The seeing eye! It is this that discloses theinner harmony of things; what Nature meant,what musical idea Nature has wrapped up inthese often rough embodiments. Something


she did mean. To the seeing eye that some-thing were discernible. Are they base, mis-erable things? You can laugh over them, youcan weep over them; you can in some way orother genially relate yourself to them;—youcan, at lowest, hold your peace about them,turn away your own and others’ face fromthem, till the hour come for practically exter-minating and extinguishing them! At bottom,it is the Poet’s first gift, as it is all men’s, thathe have intellect enough. He will be a Poet ifhe have: a Poet in word; or failing that, per-haps still better, a Poet in act. Whether hewrite at all; and if so, whether in prose or inverse, will depend on accidents: who knows onwhat extremely trivial accidents,—perhaps onhis having had a singing-master, on his beingtaught to sing in his boyhood! But the facultywhich enables him to discern the inner heartof things, and the harmony that dwells there(for whatsoever exists has a harmony in theheart of it, or it would not hold together andexist), is not the result of habits or accidents,but the gift of Nature herself; the primary out-fit for a Heroic Man in what sort soever. To thePoet, as to every other, we say first of all, See.If you cannot do that, it is of no use to keepstringing rhymes together, jingling sensibili-ties against each other, and name yourself aPoet; there is no hope for you. If you can, thereis, in prose or verse, in action or speculation,all manner of hope. The crabbed old School-master used to ask, when they brought him anew pupil, “But are ye sure he’s not a dunce?”Why, really one might ask the same thing, in


regard to every man proposed for whatsoeverfunction; and consider it as the one inquiryneedful: Are ye sure he’s not a dunce? Thereis, in this world, no other entirely fatal person.

For, in fact, I say the degree of vision thatdwells in a man is a correct measure of theman. If called to define Shakspeare’s faculty,I should say superiority of Intellect, and thinkI had included all under that. What indeedare faculties? We talk of faculties as if theywere distinct, things separable; as if a manhad intellect, imagination, fancy, &c., as hehas hands, feet and arms. That is a capitalerror. Then again, we hear of a man’s “intel-lectual nature,” and of his “moral nature,” as ifthese again were divisible, and existed apart.Necessities of language do perhaps prescribesuch forms of utterance; we must speak, I amaware, in that way, if we are to speak at all.But words ought not to harden into thingsfor us. It seems to me, our apprehension ofthis matter is, for most part, radically falsi-fied thereby. We ought to know withal, andto keep forever in mind, that these divisionsare at bottom but names; that man’s spiri-tual nature, the vital Force which dwells inhim, is essentially one and indivisible; thatwhat we call imagination, fancy, understand-ing, and so forth, are but different figures ofthe same Power of Insight, all indissolublyconnected with each other, physiognomicallyrelated; that if we knew one of them, we mightknow all of them. Morality itself, what we callthe moral quality of a man, what is this butanother side of the one vital Force whereby he


is and works? All that a man does is phys-iognomical of him. You may see how a manwould fight, by the way in which he sings; hiscourage, or want of courage, is visible in theword he utters, in the opinion he has formed,no less than in the stroke he strikes. He isone; and preaches the same Self abroad in allthese ways.

Without hands a man might have feet, andcould still walk: but, consider it,—withoutmorality, intellect were impossible for him; athoroughly immoral man could not know any-thing at all! To know a thing, what we cancall knowing, a man must first love the thing,sympathize with it: that is, be virtuously re-lated to it. If he have not the justice to putdown his own selfishness at every turn, thecourage to stand by the dangerous-true at ev-ery turn, how shall he know? His virtues, allof them, will lie recorded in his knowledge.Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad,to the selfish and the pusillanimous forever asealed book: what such can know of Natureis mean, superficial, small; for the uses of theday merely.—But does not the very Fox knowsomething of Nature? Exactly so: it knowswhere the geese lodge! The human Reynard,very frequent everywhere in the world, whatmore does he know but this and the like ofthis? Nay, it should be considered too, thatif the Fox had not a certain vulpine moral-ity, he could not even know where the geesewere, or get at the geese! If he spent histime in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on hisown misery, his ill usage by Nature, Fortune


and other Foxes, and so forth; and had notcourage, promptitude, practicality, and othersuitable vulpine gifts and graces, he wouldcatch no geese. We may say of the Fox too,that his morality and insight are of the samedimensions; different faces of the same inter-nal unity of vulpine life!—These things areworth stating; for the contrary of them actswith manifold very baleful perversion, in thistime: what limitations, modifications they re-quire, your own candor will supply.

If I say, therefore, that Shakspeare is thegreatest of Intellects, I have said all concern-ing him. But there is more in Shakspeare’sintellect than we have yet seen. It is whatI call an unconscious intellect; there is morevirtue in it than he himself is aware of. No-valis beautifully remarks of him, that thoseDramas of his are Products of Nature too,deep as Nature herself. I find a great truthin this saying. Shakspeare’s Art is not Ar-tifice; the noblest worth of it is not there byplan or precontrivance. It grows up from thedeeps of Nature, through this noble sinceresoul, who is a voice of Nature. The latestgenerations of men will find new meanings inShakspeare, new elucidations of their own hu-man being; “new harmonies with the infinitestructure of the Universe; concurrences withlater ideas, affinities with the higher powersand senses of man.” This well deserves medi-tating. It is Nature’s highest reward to a truesimple great soul, that he get thus to be apart of herself. Such a man’s works, what-soever he with utmost conscious exertion and


forethought shall accomplish, grow up withalunconsciously, from the unknown deeps inhim;—as the oak-tree grows from the Earth’sbosom, as the mountains and waters shapethemselves; with a symmetry grounded onNature’s own laws, conformable to all Truthwhatsoever. How much in Shakspeare lieshid; his sorrows, his silent struggles knownto himself; much that was not known at all,not speakable at all: like roots, like sap andforces working underground! Speech is great;but Silence is greater.

Withal the joyful tranquillity of this manis notable. I will not blame Dante for his mis-ery: it is as battle without victory; but truebattle,—the first, indispensable thing. Yet Icall Shakspeare greater than Dante, in thathe fought truly, and did conquer. Doubt it not,he had his own sorrows: those Sonnets of hiswill even testify expressly in what deep wa-ters he had waded, and swum struggling forhis life;—as what man like him ever failed tohave to do? It seems to me a heedless notion,our common one, that he sat like a bird onthe bough; and sang forth, free and off-hand,never knowing the troubles of other men. Notso; with no man is it so. How could a mantravel forward from rustic deer-poaching tosuch tragedy-writing, and not fall in with sor-rows by the way? Or, still better, how coulda man delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, aMacbeth, so many suffering heroic hearts, ifhis own heroic heart had never suffered?—And now, in contrast with all this, observehis mirthfulness, his genuine overflowing love


of laughter! You would say, in no point doeshe exaggerate but only in laughter. Fiery ob-jurgations, words that pierce and burn, areto be found in Shakspeare; yet he is alwaysin measure here; never what Johnson wouldremark as a specially “good hater.” But hislaughter seems to pour from him in floods; heheaps all manner of ridiculous nicknames onthe butt he is bantering, tumbles and tosseshim in all sorts of horse-play; you would say,with his whole heart laughs. And then, ifnot always the finest, it is always a geniallaughter. Not at mere weakness, at miseryor poverty; never. No man who can laugh,what we call laughing, will laugh at thesethings. It is some poor character only desiringto laugh, and have the credit of wit, that doesso. Laughter means sympathy; good laughteris not “the crackling of thorns under the pot.”Even at stupidity and pretension this Shaks-peare does not laugh otherwise than genially.Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts;and we dismiss them covered with explosionsof laughter: but we like the poor fellows onlythe better for our laughing; and hope they willget on well there, and continue Presidents ofthe City-watch. Such laughter, like sunshineon the deep sea, is very beautiful to me.

We have no room to speak of Shakspeare’sindividual works; though perhaps there ismuch still waiting to be said on that head.Had we, for instance, all his plays reviewed asHamlet, in Wilhelm Meister, is! A thing whichmight, one day, be done. August WilhelmSchlegel has a remark on his Historical Plays,


Henry Fifth and the others, which is worthremembering. He calls them a kind of Na-tional Epic. Marlborough, you recollect, said,he knew no English History but what he hadlearned from Shakspeare. There are really, ifwe look to it, few as memorable Histories. Thegreat salient points are admirably seized; allrounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic co-herence; it is, as Schlegel says, epic;—as in-deed all delineation by a great thinker willbe. There are right beautiful things in thosePieces, which indeed together form one beau-tiful thing. That battle of Agincourt strikesme as one of the most perfect things, in itssort, we anywhere have of Shakspeare’s. Thedescription of the two hosts: the worn-out,jaded English; the dread hour, big with des-tiny, when the battle shall begin; and thenthat deathless valor: “Ye good yeomen, whoselimbs were made in England!” There is a no-ble Patriotism in it,—far other than the “in-difference” you sometimes hear ascribed toShakspeare. A true English heart breathes,calm and strong, through the whole business;not boisterous, protrusive; all the better forthat. There is a sound in it like the ring ofsteel. This man too had a right stroke in him,had it come to that!

But I will say, of Shakspeare’s works gen-erally, that we have no full impress of himthere; even as full as we have of many men.His works are so many windows, throughwhich we see a glimpse of the world that wasin him. All his works seem, comparativelyspeaking, cursory, imperfect, written under


cramping circumstances; giving only here andthere a note of the full utterance of the man.Passages there are that come upon you likesplendor out of Heaven; bursts of radiance, il-luminating the very heart of the thing: yousay, “That is true, spoken once and forever;wheresoever and whensoever there is an openhuman soul, that will be recognized as true!”Such bursts, however, make us feel that thesurrounding matter is not radiant; that it is,in part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shak-speare had to write for the Globe Playhouse:his great soul had to crush itself, as it could,into that and no other mould. It was with him,then, as it is with us all. No man works saveunder conditions. The sculptor cannot set hisown free Thought before us; but his Thoughtas he could translate it into the stone that wasgiven, with the tools that were given. Disjectamembra are all that we find of any Poet, or ofany man.

Whoever looks intelligently at this Shak-speare may recognize that he too was aProphet, in his way; of an insight analogousto the Prophetic, though he took it up in an-other strain. Nature seemed to this man alsodivine; unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high asHeaven; “We are such stuff as Dreams aremade of!” That scroll in Westminster Abbey,which few read with understanding, is of thedepth of any seer. But the man sang; did notpreach, except musically. We called Dante themelodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism.May we not call Shakspeare the still moremelodious Priest of a true Catholicism, the


“Universal Church” of the Future and of alltimes? No narrow superstition, harsh asceti-cism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or per-version: a Revelation, so far as it goes, thatsuch a thousand-fold hidden beauty and di-vineness dwells in all Nature; which let allmen worship as they can! We may say withoutoffence, that there rises a kind of universalPsalm out of this Shakspeare too; not unfit tomake itself heard among the still more sacredPsalms. Not in disharmony with these, if weunderstood them, but in harmony!—I cannotcall this Shakspeare a “Sceptic,” as some do;his indifference to the creeds and theologicalquarrels of his time misleading them. No: nei-ther unpatriotic, though he says little abouthis Patriotism; nor sceptic, though he says lit-tle about his Faith. Such “indifference” wasthe fruit of his greatness withal: his wholeheart was in his own grand sphere of worship(we may call it such); these other controver-sies, vitally important to other men, were notvital to him.

But call it worship, call it what you will, isit not a right glorious thing, and set of things,this that Shakspeare has brought us? For my-self, I feel that there is actually a kind of sa-credness in the fact of such a man being sentinto this Earth. Is he not an eye to us all; ablessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light?—And,at bottom, was it not perhaps far better thatthis Shakspeare, every way an unconsciousman, was conscious of no Heavenly message?He did not feel, like Mahomet, because he sawinto those internal Splendors, that he spe-


cially was the “Prophet of God:” and was henot greater than Mahomet in that? Greater;and also, if we compute strictly, as we did inDante’s case, more successful. It was intrinsi-cally an error that notion of Mahomet’s, of hissupreme Prophethood; and has come down tous inextricably involved in error to this day;dragging along with it such a coil of fables,impurities, intolerances, as makes it a ques-tionable step for me here and now to say, as Ihave done, that Mahomet was a true Speakerat all, and not rather an ambitious charla-tan, perversity and simulacrum; no Speaker,but a Babbler! Even in Arabia, as I com-pute, Mahomet will have exhausted himselfand become obsolete, while this Shakspeare,this Dante may still be young;—while thisShakspeare may still pretend to be a Priestof Mankind, of Arabia as of other places, forunlimited periods to come!

Compared with any speaker or singer oneknows, even with Aeschylus or Homer, whyshould he not, for veracity and universality,last like them? He is sincere as they; reachesdeep down like them, to the universal andperennial. But as for Mahomet, I think ithad been better for him not to be so conscious!Alas, poor Mahomet; all that he was consciousof was a mere error; a futility and triviality,—as indeed such ever is. The truly great in himtoo was the unconscious: that he was a wildArab lion of the desert, and did speak out withthat great thunder-voice of his, not by wordswhich he thought to be great, but by actions,by feelings, by a history which were great! His


Koran has become a stupid piece of prolix ab-surdity; we do not believe, like him, that Godwrote that! The Great Man here too, as al-ways, is a Force of Nature. whatsoever is trulygreat in him springs up from the inarticulatedeeps.

Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peas-ant, who rose to be Manager of a Playhouse, sothat he could live without begging; whom theEarl of Southampton cast some kind glanceson; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks tohim, was for sending to the Treadmill! Wedid not account him a god, like Odin, whilehe dwelt with us;—on which point there weremuch to be said. But I will say rather, or re-peat: In spite of the sad state Hero-worshipnow lies in, consider what this Shakspearehas actually become among us. Which En-glishman we ever made, in this land of ours,which million of Englishmen, would we notgive up rather than the Stratford Peasant?There is no regiment of highest Dignitariesthat we would sell him for. He is the grandestthing we have yet done. For our honor amongforeign nations, as an ornament to our En-glish Household, what item is there that wewould not surrender rather than him? Con-sider now, if they asked us, Will you give upyour Indian Empire or your Shakspeare, youEnglish; never have had any Indian Empire,or never have had any Shakspeare? Really itwere a grave question. Official persons wouldanswer doubtless in official language; but we,for our part too, should not we be forced to an-swer: Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we


cannot do without Shakspeare! Indian Em-pire will go, at any rate, some day; but thisShakspeare does not go, he lasts forever withus; we cannot give up our Shakspeare!

Nay, apart from spiritualities; and con-sidering him merely as a real, marketable,tangibly useful possession. England, beforelong, this Island of ours, will hold but asmall fraction of the English: in America, inNew Holland, east and west to the very An-tipodes, there will be a Saxondom coveringgreat spaces of the Globe. And now, what is itthat can keep all these together into virtuallyone Nation, so that they do not fall out andfight, but live at peace, in brotherlike inter-course, helping one another? This is justly re-garded as the greatest practical problem, thething all manner of sovereignties and govern-ments are here to accomplish: what is it thatwill accomplish this? Acts of Parliament, ad-ministrative prime-ministers cannot. Amer-ica is parted from us, so far as Parliamentcould part it. Call it not fantastic, for thereis much reality in it: Here, I say, is an En-glish King, whom no time or chance, Parlia-ment or combination of Parliaments, can de-throne! This King Shakspeare, does not heshine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, asthe noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs; indestructible; really more valuable inthat point of view than any other means or ap-pliance whatsoever? We can fancy him as ra-diant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen,a thousand years hence. From Paramatta,from New York, wheresoever, under what sort


of Parish-Constable soever, English men andwomen are, they will say to one another: “Yes,this Shakspeare is ours; we produced him, wespeak and think by him; we are of one bloodand kind with him.” The most common-sensepolitician, too, if he pleases, may think of that.

Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nationthat it get an articulate voice; that it producea man who will speak forth melodiously whatthe heart of it means! Italy, for example, poorItaly lies dismembered, scattered asunder, notappearing in any protocol or treaty as a unityat all; yet the noble Italy is actually one: Italyproduced its Dante; Italy can speak! The Czarof all the Russias, he is strong with so manybayonets, Cossacks and cannons; and does agreat feat in keeping such a tract of Earthpolitically together; but he cannot yet speak.Something great in him, but it is a dumbgreatness. He has had no voice of genius, tobe heard of all men and times. He must learnto speak. He is a great dumb monster hith-erto. His cannons and Cossacks will all haverusted into nonentity, while that Dante’s voiceis still audible. The Nation that has a Danteis bound together as no dumb Russia can be.—We must here end what we had to say of theHero-Poet.

[May 15, 1840.]LECTURE IV.

The Hero as Priest. Luther; Refor-mation: Knox; Puritanism.Our present discourse is to be of the GreatMan as Priest. We have repeatedly endeav-ored to explain that all sorts of Heroes are in-trinsically of the same material; that given agreat soul, open to the Divine Significance ofLife, then there is given a man fit to speakof this, to sing of this, to fight and work forthis, in a great, victorious, enduring manner;there is given a Hero,—the outward shape ofwhom will depend on the time and the envi-ronment he finds himself in. The Priest too,as I understand it, is a kind of Prophet; inhim too there is required to be a light of in-spiration, as we must name it. He presidesover the worship of the people; is the Uniterof them with the Unseen Holy. He is the spir-itual Captain of the people; as the Prophet istheir spiritual King with many captains: heguides them heavenward, by wise guidancethrough this Earth and its work. The ideal

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of him is, that he too be what we can calla voice from the unseen Heaven; interpret-ing, even as the Prophet did, and in a morefamiliar manner unfolding the same to men.The unseen Heaven,—the “open secret of theUniverse,”—which so few have an eye for! Heis the Prophet shorn of his more awful splen-dor; burning with mild equable radiance, asthe enlightener of daily life. This, I say, is theideal of a Priest. So in old times; so in these,and in all times. One knows very well that, inreducing ideals to practice, great latitude oftolerance is needful; very great. But a Priestwho is not this at all, who does not any longeraim or try to be this, is a character—of whomwe had rather not speak in this place.

Luther and Knox were by express vocationPriests, and did faithfully perform that func-tion in its common sense. Yet it will suit usbetter here to consider them chiefly in theirhistorical character, rather as Reformers thanPriests. There have been other Priests per-haps equally notable, in calmer times, for do-ing faithfully the office of a Leader of Worship;bringing down, by faithful heroism in thatkind, a light from Heaven into the daily lifeof their people; leading them forward, as un-der God’s guidance, in the way wherein theywere to go. But when this same way was arough one, of battle, confusion and danger,the spiritual Captain, who led through that,becomes, especially to us who live under thefruit of his leading, more notable than anyother. He is the warfaring and battling Priest;who led his people, not to quiet faithful la-

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bor as in smooth times, but to faithful valor-ous conflict, in times all violent, dismembered:a more perilous service, and a more memo-rable one, be it higher or not. These two menwe will account our best Priests, inasmuch asthey were our best Reformers. Nay I mayask, Is not every true Reformer, by the na-ture of him, a Priest first of all? He appeals toHeaven’s invisible justice against Earth’s visi-ble force; knows that it, the invisible, is strongand alone strong. He is a believer in the di-vine truth of things; a seer, seeing throughthe shows of things; a worshipper, in one wayor the other, of the divine truth of things; aPriest, that is. If he be not first a Priest, hewill 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 thisworld, Theories of Life worthy to be sung bya Dante, Practices of Life by a Shakspeare,—we are now to see the reverse process; whichalso is necessary, which also may be carriedon in the Heroic manner. Curious how thisshould be necessary: yet necessary it is. Themild shining of the Poet’s light has to giveplace to the fierce lightning of the Reformer:unfortunately the Reformer too is a person-age that cannot fail in History! The Poet in-deed, with his mildness, what is he but theproduct and ultimate adjustment of Reform,or Prophecy, with its fierceness? No wild SaintDominics and Thebaid Eremites, there hadbeen no melodious Dante; rough Practical En-deavor, Scandinavian and other, from Odin to


Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila to Cranmer, en-abled Shakspeare to speak. Nay the finishedPoet, I remark sometimes, is a symptom thathis epoch itself has reached perfection and isfinished; that before long there will be a newepoch, new Reformers needed.

Doubtless it were finer, could we go alongalways in the way of music; be tamed andtaught by our Poets, as the rude creatureswere by their Orpheus of old. Or failing thisrhythmic musical way, how good were it couldwe get so much as into the equable way; Imean, if peaceable Priests, reforming from dayto day, would always suffice us! But it isnot so; even this latter has not yet been re-alized. Alas, the battling Reformer too is,from time to time, a needful and inevitablephenomenon. Obstructions are never want-ing: the very things that were once indispens-able furtherances become obstructions; andneed to be shaken off, and left behind us,—a business often of enormous difficulty. Itis notable enough, surely, how a Theorem orspiritual Representation, so we may call it,which once took in the whole Universe, andwas completely satisfactory in all parts of it tothe highly discursive acute intellect of Dante,one of the greatest in the world,—had in thecourse of another century become dubitable tocommon intellects; become deniable; and isnow, to every one of us, flatly incredible, ob-solete as Odin’s Theorem! To Dante, humanExistence, and God’s ways with men, wereall well represented by those Malebolges, Pur-gatorios; 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 theSpecies,” as handled in these times of ours;nor do I think you would care to hear muchabout it. The talk on that subject is too of-ten of the most extravagant, confused sort.Yet I may say, the fact itself seems certainenough; nay we can trace out the inevitablenecessity of it in the nature of things. Ev-ery man, as I have stated somewhere, is notonly a learner but a doer: he learns withthe mind given him what has been; but withthe same mind he discovers farther, he in-vents and devises somewhat of his own. Ab-solutely without originality there is no man.No man whatever believes, or can believe, ex-actly what his grandfather believed: he en-larges somewhat, by fresh discovery, his viewof the Universe, and consequently his The-orem of the Universe,—which is an infiniteUniverse, and can never be embraced whollyor finally by any view or Theorem, in any con-ceivable enlargement: he enlarges somewhat,I say; finds somewhat that was credible to hisgrandfather incredible to him, false to him,inconsistent with some new thing he has dis-covered or observed. It is the history of everyman; and in the history of Mankind we see itsummed up into great historical amounts,—revolutions, new epochs. Dante’s Mountain ofPurgatory does not stand “in the ocean of theother Hemisphere,” when Columbus has oncesailed thither! Men find no such thing extant


in the other Hemisphere. It is not there. Itmust cease to be believed to be there. So withall beliefs whatsoever in this world,—all Sys-tems of Belief, and Systems of Practice thatspring from these.

If we add now the melancholy fact, thatwhen Belief waxes uncertain, Practice too be-comes unsound, and errors, injustices andmiseries 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 askat every turn the world’s suffrage; if he can-not dispense with the world’s suffrage, andmake his own suffrage serve, he is a pooreye-servant; the work committed to him willbe misdone. Every such man is a daily con-tributor to the inevitable downfall. Whatso-ever work he does, dishonestly, with an eye tothe outward look of it, is a new offence, par-ent of new misery to somebody or other. Of-fences accumulate till they become insupport-able; and are then violently burst through,cleared off as by explosion. Dante’s sublimeCatholicism, incredible now in theory, and de-faced still worse by faithless, doubting anddishonest practice, has to be torn asunder bya Luther, Shakspeare’s noble Feudalism, asbeautiful as it once looked and was, has to endin a French Revolution. The accumulation ofoffences is, as we say, too literally exploded,blasted asunder volcanically; and there arelong troublous periods, before matters come toa settlement again.

Surely it were mournful enough to look


only at this face of the matter, and find inall human opinions and arrangements merelythe fact that they were uncertain, temporary,subject to the law of death! At bottom, it is notso: all death, here too we find, is but of thebody, not of the essence or soul; all destruc-tion, by violent revolution or howsoever it be,is but new creation on a wider scale. Odin-ism was Valor; Christianism was Humility, anobler kind of Valor. No thought that everdwelt honestly as true in the heart of manbut was an honest insight into God’s truth onman’s part, and has an essential truth in itwhich endures through all changes, an ever-lasting possession for us all. And, on the otherhand, what a melancholy notion is that, whichhas to represent all men, in all countries andtimes except our own, as having spent theirlife in blind condemnable error, mere lost Pa-gans, Scandinavians, Mahometans, only thatwe might have the true ultimate knowledge!All generations of men were lost and wrong,only that this present little section of a gen-eration might be saved and right. They allmarched forward there, all generations sincethe beginning of the world, like the Russiansoldiers into the ditch of Schweidnitz Fort,only to fill up the ditch with their dead bod-ies, that we might march over and take theplace! It is an incredible hypothesis.

Such incredible hypothesis we have seenmaintained with fierce emphasis; and this orthe other poor individual man, with his sectof individual men, marching as over the deadbodies of all men, towards sure victory but


when he too, with his hypothesis and ulti-mate infallible credo, sank into the ditch, andbecame a dead body, what was to be said?—Withal, it is an important fact in the nature ofman, that he tends to reckon his own insightas final, and goes upon it as such. He will al-ways do it, I suppose, in one or the other way;but it must be in some wider, wiser way thanthis. Are not all true men that live, or thatever lived, soldiers of the same army, enlisted,under Heaven’s captaincy, to do battle againstthe same enemy, the empire of Darkness andWrong? Why should we misknow one another,fight not against the enemy but against our-selves, from mere difference of uniform? Alluniforms shall be good, so they hold in themtrue valiant men. All fashions of arms, theArab turban and swift scimetar, Thor’s stronghammer smiting down Jotuns, shall be wel-come. Luther’s battle-voice, Dante’s march-melody, all genuine things are with us, notagainst us. We are all under one Captain. sol-diers of the same host.—Let us now look a lit-tle at this Luther’s fighting; what kind of bat-tle it was, and how he comported himself init. Luther too was of our spiritual Heroes; aProphet to his country and time.

As introductory to the whole, a remarkabout Idolatry will perhaps be in place here.One of Mahomet’s characteristics, which in-deed belongs to all Prophets, is unlimited im-placable zeal against Idolatry. It is the grandtheme of Prophets: Idolatry, the worshippingof dead Idols as the Divinity, is a thing theycannot away with, but have to denounce con-


tinually, and brand with inexpiable reproba-tion; it is the chief of all the sins they seedone under the sun. This is worth noting. Wewill not enter here into the theological ques-tion about Idolatry. Idol is Eidolon, a thingseen, a symbol. It is not God, but a Symbol ofGod; and perhaps one may question whetherany the most benighted mortal ever took it formore than a Symbol. I fancy, he did not thinkthat the poor image his own hands had madewas God; but that God was emblemed by it,that God was in it some way or other. And nowin this sense, one may ask, Is not all worshipwhatsoever a worship by Symbols, by eidola,or things seen? Whether seen, rendered vis-ible as an image or picture to the bodily eye;or visible only to the inward eye, to the imag-ination, to the intellect: this makes a super-ficial, but no substantial difference. It is stilla Thing Seen, significant of Godhead; an Idol.The most rigorous Puritan has his Confessionof Faith, and intellectual Representation ofDivine things, and worships thereby; therebyis worship first made possible for him. Allcreeds, liturgies, religious forms, conceptionsthat fitly invest religious feelings, are in thissense eidola, things seen. All worship what-soever must proceed by Symbols, by Idols:—we may say, all Idolatry is comparative, andthe worst Idolatry is only more idolatrous.

Where, then, lies the evil of it? Some fatalevil must lie in it, or earnest prophetic menwould not on all hands so reprobate it. Whyis Idolatry so hateful to Prophets? It seems tome as if, in the worship of those poor wooden


symbols, the thing that had chiefly provokedthe Prophet, and filled his inmost soul withindignation and aversion, was not exactlywhat suggested itself to his own thought, andcame out of him in words to others, as thething. The rudest heathen that worshippedCanopus, or the Caabah Black-Stone, he, aswe saw, was superior to the horse that wor-shipped nothing at all! Nay there was a kindof lasting merit in that poor act of his; anal-ogous to what is still meritorious in Poets:recognition of a certain endless divine beautyand significance in stars and all natural ob-jects whatsoever. Why should the Prophet somercilessly condemn him? The poorest mortalworshipping his Fetish, while his heart is fullof it, may be an object of pity, of contempt andavoidance, if you will; but cannot surely be anobject of hatred. Let his heart be honestly fullof it, the whole space of his dark narrow mindilluminated thereby; in one word, let him en-tirely believe in his Fetish,—it will then be, Ishould say, if not well with him, yet as wellas it can readily be made to be, and you willleave him alone, unmolested there.

But here enters the fatal circumstance ofIdolatry, that, in the era of the Prophets,no man’s mind is any longer honestly filledwith his Idol or Symbol. Before the Prophetcan arise who, seeing through it, knows it tobe mere wood, many men must have begundimly to doubt that it was little more. Con-demnable Idolatry is insincere Idolatry. Doubthas eaten out the heart of it: a human soul isseen clinging spasmodically to an Ark of the


Covenant, which it half feels now to have be-come a Phantasm. This is one of the balefulestsights. Souls are no longer filled with theirFetish; but only pretend to be filled, and wouldfain make themselves feel that they are filled.“You do not believe,” said Coleridge; “you onlybelieve that you believe.” It is the final scenein all kinds of Worship and Symbolism; thesure symptom that death is now nigh. It isequivalent to what we call Formulism, andWorship of Formulas, in these days of ours.No more immoral act can be done by a humancreature; for it is the beginning of all immoral-ity, or rather it is the impossibility henceforthof any morality whatsoever: the innermostmoral soul is paralyzed thereby, cast into fa-tal magnetic sleep! Men are no longer sinceremen. I do not wonder that the earnest mandenounces this, brands it, prosecutes it withinextinguishable aversion. He and it, all goodand it, are at death-feud. Blamable Idolatryis 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 ofIdols, no less than any other Prophet. Thewooden gods of the Koreish, made of timberand bees-wax, were not more hateful to Ma-homet than Tetzel’s Pardons of Sin, made ofsheepskin and ink, were to Luther. It is theproperty of every Hero, in every time, in ev-ery place and situation, that he come back toreality; that he stand upon things, and notshows of things. According as he loves, andvenerates, articulately or with deep speech-


less thought, the awful realities of things,so will the hollow shows of things, howeverregular, decorous, accredited by Koreishes orConclaves, be intolerable and detestable tohim. Protestantism, too, is the work of aProphet: the prophet-work of that sixteenthcentury. The first stroke of honest demoli-tion to an ancient thing grown false and idol-atrous; preparatory afar off to a new thing,which shall be true, and authentically divine!

At first view it might seem as if Protes-tantism were entirely destructive to this thatwe call Hero-worship, and represent as thebasis of all possible good, religious or social,for mankind. One often hears it said thatProtestantism introduced a new era, radicallydifferent from any the world had ever seen be-fore: the era of “private judgment,” as theycall it. By this revolt against the Pope, ev-ery man became his own Pope; and learnt,among other things, that he must never trustany Pope, or spiritual Hero-captain, any more!Whereby, is not spiritual union, all hierarchyand subordination among men, henceforth animpossibility? So we hear it said.—Now Ineed not deny that Protestantism was a re-volt against spiritual sovereignties, Popes andmuch else. Nay I will grant that English Pu-ritanism, revolt against earthly sovereignties,was the second act of it; that the enormousFrench Revolution itself was the third act,whereby all sovereignties earthly and spiri-tual were, as might seem, abolished or madesure of abolition. Protestantism is the grandroot from which our whole subsequent Euro-


pean History branches out. For the spiritualwill always body itself forth in the temporalhistory of men; the spiritual is the beginningof the temporal. And now, sure enough, thecry is everywhere for Liberty and Equality,Independence and so forth; instead of Kings,Ballot-boxes and Electoral suffrages: it seemsmade out that any Hero-sovereign, or loyalobedience of men to a man, in things tem-poral or things spiritual, has passed awayforever from the world. I should despair ofthe world altogether, if so. One of my deep-est convictions is, that it is not so. With-out sovereigns, true sovereigns, temporal andspiritual, I see nothing possible but an an-archy; the hatefulest of things. But I findProtestantism, whatever anarchic democracyit have produced, to be the beginning of newgenuine sovereignty and order. I find it to bea revolt against false sovereigns; the painfulbut indispensable first preparative for truesovereigns getting place among us! This isworth 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 newat that epoch of the world. There is nothinggenerically new or peculiar in the Reforma-tion; it was a return to Truth and Reality inopposition to Falsehood and Semblance, as allkinds of Improvement and genuine Teachingare and have been. Liberty of private judg-ment, if we will consider it, must at all timeshave existed in the world. Dante had not putout 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 slavesin it. Liberty of judgment? No iron chain, oroutward force of any kind, could ever compelthe soul of a man to believe or to disbelieve: itis his own indefeasible light, that judgmentof his; he will reign, and believe there, bythe grace of God alone! The sorriest sophisti-cal Bellarmine, preaching sightless faith andpassive obedience, must first, by some kindof conviction, have abdicated his right to beconvinced. His “private judgment” indicatedthat, as the advisablest step he could take.The right of private judgment will subsist, infull force, wherever true men subsist. A trueman believes with his whole judgment, withall the illumination and discernment that isin him, and has always so believed. A falseman, only struggling to “believe that he be-lieves,” will naturally manage it in some otherway. Protestantism said to this latter, Woe!and to the former, Well done! At bottom, itwas no new saying; it was a return to all oldsayings that ever had been said. Be genuine,be sincere: that was, once more, the meaningof it. Mahomet believed with his whole mind;Odin with his whole mind,—he, and all trueFollowers of Odinism. They, by their privatejudgment, had “judged “–so.

And now I venture to assert, that the ex-ercise of private judgment, faithfully goneabout, does by no means necessarily end inselfish independence, isolation; but ratherends necessarily in the opposite of that. It is


not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; butit is error, insincerity, half-belief and untruththat make it. A man protesting against erroris on the way towards uniting himself with allmen that believe in truth. There is no commu-nion possible among men who believe only inhearsays. The heart of each is lying dead; hasno power of sympathy even with things,—orhe would believe them and not hearsays. Nosympathy even with things; how much lesswith his fellow-men! He cannot unite withmen; he is an anarchic man. Only in a worldof sincere men is unity possible;—and there,in the long-run, it is as good as certain.

For observe one thing, a thing too oftenleft out of view, or rather altogether lost sightof in this controversy: That it is not neces-sary a man should himself have discoveredthe truth he is to believe in, and never so sin-cerely to believe in. A Great Man, we said,was always sincere, as the first condition ofhim. But a man need not be great in orderto be sincere; that is not the necessity of Na-ture and all Time, but only of certain corruptunfortunate epochs of Time. A man can be-lieve, and make his own, in the most genuineway, what he has received from another;—andwith boundless gratitude to that other! Themerit of originality is not novelty; it is sincer-ity. The believing man is the original man;whatsoever he believes, he believes it for him-self, not for another. Every son of Adam canbecome a sincere man, an original man, inthis sense; no mortal is doomed to be an in-sincere man. Whole ages, what we call ages


of Faith, are original; all men in them, or themost of men in them, sincere. These are thegreat and fruitful ages: every worker, in allspheres, is a worker not on semblance but onsubstance; every work issues in a result: thegeneral sum of such work is great; for all ofit, as genuine, tends towards one goal; all ofit is additive, none of it subtractive. There istrue union, true kingship, loyalty, all true andblessed things, so far as the poor Earth canproduce blessedness for men.

Hero-worship? Ah me, that a man be self-subsistent, original, true, or what we call it,is surely the farthest in the world from in-disposing him to reverence and believe othermen’s truth! It only disposes, necessitatesand invincibly compels him to disbelieve othermen’s dead formulas, hearsays and untruths.A man embraces truth with his eyes open, andbecause his eyes are open: does he need toshut them before he can love his Teacher oftruth? He alone can love, with a right grat-itude and genuine loyalty of soul, the Hero-Teacher who has delivered him out of dark-ness into light. Is not such a one a trueHero and Serpent-queller; worthy of all rev-erence! The black monster, Falsehood, ourone enemy in this world, lies prostrate by hisvalor; it was he that conquered the world forus!—See, accordingly, was not Luther him-self reverenced as a true Pope, or SpiritualFather, being verily such? Napoleon, fromamid boundless revolt of Sansculottism, be-came a King. Hero-worship never dies, norcan die. Loyalty and Sovereignty are everlast-


ing in the world:—and there is this in them,that they are grounded not on garnitures andsemblances, but on realities and sincerities.Not by shutting your eyes, your “private judg-ment;” no, but by opening them, and by hav-ing something to see! Luther’s message wasdeposition and abolition to all false Popes andPotentates, but life and strength, though afaroff, to new genuine ones.

All this of Liberty and Equality, Elec-toral suffrages, Independence and so forth, wewill take, therefore, to be a temporary phe-nomenon, by no means a final one. Thoughlikely to last a long time, with sad enough em-broilments for us all, we must welcome it, asthe penalty of sins that are past, the pledgeof inestimable benefits that are coming. Inall ways, it behooved men to quit simulacraand return to fact; cost what it might, thatdid behoove to be done. With spurious Popes,and Believers having no private judgment,—quacks pretending to command over dupes,—what can you do? Misery and mischief only.You cannot make an association out of in-sincere men; you cannot build an edifice ex-cept by plummet and level,—at right-anglesto one another! In all this wild revolution-ary work, from Protestantism downwards, Isee the blessedest result preparing itself: notabolition of Hero-worship, but rather what Iwould call a whole World of Heroes. If Heromean sincere man, why may not every one ofus be a Hero? A world all sincere, a believingworld: the like has been; the like will againbe,—cannot help being. That were the right


sort of Worshippers for Heroes: never couldthe truly Better be so reverenced as where allwere True and Good!—But we must hasten toLuther and his Life.

Luther’s birthplace was Eisleben in Sax-ony; he came into the world there on the10th of November, 1483. It was an acci-dent that gave this honor to Eisleben. Hisparents, poor mine-laborers in a village ofthat region, named Mohra, had gone to theEisleben Winter-Fair: in the tumult of thisscene the Frau Luther was taken with travail,found refuge in some poor house there, andthe boy she bore was named Martin Luther.Strange enough to reflect upon it. This poorFrau Luther, she had gone with her husbandto make her small merchandisings; perhapsto sell the lock of yarn she had been spin-ning, to buy the small winter-necessaries forher narrow hut or household; in the wholeworld, that day, there was not a more en-tirely unimportant-looking pair of people thanthis Miner and his Wife. And yet what wereall Emperors, Popes and Potentates, in com-parison? There was born here, once more, aMighty Man; whose light was to flame as thebeacon over long centuries and epochs of theworld; the whole world and its history waswaiting for this man. It is strange, it is great.It leads us back to another Birth-hour, in astill meaner environment, Eighteen Hundredyears ago,—of which it is fit that we say noth-ing, that we think only in silence; for whatwords are there! The Age of Miracles past?The Age of Miracles is forever here!—


I find it altogether suitable to Luther’sfunction in this Earth, and doubtless wiselyordered to that end by the Providence presid-ing over him and us and all things, that hewas born poor, and brought up poor, one of thepoorest of men. He had to beg, as the school-children in those times did; singing for almsand bread, from door to door. Hardship, rigor-ous Necessity was the poor boy’s companion;no man nor no thing would put on a false faceto flatter Martin Luther. Among things, notamong 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 facultyand sensibility, he suffered greatly. But it washis task to get acquainted with realities, andkeep acquainted with them, at whatever cost:his task was to bring the whole world backto reality, for it had dwelt too long with sem-blance! A youth nursed up in wintry whirl-winds, in desolate darkness and difficulty,that he may step forth at last from his stormyScandinavia, strong as a true man, as a god:a Christian Odin,—a right Thor once more,with his thunder-hammer, to smite asunderugly enough Jotuns and Giant-monsters!

Perhaps the turning incident of his life, wemay fancy, was that death of his friend Alexis,by lightning, at the gate of Erfurt. Lutherhad struggled up through boyhood, better andworse; displaying, in spite of all hindrances,the largest intellect, eager to learn: his fa-ther judging doubtless that he might promotehimself in the world, set him upon the studyof Law. This was the path to rise; Luther,


with little will in it either way, had consented:he was now nineteen years of age. Alexisand he had been to see the old Luther peo-ple at Mansfeldt; were got back again near Er-furt, when a thunder-storm came on; the boltstruck Alexis, he fell dead at Luther’s feet.What is this Life of ours?—gone in a moment,burnt up like a scroll, into the blank Eternity!What are all earthly preferments, Chancellor-ships, Kingships? They lie shrunk together—there! The Earth has opened on them; in amoment they are not, and Eternity is. Luther,struck to the heart, determined to devote him-self to God and God’s service alone. In spite ofall dissuasions from his father and others, hebecame a Monk in the Augustine Convent atErfurt.

This was probably the first light-point inthe history of Luther, his purer will now firstdecisively uttering itself; but, for the present,it was still as one light-point in an elementall of darkness. He says he was a piousmonk, ich bin ein frommer Monch gewesen;faithfully, painfully struggling to work out thetruth of this high act of his; but it was to lit-tle purpose. His misery had not lessened; hadrather, as it were, increased into infinitude.The drudgeries he had to do, as novice in hisConvent, all sorts of slave-work, were not hisgrievance: the deep earnest soul of the manhad fallen into all manner of black scruples,dubitations; he believed himself likely to diesoon, and far worse than die. One hears with anew interest for poor Luther that, at this time,he lived in terror of the unspeakable misery;


fancied that he was doomed to eternal repro-bation. Was it not the humble sincere natureof the man? What was he, that he should beraised to Heaven! He that had known onlymisery, and mean slavery: the news was tooblessed to be credible. It could not becomeclear to him how, by fasts, vigils, formalitiesand mass-work, a man’s soul could be saved.He fell into the blackest wretchedness; had towander staggering as on the verge of bottom-less Despair.

It must have been a most blessed discov-ery, that of an old Latin Bible which he foundin the Erfurt Library about this time. He hadnever seen the Book before. It taught himanother lesson than that of fasts and vigils.A brother monk too, of pious experience, washelpful. Luther learned now that a man wassaved not by singing masses, but by the infi-nite grace of God: a more credible hypothe-sis. He gradually got himself founded, as onthe rock. No wonder he should venerate theBible, which had brought this blessed help tohim. He prized it as the Word of the Highestmust be prized by such a man. He determinedto hold by that; as through life and to deathhe firmly did.

This, then, is his deliverance from dark-ness, his final triumph over darkness, whatwe call his conversion; for himself the mostimportant of all epochs. That he should nowgrow daily in peace and clearness; that, un-folding now the great talents and virtues im-planted in him, he should rise to importancein his Convent, in his country, and be found


more and more useful in all honest businessof life, is a natural result. He was sent on mis-sions by his Augustine Order, as a man of tal-ent and fidelity fit to do their business well:the Elector of Saxony, Friedrich, named theWise, a truly wise and just prince, had casthis eye on him as a valuable person; made himProfessor in his new University of Wittenberg,Preacher too at Wittenberg; in both which ca-pacities, as in all duties he did, this Luther,in the peaceable sphere of common life, wasgaining more and more esteem with all goodmen.

It was in his twenty-seventh year that hefirst saw Rome; being sent thither, as I said,on mission from his Convent. Pope Julius theSecond, and what was going on at Rome, musthave filled the mind of Luther with amaze-ment. He had come as to the Sacred City,throne of God’s High-priest on Earth; and hefound it—what we know! Many thoughts itmust have given the man; many which wehave no record of, which perhaps he did nothimself know how to utter. This Rome, thisscene of false priests, clothed not in the beautyof 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 farfrom 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 footstepswisely through the world. Let him do his ownobscure duty in it well; the rest, horrible anddismal as it looks, is in God’s hand, not in his.


It is curious to reflect what might havebeen the issue, had Roman Popery happenedto pass this Luther by; to go on in its greatwasteful orbit, and not come athwart his lit-tle path, and force him to assault it! Con-ceivable enough that, in this case, he mighthave held his peace about the abuses of Rome;left Providence, and God on high, to deal withthem! A modest quiet man; not prompt he toattack irreverently persons in authority. Hisclear task, as I say, was to do his own duty; towalk wisely in this world of confused wicked-ness, and save his own soul alive. But the Ro-man High-priesthood did come athwart him:afar off at Wittenberg he, Luther, could notget lived in honesty for it; he remonstrated,resisted, came to extremity; was struck at,struck again, and so it came to wager of bat-tle between them! This is worth attendingto in Luther’s history. Perhaps no man ofso humble, peaceable a disposition ever filledthe world with contention. We cannot but seethat he would have loved privacy, quiet dili-gence in the shade; that it was against his willhe ever became a notoriety. Notoriety: whatwould that do for him? The goal of his marchthrough this world was the Infinite Heaven;an indubitable goal for him: in a few years,he should either have attained that, or lost itforever! We will say nothing at all, I think,of that sorrowfulest of theories, of its beingsome mean shopkeeper grudge, of the Augus-tine Monk against the Dominican, that firstkindled the wrath of Luther, and produced theProtestant Reformation. We will say to the


people who maintain it, if indeed any such ex-ist now: Get first into the sphere of thoughtby which it is so much as possible to judge ofLuther, or of any man like Luther, otherwisethan distractedly; we may then begin arguingwith you.

The Monk Tetzel, sent out carelessly inthe way of trade, by Leo Tenth,—who merelywanted to raise a little money, and for therest seems to have been a Pagan rather thana Christian, so far as he was anything,—arrived at Wittenberg, and drove his scan-dalous trade there. Luther’s flock bought In-dulgences; in the confessional of his Church,people pleaded to him that they had alreadygot their sins pardoned. Luther, if he wouldnot be found wanting at his own post, a falsesluggard and coward at the very centre of thelittle space of ground that was his own andno other man’s, had to step forth against In-dulgences, and declare aloud that they were afutility and sorrowful mockery, that no man’ssins could be pardoned by them. It was the be-ginning of the whole Reformation. We knowhow it went; forward from this first publicchallenge of Tetzel, on the last day of October,1517, through remonstrance and argument;—spreading ever wider, rising ever higher; till itbecame unquenchable, and enveloped all theworld. Luther’s heart’s desire was to have thisgrief and other griefs amended; his thoughtwas still far other than that of introducingseparation in the Church, or revolting againstthe Pope, Father of Christendom.—The ele-gant Pagan Pope cared little about this Monk


and his doctrines; wished, however, to havedone with the noise of him: in a space ofsome three years, having tried various softermethods, he thought good to end it by fire.He dooms the Monk’s writings to be burnt bythe hangman, and his body to be sent boundto Rome,—probably for a similar purpose. Itwas the way they had ended with Huss, withJerome, the century before. A short argu-ment, fire. Poor Huss: he came to that Con-stance Council, with all imaginable promisesand safe-conducts; an earnest, not rebelliouskind of man: they laid him instantly in a stonedungeon “three feet wide, six feet high, sevenfeet long;” burnt the true voice of him out ofthis world; choked it in smoke and fire. Thatwas not well done!

I, for one, pardon Luther for now alto-gether revolting against the Pope. The ele-gant Pagan, by this fire-decree of his, had kin-dled into noble just wrath the bravest heartthen living in this world. The bravest, ifalso one of the humblest, peaceablest; it wasnow kindled. These words of mine, words oftruth and soberness, aiming faithfully, as hu-man inability would allow, to promote God’struth on Earth, and save men’s souls, you,God’s vicegerent on earth, answer them bythe hangman and fire? You will burn meand them, for answer to the God’s-messagethey strove to bring you? You are not God’svicegerent; 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 goodnext: this is what I do.—It was on the 10th


of December, 1520, three years after the be-ginning of the business, that Luther, “witha great concourse of people,” took this indig-nant step of burning the Pope’s fire-decree “atthe Elster-Gate of Wittenberg.” Wittenberglooked on “with shoutings;” the whole worldwas looking on. The Pope should not haveprovoked that “shout”! It was the shout ofthe awakening of nations. The quiet Germanheart, modest, patient of much, had at lengthgot more than it could bear. Formulism, Pa-gan Popeism, and other Falsehood and cor-rupt Semblance had ruled long enough: andhere once more was a man found who dursttell all men that God’s-world stood not on sem-blances but on realities; that Life was a truth,and not a lie!

At bottom, as was said above, we are toconsider Luther as a Prophet Idol-breaker; abringer-back of men to reality. It is the func-tion of great men and teachers. Mahometsaid, These idols of yours are wood; you putwax and oil on them, the flies stick on them:they are not God, I tell you, they are blackwood! Luther said to the Pope, This thing ofyours that you call a Pardon of Sins, it is abit of rag-paper with ink. It is nothing else;it, and so much like it, is nothing else. Godalone can pardon sins. Popeship, spiritual Fa-therhood of God’s Church, is that a vain sem-blance, of cloth and parchment? It is an awfulfact. God’s Church is not a semblance, Heavenand Hell are not semblances. I stand on this,since you drive me to it. Standing on this, Ia poor German Monk am stronger than you


all. I stand solitary, friendless, but on God’sTruth; you with your tiaras, triple-hats, withyour treasuries and armories, thunders spir-itual and temporal, stand on the Devil’s Lie,and are not so strong!—

The Diet of Worms, Luther’s appearancethere on the 17th of April, 1521, may be con-sidered as the greatest scene in Modern Euro-pean History; the point, indeed, from whichthe whole subsequent history of civilizationtakes its rise. After multiplied negotiations,disputations, it had come to this. The youngEmperor Charles Fifth, with all the Princes ofGermany, Papal nuncios, dignitaries spiritualand temporal, are assembled there: Lutheris to appear and answer for himself, whetherhe will recant or not. The world’s pompand power sits there on this hand: on that,stands up for God’s Truth, one man, the poorminer Hans Luther’s Son. Friends had re-minded him of Huss, advised him not to go;he would not be advised. A large company offriends rode out to meet him, with still moreearnest warnings; he answered, “Were thereas 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, crowdedthe windows and house-tops, some of themcalling out to him, in solemn words, not torecant: “Whosoever denieth me before men!”they cried to him,—as in a kind of solemnpetition and adjuration. Was it not in real-ity our petition too, the petition of the wholeworld, lying in dark bondage of soul, para-lyzed under a black spectral Nightmare and


triple-hatted Chimera, calling itself Father inGod, and what not: “Free us; it rests withthee; desert us not!”

Luther did not desert us. His speech, oftwo hours, distinguished itself by its respect-ful, wise and honest tone; submissive to what-soever could lawfully claim submission, notsubmissive to any more than that. His writ-ings, he said, were partly his own, partly de-rived from the Word of God. As to what washis own, human infirmity entered into it; un-guarded anger, blindness, many things doubt-less which it were a blessing for him could heabolish altogether. But as to what stood onsound truth and the Word of God, he couldnot recant it. How could he? “Confute me,”he concluded, “by proofs of Scripture, or elseby plain just arguments: I cannot recant oth-erwise. For it is neither safe nor prudent todo aught against conscience. Here stand I;I can do no other: God assist me!”—It is, aswe say, the greatest moment in the ModernHistory of Men. English Puritanism, Englandand its Parliaments, Americas, and vast workthese two centuries; French Revolution, Eu-rope and its work everywhere at present: thegerm of it all lay there: had Luther in thatmoment done other, it had all been otherwise!The European World was asking him: Am I tosink ever lower into falsehood, stagnant pu-trescence, loathsome accursed death; or, withwhatever paroxysm, to cast the falsehoods outof me, and be cured and live?—

Great wars, contentions and disunion fol-lowed out of this Reformation; which last


down to our day, and are yet far from ended.Great talk and crimination has been madeabout these. They are lamentable, undeni-able; but after all, what has Luther or hiscause to do with them? It seems strange rea-soning to charge the Reformation with all this.When Hercules turned the purifying river intoKing Augeas’s stables, I have no doubt theconfusion that resulted was considerable allaround: but I think it was not Hercules’sblame; it was some other’s blame! The Refor-mation might bring what results it liked whenit came, but the Reformation simply could nothelp coming. To all Popes and Popes’ advo-cates, expostulating, lamenting and accusing,the answer of the world is: Once for all, yourPopehood has become untrue. No matter howgood it was, how good you say it is, we can-not believe it; the light of our whole mind,given us to walk by from Heaven above, findsit henceforth a thing unbelievable. We willnot believe it, we will not try to believe it,—we dare not! The thing is untrue; we weretraitors against the Giver of all Truth, if wedurst pretend to think it true. Away with it;let whatsoever likes come in the place of it:with it we can have no farther trade!—Lutherand his Protestantism is not responsible forwars; the false Simulacra that forced him toprotest, they are responsible. Luther did whatevery man that God has made has not only theright, but lies under the sacred duty, to do: an-swered a Falsehood when it questioned him,Dost thou believe me?—No!—At what cost so-ever, without counting of costs, this thing be-


hooved to be done. Union, organization spiri-tual and material, a far nobler than any Pope-dom or Feudalism in their truest days, I neverdoubt, is coming for the world; sure to come.But on Fact alone, not on Semblance and Sim-ulacrum, will it be able either to come, or tostand when come. With union grounded onfalsehood, and ordering us to speak and actlies, we will not have anything to do. Peace?A brutal lethargy is peaceable, the noisomegrave is peaceable. We hope for a living peace,not a dead one!

And yet, in prizing justly the indispensableblessings of the New, let us not be unjust tothe Old. The Old was true, if it no longer is.In Dante’s days it needed no sophistry, self-blinding or other dishonesty, to get itself reck-oned true. It was good then; nay there is inthe soul of it a deathless good. The cry of “NoPopery” is foolish enough in these days. Thespeculation that Popery is on the increase,building new chapels and so forth, may passfor one of the idlest ever started. Very cu-rious: to count up a few Popish chapels, lis-ten to a few Protestant logic-choppings,—tomuch dull-droning drowsy inanity that stillcalls itself Protestant, and say: See, Protes-tantism is dead; Popeism is more alive thanit, will be alive after it!—Drowsy inanities,not a few, that call themselves Protestant aredead; but Protestantism has not died yet, thatI hear of! Protestantism, if we will look, has inthese days produced its Goethe, its Napoleon;German Literature and the French Revolu-tion; rather considerable signs of life! Nay, at


bottom, what else is alive but Protestantism?The life of most else that one meets is a gal-vanic one merely,—not a pleasant, not a last-ing sort of life!

Popery can build new chapels; welcome todo so, to all lengths. Popery cannot come back,any more than Paganism can,—which alsostill lingers in some countries. But, indeed, itis with these things, as with the ebbing of thesea: you look at the waves oscillating hither,thither on the beach; for minutes you cannottell how it is going; look in half an hour whereit is,—look in half a century where your Pope-hood is! Alas, would there were no greaterdanger to our Europe than the poor old Pope’srevival! Thor may as soon try to revive.—Andwithal this oscillation has a meaning. Thepoor old Popehood will not die away entirely,as Thor has done, for some time yet; nor oughtit. We may say, the Old never dies till thishappen, Till all the soul of good that was init have got itself transfused into the practicalNew. While a good work remains capable ofbeing done by the Romish form; or, what isinclusive of all, while a pious life remains ca-pable of being led by it, just so long, if we con-sider, will this or the other human soul adoptit, go about as a living witness of it. So long itwill obtrude itself on the eye of us who rejectit, till we in our practice too have appropri-ated whatsoever of truth was in it. Then, butalso not till then, it will have no charm morefor any man. It lasts here for a purpose. Let itlast as long as it can.—

Of Luther I will add now, in reference to all


these wars and bloodshed, the noticeable factthat none of them began so long as he con-tinued living. The controversy did not get tofighting so long as he was there. To me it isproof of his greatness in all senses, this fact.How seldom do we find a man that has stirredup some vast commotion, who does not him-self perish, swept away in it! Such is the usualcourse of revolutionists. Luther continued, ina good degree, sovereign of this greatest rev-olution; all Protestants, of what rank or func-tion soever, looking much to him for guidance:and he held it peaceable, continued firm at thecentre of it. A man to do this must have akingly faculty: he must have the gift to dis-cern at all turns where the true heart of thematter lies, and to plant himself courageouslyon that, as a strong true man, that other truemen may rally round him there. He will notcontinue leader of men otherwise. Luther’sclear deep force of judgment, his force of allsorts, of silence, of tolerance and moderation,among others, are very notable in these cir-cumstances.

Tolerance, I say; a very genuine kind oftolerance: he distinguishes what is essential,and what is not; the unessential may go verymuch as it will. A complaint comes to himthat such and such a Reformed Preacher “willnot preach without a cassock.” Well, answersLuther, what harm will a cassock do the man?“Let him have a cassock to preach in; let himhave three cassocks if he find benefit in them!”His conduct in the matter of Karlstadt’s wildimage-breaking; of the Anabaptists; of the


Peasants’ War, shows a noble strength, verydifferent from spasmodic violence. With sureprompt insight he discriminates what is what:a strong just man, he speaks forth what isthe wise course, and all men follow him inthat. Luther’s Written Works give similar tes-timony of him. The dialect of these specula-tions is now grown obsolete for us; but onestill reads them with a singular attraction.And indeed the mere grammatical diction isstill legible enough; Luther’s merit in liter-ary history is of the greatest: his dialect be-came the language of all writing. They are notwell written, these Four-and-twenty Quartosof his; written hastily, with quite other thanliterary objects. But in no Books have I founda more robust, genuine, I will say noble fac-ulty of a man than in these. A rugged hon-esty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterlingsense and strength. He dashes out illumina-tion from him; his smiting idiomatic phrasesseem to cleave into the very secret of the mat-ter. Good humor too, nay tender affection, no-bleness and depth: this man could have beena Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, notwrite one. I call him a great Thinker; as in-deed his greatness of heart already betokensthat.

Richter says of Luther’s words, “His wordsare half-battles.” They may be called so. Theessential quality of him was, that he couldfight and conquer; that he was a right pieceof human Valor. No more valiant man, nomortal heart to be called braver, that one hasrecord of, ever lived in that Teutonic Kindred,


whose character is valor. His defiance of the“Devils” in Worms was not a mere boast, asthe like might be if now spoken. It was afaith of Luther’s that there were Devils, spiri-tual denizens of the Pit, continually besettingmen. Many times, in his writings, this turnsup; and a most small sneer has been groundedon it by some. In the room of the Wartburgwhere he sat translating the Bible, they stillshow you a black spot on the wall; the strangememorial of one of these conflicts. Luther sattranslating one of the Psalms; he was worndown with long labor, with sickness, absti-nence from food: there rose before him somehideous indefinable Image, which he took forthe Evil One, to forbid his work: Lutherstarted up, with fiend-defiance; flung his ink-stand at the spectre, and it disappeared! Thespot still remains there; a curious monumentof several things. Any apothecary’s appren-tice can now tell us what we are to think ofthis apparition, in a scientific sense: but theman’s heart that dare rise defiant, face to face,against Hell itself, can give no higher proof offearlessness. The thing he will quail beforeexists not on this Earth or under it.—Fearlessenough! “The Devil is aware,” writes he onone occasion, “that this does not proceed outof fear in me. I have seen and defied innumer-able Devils. Duke George,” of Leipzig, a greatenemy of his, “Duke George is not equal to oneDevil,”—far short of a Devil! “If I had businessat Leipzig, I would ride into Leipzig, though itrained Duke Georges for nine days running.”What a reservoir of Dukes to ride into!—


At the same time, they err greatly whoimagine that this man’s courage was ferocity,mere coarse disobedient obstinacy and sav-agery, as many do. Far from that. There maybe an absence of fear which arises from theabsence of thought or affection, from the pres-ence of hatred and stupid fury. We do notvalue the courage of the tiger highly! WithLuther it was far otherwise; no accusationcould be more unjust than this of mere fero-cious violence brought against him. A mostgentle heart withal, full of pity and love, asindeed the truly valiant heart ever is. Thetiger before a stronger foe—flies: the tigeris not what we call valiant, only fierce andcruel. I know few things more touching thanthose soft breathings of affection, soft as achild’s or a mother’s, in this great wild heartof Luther. So honest, unadulterated with anycant; homely, rude in their utterance; pure aswater welling from the rock. What, in fact,was all that down-pressed mood of despairand reprobation, which we saw in his youth,but the outcome of pre-eminent thoughtfulgentleness, affections too keen and fine? It isthe course such men as the poor Poet Cowperfall into. Luther to a slight observer mighthave seemed a timid, weak man; modesty, af-fectionate shrinking tenderness the chief dis-tinction of him. It is a noble valor which isroused in a heart like this, once stirred up intodefiance, all kindled into a heavenly blaze.

In Luther’s Table-Talk, a posthumousBook of anecdotes and sayings collected by hisfriends, the most interesting now of all the


Books proceeding from him, we have manybeautiful unconscious displays of the man,and what sort of nature he had. His behav-ior at the death-bed of his little Daughter, sostill, so great and loving, is among the mostaffecting things. He is resigned that his littleMagdalene should die, yet longs inexpressiblythat she might live;—follows, in awe-struckthought, the flight of her little soul throughthose unknown realms. Awe-struck; mostheartfelt, we can see; and sincere,—for afterall dogmatic creeds and articles, he feels whatnothing it is that we know, or can know: Hislittle Magdalene shall be with God, as Godwills; for Luther too that is all; Islam is all.

Once, he looks out from his solitary Pat-mos, the Castle of Coburg, in the middle ofthe night: The great vault of Immensity, longflights of clouds sailing through it,—dumb,gaunt, huge:—who supports all that? “Noneever saw the pillars of it; yet it is supported.”God supports it. We must know that Godis great, that God is good; and trust, wherewe cannot see.—Returning home from Leipzigonce, 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 onceagain; the bread of man!—In the garden atWittenberg one evening at sunset, a little birdhas perched for the night: That little bird,says Luther, above it are the stars and deepHeaven of worlds; yet it has folded its lit-tle wings; gone trustfully to rest there as in


its home: the Maker of it has given it tooa home!—Neither are mirthful turns want-ing: there is a great free human heart inthis man. The common speech of him has arugged nobleness, idiomatic, expressive, gen-uine; gleams here and there with beautiful po-etic tints. One feels him to be a great brotherman. His love of Music, indeed, is not this,as it were, the summary of all these affec-tions in him? Many a wild unutterability hespoke 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 mu-sic on the other; I could call these the two op-posite poles of a great soul; between these twoall great things had room.

Luther’s face is to me expressive of him;in Kranach’s best portraits I find the trueLuther. A rude plebeian face; with its hugecrag-like brows and bones, the emblem ofrugged energy; at first, almost a repulsiveface. Yet in the eyes especially there is a wildsilent sorrow; an unnamable melancholy, theelement of all gentle and fine affections; giv-ing to the rest the true stamp of nobleness.Laughter was in this Luther, as we said; buttears also were there. Tears also were ap-pointed him; tears and hard toil. The basis ofhis life was Sadness, Earnestness. In his lat-ter days, after all triumphs and victories, heexpresses himself heartily weary of living; heconsiders that God alone can and will regulatethe course things are taking, and that perhapsthe Day of Judgment is not far. As for him, helongs for one thing: that God would release


him from his labor, and let him depart and beat rest. They understand little of the man whocite this in discredit of him!—I will call thisLuther a true Great Man; great in intellect,in courage, affection and integrity; one of ourmost lovable and precious men. Great, not asa hewn obelisk; but as an Alpine mountain,—so simple, honest, spontaneous, not setting upto be great at all; there for quite another pur-pose than being great! Ah yes, unsubduablegranite, piercing far and wide into the Heav-ens; yet in the clefts of it fountains, greenbeautiful valleys with flowers! A right Spir-itual Hero and Prophet; once more, a true Sonof Nature and Fact, for whom these centuries,and many that are to come yet, will be thank-ful to Heaven.

The most interesting phasis which the Ref-ormation anywhere assumes, especially for usEnglish, is that of Puritanism. In Luther’sown country Protestantism soon dwindledinto a rather barren affair: not a religionor faith, but rather now a theological jan-gling of argument, the proper seat of it notthe heart; the essence of it sceptical con-tention: which indeed has jangled more andmore, down to Voltaireism itself,—throughGustavus-Adolphus contentions onwards toFrench-Revolution ones! But in our Islandthere arose a Puritanism, which even got it-self established as a Presbyterianism and Na-tional Church among the Scotch; which cameforth as a real business of the heart; and hasproduced in the world very notable fruit. Insome senses, one may say it is the only pha-


sis of Protestantism that ever got to the rankof being a Faith, a true heart-communicationwith Heaven, and of exhibiting itself in His-tory as such. We must spare a few words forKnox; himself a brave and remarkable man;but still more important as Chief Priest andFounder, which one may consider him to be, ofthe Faith that became Scotland’s, New Eng-land’s, Oliver Cromwell’s. History will havesomething to say about this, for some time tocome!

We may censure Puritanism as we please;and no one of us, I suppose, but would findit a very rough defective thing. But we, andall men, may understand that it was a gen-uine thing; for Nature has adopted it, and ithas grown, and grows. I say sometimes, thatall goes by wager-of-battle in this world; thatstrength, well understood, is the measure ofall worth. Give a thing time; if it can suc-ceed, it is a right thing. Look now at Amer-ican Saxondom; and at that little Fact of thesailing of the Mayflower, two hundred yearsago, from Delft Haven in Holland! Were weof open sense as the Greeks were, we hadfound a Poem here; one of Nature’s own Po-ems, such as she writes in broad facts overgreat continents. For it was properly the be-ginning of America: there were straggling set-tlers in America before, some material as ofa body was there; but the soul of it was firstthis. These poor men, driven out of their owncountry, not able well to live in Holland, deter-mine on settling in the New World. Black un-tamed forests are there, and wild savage crea-


tures; but not so cruel as Star-chamber hang-men. They thought the Earth would yieldthem food, if they tilled honestly; the everlast-ing heaven would stretch, there too, overhead;they should be left in peace, to prepare forEternity by living well in this world of Time;worshipping in what they thought the true,not the idolatrous way. They clubbed theirsmall means together; hired a ship, the littleship Mayflower, and made ready to set sail.

In Neal’s History of the Puritans [Neal(London, 1755), i. 490] is an account of the cer-emony of their departure: solemnity, we mightcall it rather, for it was a real act of worship.Their minister went down with them to thebeach, and their brethren whom they were toleave behind; all joined in solemn prayer, ThatGod would have pity on His poor children, andgo with them into that waste wilderness, forHe also had made that, He was there alsoas well as here.—Hah! These men, I think,had a work! The weak thing, weaker than achild, becomes strong one day, if it be a truething. Puritanism was only despicable, laugh-able then; but nobody can manage to laughat it now. Puritanism has got weapons andsinews; it has firearms, war-navies; it hascunning in its ten fingers, strength in its rightarm; it can steer ships, fell forests, removemountains;—it is one of the strongest thingsunder this sun at present!

In the history of Scotland, too, I can findproperly but one epoch: we may say, it con-tains nothing of world-interest at all but thisReformation by Knox. A poor barren coun-


try, full of continual broils, dissensions, mas-sacrings; a people in the last state of rudenessand destitution; little better perhaps than Ire-land at this day. Hungry fierce barons, not somuch as able to form any arrangement witheach other how to divide what they fleecedfrom these poor drudges; but obliged, as theColombian Republics are at this day, to makeof every alteration a revolution; no way ofchanging a ministry but by hanging the oldministers on gibbets: this is a historical spec-tacle of no very singular significance! “Brav-ery” enough, I doubt not; fierce fighting inabundance: but not braver or fiercer thanthat of their old Scandinavian Sea-king ances-tors; whose exploits we have not found worthdwelling on! It is a country as yet without asoul: nothing developed in it but what is rude,external, semi-animal. And now at the Refor-mation, the internal life is kindled, as it were,under the ribs of this outward material death.A cause, the noblest of causes kindles itself,like a beacon set on high; high as Heaven, yetattainable from Earth;—whereby the mean-est man becomes not a Citizen only, but aMember of Christ’s visible Church; a verita-ble Hero, if he prove a true man!

Well; this is what I mean by a whole “na-tion of heroes;” a believing nation. Thereneeds not a great soul to make a hero; thereneeds a god-created soul which will be true toits origin; that will be a great soul! The likehas been seen, we find. The like will be againseen, under wider forms than the Presbyte-rian: there can be no lasting good done till


then.—Impossible! say some. Possible? Hasit not been, in this world, as a practiced fact?Did Hero-worship fail in Knox’s case? Or arewe made of other clay now? Did the Westmin-ster Confession of Faith add some new prop-erty to the soul of man? God made the soul ofman. He did not doom any soul of man to liveas a Hypothesis and Hearsay, in a world filledwith such, and with the fatal work and fruitof such!—

But to return: This that Knox did for hisNation, I say, we may really call a resurrec-tion as from death. It was not a smooth busi-ness; but it was welcome surely, and cheap atthat price, had it been far rougher. On thewhole, cheap at any price!—as life is. Thepeople began to live: they needed first of allto do that, at what cost and costs soever.Scotch Literature and Thought, Scotch Indus-try; James Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott,Robert Burns: I find Knox and the Reforma-tion acting in the heart’s core of every oneof these persons and phenomena; I find thatwithout the Reformation they would not havebeen. Or what of Scotland? The Puritanismof Scotland became that of England, of NewEngland. A tumult in the High Church ofEdinburgh spread into a universal battle andstruggle over all these realms;—there cameout, after fifty years’ struggling, what we allcall the “Glorious Revolution” a Habeas Cor-pus Act, Free Parliaments, and much else!—Alas, is it not too true what we said, Thatmany men in the van do always, like Rus-sian soldiers, march into the ditch of Schweid-


nitz, and fill it up with their dead bodies, thatthe rear may pass over them dry-shod, andgain the honor? How many earnest ruggedCromwells, Knoxes, poor Peasant Covenan-ters, wrestling, battling for very life, in roughmiry places, have to struggle, and suffer,and fall, greatly censured, bemired,—before abeautiful Revolution of Eighty-eight can stepover them in official pumps and silk-stockings,with universal three-times-three!

It seems to me hard measure that thisScottish man, now after three hundred years,should have to plead like a culprit before theworld; intrinsically for having been, in suchway as it was then possible to be, the bravestof all Scotchmen! Had he been a poor Half-and-half, he could have crouched into the cor-ner, like so many others; Scotland had notbeen delivered; and Knox had been withoutblame. He is the one Scotchman to whom,of all others, his country and the world owea debt. He has to plead that Scotland wouldforgive him for having been worth to it anymillion “unblamable” Scotchmen that need noforgiveness! He bared his breast to the battle;had to row in French galleys, wander forlornin exile, in clouds and storms; was censured,shot at through his windows; had a right sorefighting life: if this world were his place of rec-ompense, he had made but a bad venture ofit. I cannot apologize for Knox. To him it isvery indifferent, these two hundred and fiftyyears or more, what men say of him. But we,having got above all those details of his bat-tle, and living now in clearness on the fruits


of his victory, we, for our own sake, ought tolook through the rumors and controversies en-veloping the man, into the man himself.

For one thing, I will remark that this postof Prophet to his Nation was not of his seek-ing; Knox had lived forty years quietly ob-scure, before he became conspicuous. He wasthe son of poor parents; had got a college ed-ucation; become a Priest; adopted the Refor-mation, and seemed well content to guide hisown steps by the light of it, nowise unduly in-truding it on others. He had lived as Tutorin gentlemen’s families; preaching when anybody of persons wished to hear his doctrine:resolute he to walk by the truth, and speakthe truth when called to do it; not ambitiousof more; not fancying himself capable of more.In this entirely obscure way he had reachedthe age of forty; was with the small body ofReformers who were standing siege in St. An-drew’s Castle,—when one day in their chapel,the Preacher after finishing his exhortation tothese fighters in the forlorn hope, said sud-denly, That there ought to be other speakers,that all men who had a priest’s heart and giftin them ought now to speak;—which gifts andheart one of their own number, John Knoxthe name of him, had: Had he not? said thePreacher, appealing to all the audience: whatthen is his duty? The people answered affir-matively; it was a criminal forsaking of hispost, if such a man held the word that was inhim 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 ingrievous trouble for some days. He felt what asmall faculty was his for this great work. Hefelt what a baptism he was called to be bap-tized withal. He “burst into tears.”

Our primary characteristic of a Hero, thathe is sincere, applies emphatically to Knox.It is not denied anywhere that this, what-ever might be his other qualities or faults, isamong the truest of men. With a singular in-stinct he holds to the truth and fact; the truthalone is there for him, the rest a mere shadowand deceptive nonentity. However feeble, for-lorn the reality may seem, on that and thatonly can he take his stand. In the Galleys ofthe River Loire, whither Knox and the others,after their Castle of St. Andrew’s was taken,had been sent as Galley-slaves,—some offi-cer or priest, one day, presented them an Im-age of the Virgin Mother, requiring that they,the blasphemous heretics, should do it rever-ence. Mother? Mother of God? said Knox,when the turn came to him: This is no Motherof God: this is “a pented bredd,”—a piece ofwood, I tell you, with paint on it! She is fit-ter for swimming, I think, than for being wor-shipped, added Knox; and flung the thing intothe river. It was not very cheap jesting there:but come of it what might, this thing to Knoxwas and must continue nothing other than thereal truth; it was a pented bredd: worship ithe would not.

He told his fellow-prisoners, in this dark-est time, to be of courage; the Cause theyhad was the true one, and must and would


prosper; the whole world could not put itdown. Reality is of God’s making; it is alonestrong. How many pented bredds, pretend-ing to be real, are fitter to swim than to beworshipped!—This Knox cannot live but byfact: he clings to reality as the shipwreckedsailor to the cliff. He is an instance to us howa man, by sincerity itself, becomes heroic: it isthe grand gift he has. We find in Knox a goodhonest intellectual talent, no transcendentone;—a narrow, inconsiderable man, as com-pared with Luther: but in heartfelt instinc-tive adherence to truth, in sincerity, as we say,he has no superior; nay, one might ask, Whatequal he has? The heart of him is of the trueProphet cast. “He lies there,” said the Earlof Morton at his grave, “who never feared theface of man.” He resembles, more than anyof the moderns, an Old-Hebrew Prophet. Thesame inflexibility, intolerance, rigid narrow-looking adherence to God’s truth, stern re-buke in the name of God to all that forsaketruth: an Old-Hebrew Prophet in the guise ofan Edinburgh Minister of the Sixteenth Cen-tury. We are to take him for that; not requirehim to be other.

Knox’s conduct to Queen Mary, the harshvisits he used to make in her own palace, to re-prove her there, have been much commentedupon. Such cruelty, such coarseness fills uswith indignation. On reading the actual nar-rative of the business, what Knox said, andwhat Knox meant, I must say one’s tragicfeeling is rather disappointed. They are notso coarse, these speeches; they seem to me


about as fine as the circumstances would per-mit! Knox was not there to do the courtier;he came on another errand. Whoever, read-ing these colloquies of his with the Queen,thinks they are vulgar insolences of a plebeianpriest to a delicate high lady, mistakes thepurport and essence of them altogether. It wasunfortunately not possible to be polite withthe Queen of Scotland, unless one proved un-true to the Nation and Cause of Scotland. Aman who did not wish to see the land of hisbirth made a hunting-field for intriguing am-bitious Guises, and the Cause of God tram-pled underfoot of Falsehoods, Formulas andthe Devil’s Cause, had no method of mak-ing himself agreeable! “Better that womenweep,” said Morton, “than that bearded menbe forced to weep.” Knox was the constitu-tional opposition-party in Scotland: the No-bles of the country, called by their station totake that post, were not found in it; Knoxhad to go, or no one. The hapless Queen;—but the still more hapless Country, if she weremade happy! Mary herself was not with-out sharpness enough, among her other qual-ities: “Who are you,” said she once, “that pre-sume to school the nobles and sovereign of thisrealm?”—“Madam, a subject born within thesame,” answered he. Reasonably answered! Ifthe “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 tolerantas possible. Yet, at bottom, after all the talkthere is and has been about it, what is toler-


ance? Tolerance has to tolerate the unessen-tial; and to see well what that is. Tolerancehas to be noble, measured, just in its verywrath, when it can tolerate no longer. But, onthe whole, we are not altogether here to toler-ate! We are here to resist, to control and van-quish withal. We do not “tolerate” Falsehoods,Thieveries, Iniquities, when they fasten on us;we say to them, Thou art false, thou art nottolerable! We are here to extinguish False-hoods, and put an end to them, in some wiseway! I will not quarrel so much with the way;the doing of the thing is our great concern. Inthis sense Knox was, full surely, intolerant.

A man sent to row in French Galleys, andsuch like, for teaching the Truth in his ownland, cannot always be in the mildest humor!I am not prepared to say that Knox had asoft temper; nor do I know that he had whatwe call an ill temper. An ill nature he decid-edly had not. Kind honest affections dwelt inthe much-enduring, hard-worn, ever-battlingman. That he could rebuke Queens, and hadsuch weight among those proud turbulent No-bles, proud enough whatever else they were;and could maintain to the end a kind of vir-tual Presidency and Sovereignty in that wildrealm, he who was only “a subject born withinthe same:” this of itself will prove to us thathe was found, close at hand, to be no meanacrid man; but at heart a healthful, strong,sagacious man. Such alone can bear rule inthat kind. They blame him for pulling downcathedrals, and so forth, as if he were a sedi-tious rioting demagogue: precisely the reverse


is seen to be the fact, in regard to cathedralsand the rest of it, if we examine! Knox wantedno pulling down of stone edifices; he wantedleprosy and darkness to be thrown out of thelives of men. Tumult was not his element; itwas the tragic feature of his life that he wasforced to dwell so much in that. Every suchman is the born enemy of Disorder; hates tobe in it: but what then? Smooth Falsehood isnot Order; it is the general sum-total of Disor-der. Order is Truth,—each thing standing onthe basis that belongs to it: Order and False-hood cannot subsist together.

Withal, unexpectedly enough, this Knoxhas a vein of drollery in him; which I likemuch, in combination with his other quali-ties. He has a true eye for the ridiculous.His History, with its rough earnestness, is cu-riously enlivened with this. When the twoPrelates, entering Glasgow Cathedral, quar-rel about precedence; march rapidly up, taketo hustling one another, twitching one an-other’s rochets, and at last flourishing theircrosiers like quarter-staves, it is a great sightfor him every way! Not mockery, scorn, bitter-ness alone; though there is enough of that too.But a true, loving, illuminating laugh mountsup 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 tothe high, brother also to the low; sincere inhis sympathy with both. He had his pipe ofBourdeaux too, we find, in that old Edinburghhouse of his; a cheery social man, with facesthat loved him! They go far wrong who think


this Knox was a gloomy, spasmodic, shriekingfanatic. Not at all: he is one of the solidestof men. Practical, cautious-hopeful, patient;a most shrewd, observing, quietly discerningman. In fact, he has very much the type ofcharacter we assign to the Scotch at present: acertain sardonic taciturnity is in him; insightenough; and a stouter heart than he himselfknows of. He has the power of holding hispeace over many things which do not vitallyconcern him,—“They? what are they?” Butthe thing which does vitally concern him, thatthing he will speak of; and in a tone the wholeworld shall be made to hear: all the more em-phatic for his long silence.

This Prophet of the Scotch is to me no hate-ful man!—He had a sore fight of an existence;wrestling with Popes and Principalities; in de-feat, contention, life-long struggle; rowing asa galley-slave, wandering as an exile. A sorefight: but he won it. “Have you hope?” theyasked him in his last moment, when he couldno longer speak. He lifted his finger, “pointedupwards with his finger,” and so died. Honorto him! His works have not died. The letter ofhis work dies, as of all men’s; but the spirit ofit never.

One word more as to the letter of Knox’swork. The unforgivable offence in him is, thathe wished to set up Priests over the head ofKings. In other words, he strove to make theGovernment of Scotland a Theocracy. This in-deed is properly the sum of his offences, theessential sin; for which what pardon can therebe? It is most true, he did, at bottom, con-


sciously or unconsciously, mean a Theocracy,or Government of God. He did mean thatKings and Prime Ministers, and all mannerof persons, in public or private, diplomatizingor whatever else they might be doing, shouldwalk according to the Gospel of Christ, andunderstand that this was their Law, supremeover all laws. He hoped once to see such athing realized; and the Petition, Thy Kingdomcome, no longer an empty word. He was soregrieved when he saw greedy worldly Baronsclutch hold of the Church’s property; whenhe expostulated that it was not secular prop-erty, that it was spiritual property, and shouldbe turned to true churchly uses, education,schools, worship;—and the Regent Murrayhad to answer, with a shrug of the shoulders,“It is a devout imagination!” This was Knox’sscheme of right and truth; this he zealouslyendeavored after, to realize it. If we think hisscheme 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 strug-gling to realize it? Theocracy, Governmentof God, is precisely the thing to be struggledfor! All Prophets, zealous Priests, are therefor that purpose. Hildebrand wished a Theoc-racy; Cromwell wished it, fought for it; Ma-homet attained it. Nay, is it not what all zeal-ous men, whether called Priests, Prophets, orwhatsoever else called, do essentially wish,and must wish? That right and truth, or God’sLaw, reign supreme among men, this is the


Heavenly Ideal (well named in Knox’s time,and namable in all times, a revealed “Will ofGod”) towards which the Reformer will insistthat all be more and more approximated. Alltrue Reformers, as I said, are by the nature ofthem Priests, and strive for a Theocracy.

How far such Ideals can ever be introducedinto Practice, and at what point our impa-tience with their non-introduction ought to be-gin, is always a question. I think we maysay safely, Let them introduce themselves asfar as they can contrive to do it! If theyare the true faith of men, all men ought tobe more or less impatient always where theyare not found introduced. There will neverbe wanting Regent Murrays enough to shrugtheir shoulders, and say, “A devout imagina-tion!” We will praise the Hero-priest rather,who does what is in him to bring them in; andwears out, in toil, calumny, contradiction, anoble life, to make a God’s Kingdom of thisEarth. The Earth will not become too godlike!

[May 19, 1840.]LECTURE V.

The Hero as Man of Letters. John-son, Rousseau, Burns.Hero-Gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are formsof Heroism that belong to the old ages, maketheir appearance in the remotest times; someof them have ceased to be possible long since,and cannot any more show themselves in thisworld. The Hero as Man of Letters, again,of which class we are to speak to-day, is al-together a product of these new ages; andso long as the wondrous art of Writing, orof Ready-writing which we call Printing, sub-sists, he may be expected to continue, as one ofthe main forms of Heroism for all future ages.He is, in various respects, a very singular phe-nomenon.

He is new, I say; he has hardly lasted abovea century in the world yet. Never, till about ahundred years ago, was there seen any figureof a Great Soul living apart in that anomalousmanner; endeavoring to speak forth the inspi-ration that was in him by Printed Books, and

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find place and subsistence by what the worldwould please to give him for doing that. Muchhad been sold and bought, and left to make itsown bargain in the market-place; but the in-spired wisdom of a Heroic Soul never till then,in that naked manner. He, with his copy-rights and copy-wrongs, in his squalid garret,in his rusty coat; ruling (for this is what hedoes), from his grave, after death, whole na-tions and generations who would, or wouldnot, give him bread while living,—is a rathercurious spectacle! Few shapes of Heroism canbe more unexpected.

Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramphimself into strange shapes: the world knowsnot well at any time what to do with him, soforeign is his aspect in the world! It seemedabsurd to us, that men, in their rude admi-ration, should take some wise great Odin fora god, and worship him as such; some wisegreat Mahomet for one god-inspired, and re-ligiously follow his Law for twelve centuries:but that a wise great Johnson, a Burns, aRousseau, should be taken for some idle non-descript, extant in the world to amuse idle-ness, and have a few coins and applausesthrown him, that he might live thereby; thisperhaps, as before hinted, will one day seem astill absurder phasis of things!—Meanwhile,since it is the spiritual always that deter-mines the material, this same Man-of-LettersHero must be regarded as our most importantmodern person. He, such as he may be, is thesoul of all. What he teaches, the whole worldwill do and make. The world’s manner of deal-

The Hero as Man of Letters 211

ing with him is the most significant featureof the world’s general position. Looking wellat his life, we may get a glance, as deep as isreadily possible for us, into the life of thosesingular centuries which have produced him,in which we ourselves live and work.

There are genuine Men of Letters, and notgenuine; as in every kind there is a genuineand a spurious. If hero be taken to mean gen-uine, then I say the Hero as Man of Letterswill be found discharging a function for uswhich is ever honorable, ever the highest; andwas once well known to be the highest. He isuttering forth, in such way as he has, the in-spired soul of him; all that a man, in any case,can do. I say inspired; for what we call “orig-inality,” “sincerity,” “genius,” the heroic qual-ity we have no good name for, signifies that.The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphereof things, in the True, Divine and Eternal,which exists always, unseen to most, underthe Temporary, Trivial: his being is in that;he declares that abroad, by act or speech as itmay be in declaring himself abroad. His life,as we said before, is a piece of the everlast-ing heart of Nature herself: all men’s life is,—but the weak many know not the fact, and areuntrue to it, in most times; the strong few arestrong, heroic, perennial, because it cannot behidden from them. The Man of Letters, likeevery Hero, is there to proclaim this in suchsort as he can. Intrinsically it is the samefunction which the old generations named aman Prophet, Priest, Divinity for doing; whichall manner of Heroes, by speech or by act, are


sent into the world to do.Fichte the German Philosopher delivered,

some forty years ago at Erlangen, a highlyremarkable Course of Lectures on this sub-ject: “Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten, On theNature of the Literary Man.” Fichte, in con-formity with the Transcendental Philosophy,of which he was a distinguished teacher, de-clares first: That all things which we see orwork with in this Earth, especially we our-selves and all persons, are as a kind of vestureor sensuous Appearance: that under all therelies, as the essence of them, what he calls the“Divine Idea of the World;” this is the Realitywhich “lies at the bottom of all Appearance.”To the mass of men no such Divine Idea is rec-ognizable in the world; they live merely, saysFichte, among the superficialities, practicali-ties and shows of the world, not dreaming thatthere is anything divine under them. But theMan of Letters is sent hither specially that hemay discern for himself, and make manifestto us, this same Divine Idea: in every newgeneration it will manifest itself in a new di-alect; and he is there for the purpose of doingthat. Such is Fichte’s phraseology; with whichwe need not quarrel. It is his way of nam-ing what I here, by other words, am strivingimperfectly to name; what there is at presentno name for: The unspeakable Divine Signif-icance, full of splendor, of wonder and terror,that lies in the being of every man, of everything,—the Presence of the God who made ev-ery man and thing. Mahomet taught this inhis 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, aPriest, continually unfolding the Godlike tomen: Men of Letters are a perpetual Priest-hood, from age to age, teaching all men that aGod is still present in their life, that all “Ap-pearance,” whatsoever we see in the world,is but as a vesture for the “Divine Idea ofthe World,” for “that which lies at the bot-tom of Appearance.” In the true Literary Manthere is thus ever, acknowledged or not by theworld, a sacredness: he is the light of theworld; the world’s Priest;—guiding it, like asacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimagethrough the waste of Time. Fichte discrimi-nates with sharp zeal the true Literary Man,what we here call the Hero as Man of Letters,from multitudes of false unheroic. Whoeverlives not wholly in this Divine Idea, or livingpartially in it, struggles not, as for the onegood, to live wholly in it,—he is, let him livewhere else he like, in what pomps and pros-perities he like, no Literary Man; he is, saysFichte, a “Bungler, Stumper.” Or at best, ifhe belong to the prosaic provinces, he may bea “Hodman;” Fichte even calls him elsewherea “Nonentity,” and has in short no mercy forhim, no wish that he should continue happyamong us! This is Fichte’s notion of the Manof Letters. It means, in its own form, preciselywhat we here mean.

In this point of view, I consider that, for thelast hundred years, by far the notablest of all


Literary Men is Fichte’s countryman, Goethe.To that man too, in a strange way, there wasgiven what we may call a life in the DivineIdea of the World; vision of the inward divinemystery: and strangely, out of his Books, theworld rises imaged once more as godlike, theworkmanship and temple of a God. Illumi-nated all, not in fierce impure fire-splendor asof Mahomet, but in mild celestial radiance;—really a Prophecy in these most unprophetictimes; to my mind, by far the greatest, thoughone of the quietest, among all the great thingsthat have come to pass in them. Our chosenspecimen of the Hero as Literary Man wouldbe this Goethe. And it were a very pleasantplan for me here to discourse of his heroism:for I consider him to be a true Hero; heroicin what he said and did, and perhaps stillmore in what he did not say and did not do;to me a noble spectacle: a great heroic an-cient man, speaking and keeping silence as anancient Hero, in the guise of a most modern,high-bred, high-cultivated Man of Letters! Wehave had no such spectacle; no man capable ofaffording such, for the last hundred and fiftyyears.

But at present, such is the general state ofknowledge about Goethe, it were worse thanuseless to attempt speaking of him in thiscase. Speak as I might, Goethe, to the greatmajority of you, would remain problematic,vague; no impression but a false one could berealized. Him we must leave to future times.Johnson, Burns, Rousseau, three great figuresfrom a prior time, from a far inferior state of


circumstances, will suit us better here. Threemen of the Eighteenth Century; the condi-tions of their life far more resemble whatthose of ours still are in England, than whatGoethe’s in Germany were. Alas, these mendid not conquer like him; they fought bravely,and fell. They were not heroic bringers ofthe light, but heroic seekers of it. They livedunder galling conditions; struggling as un-der mountains of impediment, and could notunfold themselves into clearness, or victori-ous interpretation of that “Divine Idea.” Itis rather the Tombs of three Literary Heroesthat I have to show you. There are the monu-mental heaps, under which three spiritual gi-ants lie buried. Very mournful, but also greatand full of interest for us. We will linger bythem for a while.

Complaint is often made, in these times, ofwhat we call the disorganized condition of so-ciety: how ill many forces of society fulfil theirwork; how many powerful are seen workingin a wasteful, chaotic, altogether unarrangedmanner. It is too just a complaint, as weall know. But perhaps if we look at this ofBooks and the Writers of Books, we shall findhere, as it were, the summary of all otherdisorganizations;—a sort of heart, from which,and to which all other confusion circulatesin the world! Considering what Book writ-ers do in the world, and what the world doeswith Book writers, I should say, It is the mostanomalous thing the world at present has toshow.—We should get into a sea far beyondsounding, did we attempt to give account of


this: but we must glance at it for the sakeof our subject. The worst element in thelife of these three Literary Heroes was, thatthey found their business and position such achaos. On the beaten road there is tolerabletravelling; but it is sore work, and many haveto perish, fashioning a path through the im-passable!

Our pious Fathers, feeling well what im-portance lay in the speaking of man to men,founded churches, made endowments, regula-tions; everywhere in the civilized world thereis a Pulpit, environed with all manner ofcomplex dignified appurtenances and further-ances, that therefrom a man with the tonguemay, to best advantage, address his fellow-men. They felt that this was the most im-portant thing; that without this there was nogood thing. It is a right pious work, that oftheirs; beautiful to behold! But now with theart of Writing, with the art of Printing, a to-tal change has come over that business. TheWriter of a Book, is not he a Preacher preach-ing not to this parish or that, on this day orthat, but to all men in all times and places?Surely it is of the last importance that he dohis work right, whoever do it wrong;—that theeye report not falsely, for then all the othermembers are astray! Well; how he may do hiswork, whether he do it right or wrong, or do itat all, is a point which no man in the world hastaken the pains to think of. To a certain shop-keeper, trying to get some money for his books,if lucky, he is of some importance; to no otherman of any. Whence he came, whither he is


bound, by what ways he arrived, by what hemight be furthered on his course, no one asks.He is an accident in society. He wanders likea wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is asthe spiritual light, either the guidance or themisguidance!

Certainly the Art of Writing is the mostmiraculous of all things man has devised.Odin’s Runes were the first form of the work ofa Hero; Books written words, are still mirac-ulous Runes, the latest form! In Books liesthe soul of the whole Past Time; the articulateaudible voice of the Past, when the body andmaterial substance of it has altogether van-ished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies,harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed,many-engined,—they are precious, great: butwhat do they become? Agamemnon, the manyAgamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece;all is gone now to some ruined fragments,dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but theBooks of Greece! There Greece, to everythinker, still very literally lives: can be calledup again into life. No magic Rune is strangerthan a Book. All that Mankind has done,thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magicpreservation in the pages of Books. They arethe chosen possession of men.

Do not Books still accomplish miracles, asRunes were fabled to do? They persuademen. Not the wretchedest circulating-librarynovel, which foolish girls thumb and con inremote villages, but will help to regulate theactual practical weddings and households ofthose foolish girls. So “Celia” felt, so “Clifford”


acted: the foolish Theorem of Life, stampedinto those young brains, comes out as a solidPractice one day. Consider whether any Runein the wildest imagination of Mythologist everdid such wonders as, on the actual firm Earth,some Books have done! What built St. Paul’sCathedral? Look at the heart of the matter,it was that divine Hebrew book,—the wordpartly of the man Moses, an outlaw tendinghis Midianitish herds, four thousand yearsago, in the wildernesses of Sinai! It is thestrangest of things, yet nothing is truer. Withthe art of Writing, of which Printing is a sim-ple, an inevitable and comparatively insignif-icant corollary, the true reign of miracles formankind commenced. It related, with a won-drous new contiguity and perpetual closeness,the Past and Distant with the Present in timeand place; all times and all places with thisour actual Here and Now. All things were al-tered for men; all modes of important work ofmen: teaching, preaching, governing, and allelse.

To look at Teaching, for instance. Uni-versities are a notable, respectable productof the modern ages. Their existence too ismodified, to the very basis of it, by the exis-tence of Books. Universities arose while therewere yet no Books procurable; while a man,for a single Book, had to give an estate ofland. That, in those circumstances, when aman had some knowledge to communicate, heshould do it by gathering the learners roundhim, face to face, was a necessity for him.If you wanted to know what Abelard knew,


you must go and listen to Abelard. Thou-sands, as many as thirty thousand, went tohear Abelard and that metaphysical theologyof his. And now for any other teacher who hadalso something of his own to teach, there wasa great convenience opened: so many thou-sands eager to learn were already assembledyonder; of all places the best place for himwas that. For any third teacher it was bet-ter still; and grew ever the better, the moreteachers there came. It only needed now thatthe King took notice of this new phenomenon;combined or agglomerated the various schoolsinto one school; gave it edifices, privileges, en-couragements, and named it Universitas, orSchool of all Sciences: the University of Paris,in its essential characters, was there. Themodel of all subsequent Universities; whichdown even to these days, for six centuries now,have gone on to found themselves. Such, I con-ceive, was the origin of Universities.

It is clear, however, that with this sim-ple circumstance, facility of getting Books, thewhole conditions of the business from top tobottom were changed. Once invent Printing,you metamorphosed all Universities, or su-perseded them! The Teacher needed not nowto gather men personally round him, that hemight speak to them what he knew: print itin a Book, and all learners far and wide, fora trifle, had it each at his own fireside, muchmore effectually to learn it!—Doubtless thereis still peculiar virtue in Speech; even writ-ers of Books may still, in some circumstances,find it convenient to speak also,—witness our


present meeting here! There is, one wouldsay, and must ever remain while man hasa tongue, a distinct province for Speech aswell as for Writing and Printing. In regardto all things this must remain; to Universi-ties among others. But the limits of the twohave nowhere yet been pointed out, ascer-tained; much less put in practice: the Uni-versity which would completely take in thatgreat new fact, of the existence of PrintedBooks, and stand on a clear footing for theNineteenth Century as the Paris one did forthe Thirteenth, has not yet come into exis-tence. If we think of it, all that a University,or final highest School can do for us, is stillbut what the first School began doing,—teachus to read. We learn to read, in various lan-guages, in various sciences; we learn the al-phabet and letters of all manner of Books. Butthe place where we are to get knowledge, eventheoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves!It depends on what we read, after all mannerof Professors have done their best for us. Thetrue University of these days is a Collection ofBooks.

But to the Church itself, as I hinted al-ready, all is changed, in its preaching, in itsworking, by the introduction of Books. TheChurch is the working recognized Union ofour Priests or Prophets, of those who by wiseteaching guide the souls of men. While therewas no Writing, even while there was no Easy-writing, or Printing, the preaching of the voicewas the natural sole method of performingthis. But now with Books! —He that can


write a true Book, to persuade England, is nothe the Bishop and Archbishop, the Primate ofEngland and of All England? I many a timesay, the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets,Poems, Books, these are the real working ef-fective Church of a modern country. Nay notonly our preaching, but even our worship, isnot it too accomplished by means of PrintedBooks? The noble sentiment which a giftedsoul has clothed for us in melodious words,which brings melody into our hearts,—is notthis essentially, if we will understand it, ofthe nature of worship? There are many, inall countries, who, in this confused time, haveno other method of worship. He who, in anyway, shows us better than we knew before thata lily of the fields is beautiful, does he notshow it us as an effluence of the Fountain ofall Beauty; as the handwriting, made visiblethere, of the great Maker of the Universe? Hehas sung for us, made us sing with him, a lit-tle verse of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so.How much more he who sings, who says, orin any way brings home to our heart the no-ble doings, feelings, darings and endurancesof a brother man! He has verily touched ourhearts as with a live coal from the altar. Per-haps there is no worship more authentic.

Literature, so far as it is Literature, isan “apocalypse of Nature,” a revealing of the“open secret.” It may well enough be named,in Fichte’s style, a “continuous revelation” ofthe Godlike in the Terrestrial and Common.The Godlike does ever, in very truth, endurethere; is brought out, now in this dialect, now


in that, with various degrees of clearness: alltrue gifted Singers and Speakers are, con-sciously or unconsciously, doing so. The darkstormful indignation of a Byron, so waywardand perverse, may have touches of it; naythe withered mockery of a French sceptic,—his mockery of the False, a love and worshipof the True. How much more the sphere-harmony of a Shakspeare, of a Goethe; thecathedral music of a Milton! They are some-thing too, those humble genuine lark-notes ofa Burns,—skylark, starting from the humblefurrow, far overhead into the blue depths, andsinging to us so genuinely there! For all truesinging is of the nature of worship; as indeedall true working may be said to be,—whereofsuch singing is but the record, and fit melo-dious representation, to us. Fragments of areal “Church Liturgy” and “Body of Homilies,”strangely disguised from the common eye, areto be found weltering in that huge froth-oceanof Printed Speech we loosely call Literature!Books are our Church too.

Or turning now to the Government of men.Witenagemote, old Parliament, was a greatthing. The affairs of the nation were there de-liberated and decided; what we were to do asa nation. But does not, though the name Par-liament subsists, the parliamentary debate goon now, everywhere and at all times, in a farmore comprehensive way, out of Parliamentaltogether? Burke said there were Three Es-tates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate moreimportant 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. Liter-ature is our Parliament too. Printing, whichcomes necessarily out of Writing, I say of-ten, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writ-ing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing bringsPrinting; brings universal everyday extem-pore Printing, as we see at present. Whoevercan speak, speaking now to the whole nation,becomes a power, a branch of government,with inalienable weight in law-making, in allacts of authority. It matters not what rank hehas, what revenues or garnitures. the requi-site thing is, that he have a tongue which oth-ers will listen to; this and nothing more is req-uisite. The nation is governed by all that hastongue in the nation: Democracy is virtuallythere. Add only, that whatsoever power existswill have itself, by and by, organized; work-ing secretly under bandages, obscurations, ob-structions, it will never rest till it get to workfree, unencumbered, visible to all. Democracyvirtually extant will insist on becoming palpa-bly extant.—

On all sides, are we not driven to the con-clusion that, of the things which man can door make here below, by far the most momen-tous, wonderful and worthy are the things wecall Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper withblack ink on them;—from the Daily Newspa-per to the sacred Hebrew book, what havethey not done, what are they not doing!—Forindeed, whatever be the outward form of thething (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 isthe Thought of man; the true thaumaturgicvirtue; by which man works all things what-soever. All that he does, and brings to pass, isthe vesture of a Thought. This London City,with all its houses, palaces, steam-engines,cathedrals, and huge immeasurable trafficand tumult, what is it but a Thought, butmillions of Thoughts made into One;—a hugeimmeasurable Spirit of a thought, embodiedin brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Par-liaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks,and the rest of it! Not a brick was made butsome man had to think of the making of thatbrick.—The thing we called “bits of paper withtraces of black ink,” is the purest embodimenta Thought of man can have. No wonder it is,in all ways, the activest and noblest.

All this, of the importance and supremeimportance of the Man of Letters in modernSociety, and how the Press is to such a de-gree superseding the Pulpit, the Senate, theSenatus Academicus and much else, has beenadmitted for a good while; and recognized of-ten enough, in late times, with a sort of sen-timental triumph and wonderment. It seemsto me, the Sentimental by and by will haveto give place to the Practical. If Men of Let-ters are so incalculably influential, actuallyperforming such work for us from age to age,and even from day to day, then I think wemay conclude that Men of Letters will not al-ways wander like unrecognized unregulatedIshmaelites among us! Whatsoever thing, as Isaid above, has virtual unnoticed power will


cast off its wrappages, bandages, and stepforth one day with palpably articulated, uni-versally visible power. That one man wearthe clothes, and take the wages, of a func-tion which is done by quite another: therecan be no profit in this; this is not right, it iswrong. And yet, alas, the making of it right,—what a business, for long times to come! Sureenough, this that we call Organization of theLiterary Guild is still a great way off, encum-bered with all manner of complexities. If youasked me what were the best possible organi-zation for the Men of Letters in modern soci-ety; the arrangement of furtherance and reg-ulation, grounded the most accurately on theactual facts of their position and of the world’sposition,—I should beg to say that the prob-lem far exceeded my faculty! It is not oneman’s faculty; it is that of many successivemen turned earnestly upon it, that will bringout even an approximate solution. What thebest arrangement were, none of us could say.But if you ask, Which is the worst? I answer:This which we now have, that Chaos shouldsit umpire in it; this is the worst. To the best,or any good one, there is yet a long way.

One remark I must not omit, That royalor parliamentary grants of money are by nomeans the chief thing wanted! To give ourMen of Letters stipends, endowments and allfurtherance of cash, will do little towards thebusiness. On the whole, one is weary of hear-ing about the omnipotence of money. I will sayrather that, for a genuine man, it is no evil tobe poor; that there ought to be Literary Men


poor,—to show whether they are genuine ornot! Mendicant Orders, bodies of good mendoomed to beg, were instituted in the Chris-tian Church; a most natural and even neces-sary development of the spirit of Christian-ity. It was itself founded on Poverty, on Sor-row, Contradiction, Crucifixion, every speciesof worldly Distress and Degradation. We maysay, that he who has not known those things,and learned from them the priceless lessonsthey have to teach, has missed a good oppor-tunity of schooling. To beg, and go barefoot, incoarse woollen cloak with a rope round yourloins, and be despised of all the world, was nobeautiful business;—nor an honorable one inany eye, till the nobleness of those who did sohad made it honored of some!

Begging is not in our course at the presenttime: but for the rest of it, who will say thata Johnson is not perhaps the better for beingpoor? It is needful for him, at all rates, toknow that outward profit, that success of anykind is not the goal he has to aim at. Pride,vanity, ill-conditioned egoism of all sorts, arebred 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 forthfrom it, as a thing worthless. Byron, born richand noble, made out even less than Burns,poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in thatsame “best possible organization” as yet faroff, Poverty may still enter as an importantelement? What if our Men of Letters, mensetting up to be Spiritual Heroes, were stillthen, as they now are, a kind of “involuntary


monastic order;” bound still to this same uglyPoverty,—till they had tried what was in ittoo, till they had learned to make it too dofor them! Money, in truth, can do much, butit cannot do all. We must know the provinceof it, and confine it there; and even spurn itback, when it wishes to get farther.

Besides, were the money-furtherances, theproper season for them, the fit assigner ofthem, all settled,—how is the Burns to berecognized that merits these? He must passthrough the ordeal, and prove himself. Thisordeal; this wild welter of a chaos which iscalled Literary Life: this too is a kind of or-deal! There is clear truth in the idea that astruggle from the lower classes of society, to-wards the upper regions and rewards of soci-ety, must ever continue. Strong men are bornthere, who ought to stand elsewhere thanthere. The manifold, inextricably complex,universal struggle of these constitutes, andmust constitute, what is called the progress ofsociety. For Men of Letters, as for all othersorts of men. How to regulate that strug-gle? There is the whole question. To leaveit as it is, at the mercy of blind Chance; awhirl of distracted atoms, one cancelling theother; one of the thousand arriving saved,nine hundred and ninety-nine lost by the way;your royal Johnson languishing inactive ingarrets, or harnessed to the yoke of PrinterCave; your Burns dying broken-hearted as aGauger; your Rousseau driven into mad exas-peration, kindling French Revolutions by hisparadoxes: this, as we said, is clearly enough


the worst regulation. The best, alas, is farfrom us!

And yet there can be no doubt but it is com-ing; advancing on us, as yet hidden in thebosom of centuries: this is a prophecy onecan risk. For so soon as men get to discernthe importance of a thing, they do infalliblyset about arranging it, facilitating, forward-ing it; and rest not till, in some approximatedegree, they have accomplished that. I say,of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, GoverningClasses at present extant in the world, thereis no class comparable for importance to thatPriesthood of the Writers of Books. This is afact which he who runs may read,—and drawinferences from. “Literature will take care ofitself,” answered Mr. Pitt, when applied to forsome help for Burns. “Yes,” adds Mr. Southey,“it will take care of itself; and of you too, if youdo not look to it!”

The result to individual Men of Letters isnot the momentous one; they are but individu-als, an infinitesimal fraction of the great body;they can struggle on, and live or else die, asthey have been wont. But it deeply concernsthe whole society, whether it will set its lighton high places, to walk thereby; or trample itunder foot, and scatter it in all ways of wildwaste (not without conflagration), as hereto-fore! Light is the one thing wanted for theworld. Put wisdom in the head of the world,the world will fight its battle victoriously, andbe the best world man can make it. I calledthis anomaly of a disorganic Literary Classthe heart of all other anomalies, at once prod-


uct and parent; some good arrangement forthat would be as the punctum saliens of anew vitality and just arrangement for all. Al-ready, in some European countries, in France,in Prussia, one traces some beginnings of anarrangement for the Literary Class; indicat-ing the gradual possibility of such. I believethat it is possible; that it will have to be pos-sible.

By far the most interesting fact I hearabout the Chinese is one on which we cannotarrive at clearness, but which excites endlesscuriosity even in the dim state: this namely,that they do attempt to make their Men ofLetters their Governors! It would be rashto 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; thevery attempt how precious! There does seemto be, all over China, a more or less activesearch everywhere to discover the men of tal-ent that grow up in the young generation.Schools there are for every one: a foolish sortof training, yet still a sort. The youths whodistinguish themselves in the lower schoolare promoted into favorable stations in thehigher, that they may still more distinguishthemselves,—forward and forward: it appearsto be out of these that the Official Persons,and incipient Governors, are taken. Theseare they whom they try first, whether theycan govern or not. And surely with the besthope: for they are the men that have alreadyshown intellect. Try them: they have not gov-


erned or administered as yet; perhaps theycannot; but there is no doubt they have someUnderstanding,—without which no man can!Neither is Understanding a tool, as we are tooapt to figure; “it is a hand which can handleany tool.” Try these men: they are of all oth-ers the best worth trying.—Surely there is nokind of government, constitution, revolution,social apparatus or arrangement, that I knowof in this world, so promising to one’s scien-tific curiosity as this. The man of intellect atthe top of affairs: this is the aim of all con-stitutions and revolutions, if they have anyaim. For the man of true intellect, as I assertand believe always, is the noble-hearted manwithal, the true, just, humane and valiantman. Get him for governor, all is got; fail toget him, though you had Constitutions plenti-ful as blackberries, and a Parliament in everyvillage, there is nothing yet got!—

These things look strange, truly; and arenot such as we commonly speculate upon. Butwe are fallen into strange times; these thingswill require to be speculated upon; to be ren-dered practicable, to be in some way put inpractice. These, and many others. On allhands of us, there is the announcement, au-dible enough, that the old Empire of Routinehas ended; that to say a thing has long been,is no reason for its continuing to be. Thethings which have been are fallen into decay,are fallen into incompetence; large masses ofmankind, in every society of our Europe, areno longer capable of living at all by the thingswhich have been. When millions of men can


no longer by their utmost exertion gain foodfor themselves, and “the third man for thirty-six weeks each year is short of third-rate pota-toes,” the things which have been must decid-edly prepare to alter themselves!—I will nowquit this of the organization of Men of Letters.

Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest onthose Literary Heroes of ours was not thewant of organization for Men of Letters, buta far deeper one; out of which, indeed, thisand 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 Let-ters had to travel without highway, compan-ionless, through an inorganic chaos,—and toleave his own life and faculty lying there, asa partial contribution towards pushing somehighway through it: this, had not his fac-ulty itself been so perverted and paralyzed,he might have put up with, might have con-sidered to be but the common lot of Heroes.His fatal misery was the spiritual paralysis,so we may name it, of the Age in which his lifelay; whereby his life too, do what he might,was half paralyzed! The Eighteenth was aSceptical Century; in which little word thereis a whole Pandora’s Box of miseries. Scepti-cism means not intellectual Doubt alone, butmoral Doubt; all sorts of infidelity, insincer-ity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, in few cen-turies that one could specify since the worldbegan, was a life of Heroism more difficult fora man. That was not an age of Faith,—anage of Heroes! The very possibility of Hero-ism had been, as it were, formally abnegated


in the minds of all. Heroism was gone for-ever; Triviality, Formulism and Commonplacewere come forever. The “age of miracles” hadbeen, or perhaps had not been; but it was notany longer. An effete world; wherein Wonder,Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell;—inone word, a godless world!

How mean, dwarfish are their ways ofthinking, in this time,—compared not withthe Christian Shakspeares and Miltons, butwith the old Pagan Skalds, with any speciesof believing men! The living tree Igdrasil,with the melodious prophetic waving of itsworld-wide boughs, deep-rooted as Hela, hasdied out into the clanking of a World-machine.“Tree” and “Machine:” contrast these twothings. I, for my share, declare the worldto be no machine! I say that it does not goby wheel-and-pinion “motives” self-interests,checks, balances; that there is something farother in it than the clank of spinning-jennies,and parliamentary majorities; and, on thewhole, that it is not a machine at all!—The oldNorse Heathen had a truer motion of God’s-world than these poor Machine-Sceptics: theold Heathen Norse were sincere men. Butfor these poor Sceptics there was no sincerity,no truth. Half-truth and hearsay was calledtruth. Truth, for most men, meant plausibil-ity; to be measured by the number of votes youcould get. They had lost any notion that sin-cerity was possible, or of what sincerity was.How many Plausibilities asking, with unaf-fected surprise and the air of offended virtue,What! am not I sincere? Spiritual Paralysis, I


say, nothing left but a Mechanical life, was thecharacteristic of that century. For the com-mon man, unless happily he stood below hiscentury and belonged to another prior one, itwas impossible to be a Believer, a Hero; helay buried, unconscious, under these balefulinfluences. To the strongest man, only withinfinite struggle and confusion was it possibleto work himself half loose; and lead as it were,in an enchanted, most tragical way, a spiritualdeath-in-life, and be a Half-Hero!

Scepticism is the name we give to all this;as the chief symptom, as the chief origin of allthis. Concerning which so much were to besaid! It would take many Discourses, not asmall fraction of one Discourse, to state whatone feels about that Eighteenth Century andits ways. As indeed this, and the like of this,which we now call Scepticism, is precisely theblack malady and life-foe, against which allteaching and discoursing since man’s life be-gan has directed itself: the battle of Beliefagainst Unbelief is the never-ending battle!Neither is it in the way of crimination thatone would wish to speak. Scepticism, for thatcentury, we must consider as the decay of oldways of believing, the preparation afar off fornew better and wider ways,—an inevitablething. We will not blame men for it; we willlament their hard fate. We will understandthat destruction of old forms is not destructionof everlasting substances; that Scepticism, assorrowful and hateful as we see it, is not anend but a beginning.

The other day speaking, without prior pur-


pose that way, of Bentham’s theory of man andman’s life, I chanced to call it a more beg-garly one than Mahomet’s. I am bound tosay, now when it is once uttered, that suchis my deliberate opinion. Not that one wouldmean offence against the man Jeremy Ben-tham, or those who respect and believe him.Bentham himself, and even the creed of Ben-tham, seems to me comparatively worthy ofpraise. It is a determinate being what allthe 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 callthis gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism an ap-proach towards new Faith. It was a laying-down of cant; a saying to oneself: “Well then,this world is a dead iron machine, the god ofit Gravitation and selfish Hunger; let us seewhat, by checking and balancing, and goodadjustment of tooth and pinion, can be madeof it!” Benthamism has something complete,manful, in such fearless committal of itselfto what it finds true; you may call it Heroic,though a Heroism with its eyes put out! Itis the culminating point, and fearless ultima-tum, of what lay in the half-and-half state,pervading man’s whole existence in that Eigh-teenth Century. It seems to me, all deniers ofGodhood, and all lip-believers of it, are boundto be Benthamites, if they have courage andhonesty. Benthamism is an eyeless Heroism:the Human Species, like a hapless blindedSamson grinding in the Philistine Mill, claspsconvulsively the pillars of its Mill; brings hugeruin 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 dis-cerns nothing but Mechanism in the Universehas in the fatalest way missed the secret ofthe Universe altogether. That all Godhoodshould vanish out of men’s conception of thisUniverse seems to me precisely the most bru-tal error,—I will not disparage Heathenism bycalling it a Heathen error,—that men couldfall into. It is not true; it is false at the veryheart of it. A man who thinks so will thinkwrong about all things in the world; this origi-nal sin will vitiate all other conclusions he canform. One might call it the most lamentableof Delusions,—not forgetting Witchcraft itself!Witchcraft worshipped at least a living Devil;but this worships a dead iron Devil; no God,not even a Devil! Whatsoever is noble, divine,inspired, drops thereby out of life. There re-mains everywhere in life a despicable caput-mortuum; the mechanical hull, all soul fledout of it. How can a man act heroically? The“Doctrine of Motives” will teach him that itis, under more or less disguise, nothing but awretched love of Pleasure, fear of Pain; thatHunger, of applause, of cash, of whatsoevervictual it may be, is the ultimate fact of man’slife. Atheism, in brief;—which does indeedfrightfully punish itself. The man, I say, is be-come spiritually a paralytic man; this godlikeUniverse a dead mechanical steam-engine, allworking by motives, checks, balances, and Iknow not what; wherein, as in the detestablebelly of some Phalaris’-Bull of his own contriv-


ing, he the poor Phalaris sits miserably dying!Belief I define to be the healthy act of a

man’s mind. It is a mysterious indescrib-able process, that of getting to believe;—indescribable, as all vital acts are. We haveour mind given us, not that it may cavil andargue, but that it may see into something,give us clear belief and understanding aboutsomething, whereon we are then to proceed toact. Doubt, truly, is not itself a crime. Cer-tainly we do not rush out, clutch up the firstthing we find, and straightway believe that!All manner of doubt, inquiry, σκεψις as it isnamed, about all manner of objects, dwellsin every reasonable mind. It is the mysticworking of the mind, on the object it is get-ting to know and believe. Belief comes outof all this, above ground, like the tree fromits hidden roots. But now if, even on commonthings, we require that a man keep his doubtssilent, and not babble of them till they in somemeasure become affirmations or denials; howmuch more in regard to the highest things,impossible to speak of in words at all! Thata man parade his doubt, and get to imaginethat debating and logic (which means at bestonly the manner of telling us your thought,your belief or disbelief, about a thing) is thetriumph and true work of what intellect hehas: alas, this is as if you should overturn thetree, and instead of green boughs, leaves andfruits, show us ugly taloned roots turned upinto the air,—and no growth, only death andmisery going on!

For the Scepticism, as I said, is not in-


tellectual only; it is moral also; a chronicatrophy and disease of the whole soul. Aman lives by believing something; not by de-bating and arguing about many things. Asad case for him when all that he can man-age to believe is something he can button inhis pocket, and with one or the other organeat and digest! Lower than that he will notget. We call those ages in which he getsso low the mournfulest, sickest and mean-est of all ages. The world’s heart is palsied,sick: how can any limb of it be whole? Gen-uine Acting ceases in all departments of theworld’s work; dexterous Similitude of Actingbegins. The world’s wages are pocketed, theworld’s work is not done. Heroes have goneout; Quacks have come in. Accordingly, whatCentury, since the end of the Roman world,which also was a time of scepticism, simu-lacra and universal decadence, so aboundswith Quacks as that Eighteenth? Considerthem, with their tumid sentimental vapor-ing about virtue, benevolence,—the wretchedQuack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head ofthem! Few men were without quackery; theyhad got to consider it a necessary ingredientand amalgam for truth. Chatham, our braveChatham himself, comes down to the House,all wrapt and bandaged; he “has crawled outin great bodily suffering,” and so on;—forgets,says Walpole, that he is acting the sick man;in the fire of debate, snatches his arm fromthe sling, and oratorically swings and bran-dishes it! Chatham himself lives the strangestmimetic life, half-hero, half-quack, all along.


For indeed the world is full of dupes; and youhave to gain the world’s suffrage! How theduties of the world will be done in that case,what quantities of error, which means fail-ure, which means sorrow and misery, to someand to many, will gradually accumulate in allprovinces of the world’s business, we need notcompute.

It seems to me, you lay your finger here onthe heart of the world’s maladies, when youcall it a Sceptical World. An insincere world;a godless untruth of a world! It is out of this,as I consider, that the whole tribe of socialpestilences, French Revolutions, Chartisms,and what not, have derived their being,—theirchief necessity to be. This must alter. Till thisalter, nothing can beneficially alter. My onehope of the world, my inexpugnable consola-tion in looking at the miseries of the world,is that this is altering. Here and there onedoes now find a man who knows, as of old, thatthis world is a Truth, and no Plausibility andFalsity; that he himself is alive, not dead orparalytic; and that the world is alive, instinctwith Godhood, beautiful and awful, even as inthe beginning of days! One man once know-ing this, many men, all men, must by and bycome to know it. It lies there clear, for whoso-ever will take the spectacles off his eyes andhonestly look, to know! For such a man theUnbelieving Century, with its unblessed Prod-ucts, is already past; a new century is alreadycome. The old unblessed Products and Perfor-mances, as solid as they look, are Phantasms,preparing speedily to vanish. To this and the


other noisy, very great-looking Simulacrumwith the whole world huzzaing at its heels,he can say, composedly stepping aside: Thouart not true; thou art not extant, only sem-blant; go thy way!—Yes, hollow Formulism,gross Benthamism, and other unheroic athe-istic Insincerity is visibly and even rapidly de-clining. An unbelieving Eighteenth Centuryis but an exception,—such as now and then oc-curs. I prophesy that the world will once morebecome sincere; a believing world; with manyHeroes in it, a heroic world! It will then be avictorious world; never till then.

Or indeed what of the world and its victo-ries? Men speak too much about the world.Each one of us here, let the world go how itwill, and be victorious or not victorious, hashe not a Life of his own to lead? One Life;a little gleam of Time between two Eterni-ties; no second chance to us forevermore! Itwere well for us to live not as fools and sim-ulacra, but as wise and realities. The world’sbeing saved will not save us; nor the world’sbeing lost destroy us. We should look to our-selves: there is great merit here in the “dutyof staying at home”! And, on the whole, tosay truth, I never heard of “world’s” being“saved” in any other way. That mania of sav-ing worlds is itself a piece of the EighteenthCentury with its windy sentimentalism. Letus not follow it too far. For the saving of theworld I will trust confidently to the Maker ofthe world; and look a little to my own saving,which I am more competent to!—In brief, forthe world’s sake, and for our own, we will re-


joice greatly that Scepticism, Insincerity, Me-chanical Atheism, with all their poison-dews,are going, and as good as gone.—

Now it was under such conditions, in thosetimes of Johnson, that our Men of Lettershad to live. Times in which there was prop-erly no truth in life. Old truths had fallennigh dumb; the new lay yet hidden, not try-ing to speak. That Man’s Life here below wasa Sincerity and Fact, and would forever con-tinue such, no new intimation, in that duskof the world, had yet dawned. No intima-tion; not even any French Revolution,—whichwe define to be a Truth once more, thougha Truth clad in hell-fire! How different wasthe Luther’s pilgrimage, with its assured goal,from the Johnson’s, girt with mere traditions,suppositions, grown now incredible, unintel-ligible! Mahomet’s Formulas were of “woodwaxed and oiled,” and could be burnt out ofone’s way: poor Johnson’s were far more dif-ficult to burn.—The strong man will ever findwork, which means difficulty, pain, to the fullmeasure of his strength. But to make outa victory, in those circumstances of our poorHero as Man of Letters, was perhaps more dif-ficult than in any. Not obstruction, disorga-nization, Bookseller Osborne and Fourpence-halfpenny a day; not this alone; but the lightof his own soul was taken from him. No land-mark on the Earth; and, alas, what is that tohaving no loadstar in the Heaven! We neednot wonder that none of those Three men roseto victory. That they fought truly is the high-est praise. With a mournful sympathy we


will contemplate, if not three living victoriousHeroes, as I said, the Tombs of three fallenHeroes! They fell for us too; making a wayfor us. There are the mountains which theyhurled abroad in their confused War of theGiants; under which, their strength and lifespent, they now lie buried.

I have already written of these three Lit-erary Heroes, expressly or incidentally; whatI suppose is known to most of you; whatneed not be spoken or written a second time.They concern us here as the singular Prophetsof that singular age; for such they virtuallywere; and the aspect they and their world ex-hibit, under this point of view, might lead usinto reflections enough! I call them, all three,Genuine Men more or less; faithfully, for mostpart unconsciously, struggling to be genuine,and plant themselves on the everlasting truthof things. This to a degree that eminently dis-tinguishes them from the poor artificial massof their contemporaries; and renders themworthy to be considered as Speakers, in somemeasure, of the everlasting truth, as Prophetsin that age of theirs. By Nature herself a no-ble necessity was laid on them to be so. Theywere men of such magnitude that they couldnot live on unrealities,—clouds, froth and allinanity gave way under them: there was nofooting for them but on firm earth; no rest orregular motion for them, if they got not foot-ing there. To a certain extent, they were Sonsof Nature once more in an age of Artifice; oncemore, Original Men.

As for Johnson, I have always considered


him to be, by nature, one of our great Englishsouls. A strong and noble man; so much leftundeveloped in him to the last: in a kindlierelement what might he not have been,—Poet,Priest, sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a manmust not complain of his “element,” of his“time,” or the like; it is thriftless work do-ing so. His time is bad: well then, he isthere to make it better!—Johnson’s youth waspoor, isolated, hopeless, very miserable. In-deed, it does not seem possible that, in anythe favorablest outward circumstances, John-son’s life could have been other than a painfulone. The world might have had more of prof-itable work out of him, or less; but his ef-fort against the world’s work could never havebeen a light one. Nature, in return for his no-bleness, had said to him, Live in an elementof diseased sorrow. Nay, perhaps the sorrowand the nobleness were intimately and eveninseparably connected with each other. At allevents, poor Johnson had to go about girt withcontinual hypochondria, physical and spiri-tual pain. Like a Hercules with the burningNessus’-shirt on him, which shoots in on himdull incurable misery: the Nessus’-shirt not tobe stript off, which is his own natural skin!In this manner he had to live. Figure himthere, with his scrofulous diseases, with hisgreat greedy heart, and unspeakable chaosof thoughts; stalking mournful as a strangerin this Earth; eagerly devouring what spiri-tual thing he could come at: school-languagesand other merely grammatical stuff, if therewere nothing better! The largest soul that


was in all England; and provision made forit of “fourpence-halfpenny a day.” Yet a gi-ant invincible soul; a true man’s. One re-members always that story of the shoes at Ox-ford: the rough, seamy-faced, rawboned Col-lege Servitor stalking about, in winter-season,with his shoes worn out; how the charitableGentleman Commoner secretly places a newpair at his door; and the rawboned Servitor,lifting them, looking at them near, with hisdim eyes, with what thoughts,—pitches themout of window! Wet feet, mud, frost, hungeror what you will; but not beggary: we cannotstand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help here;a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confusedmisery and want, yet of nobleness and man-fulness withal. It is a type of the man’s life,this pitching away of the shoes. An originalman;—not a second-hand, borrowing or beg-ging man. Let us stand on our own basis, atany rate! On such shoes as we ourselves canget. On frost and mud, if you will, but hon-estly on that;—on the reality and substancewhich Nature gives us, not on the semblance,on the thing she has given another than us!—

And yet with all this rugged pride of man-hood and self-help, was there ever soul moretenderly affectionate, loyally submissive towhat was really higher than he? Great soulsare always loyally submissive, reverent towhat is over them; only small mean souls areotherwise. I could not find a better proof ofwhat I said the other day, That the sincereman was by nature the obedient man; thatonly in a World of Heroes was there loyal Obe-


dience to the Heroic. The essence of original-ity is not that it be new: Johnson believedaltogether in the old; he found the old opin-ions credible for him, fit for him; and in aright heroic manner lived under them. He iswell worth study in regard to that. For weare to say that Johnson was far other thana mere man of words and formulas; he wasa man of truths and facts. He stood by theold formulas; the happier was it for him thathe could so stand: but in all formulas that hecould stand by, there needed to be a most gen-uine substance. Very curious how, in that poorPaper-age, so barren, artificial, thick-quiltedwith Pedantries, Hearsays, the great Fact ofthis Universe glared in, forever wonderful, in-dubitable, unspeakable, divine-infernal, uponthis man too! How he harmonized his Formu-las with it, how he managed at all under suchcircumstances: that is a thing worth seeing.A thing “to be looked at with reverence, withpity, with awe.” That Church of St. ClementDanes, where Johnson still worshipped in theera of Voltaire, is to me a venerable place.

It was in virtue of his sincerity, of hisspeaking still in some sort from the heart ofNature, though in the current artificial di-alect, that Johnson was a Prophet. Are not alldialects “artificial”? Artificial things are notall false;—nay every true Product of Naturewill 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 ori-gin bad; they are indispensably good. Formulais method, habitude; found wherever man is


found. Formulas fashion themselves as Pathsdo, as beaten Highways, leading toward somesacred or high object, whither many men arebent. Consider it. One man, full of heart-felt earnest impulse, finds out a way of do-ing somewhat,–were it of uttering his soul’sreverence for the Highest, were it but of fitlysaluting his fellow-man. An inventor wasneeded to do that, a poet; he has articulatedthe dim-struggling thought that dwelt in hisown and many hearts. This is his way of do-ing that; these are his footsteps, the beginningof a “Path.” And now see: the second mentravels naturally in the footsteps of his fore-goer, it is the easiest method. In the footstepsof his foregoer; yet with improvements, withchanges where such seem good; at all eventswith enlargements, the Path ever widening it-self as more travel it;—till at last there is abroad Highway whereon the whole world maytravel and drive. While there remains a Cityor Shrine, or any Reality to drive to, at thefarther end, the Highway shall be right wel-come! When the City is gone, we will for-sake the Highway. In this manner all Insti-tutions, Practices, Regulated Things in theworld have come into existence, and gone outof existence. Formulas all begin by being fullof substance; you may call them the skin, thearticulation into shape, into limbs and skin,of a substance that is already there: they hadnot been there otherwise. Idols, as we said,are not idolatrous till they become doubtful,empty for the worshipper’s heart. Much aswe talk against Formulas, I hope no one of us


is ignorant withal of the high significance oftrue Formulas; that they were, and will everbe, the indispensablest furniture of our habi-tation in this world.—

Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his“sincerity.” He has no suspicion of his be-ing particularly sincere,—of his being partic-ularly anything! A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or “scholar” as he calls himself,trying hard to get some honest livelihood inthe world, not to starve, but to live—withoutstealing! 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. Thinkof it once more. The man whom Nature hasappointed to do great things is, first of all, fur-nished with that openness to Nature whichrenders him incapable of being insincere! Tohis large, open, deep-feeling heart Nature isa Fact: all hearsay is hearsay; the unspeak-able greatness of this Mystery of Life, let himacknowledge it or not, nay even though heseem to forget it or deny it, is ever presentto him,—fearful and wonderful, on this handand on that. He has a basis of sincerity; unrec-ognized, because never questioned or capableof question. Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell,Napoleon: all the Great Men I ever heard ofhave this as the primary material of them.Innumerable commonplace men are debating,are talking everywhere their commonplacedoctrines, which they have learned by logic, byrote, at second-hand: to that kind of man allthis is still nothing. He must have truth; truth


which he feels to be true. How shall he standotherwise? His whole soul, at all moments, inall 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 isnot mine, any more than Mahomet’s was: butI recognize the everlasting element of heart-sincerity in both; and see with pleasure howneither of them remains ineffectual. Neitherof them is as chaff sown; in both of them issomething which the seedfield will grow.

Johnson was a Prophet to his people;preached a Gospel to them,—as all like himalways do. The highest Gospel he preachedwe may describe as a kind of Moral Prudence:“in a world where much is to be done, andlittle is to be known,” see how you will doit! A thing well worth preaching. “A worldwhere much is to be done, and little is tobe known:” do not sink yourselves in bound-less bottomless abysses of Doubt, of wretchedgod-forgetting Unbelief;—you were miserablethen, powerless, mad: how could you do orwork at all? Such Gospel Johnson preachedand taught;—coupled, theoretically and prac-tically, with this other great Gospel, “Clearyour mind of Cant!” Have no trade with Cant:stand on the cold mud in the frosty weather,but let it be in your own real torn shoes: “thatwill be better for you,” as Mahomet says! I callthis, I call these two things joined together, agreat Gospel, the greatest perhaps that waspossible at that time.

Johnson’s Writings, which once had suchcurrency and celebrity, are now as it were dis-


owned by the young generation. It is not won-derful; Johnson’s opinions are fast becomingobsolete: but his style of thinking and of liv-ing, we may hope, will never become obsolete.I find in Johnson’s Books the indisputablesttraces of a great intellect and great heart;—ever welcome, under what obstructions andperversions soever. They are sincere words,those of his; he means things by them. Awondrous buckram style,—the best he couldget to then; a measured grandiloquence, step-ping or rather stalking along in a very solemnway, grown obsolete now; sometimes a tumidsize of phraseology not in proportion to thecontents of it: all this you will put up with.For the phraseology, tumid or not, has alwayssomething within it. So many beautiful stylesand books, with nothing in them;—a man isa malefactor to the world who writes such!They are the avoidable kind!—Had Johnsonleft nothing but his Dictionary, one mighthave traced there a great intellect, a genuineman. Looking to its clearness of definition,its general solidity, honesty, insight and suc-cessful method, it may be called the best of allDictionaries. There is in it a kind of architec-tural nobleness; it stands there like a greatsolid square-built edifice, finished, symmetri-cally complete: you judge that a true Builderdid it.

One word, in spite of our haste, must begranted to poor Bozzy. He passes for a mean,inflated, gluttonous creature; and was so inmany senses. Yet the fact of his reverencefor Johnson will ever remain noteworthy. The


foolish conceited Scotch Laird, the most con-ceited man of his time, approaching in suchawe-struck attitude the great dusty irasciblePedagogue in his mean garret there: it is agenuine reverence for Excellence; a worshipfor Heroes, at a time when neither Heroes norworship were surmised to exist. Heroes, itwould seem, exist always, and a certain wor-ship of them! We will also take the libertyto deny altogether that of the witty French-man, that no man is a Hero to his valet-de-chambre. Or if so, it is not the Hero’sblame, but the Valet’s: that his soul, namely,is a mean valet-soul! He expects his Hero toadvance in royal stage-trappings, with mea-sured step, trains borne behind him, trum-pets sounding before him. It should standrather, No man can be a Grand-Monarque tohis valet-de-chambre. Strip your Louis Qua-torze of his king-gear, and there is left noth-ing but a poor forked radish with a head fan-tastically carved;—admirable to no valet. TheValet does not know a Hero when he sees him!Alas, no: it requires a kind of Hero to dothat;—and one of the world’s wants, in this asin other senses, is for most part want of such.

On the whole, shall we not say, thatBoswell’s admiration was well bestowed; thathe could have found no soul in all Englandso worthy of bending down before? Shall wenot say, of this great mournful Johnson too,that he guided his difficult confused existencewisely; led it well, like a right valiant man?That waste chaos of Authorship by trade; thatwaste chaos of Scepticism in religion and pol-


itics, in life-theory and life-practice; in hispoverty, in his dust and dimness, with the sickbody and the rusty coat: he made it do for him,like a brave man. Not wholly without a load-star in the Eternal; he had still a loadstar, asthe brave all need to have: with his eye set onthat, he would change his course for nothingin these confused vortices of the lower sea ofTime. “To the Spirit of Lies, bearing death andhunger, he would in nowise strike his flag.”Brave old Samuel: ultimus Romanorum!

Of Rousseau and his Heroism I cannot sayso much. He is not what I call a strong man.A morbid, excitable, spasmodic man; at best,intense rather than strong. He had not “thetalent of Silence,” an invaluable talent; whichfew Frenchmen, or indeed men of any sort inthese times, excel in! The suffering man oughtreally “to consume his own smoke;” thereis no good in emitting smoke till you havemade it into fire,—which, in the metaphoricalsense too, all smoke is capable of becoming!Rousseau has not depth or width, not calmforce for difficulty; the first characteristic oftrue greatness. A fundamental mistake to callvehemence and rigidity strength! A man isnot strong who takes convulsion-fits; thoughsix men cannot hold him then. He that canwalk under the heaviest weight without stag-gering, he is the strong man. We need forever,especially in these loud-shrieking days, to re-mind ourselves of that. A man who cannothold his peace, till the time come for speakingand acting, is no right man.

Poor Rousseau’s face is to me expres-


sive of him. A high but narrow con-tracted intensity in it: bony brows; deep,strait-set eyes, in which there is some-thing bewildered-looking,—bewildered, peer-ing with lynx-eagerness. A face full of misery,even ignoble misery, and also of the antago-nism against that; something mean, plebeianthere, redeemed only by intensity: the face ofwhat is called a Fanatic,—a sadly contractedHero! We name him here because, with allhis drawbacks, and they are many, he has thefirst and chief characteristic of a Hero: he isheartily in earnest. In earnest, if ever manwas; as none of these French Philosopherswere. Nay, one would say, of an earnestnesstoo great for his otherwise sensitive, ratherfeeble nature; and which indeed in the enddrove him into the strangest incoherences, al-most delirations. There had come, at last, tobe a kind of madness in him: his Ideas pos-sessed him like demons; hurried him so about,drove him over steep places!—

The fault and misery of Rousseau waswhat we easily name by a single word, Ego-ism; which is indeed the source and sum-mary of all faults and miseries whatsoever.He had not perfected himself into victory overmere Desire; a mean Hunger, in many sorts,was still the motive principle of him. I amafraid he was a very vain man; hungry forthe praises of men. You remember Genlis’sexperience of him. She took Jean Jacquesto the Theatre; he bargaining for a strictincognito,—“He would not be seen there forthe world!” The curtain did happen nev-


ertheless to be drawn aside: the Pit recog-nized Jean Jacques, but took no great noticeof him! He expressed the bitterest indigna-tion; gloomed all evening, spake no other thansurly words. The glib Countess remained en-tirely convinced that his anger was not at be-ing seen, but at not being applauded whenseen. How the whole nature of the man is poi-soned; nothing but suspicion, self-isolation,fierce moody ways! He could not live with any-body. A man of some rank from the country,who visited him often, and used to sit withhim, expressing all reverence and affection forhim, comes one day; finds Jean Jacques full ofthe sourest unintelligible humor. “Monsieur,”said Jean Jacques, with flaming eyes, “I knowwhy you come here. You come to see whata poor life I lead; how little is in my poorpot that is boiling there. Well, look into thepot! There is half a pound of meat, one car-rot and three onions; that is all: go and tellthe whole world that, if you like, Monsieur!”—A man of this sort was far gone. The wholeworld got itself supplied with anecdotes, forlight laughter, for a certain theatrical inter-est, from these perversions and contortions ofpoor Jean Jacques. Alas, to him they were notlaughing or theatrical; too real to him! Thecontortions of a dying gladiator: the crowdedamphitheatre looks on with entertainment;but the gladiator is in agonies and dying.

And yet this Rousseau, as we say, withhis passionate appeals to Mothers, with hiscontrat-social, with his celebrations of Nature,even of savage life in Nature, did once more


touch upon Reality, struggle towards Reality;was doing the function of a Prophet to hisTime. As he could, and as the Time could!Strangely through all that defacement, degra-dation and almost madness, there is in the in-most heart of poor Rousseau a spark of realheavenly fire. Once more, out of the elementof that withered mocking Philosophism, Scep-ticism and Persiflage, there has arisen in thisman the ineradicable feeling and knowledgethat this Life of ours is true: not a Scepti-cism, Theorem, or Persiflage, but a Fact, anawful Reality. Nature had made that revela-tion to him; had ordered him to speak it out.He got it spoken out; if not well and clearly,then ill and dimly,—as clearly as he could.Nay what are all errors and perversities of his,even those stealings of ribbons, aimless con-fused miseries and vagabondisms, if we willinterpret them kindly, but the blinkard daz-zlement and staggerings to and fro of a mansent on an errand he is too weak for, by a pathhe cannot yet find? Men are led by strangeways. One should have tolerance for a man,hope of him; leave him to try yet what he willdo. While life lasts, hope lasts for every man.

Of Rousseau’s literary talents, greatly cel-ebrated still among his countrymen, I do notsay much. His Books, like himself, are whatI call unhealthy; not the good sort of Books.There is a sensuality in Rousseau. Combinedwith such an intellectual gift as his, it makespictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness:but they are not genuinely poetical. Not whitesunlight: something operatic; a kind of rose-


pink, artificial bedizenment. It is frequent,or rather it is universal, among the Frenchsince his time. Madame de Stael has some-thing of it; St. Pierre; and down onwards tothe present astonishing convulsionary “Liter-ature of Desperation,” it is everywhere abun-dant. That same rose-pink is not the righthue. Look at a Shakspeare, at a Goethe, evenat a Walter Scott! He who has once seen intothis, has seen the difference of the True fromthe Sham-True, and will discriminate themever afterwards.

We had to observe in Johnson how muchgood a Prophet, under all disadvantagesand disorganizations, can accomplish for theworld. In Rousseau we are called to lookrather at the fearful amount of evil which,under such disorganization, may accompanythe good. Historically it is a most pregnantspectacle, that of Rousseau. Banished intoParis garrets, in the gloomy company of hisown Thoughts and Necessities there; drivenfrom post to pillar; fretted, exasperated tillthe heart of him went mad, he had grown tofeel deeply that the world was not his friendnor the world’s law. It was expedient, if anyway possible, that such a man should not havebeen set in flat hostility with the world. Hecould be cooped into garrets, laughed at asa maniac, left to starve like a wild beast inhis cage;—but he could not be hindered fromsetting the world on fire. The French Revo-lution found its Evangelist in Rousseau. Hissemi-delirious speculations on the miseries ofcivilized life, the preferability of the savage


to the civilized, and such like, helped well toproduce a whole delirium in France generally.True, you may well ask, What could the world,the governors of the world, do with such aman? Difficult to say what the governors ofthe world could do with him! What he coulddo with them is unhappily clear enough,—guillotine a great many of them! Enough nowof Rousseau.

It was a curious phenomenon, in the with-ered, unbelieving second-hand EighteenthCentury, that of a Hero starting up, among theartificial pasteboard figures and productions,in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like a littlewell in the rocky desert places,—like a suddensplendor of Heaven in the artificial Vauxhall!People knew not what to make of it. They tookit for a piece of the Vauxhall fire-work; alas, itlet itself be so taken, though struggling half-blindly, as in bitterness of death, against that!Perhaps no man had such a false receptionfrom his fellow-men. Once more a very waste-ful life-drama was enacted under the sun.

The tragedy of Burns’s life is known to allof you. Surely we may say, if discrepancy be-tween place held and place merited constituteperverseness of lot for a man, no lot couldbe more perverse then Burns’s. Among thosesecond-hand acting-figures, mimes for mostpart, of the Eighteenth Century, once morea giant Original Man; one of those men whoreach down to the perennial Deeps, who takerank with the Heroic among men: and he wasborn in a poor Ayrshire hut. The largest soulof all the British lands came among us in the


shape of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant.His Father, a poor toiling man, tried var-

ious things; did not succeed in any; was in-volved in continual difficulties. The Steward,Factor as the Scotch call him, used to sendletters and threatenings, Burns says, “whichthrew us all into tears.” The brave, hard-toiling, hard-suffering Father, his brave hero-ine of a wife; and those children, of whomRobert was one! In this Earth, so wide other-wise, no shelter for them. The letters “threwus all into tears:” figure it. The brave Father,I say always;—a silent Hero and Poet; with-out whom the son had never been a speakingone! Burns’s Schoolmaster came afterwardsto London, learnt what good society was; butdeclares that in no meeting of men did he everenjoy better discourse than at the hearth ofthis peasant. And his poor “seven acres ofnursery-ground,”—not that, nor the miserablepatch of clay-farm, nor anything he tried toget a living by, would prosper with him; hehad a sore unequal battle all his days. But hestood to it valiantly; a wise, faithful, uncon-querable man;—swallowing down how manysore sufferings daily into silence; fighting likean unseen Hero,—nobody publishing newspa-per paragraphs about his nobleness; votingpieces of plate to him! However, he was notlost; nothing is lost. Robert is there the out-come of him,—and indeed of many genera-tions of such as him.

This Burns appeared under every disad-vantage: uninstructed, poor, born only to hardmanual toil; and writing, when it came to


that, in a rustic special dialect, known onlyto a small province of the country he lived in.Had he written, even what he did write, inthe general language of England, I doubt nothe had already become universally recognizedas being, or capable to be, one of our greatestmen. That he should have tempted so many topenetrate through the rough husk of that di-alect of his, is proof that there lay somethingfar from common within it. He has gaineda certain recognition, and is continuing to doso over all quarters of our wide Saxon world:wheresoever a Saxon dialect is spoken, it be-gins to be understood, by personal inspectionof this and the other, that one of the most con-siderable Saxon men of the Eighteenth Cen-tury was an Ayrshire Peasant named RobertBurns. Yes, I will say, here too was a pieceof 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 wildimpetuous whirlwind of passion and facultyslumbered quiet there; such heavenly melodydwelling in the heart of it. A noble rough gen-uineness; homely, rustic, honest; true simplic-ity of strength; with its lightning-fire, with itssoft dewy pity;—like the old Norse Thor, thePeasant-god!

Burns’s Brother Gilbert, a man of muchsense and worth, has told me that Robert,in his young days, in spite of their hardship,was usually the gayest of speech; a fellow ofinfinite frolic, laughter, sense and heart; farpleasanter to hear there, stript cutting peatsin the bog, or such like, than he ever after-


wards knew him. I can well believe it. Thisbasis of mirth (“fond gaillard,” as old MarquisMirabeau calls it), a primal element of sun-shine and joyfulness, coupled with his otherdeep and earnest qualities, is one of the mostattractive characteristics of Burns. A largefund of Hope dwells in him; spite of his trag-ical history, he is not a mourning man. Heshakes his sorrows gallantly aside; boundsforth victorious over them. It is as the lionshaking “dew-drops from his mane;” as theswift-bounding horse, that laughs at the shak-ing of the spear.—But indeed, Hope, Mirth, ofthe sort like Burns’s, are they not the outcomeproperly of warm generous affection,—such asis the beginning of all to every man?

You would think it strange if I called Burnsthe most gifted British soul we had in all thatcentury of his: and yet I believe the day iscoming when there will be little danger in say-ing so. His writings, all that he did undersuch obstructions, are only a poor fragment ofhim. Professor Stewart remarked very justly,what indeed is true of all Poets good for much,that his poetry was not any particular fac-ulty; but the general result of a naturally vig-orous original mind expressing itself in thatway. Burns’s gifts, expressed in conversation,are the theme of all that ever heard him. Allkinds of gifts: from the gracefulest utterancesof courtesy, to the highest fire of passionatespeech; loud floods of mirth, soft wailings ofaffection, laconic emphasis, clear piercing in-sight; all was in him. Witty duchesses cele-brate him as a man whose speech “led them


off their feet.” This is beautiful: but stillmore beautiful that which Mr. Lockhart hasrecorded, which I have more than once al-luded to, How the waiters and ostlers at innswould get out of bed, and come crowding tohear this man speak! Waiters and ostlers:—they too were men, and here was a man! Ihave heard much about his speech; but oneof the best things I ever heard of it was, lastyear, from a venerable gentleman long fa-miliar with him. That it was speech distin-guished by always having something in it. “Hespoke rather little than much,” this old mantold me; “sat rather silent in those early days,as in the company of persons above him; andalways when he did speak, it was to thrownew light on the matter.” I know not why anyone should ever speak otherwise!—But if welook at his general force of soul, his healthyrobustness every way, the rugged downright-ness, penetration, generous valor and manful-ness that was in him,—where shall we readilyfind a better-gifted man?

Among the great men of the EighteenthCentury, I sometimes feel as if Burns mightbe found to resemble Mirabeau more thanany other. They differ widely in vesture;yet look at them intrinsically. There is thesame burly thick-necked strength of body asof soul;—built, in both cases, on what theold Marquis calls a fond gaillard. By na-ture, by course of breeding, indeed by nation,Mirabeau has much more of bluster; a noisy,forward, unresting man. But the character-istic of Mirabeau too is veracity and sense,


power of true insight, superiority of vision.The thing that he says is worth remember-ing. It is a flash of insight into some objector other: so do both these men speak. Thesame raging passions; capable too in both ofmanifesting themselves as the tenderest no-ble affections. Wit; wild laughter, energy, di-rectness, sincerity: these were in both. Thetypes of the two men are not dissimilar. Burnstoo could have governed, debated in NationalAssemblies; politicized, as few could. Alas, thecourage which had to exhibit itself in captureof smuggling schooners in the Solway Frith; inkeeping silence over so much, where no goodspeech, but only inarticulate rage was possi-ble: this might have bellowed forth Ushersde Breze and the like; and made itself visi-ble to all men, in managing of kingdoms, inruling of great ever-memorable epochs! Butthey said to him reprovingly, his Official Su-periors said, and wrote: “You are to work, notthink.” Of your thinking-faculty, the greatestin this land, we have no need; you are to gaugebeer there; for that only are you wanted. Verynotable;—and worth mentioning, though weknow what is to be said and answered! Asif Thought, Power of Thinking, were not, atall times, in all places and situations of theworld, precisely the thing that was wanted.The fatal man, is he not always the unthink-ing man, the man who cannot think and see;but only grope, and hallucinate, and misseethe nature of the thing he works with? Hemis-sees it, mis_takes_ it as we say; takes itfor one thing, and it is another thing,—and


leaves him standing like a Futility there! Heis the fatal man; unutterably fatal, put in thehigh places of men.—“Why complain of this?”say some: “Strength is mournfully denied itsarena; that was true from of old.” Doubtless;and the worse for the arena, answer I! Com-plaining profits little; stating of the truth mayprofit. That a Europe, with its French Rev-olution just breaking out, finds no need of aBurns except for gauging beer,—is a thing I,for one, cannot rejoice at!—

Once more we have to say here, that thechief quality of Burns is the sincerity of him.So in his Poetry, so in his Life. The song hesings is not of fantasticalities; it is of a thingfelt, really there; the prime merit of this, as ofall in him, and of his Life generally, is truth.The Life of Burns is what we may call a greattragic sincerity. A sort of savage sincerity,—not cruel, far from that; but wild, wrestlingnaked with the truth of things. In that sense,there is something of the savage in all greatmen.

Hero-worship,—Odin, Burns? Well; theseMen of Letters too were not without a kindof Hero-worship: but what a strange con-dition has that got into now! The waitersand ostlers of Scotch inns, prying about thedoor, eager to catch any word that fell fromBurns, were doing unconscious reverence tothe Heroic. Johnson had his Boswell for wor-shipper. Rousseau had worshippers enough;princes calling on him in his mean garret;the great, the beautiful doing reverence to thepoor moon-struck man. For himself a most


portentous contradiction; the two ends of hislife not to be brought into harmony. He sits atthe tables of grandees; and has to copy musicfor his own living. He cannot even get his mu-sic copied: “By dint of dining out,” says he, “Irun the risk of dying by starvation at home.”For his worshippers too a most questionablething! If doing Hero-worship well or badlybe the test of vital well-being or ill-being toa generation, can we say that these genera-tions are very first-rate?—And yet our heroicMen of Letters do teach, govern, are kings,priests, or what you like to call them; intrinsi-cally there is no preventing it by any meanswhatever. The world has to obey him whothinks and sees in the world. The world canalter the manner of that; can either have itas blessed continuous summer sunshine, or asunblessed black thunder and tornado,—withunspeakable difference of profit for the world!The manner of it is very alterable; the matterand fact of it is not alterable by any power un-der the sky. Light; or, failing that, lightning:the world can take its choice. Not whether wecall an Odin god, prophet, priest, or what wecall him; but whether we believe the word hetells us: there it all lies. If it be a true word,we shall have to believe it; believing it, weshall have to do it. What name or welcomewe give him or it, is a point that concerns our-selves mainly. It, the new Truth, new deeperrevealing of the Secret of this Universe, is ver-ily of the nature of a message from on high;and must and will have itself obeyed.—

My last remark is on that notablest pha-


sis of Burns’s history,—his visit to Edinburgh.Often it seems to me as if his demeanor therewere the highest proof he gave of what a fundof worth and genuine manhood was in him.If we think of it, few heavier burdens couldbe laid on the strength of a man. So sud-den; all common Lionism. which ruins innu-merable men, was as nothing to this. It isas if Napoleon had been made a King of, notgradually, but at once from the Artillery Lieu-tenancy in the Regiment La Fere. Burns, stillonly in his twenty-seventh year, is no longereven a ploughman; he is flying to the WestIndies to escape disgrace and a jail. Thismonth he is a ruined peasant, his wages sevenpounds a year, and these gone from him: nextmonth he is in the blaze of rank and beauty,handing down jewelled Duchesses to dinner;the cynosure of all eyes! Adversity is some-times hard upon a man; but for one manwho can stand prosperity, there are a hundredthat will stand adversity. I admire much theway in which Burns met all this. Perhaps noman one could point out, was ever so sorelytried, and so little forgot himself. Tranquil,unastonished; not abashed, not inflated, nei-ther awkwardness nor affectation: he feelsthat he there is the man Robert Burns; thatthe “rank is but the guinea-stamp;” that thecelebrity is but the candle-light, which willshow what man, not in the least make him abetter or other man! Alas, it may readily, un-less he look to it, make him a worse man; awretched inflated wind-bag,—inflated till heburst, and become a dead lion; for whom, as


some one has said, “there is no resurrection ofthe body;” worse than a living dog!—Burns isadmirable here.

And yet, alas, as I have observed else-where, these Lion-hunters were the ruin anddeath of Burns. It was they that renderedit impossible for him to live! They gatheredround him in his Farm; hindered his indus-try; no place was remote enough from them.He could not get his Lionism forgotten, hon-estly as he was disposed to do so. He falls intodiscontents, into miseries, faults; the worldgetting ever more desolate for him; health,character, peace of mind, all gone;—solitaryenough now. It is tragical to think of! Thesemen came but to see him; it was out of no sym-pathy with him, nor no hatred to him. Theycame to get a little amusement; they got theiramusement;—and the Hero’s life went for it!

Richter says, in the Island of Sumatrathere is a kind of “Light-chafers,” large Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits, and illu-minate the ways with at night. Persons ofcondition can thus travel with a pleasant ra-diance, which they much admire. Great honorto the Fire-flies! But—!

[May 22, 1840.]LECTURE VI.

The Hero as King. Cromwell,Napoleon: Modern Revolution-ism.We come now to the last form of Heroism;that which we call Kingship. The Comman-der over Men; he to whose will our wills are tobe subordinated, and loyally surrender them-selves, and find their welfare in doing so, maybe reckoned the most important of Great Men.He is practically the summary for us of all thevarious figures of Heroism; Priest, Teacher,whatsoever of earthly or of spiritual dignitywe can fancy to reside in a man, embodies it-self here, to command over us, to furnish uswith constant practical teaching, to tell us forthe day and hour what we are to do. He iscalled Rex, Regulator, Roi: our own name isstill better; King, Konning, which means Can-ning, Able-man.

Numerous considerations, pointing to-wards deep, questionable, and indeed unfath-omable regions, present themselves here: on

265


the most of which we must resolutely for thepresent forbear to speak at all. As Burkesaid that perhaps fair Trial by Jury was thesoul of Government, and that all legislation,administration, parliamentary debating, andthe rest of it, went on, in “order to bringtwelve impartial men into a jury-box;”—so, bymuch stronger reason, may I say here, thatthe finding of your Ableman and getting himinvested with the symbols of ability, with dig-nity, worship (worth-ship), royalty, kinghood,or whatever we call it, so that he may actuallyhave room to guide according to his faculty ofdoing it,—is the business, well or ill accom-plished, of all social procedure whatsoever inthis world! Hustings-speeches, Parliamentarymotions, Reform Bills, French Revolutions, allmean at heart this; or else nothing. Find inany country the Ablest Man that exists there;raise him to the supreme place, and loyallyreverence him: you have a perfect governmentfor that country; no ballot-box, parliamen-tary eloquence, voting, constitution-building,or other machinery whatsoever can improve ita whit. It is in the perfect state; an ideal coun-try. The Ablest Man; he means also the truest-hearted, justest, the Noblest Man: what hetells us to do must be precisely the wisest,fittest, that we could anywhere or anyhowlearn;—the thing which it will in all ways be-hoove us, with right loyal thankfulness andnothing doubting, to do! Our doing and lifewere then, so far as government could regu-late it, well regulated; that were the ideal ofconstitutions.

The Hero as King 267

Alas, we know very well that Ideals cannever be completely embodied in practice. Ide-als must ever lie a very great way off; and wewill right thankfully content ourselves withany not intolerable approximation thereto!Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously“measure by a scale of perfection the meagreproduct of reality” in this poor world of ours.We will esteem him no wise man; we will es-teem him a sickly, discontented, foolish man.And yet, on the other hand, it is never to beforgotten that Ideals do exist; that if they benot approximated to at all, the whole mat-ter goes to wreck! Infallibly. No bricklayerbuilds a wall perfectly perpendicular, mathe-matically this is not possible; a certain degreeof perpendicularity suffices him; and he, like agood bricklayer, who must have done with hisjob, leaves it so. And yet if he sway too muchfrom the perpendicular; above all, if he throwplummet and level quite away from him, andpile brick on brick heedless, just as it comes tohand—! Such bricklayer, I think, is in a badway. He has forgotten himself: but the Law ofGravitation does not forget to act on him; heand his wall rush down into confused welterof ruin!—

This is the history of all rebellions, FrenchRevolutions, social explosions in ancient ormodern times. You have put the too UnableMan at the head of affairs! The too igno-ble, unvaliant, fatuous man. You have forgot-ten 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. Un-


able Simulacrum of Ability, quack, in a word,must adjust himself with quack, in all mannerof administration of human things;—whichaccordingly lie unadministered, fermentinginto unmeasured masses of failure, of indigentmisery: in the outward, and in the inward orspiritual, miserable millions stretch out thehand for their due supply, and it is not there.The “law of gravitation” acts; Nature’s laws donone of them forget to act. The miserable mil-lions burst forth into Sansculottism, or someother sort of madness: bricks and bricklayerlie as a fatal chaos!—

Much sorry stuff, written some hundredyears ago or more, about the “Divine right ofKings,” moulders unread now in the Public Li-braries of this country. Far be it from us todisturb the calm process by which it is disap-pearing harmlessly from the earth, in thoserepositories! At the same time, not to let theimmense rubbish go without leaving us, as itought, some soul of it behind—I will say thatit did mean something; something true, whichit is important for us and all men to keep inmind. To assert that in whatever man youchose to lay hold of (by this or the other planof clutching at him); and claps a round piece ofmetal on the head of, and called King,—therestraightway came to reside a divine virtue, sothat he became a kind of god, and a Divin-ity inspired him with faculty and right to ruleover you to all lengths: this,—what can wedo with this but leave it to rot silently in thePublic Libraries? But I will say withal, andthat is what these Divine-right men meant,


That in Kings, and in all human Authorities,and relations that men god-created can formamong each other, there is verily either a Di-vine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong; one orthe other of these two! For it is false alto-gether, what the last Sceptical Century taughtus, that this world is a steam-engine. There isa God in this world; and a God’s-sanction, orelse the violation of such, does look out fromall ruling and obedience, from all moral actsof men. There is no act more moral betweenmen than that of rule and obedience. Woe tohim that claims obedience when it is not due;woe to him that refuses it when it is! God’slaw is in that, I say, however the Parchment-laws may run: there is a Divine Right or elsea Diabolic Wrong at the heart of every claimthat 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 byself-interest and the checking and balancingof greedy knaveries, and that in short, thereis nothing divine whatever in the associationof men, a still more despicable error, naturalas it is to an unbelieving century, than that ofa “divine right” in people called Kings. I say,Find me the true Konning, King, or Able-man,and he has a divine right over me. That weknew in some tolerable measure how to findhim, and that all men were ready to acknowl-edge his divine right when found: this is pre-cisely the healing which a sick world is every-where, in these ages, seeking after! The true


King, as guide of the practical, has ever some-thing of the Pontiff in him,—guide of the spir-itual, from which all practice has its rise. Thistoo is a true saying, That the King is head ofthe Church.—But we will leave the Polemicstuff of a dead century to lie quiet on its book-shelves.

Certainly it is a fearful business, that ofhaving your Ableman to seek, and not know-ing in what manner to proceed about it! Thatis the world’s sad predicament in these timesof ours. They are times of revolution, and havelong been. The bricklayer with his bricks, nolonger heedful of plummet or the law of grav-itation, have toppled, tumbled, and it all wel-ters as we see! But the beginning of it wasnot the French Revolution; that is rather theend, we can hope. It were truer to say, thebeginning was three centuries farther back:in the Reformation of Luther. That the thingwhich still called itself Christian Church hadbecome a Falsehood, and brazenly went aboutpretending to pardon men’s sins for metalliccoined money, and to do much else which inthe everlasting truth of Nature it did not nowdo: here lay the vital malady. The inward be-ing wrong, all outward went ever more andmore wrong. Belief died away; all was Doubt,Disbelief. The builder cast away his plummet;said to himself, “What is gravitation? Bricklies on brick there!” Alas, does it not stillsound strange to many of us, the assertionthat there is a God’s-truth in the business ofgod-created men; that all is not a kind of gri-mace, an “expediency,” diplomacy, one knows


not what!—From that first necessary assertion of

Luther’s, “You, self-styled Papa, you are noFather in God at all; you are—a Chimera,whom I know not how to name in politelanguage!”—from that onwards to the shoutwhich rose round Camille Desmoulins in thePalais-Royal, “Aux armes!” when the peo-ple had burst up against all manner ofChimeras,—I find a natural historical se-quence. That shout too, so frightful, half-infernal, was a great matter. Once more thevoice of awakened nations;—starting confus-edly, 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 anddiplomacy! Infernal;—yes, since they wouldnot have it otherwise. Infernal, since not ce-lestial or terrestrial! Hollowness, insincerityhas to cease; sincerity of some sort has to be-gin. Cost what it may, reigns of terror, horrorsof French Revolution or what else, we have toreturn to truth. Here is a Truth, as I said: aTruth clad in hell-fire, since they would notbut have it so!—

A common theory among considerable par-ties of men in England and elsewhere used tobe, that the French Nation had, in those days,as it were gone mad; that the French Revo-lution was a general act of insanity, a tempo-rary conversion of France and large sectionsof the world into a kind of Bedlam. The Eventhad risen and raged; but was a madnessand nonentity,—gone now happily into the re-gion of Dreams and the Picturesque!—To such


comfortable philosophers, the Three Days ofJuly, 183O, must have been a surprising phe-nomenon. Here is the French Nation risenagain, in musketry and death-struggle, outshooting and being shot, to make that samemad French Revolution good! The sons andgrandsons of those men, it would seem, per-sist in the enterprise: they do not disown it;they will have it made good; will have them-selves shot, if it be not made good. To philoso-phers who had made up their life-system, onthat “madness” quietus, no phenomenon couldbe more alarming. Poor Niebuhr, they say, thePrussian Professor and Historian, fell broken-hearted in consequence; sickened, if we canbelieve it, and died of the Three Days! Itwas surely not a very heroic death;—little bet-ter than Racine’s, dying because Louis Four-teenth looked sternly on him once. The worldhad stood some considerable shocks, in itstime; might have been expected to survive theThree Days too, and be found turning on itsaxis after even them! The Three Days told allmortals that the old French Revolution, madas it might look, was not a transitory ebulli-tion of Bedlam, but a genuine product of thisEarth where we all live; that it was verily aFact, and that the world in general would dowell everywhere to regard it as such.

Truly, without the French Revolution, onewould not know what to make of an age likethis at all. We will hail the French Revo-lution, as shipwrecked mariners might thesternest rock, in a world otherwise all of base-less sea and waves. A true Apocalypse, though


a terrible one, to this false withered artifi-cial time; testifying once more that Nature ispreternatural; if not divine, then diabolic; thatSemblance is not Reality; that it has to be-come Reality, or the world will take fire un-der it,—burn it into what it is, namely Noth-ing! Plausibility has ended; empty Routinehas ended; much has ended. This, as witha Trump of Doom, has been proclaimed toall men. They are the wisest who will learnit soonest. Long confused generations be-fore it be learned; peace impossible till it be!The earnest man, surrounded, as ever, with aworld of inconsistencies, can await patiently,patiently strive to do his work, in the midstof that. Sentence of Death is written down inHeaven against all that; sentence of Death isnow proclaimed on the Earth against it: thishe with his eyes may see. And surely, I shouldsay, considering the other side of the matter,what enormous difficulties lie there, and howfast, fearfully fast, in all countries, the inex-orable demand for solution of them is press-ing on,—he may easily find other work to dothan laboring in the Sansculottic province atthis time of day!

To me, in these circumstances, that of“Hero-worship” becomes a fact inexpressiblyprecious; the most solacing fact one sees inthe world at present. There is an everlastinghope in it for the management of the world.Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, so-cieties that men ever instituted, sunk away,this would remain. The certainty of Heroesbeing sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to


reverence Heroes when sent: it shines likea polestar through smoke-clouds, dust-clouds,and all manner of down-rushing and confla-gration.

Hero-worship would have sounded verystrange to those workers and fighters in theFrench Revolution. Not reverence for GreatMen; not any hope or belief, or even wish, thatGreat Men could again appear in the world!Nature, turned into a “Machine,” was as if ef-fete now; could not any longer produce GreatMen:—I can tell her, she may give up thetrade altogether, then; we cannot do withoutGreat Men!—But neither have I any quarrelwith that of “Liberty and Equality;” with thefaith that, wise great men being impossible,a level immensity of foolish small men wouldsuffice. It was a natural faith then and there.“Liberty and Equality; no Authority neededany longer. Hero-worship, reverence for suchAuthorities, has proved false, is itself a false-hood; no more of it! We have had such forg-eries, we will now trust nothing. So manybase plated coins passing in the market, thebelief has now become common that no goldany longer exists,—and even that we can dovery well without gold!” I find this, amongother things, in that universal cry of Libertyand Equality; and find it very natural, as mat-ters then stood.

And yet surely it is but the transition fromfalse to true. Considered as the whole truth,it is false altogether;—the product of entiresceptical blindness, as yet only struggling tosee. Hero-worship exists forever, and every-


where: not Loyalty alone; it extends fromdivine adoration down to the lowest practi-cal regions of life. “Bending before men,” ifit is not to be a mere empty grimace, bet-ter dispensed with than practiced, is Hero-worship,—a recognition that there does dwellin that presence of our brother something di-vine; that every created man, as Novalis said,is a “revelation in the Flesh.” They were Poetstoo, that devised all those graceful courtesieswhich make life noble! Courtesy is not a false-hood or grimace; it need not be such. And Loy-alty, religious Worship itself, are still possible;nay still inevitable.

May we not say, moreover, while so manyof our late Heroes have worked rather as revo-lutionary men, that nevertheless every GreatMan, every genuine man, is by the nature ofhim a son of Order, not of Disorder? It is atragical position for a true man to work in rev-olutions. He seems an anarchist; and indeeda painful element of anarchy does encumberhim at every step,—him to whose whole soulanarchy is hostile, hateful. His mission is Or-der; every man’s is. He is here to make whatwas disorderly, chaotic, into a thing ruled, reg-ular. He is the missionary of Order. Is not allwork of man in this world a making of Order?The carpenter finds rough trees; shapes them,constrains them into square fitness, into pur-pose and use. We are all born enemies of Dis-order: it is tragical for us all to be concernedin image-breaking and down-pulling; for theGreat Man, more a man than we, it is doublytragical.


Thus too all human things, maddestFrench Sansculottisms, do and must work to-wards Order. I say, there is not a man in them,raging in the thickest of the madness, but isimpelled withal, at all moments, towards Or-der. His very life means that; Disorder is dis-solution, death. No chaos but it seeks a cen-tre to revolve round. While man is man, someCromwell or Napoleon is the necessary finishof a Sansculottism.—Curious: in those dayswhen Hero-worship was the most incrediblething to every one, how it does come out never-theless, and assert itself practically, in a waywhich all have to credit. Divine right, takeit on the great scale, is found to mean divinemight withal! While old false Formulas aregetting trampled everywhere into destruction,new genuine Substances unexpectedly unfoldthemselves indestructible. In rebellious ages,when Kingship itself seems dead and abol-ished, Cromwell, Napoleon step forth again asKings. The history of these men is what wehave now to look at, as our last phasis of Hero-ism. The old ages are brought back to us; themanner in which Kings were made, and King-ship itself first took rise, is again exhibited inthe history of these Two.

We have had many civil wars in England;wars of Red and White Roses, wars of Simonde Montfort; wars enough, which are not verymemorable. But that war of the Puritans hasa significance which belongs to no one of theothers. Trusting to your candor, which willsuggest on the other side what I have notroom to say, I will call it a section once more


of that great universal war which alone makesup the true History of the World,—the war ofBelief against Unbelief! The struggle of menintent on the real essence of things, againstmen intent on the semblances and forms ofthings. The Puritans, to many, seem meresavage Iconoclasts, fierce destroyers of Forms;but it were more just to call them haters ofuntrue Forms. I hope we know how to re-spect Laud and his King as well as them. PoorLaud seems to me to have been weak and ill-starred, not dishonest an unfortunate Pedantrather than anything worse. His “Dreams”and superstitions, at which they laugh so,have an affectionate, lovable kind of charac-ter. He is like a College-Tutor, whose wholeworld is forms, College-rules; whose notion isthat these are the life and safety of the world.He is placed suddenly, with that unalterableluckless notion of his, at the head not of aCollege but of a Nation, to regulate the mostcomplex deep-reaching interests of men. Hethinks they ought to go by the old decent reg-ulations; nay that their salvation will lie inextending and improving these. Like a weakman, he drives with spasmodic vehemence to-wards his purpose; cramps himself to it, heed-ing no voice of prudence, no cry of pity: Hewill have his College-rules obeyed by his Col-legians; that first; and till that, nothing. Heis an ill-starred Pedant, as I said. He wouldhave it the world was a College of that kind,and the world was not that. Alas, was not hisdoom stern enough? Whatever wrongs he did,were they not all frightfully avenged on him?


It is meritorious to insist on forms; Re-ligion and all else naturally clothes itself informs. Everywhere the formed world is theonly habitable one. The naked formlessness ofPuritanism is not the thing I praise in the Pu-ritans; it is the thing I pity,—praising only thespirit which had rendered that inevitable! Allsubstances clothe themselves in forms: butthere are suitable true forms, and then thereare untrue unsuitable. As the briefest defini-tion, one might say, Forms which grow rounda substance, if we rightly understand that,will correspond to the real nature and pur-port of it, will be true, good; forms which areconsciously put round a substance, bad. I in-vite you to reflect on this. It distinguishestrue from false in Ceremonial Form, earnestsolemnity from empty pageant, in all humanthings.

There must be a veracity, a natural spon-taneity in forms. In the commonest meetingof men, a person making, what we call, “setspeeches,” is not he an offence? In the meredrawing-room, whatsoever courtesies you seeto be grimaces, prompted by no spontaneousreality within, are a thing you wish to getaway from. But suppose now it were somematter of vital concernment, some transcen-dent matter (as Divine Worship is), aboutwhich your whole soul, struck dumb with itsexcess of feeling, knew not how to form it-self into utterance at all, and preferred form-less silence to any utterance there possible,—what should we say of a man coming forwardto represent or utter it for you in the way of


upholsterer-mummery? Such a man,—let himdepart swiftly, if he love himself! You havelost your only son; are mute, struck down,without even tears: an importunate man im-portunately offers to celebrate Funeral Gamesfor him in the manner of the Greeks! Suchmummery is not only not to be accepted,—itis hateful, unendurable. It is what the oldProphets called “Idolatry,” worshipping of hol-low shows; what all earnest men do and willreject. We can partly understand what thosepoor Puritans meant. Laud dedicating thatSt. Catherine Creed’s Church, in the mannerwe have it described; with his multiplied cere-monial bowings, gesticulations, exclamations:surely it is rather the rigorous formal Pedant,intent on his “College-rules,” than the earnestProphet intent on the essence of the matter!

Puritanism found such forms insupport-able; trampled on such forms;—we have to ex-cuse it for saying, No form at all rather thansuch! It stood preaching in its bare pulpit,with nothing but the Bible in its hand. Nay,a man preaching from his earnest soul intothe earnest souls of men: is not this virtu-ally the essence of all Churches whatsoever?The nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is prefer-able to any semblance, however dignified. Be-sides, it will clothe itself with due semblanceby and by, if it be real. No fear of that; actu-ally no fear at all. Given the living man, therewill be found clothes for him; he will find him-self clothes. But the suit-of-clothes pretendingthat it is both clothes and man—! We cannot“fight the French” by three hundred thousand


red uniforms; there must be men in the insideof them! Semblance, I assert, must actuallynot divorce itself from Reality. If Semblancedo,—why then there must be men found torebel against Semblance, for it has become alie! These two Antagonisms at war here, inthe case of Laud and the Puritans, are as oldnearly as the world. They went to fierce battleover England in that age; and fought out theirconfused controversy to a certain length, withmany results for all of us.

In the age which directly followed that ofthe Puritans, their cause or themselves werelittle likely to have justice done them. CharlesSecond and his Rochesters were not the kindof men you would set to judge what the worthor meaning of such men might have been.That there could be any faith or truth in thelife of a man, was what these poor Rochesters,and the age they ushered in, had forgotten.Puritanism was hung on gibbets,—like thebones of the leading Puritans. Its work nev-ertheless went on accomplishing itself. Alltrue work of a man, hang the author of it onwhat gibbet you like, must and will accom-plish itself. We have our Habeas-Corpus, ourfree Representation of the People; acknowl-edgment, wide as the world, that all men are,or else must, shall, and will become, what wecall free men;—men with their life groundedon reality and justice, not on tradition, whichhas become unjust and a chimera! This inpart, and much besides this, was the work ofthe Puritans.

And indeed, as these things became grad-


ually manifest, the character of the Puritansbegan to clear itself. Their memories were,one after another, taken down from the gibbet;nay a certain portion of them are now, in thesedays, as good as canonized. Eliot, Hampden,Pym, nay Ludlow, Hutchinson, Vane himself,are admitted to be a kind of Heroes; politicalConscript Fathers, to whom in no small de-gree we owe what makes us a free England:it would not be safe for anybody to designatethese men as wicked now. Few Puritans ofnote but find their apologists somewhere, andhave a certain reverence paid them by earnestmen. One Puritan, I think, and almost healone, our poor Cromwell, seems to hang yeton the gibbet, and find no hearty apologistanywhere. Him neither saint nor sinner willacquit of great wickedness. A man of abil-ity, infinite talent, courage, and so forth: buthe betrayed the Cause. Selfish ambition, dis-honesty, duplicity; a fierce, coarse, hypocrit-ical Tartuffe; turning all that noble Strugglefor constitutional Liberty into a sorry farceplayed for his own benefit: this and worseis the character they give of Cromwell. Andthen there come contrasts with Washingtonand others; above all, with these noble Pymsand Hampdens, whose noble work he stole forhimself, and ruined into a futility and defor-mity.

This view of Cromwell seems to me the notunnatural product of a century like the Eigh-teenth. As we said of the Valet, so of theSceptic: He does not know a Hero when hesees him! The Valet expected purple man-


tles, gilt sceptres, bodyguards and flourishesof trumpets: the Sceptic of the Eighteenthcentury looks for regulated respectable For-mulas, “Principles,” or what else he may callthem; a style of speech and conduct which hasgot to seem “respectable,” which can plead foritself in a handsome articulate manner, andgain the suffrages of an enlightened scepti-cal Eighteenth century! It is, at bottom, thesame thing that both the Valet and he expect:the garnitures of some acknowledged royalty,which then they will acknowledge! The Kingcoming to them in the rugged unformulisticstate shall be no King.

For my own share, far be it from me tosay or insinuate a word of disparagementagainst such characters as Hampden, Elliot,Pym; whom I believe to have been right wor-thy and useful men. I have read diligentlywhat books and documents about them I couldcome at;—with the honestest wish to admire,to love and worship them like Heroes; butI am sorry to say, if the real truth must betold, with very indifferent success! At bot-tom, I found that it would not do. Theyare very noble men, these; step along intheir stately way, with their measured eu-phemisms, philosophies, parliamentary elo-quences, Ship-moneys, Monarchies of Man;a most constitutional, unblamable, dignifiedset of men. But the heart remains cold be-fore them; the fancy alone endeavors to getup some worship of them. What man’s heartdoes, in reality, break forth into any fire ofbrotherly love for these men? They are be-


come dreadfully dull men! One breaks downoften enough in the constitutional eloquenceof the admirable Pym, with his “seventhlyand lastly.” You find that it may be the ad-mirablest thing in the world, but that it isheavy,—heavy as lead, barren as brick-clay;that, in a word, for you there is little or noth-ing now surviving there! One leaves all theseNobilities standing in their niches of honor:the rugged outcast Cromwell, he is the man ofthem all in whom one still finds human stuff.The great savage Baresark: he could writeno euphemistic Monarchy of Man; did notspeak, did not work with glib regularity; hadno straight story to tell for himself anywhere.But he stood bare, not cased in euphemisticcoat-of-mail; he grappled like a giant, face toface, heart to heart, with the naked truth ofthings! That, after all, is the sort of man forone. I plead guilty to valuing such a man be-yond all other sorts of men. Smooth-shavenRespectabilities not a few one finds, that arenot good for much. Small thanks to a man forkeeping his hands clean, who would not touchthe work but with gloves on!

Neither, on the whole, does this constitu-tional tolerance of the Eighteenth century forthe other happier Puritans seem to be a verygreat matter. One might say, it is but a pieceof Formulism and Scepticism, like the rest.They tell us, It was a sorrowful thing to con-sider that the foundation of our English Lib-erties should have been laid by “Superstition.”These Puritans came forward with Calvinisticincredible Creeds, Anti-Laudisms, Westmin-


ster Confessions; demanding, chiefly of all,that they should have liberty to worship intheir own way. Liberty to tax themselves: thatwas the thing they should have demanded! Itwas Superstition, Fanaticism, disgraceful ig-norance of Constitutional Philosophy to insiston the other thing!—Liberty to tax oneself?Not to pay out money from your pocket ex-cept on reason shown? No century, I think,but a rather barren one would have fixed onthat as the first right of man! I should say, onthe contrary, A just man will generally havebetter cause than money in what shape so-ever, before deciding to revolt against his Gov-ernment. Ours is a most confused world; inwhich a good man will be thankful to see anykind of Government maintain itself in a notinsupportable manner: and here in England,to this hour, if he is not ready to pay a greatmany taxes which he can see very small rea-son in, it will not go well with him, I think! Hemust try some other climate than this. Tax-gatherer? Money? He will say: “Take mymoney, since you can, and it is so desirableto you; take it,—and take yourself away withit; and leave me alone to my work here. I amstill here; can still work, after all the moneyyou have taken from me!” But if they come tohim, and say, “Acknowledge a Lie; pretend tosay you are worshipping God, when you arenot doing it: believe not the thing that youfind true, but the thing that I find, or pretendto find true!” He will answer: “No; by God’shelp, no! You may take my purse; but I cannothave my moral Self annihilated. The purse is


any Highwayman’s who might meet me with aloaded pistol: but the Self is mine and God myMaker’s; it is not yours; and I will resist you tothe death, and revolt against you, and, on thewhole, front all manner of extremities, accu-sations and confusions, in defence of that!”—

Really, it seems to me the one reason whichcould justify revolting, this of the Puritans. Ithas been the soul of all just revolts amongmen. Not Hunger alone produced even theFrench Revolution; no, but the feeling of theinsupportable all-pervading Falsehood whichhad now embodied itself in Hunger, in uni-versal material Scarcity and Nonentity, andthereby become indisputably false in the eyesof all! We will leave the Eighteenth centurywith its “liberty to tax itself.” We will notastonish ourselves that the meaning of suchmen as the Puritans remained dim to it. Tomen who believe in no reality at all, how shalla real human soul, the intensest of all reali-ties, as it were the Voice of this world’s Makerstill speaking to us,—be intelligible? Whatit cannot reduce into constitutional doctrinesrelative to “taxing,” or other the like mate-rial interest, gross, palpable to the sense, sucha century will needs reject as an amorphousheap of rubbish. Hampdens, Pyms and Ship-money will be the theme of much constitu-tional eloquence, striving to be fervid;—whichwill glitter, if not as fire does, then as ice does:and the irreducible Cromwell will remain achaotic mass of “madness,” “hypocrisy,” andmuch else.

From of old, I will confess, this theory of


Cromwell’s falsity has been incredible to me.Nay I cannot believe the like, of any GreatMan whatever. Multitudes of Great Men fig-ure in History as false selfish men; but if wewill consider it, they are but figures for us, un-intelligible shadows; we do not see into themas men that could have existed at all. A super-ficial unbelieving generation only, with no eyebut for the surfaces and semblances of things,could form such notions of Great Men. Cana great soul be possible without a consciencein it, the essence of all real souls, great orsmall?—No, we cannot figure Cromwell as aFalsity and Fatuity; the longer I study himand his career, I believe this the less. Whyshould we? There is no evidence of it. Isit not strange that, after all the mountainsof calumny this man has been subject to, af-ter being represented as the very prince ofliars, who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth,but always some cunning counterfeit of truth,there should not yet have been one falsehoodbrought clearly home to him? A prince of liars,and no lie spoken by him. Not one that Icould yet get sight of. It is like Pococke askingGrotius, Where is your proof of Mahomet’s Pi-geon? No proof!—Let us leave all these calum-nious chimeras, as chimeras ought to be left.They are not portraits of the man; they aredistracted phantasms of him, the joint prod-uct of hatred and darkness.

Looking at the man’s life with our owneyes, it seems to me, a very different hypothe-sis suggests itself. What little we know of hisearlier obscure years, distorted as it has come


down to us, does it not all betoken an earnest,affectionate, sincere kind of man? His nervousmelancholic temperament indicates rather aseriousness too deep for him. Of those sto-ries of “Spectres;” of the white Spectre inbroad daylight, predicting that he should beKing of England, we are not bound to believemuch;—probably no more than of the otherblack Spectre, or Devil in person, to whom theOfficer saw him sell himself before Worces-ter Fight! But the mournful, oversensitive,hypochondriac humor of Oliver, in his youngyears, is otherwise indisputably known. TheHuntingdon Physician told Sir Philip War-wick himself, He had often been sent for atmidnight; Mr. Cromwell was full of hypochon-dria, thought himself near dying, and “hadfancies about the Town-cross.” These thingsare significant. Such an excitable deep-feelingnature, in that rugged stubborn strength ofhis, is not the symptom of falsehood; it isthe symptom and promise of quite other thanfalsehood!

The young Oliver is sent to study Law;falls, or is said to have fallen, for a little pe-riod, into some of the dissipations of youth;but if so, speedily repents, abandons all this:not much above twenty, he is married, settledas an altogether grave and quiet man. “Hepays back what money he had won at gam-bling,” says the story;—he does not think anygain of that kind could be really his. It isvery interesting, very natural, this “conver-sion,” as they well name it; this awakening ofa great true soul from the worldly slough, to


see into the awful truth of things;—to see thatTime and its shows all rested on Eternity, andthis poor Earth of ours was the threshold ei-ther of Heaven or of Hell! Oliver’s life at St.Ives and Ely, as a sober industrious Farmer,is it not altogether as that of a true and de-vout man? He has renounced the world andits ways; its prizes are not the thing that canenrich him. He tills the earth; he reads hisBible; daily assembles his servants round himto worship God. He comforts persecuted min-isters, is fond of preachers; nay can himselfpreach,—exhorts his neighbors to be wise, toredeem the time. In all this what “hypocrisy,”“ambition,” “cant,” or other falsity? The man’shopes, I do believe, were fixed on the otherHigher World; his aim to get well thither, bywalking well through his humble course inthis world. He courts no notice: what couldnotice here do for him? “Ever in his greatTaskmaster’s eye.”

It is striking, too, how he comes out onceinto public view; he, since no other is willingto come: in resistance to a public grievance. Imean, in that matter of the Bedford Fens. Noone else will go to law with Authority; there-fore he will. That matter once settled, he re-turns back into obscurity, to his Bible and hisPlough. “Gain influence”? His influence is themost legitimate; derived from personal knowl-edge of him, as a just, religious, reasonableand determined man. In this way he has livedtill 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 Parliamen-tary mission in that way!

His successes in Parliament, his successesthrough the war, are honest successes of abrave man; who has more resolution in theheart of him, more light in the head of himthan other men. His prayers to God; his spo-ken thanks to the God of Victory, who hadpreserved him safe, and carried him forwardso far, through the furious clash of a worldall set in conflict, through desperate-lookingenvelopments at Dunbar; through the death-hail of so many battles; mercy after mercy; tothe “crowning mercy” of Worcester Fight: allthis is good and genuine for a deep-heartedCalvinistic Cromwell. Only to vain unbeliev-ing Cavaliers, worshipping not God but theirown “love-locks,” frivolities and formalities,living quite apart from contemplations of God,living without God in the world, need it seemhypocritical.

Nor will his participation in the King’sdeath involve him in condemnation with us.It is a stern business killing of a King! Butif you once go to war with him, it lies there;this and all else lies there. Once at war, youhave made wager of battle with him: it is heto die, or else you. Reconciliation is problem-atic; may be possible, or, far more likely, isimpossible. It is now pretty generally admit-ted that the Parliament, having vanquishedCharles First, had no way of making any ten-able arrangement with him. The large Pres-byterian party, apprehensive now of the Inde-pendents, were most anxious to do so; anxious


indeed as for their own existence; but it couldnot be. The unhappy Charles, in those finalHampton-Court negotiations, shows himselfas a man fatally incapable of being dealt with.A man who, once for all, could not and wouldnot understand:—whose thought did not inany measure represent to him the real fact ofthe matter; nay worse, whose word did not atall represent his thought. We may say thisof him without cruelty, with deep pity rather:but it is true and undeniable. Forsaken thereof all but the name of Kingship, he still, find-ing himself treated with outward respect asa King, fancied that he might play off partyagainst party, and smuggle himself into hisold power by deceiving both. Alas, they bothdiscovered that he was deceiving them. A manwhose word will not inform you at all what hemeans or will do, is not a man you can bar-gain with. You must get out of that man’sway, or put him out of yours! The Presbyte-rians, in their despair, were still for believ-ing Charles, though found false, unbelievableagain and again. Not so Cromwell: “For allour fighting,” says he, “we are to have a littlebit of paper?” No!—

In fact, everywhere we have to note the de-cisive practical eye of this man; how he drivestowards the practical and practicable; has agenuine insight into what is fact. Such an in-tellect, I maintain, does not belong to a falseman: the false man sees false shows, plausi-bilities, expediences: the true man is neededto discern even practical truth. Cromwell’sadvice about the Parliament’s Army, early


in the contest, How they were to dismisstheir city-tapsters, flimsy riotous persons, andchoose substantial yeomen, whose heart wasin the work, to be soldiers for them: this is ad-vice by a man who saw. Fact answers, if yousee into Fact! Cromwell’s Ironsides were theembodiment of this insight of his; men fear-ing God; and without any other fear. No moreconclusively genuine set of fighters ever trodthe soil of England, or of any other land.

Neither will we blame greatly that word ofCromwell’s to them; which was so blamed: “Ifthe King should meet me in battle, I wouldkill the King.” Why not? These words werespoken to men who stood as before a Higherthan Kings. They had set more than their ownlives 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 offi-ciality; it is sheer rough death and earnest.They have brought it to the calling-forth ofWar; horrid internecine fight, man grapplingwith man in fire-eyed rage,—the infernal el-ement in man called forth, to try it by that!Do that therefore; since that is the thing tobe done.—The successes of Cromwell seem tome a very natural thing! Since he was notshot in battle, they were an inevitable thing.That such a man, with the eye to see, withthe heart to dare, should advance, from post topost, from victory to victory, till the Hunting-don Farmer became, by whatever name youmight call him, the acknowledged StrongestMan in England, virtually the King of Eng-


land, requires no magic to explain it!—Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for

a man, to fall into Scepticism, into dilettan-tism, insincerity; not to know Sincerity whenthey 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 ismerely the vulpine intellect. That a true Kingbe sent them is of small use; they do not knowhim when sent. They say scornfully, Is thisyour King? The Hero wastes his heroic fac-ulty in bootless contradiction from the unwor-thy; and can accomplish little. For himself hedoes accomplish a heroic life, which is much,which is all; but for the world he accomplishescomparatively nothing. The wild rude Sincer-ity, direct from Nature, is not glib in answer-ing from the witness-box: in your small-debtpie-powder court, he is scouted as a counter-feit. The vulpine intellect “detects” him. Forbeing a man worth any thousand men, the re-sponse your Knox, your Cromwell gets, is anargument for two centuries whether he was aman at all. God’s greatest gift to this Earth issneeringly flung away. The miraculous talis-man is a paltry plated coin, not fit to pass inthe shops as a common guinea.

Lamentable this! I say, this must be reme-died. Till this be remedied in some measure,there is nothing remedied. “Detect quacks”?Yes do, for Heaven’s sake; but know withalthe men that are to be trusted! Till we knowthat, what is all our knowledge; how shall weeven so much as “detect”? For the vulpinesharpness, which considers itself to be knowl-


edge, and “detects” in that fashion, is far mis-taken. Dupes indeed are many: but, of alldupes, there is none so fatally situated as hewho lives in undue terror of being duped. Theworld does exist; the world has truth in it, or itwould not exist! First recognize what is true,we shall then discern what is false; and prop-erly never till then.

“Know the men that are to be trusted:”alas, this is yet, in these days, very far fromus. The sincere alone can recognize sincer-ity. Not a Hero only is needed, but a worldfit for him; a world not of Valets;—the Herocomes almost in vain to it otherwise! Yes, itis far from us: but it must come; thank God,it is visibly coming. Till it do come, whathave we? Ballot-boxes, suffrages, FrenchRevolutions:—if we are as Valets, and do notknow the Hero when we see him, what goodare all these? A heroic Cromwell comes; andfor a hundred and fifty years he cannot havea vote from us. Why, the insincere, unbeliev-ing world is the natural property of the Quack,and of the Father of quacks and quackeries!Misery, confusion, unveracity are alone possi-ble there. By ballot-boxes we alter the figureof our Quack; but the substance of him con-tinues. The Valet-World has to be governed bythe Sham-Hero, by the King merely dressedin King-gear. It is his; he is its! In brief, oneof two things: We shall either learn to knowa Hero, a true Governor and Captain, some-what better, when we see him; or else go on tobe forever governed by the Unheroic;—had weballot-boxes clattering at every street-corner,


there were no remedy in these.Poor Cromwell,—great Cromwell! The

inarticulate Prophet; Prophet who could notspeak. Rude, confused, struggling to utterhimself, with his savage depth, with his wildsincerity; and he looked so strange, among theelegant Euphemisms, dainty little Falklands,didactic Chillingworths, diplomatic Claren-dons! Consider him. An outer hull ofchaotic confusion, visions of the Devil, ner-vous dreams, almost semi-madness; and yetsuch 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, work-ing in such an element of boundless hypochon-dria, unformed black of darkness! And yetwithal this hypochondria, what was it but thevery greatness of the man? The depth andtenderness of his wild affections: the quantityof sympathy he had with things,—the quan-tity of insight he would yet get into the heartof things, the mastery he would yet get overthings: this was his hypochondria. The man’smisery, as man’s misery always does, cameof his greatness. Samuel Johnson too is thatkind of man. Sorrow-stricken, half-distracted;the wide element of mournful black envelop-ing him,—wide as the world. It is the charac-ter of a prophetic man; a man with his wholesoul seeing, and struggling to see.

On this ground, too, I explain to myselfCromwell’s reputed confusion of speech. Tohimself the internal meaning was sun-clear;but the material with which he was to clotheit in utterance was not there. He had lived


silent; a great unnamed sea of Thought roundhim all his days; and in his way of life lit-tle call to attempt naming or uttering that.With his sharp power of vision, resolute powerof action, I doubt not he could have learnedto write Books withal, and speak fluentlyenough;—he did harder things than writingof Books. This kind of man is precisely hewho is fit for doing manfully all things youwill set him on doing. Intellect is not speak-ing and logicizing; it is seeing and ascertain-ing. Virtue, Virtues, manhood, herohood, isnot fair-spoken immaculate regularity; it isfirst of all, what the Germans well name it,Tugend (Taugend, dow-ing or Dough-tinesS),Courage and the Faculty to do. This basis ofthe matter Cromwell had in him.

One understands moreover how, thoughhe could not speak in Parliament, he mightpreach, rhapsodic preaching; above all, howhe might be great in extempore prayer. Theseare the free outpouring utterances of whatis in the heart: method is not required inthem; warmth, depth, sincerity are all thatis required. Cromwell’s habit of prayer isa notable feature of him. All his great en-terprises were commenced with prayer. Indark inextricable-looking difficulties, his Offi-cers and he used to assemble, and pray alter-nately, for hours, for days, till some definiteresolution rose among them, some “door ofhope,” as they would name it, disclosed itself.Consider that. In tears, in fervent prayers,and cries to the great God, to have pity onthem, to make His light shine before them.


They, armed Soldiers of Christ, as they feltthemselves to be; a little band of ChristianBrothers, who had drawn the sword againsta great black devouring world not Christian,but Mammonish, Devilish,—they cried to Godin their straits, in their extreme need, not toforsake the Cause that was His. The lightwhich now rose upon them,—how could a hu-man soul, by any means at all, get betterlight? Was not the purpose so formed like tobe precisely the best, wisest, the one to be fol-lowed without hesitation any more? To themit was as the shining of Heaven’s own Splen-dor in the waste-howling darkness; the Pillarof Fire by night, that was to guide them ontheir desolate perilous way. Was it not such?Can a man’s soul, to this hour, get guidanceby any other method than intrinsically bythat same,—devout prostration of the earneststruggling soul before the Highest, the Giverof all Light; be such prayer a spoken, artic-ulate, or be it a voiceless, inarticulate one?There is no other method. “Hypocrisy”? Onebegins to be weary of all that. They who callit so, have no right to speak on such matters.They never formed a purpose, what one cancall a purpose. They went about balancing ex-pediencies, plausibilities; gathering votes, ad-vices; they never were alone with the truthof a thing at all.—Cromwell’s prayers werelikely to be “eloquent,” and much more thanthat. His was the heart of a man who couldpray.

But indeed his actual Speeches, I appre-hend, were not nearly so ineloquent, incon-


dite, as they look. We find he was, what allspeakers aim to be, an impressive speaker,even in Parliament; one who, from the first,had weight. With that rude passionate voiceof his, he was always understood to meansomething, and men wished to know what. Hedisregarded eloquence, nay despised and dis-liked it; spoke always without premeditationof the words he was to use. The Reporters,too, in those days seem to have been singu-larly candid; and to have given the Printerprecisely what they found on their own note-paper. And withal, what a strange proof isit of Cromwell’s being the premeditative ever-calculating hypocrite, acting a play before theworld, That to the last he took no more chargeof his Speeches! How came he not to studyhis words a little, before flinging them out tothe public? If the words were true words, theycould be left to shift for themselves.

But with regard to Cromwell’s “lying,” wewill make one remark. This, I suppose, orsomething like this, to have been the natureof it. All parties found themselves deceived inhim; each party understood him to be mean-ing this, heard him even say so, and behold heturns out to have been meaning that! He was,cry they, the chief of liars. But now, intrinsi-cally, is not all this the inevitable fortune, notof a false man in such times, but simply of asuperior man? Such a man must have reti-cences in him. If he walk wearing his heartupon his sleeve for daws to peck at, his jour-ney will not extend far! There is no use for anyman’s taking up his abode in a house built of


glass. A man always is to be himself the judgehow much of his mind he will show to othermen; even to those he would have work alongwith him. There are impertinent inquiriesmade: your rule is, to leave the inquirer un-informed on that matter; not, if you can helpit, misinformed, but precisely as dark as hewas! This, could one hit the right phrase ofresponse, is what the wise and faithful manwould aim to answer in such a case.

Cromwell, no doubt of it, spoke often in thedialect of small subaltern parties; uttered tothem a part of his mind. Each little partythought 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? Atall seasons of his history he must have felt,among such people, how, if he explained tothem the deeper insight he had, they must ei-ther have shuddered aghast at it, or believingit, their own little compact hypothesis musthave gone wholly to wreck. They could nothave worked in his province any more; nayperhaps they could not now have worked intheir own province. It is the inevitable posi-tion of a great man among small men. Smallmen, most active, useful, are to be seen every-where, whose whole activity depends on someconviction which to you is palpably a limitedone; imperfect, what we call an error. Butwould it be a kindness always, is it a duty al-ways or often, to disturb them in that? Manya man, doing loud work in the world, standsonly on some thin traditionality, convention-ality; to him indubitable, to you incredible:


break that beneath him, he sinks to endlessdepths! “I might have my hand full of truth,”said Fontenelle, “and open only my little fin-ger.”

And if this be the fact even in matters ofdoctrine, how much more in all departmentsof practice! He that cannot withal keep hismind to himself cannot practice any consid-erable thing whatever. And we call it “dissim-ulation,” all this? What would you think ofcalling the general of an army a dissemblerbecause he did not tell every corporal and pri-vate soldier, who pleased to put the question,what his thoughts were about everything?—Cromwell, I should rather say, managed allthis in a manner we must admire for its per-fection. An endless vortex of such question-ing “corporals” rolled confusedly round himthrough his whole course; whom he did an-swer. It must have been as a great true-seeingman that he managed this too. Not one provedfalsehood, as I said; not one! Of what manthat ever wound himself through such a coilof things will you say so much?—

But in fact there are two errors, widelyprevalent, which pervert to the very basisour judgments formed about such men asCromwell; about their “ambition,” “falsity,”and such like. The first is what I might callsubstituting the goal of their career for thecourse and starting-point of it. The vulgarHistorian of a Cromwell fancies that he haddetermined on being Protector of England, atthe time when he was ploughing the marshlands of Cambridgeshire. His career lay all


mapped out: a program of the whole drama;which he then step by step dramatically un-folded, with all manner of cunning, decep-tive dramaturgy, as he went on,—the hollow,scheming Υπoκριτης, or Play-actor, that hewas! This is a radical perversion; all but uni-versal in such cases. And think for an instanthow different the fact is! How much doesone of us foresee of his own life? Short wayahead of us it is all dim; an unwound skein ofpossibilities, of apprehensions, attemptabili-ties, vague-looming hopes. This Cromwell hadnot his life lying all in that fashion of Pro-gram, which he needed then, with that un-fathomable cunning of his, only to enact dra-matically, scene after scene! Not so. We see itso; but to him it was in no measure so. Whatabsurdities would fall away of themselves,were this one undeniable fact kept honestlyin view by History! Historians indeed will tellyou that they do keep it in view;—but lookwhether such is practically the fact! VulgarHistory, as in this Cromwell’s case, omits it al-together; even the best kinds of History onlyremember it now and then. To remember itduly with rigorous perfection, as in the factit stood, requires indeed a rare faculty; rare,nay impossible. A very Shakspeare for fac-ulty; or more than Shakspeare; who could en-act a brother man’s biography, see with thebrother man’s eyes at all points of his coursewhat things he saw; in short, know his courseand him, as few “Historians” are like to do.Half or more of all the thick-plied perversionswhich distort our image of Cromwell, will dis-


appear, if we honestly so much as try to repre-sent them so; in sequence, as they were; not inthe lump, as they are thrown down before us.

But a second error, which I think the gen-erality commit, refers to this same “ambition”itself. We exaggerate the ambition of GreatMen; we mistake what the nature of it is.Great Men are not ambitious in that sense; heis a small poor man that is ambitious so. Ex-amine the man who lives in misery becausehe does not shine above other men; who goesabout producing himself, pruriently anxiousabout his gifts and claims; struggling to forceeverybody, as it were begging everybody forGod’s sake, to acknowledge him a great man,and set him over the heads of men! Such acreature is among the wretchedest sights seenunder this sun. A great man? A poor mor-bid prurient empty man; fitter for the ward ofa hospital, than for a throne among men. Iadvise you to keep out of his way. He cannotwalk on quiet paths; unless you will look athim, wonder at him, write paragraphs abouthim, he cannot live. It is the emptiness of theman, not his greatness. Because there is noth-ing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that youwould find something in him. In good truth, Ibelieve no great man, not so much as a gen-uine man who had health and real substancein him of whatever magnitude, was ever muchtormented in this way.

Your Cromwell, what good could it do himto be “noticed” by noisy crowds of people? Godhis Maker already noticed him. He, Cromwell,was already there; no notice would make him


other than he already was. Till his hairwas grown gray; and Life from the down-hillslope was all seen to be limited, not infinitebut finite, and all a measurable matter howit went,—he had been content to plough theground, and read his Bible. He in his old dayscould not support it any longer, without sell-ing himself to Falsehood, that he might ridein gilt carriages to Whitehall, and have clerkswith bundles of papers haunting him, “De-cide this, decide that,” which in utmost sorrowof heart no man can perfectly decide! Whatcould gilt carriages do for this man? From ofold, was there not in his life a weight of mean-ing, a terror and a splendor as of Heaven it-self? His existence there as man set him be-yond the need of gilding. Death, Judgmentand Eternity: these already lay as the back-ground of whatsoever he thought or did. Allhis life lay begirt as in a sea of namelessThoughts, which no speech of a mortal couldname. God’s Word, as the Puritan prophets ofthat time had read it: this was great, and allelse was little to him. To call such a man “am-bitious,” to figure him as the prurient wind-bag described above, seems to me the poorestsolecism. Such a man will say: “Keep yourgilt carriages and huzzaing mobs, keep yourred-tape clerks, your influentialities, your im-portant businesses. Leave me alone, leave mealone; there is too much of life in me already!”Old Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in Eng-land in his day, was not ambitious. “Cor-sica Boswell” flaunted at public shows withprinted ribbons round his hat; but the great


old Samuel stayed at home. The world-widesoul wrapt up in its thoughts, in its sorrows;—what could paradings, and ribbons in the hat,do for it?

Ah yes, I will say again: The great silentmen! Looking round on the noisy inanityof the world, words with little meaning, ac-tions with little worth, one loves to reflect onthe great Empire of Silence. The noble silentmen, scattered here and there, each in his de-partment; silently thinking, silently working;whom no Morning Newspaper makes mentionof! They are the salt of the Earth. A coun-try that has none or few of these is in a badway. Like a forest which had no roots; whichhad all turned into leaves and boughs;—whichmust soon wither and be no forest. Woe for usif we had nothing but what we can show, orspeak. Silence, the great Empire of Silence:higher than the stars; deeper than the King-doms of Death! It alone is great; all else issmall.—I hope we English will long maintainour grand talent pour le silence. Let othersthat cannot do without standing on barrel-heads, to spout, and be seen of all the market-place, cultivate speech exclusively,—becomea most green forest without roots! Solomonsays, There is a time to speak; but also a timeto keep silence. Of some great silent Samuel,not urged to writing, as old Samuel Johnsonsays he was, by want of money, and nothingother, one might ask, “Why do not you too getup and speak; promulgate your system, foundyour sect?” “Truly,” he will answer, “I am con-tinent of my thought hitherto; happily I have


yet had the ability to keep it in me, no compul-sion strong enough to speak it. My ‘system’ isnot for promulgation first of all; it is for serv-ing myself to live by. That is the great pur-pose of it to me. And then the ‘honor’? Alas,yes;—but as Cato said of the statue: So manystatues in that Forum of yours, may it not bebetter if they ask, Where is Cato’s statue?”—

But now, by way of counterpoise to this ofSilence, let me say that there are two kindsof ambition; one wholly blamable, the otherlaudable and inevitable. Nature has providedthat the great silent Samuel shall not be silenttoo long. The selfish wish to shine over others,let it be accounted altogether poor and miser-able. “Seekest thou great things, seek themnot:” this is most true. And yet, I say, thereis an irrepressible tendency in every man todevelop himself according to the magnitudewhich Nature has made him of; to speak out,to act out, what nature has laid in him. Thisis proper, fit, inevitable; nay it is a duty, andeven the summary of duties for a man. Themeaning of life here on earth might be definedas consisting in this: To unfold your self, towork what thing you have the faculty for. Itis a necessity for the human being, the firstlaw of our existence. Coleridge beautifully re-marks that the infant learns to speak by thisnecessity it feels.—We will say therefore: Todecide about ambition, whether it is bad ornot, you have two things to take into view.Not the coveting of the place alone, but thefitness of the man for the place withal: that isthe question. Perhaps the place was his; per-


haps he had a natural right, and even obliga-tion, to seek the place! Mirabeau’s ambitionto be Prime Minister, how shall we blame it, ifhe were “the only man in France that couldhave done any good there”? Hopefuler per-haps had he not so clearly felt how much goodhe could do! But a poor Necker, who could dono good, and had even felt that he could donone, yet sitting broken-hearted because theyhad 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 greatman shall strive to speak withal; too amply,rather!

Fancy, for example, you had revealed to thebrave old Samuel Johnson, in his shrouded-upexistence, that it was possible for him to dopriceless divine work for his country and thewhole world. That the perfect Heavenly Lawmight be made Law on this Earth; that theprayer he prayed daily, “Thy kingdom come,”was at length to be fulfilled! If you had con-vinced his judgment of this; that it was pos-sible, practicable; that he the mournful silentSamuel was called to take a part in it! Wouldnot the whole soul of the man have flamed upinto a divine clearness, into noble utteranceand determination to act; casting all sorrowsand misgivings under his feet, counting allaffliction and contradiction small,—the wholedark element of his existence blazing into ar-ticulate radiance of light and lightning? Itwere a true ambition this! And think now howit actually was with Cromwell. From of old,the sufferings of God’s Church, true zealous


Preachers of the truth flung into dungeons,whips, set on pillories, their ears crops off,God’s Gospel-cause trodden under foot of theunworthy: all this had lain heavy on his soul.Long years he had looked upon it, in silence,in prayer; seeing no remedy on Earth; trust-ing well that a remedy in Heaven’s goodnesswould come,—that such a course was false,unjust, and could not last forever. And nowbehold the dawn of it; after twelve years silentwaiting, all England stirs itself; there is tobe once more a Parliament, the Right will geta voice for itself: inexpressible well-groundedhope has come again into the Earth. Was notsuch a Parliament worth being a member of?Cromwell threw down his ploughs, and has-tened thither.

He spoke there,—rugged bursts of earnest-ness, of a self-seen truth, where we get aglimpse of them. He worked there; he foughtand strove, like a strong true giant of a man,through cannon-tumult and all else,—on andon, till the Cause triumphed, its once soformidable enemies all swept from before it,and the dawn of hope had become clear lightof victory and certainty. That he stood there asthe strongest soul of England, the undisputedHero of all England,—what of this? It waspossible that the Law of Christ’s Gospel couldnow establish itself in the world! The Theoc-racy which John Knox in his pulpit mightdream of as a “devout imagination,” this prac-tical man, experienced in the whole chaos ofmost rough practice, dared to consider as ca-pable of being realized. Those that were high-


est in Christ’s Church, the devoutest wisestmen, were to rule the land: in some consider-able degree, it might be so and should be so.Was it not true, God’s truth? And if true, wasit not then the very thing to do? The strongestpractical intellect in England dared to answer,Yes! This I call a noble true purpose; is it not,in its own dialect, the noblest that could en-ter into the heart of Statesman or man? Fora Knox to take it up was something; but fora Cromwell, with his great sound sense andexperience of what our world was,—History, Ithink, shows it only this once in such a degree.I account it the culminating point of Protes-tantism; the most heroic phasis that “Faith inthe Bible” was appointed to exhibit here be-low. Fancy it: that it were made manifestto one of us, how we could make the Rightsupremely victorious over Wrong, and all thatwe had longed and prayed for, as the highestgood to England and all lands, an attainablefact!

Well, I must say, the vulpine intellect, withits knowingness, its alertness and expertnessin “detecting hypocrites,” seems to me a rathersorry business. We have had but one suchStatesman in England; one man, that I canget sight of, who ever had in the heart ofhim any such purpose at all. One man, inthe course of fifteen hundred years; and thiswas his welcome. He had adherents by thehundred or the ten; opponents by the mil-lion. Had England rallied all round him,—why, then, England might have been a Chris-tian land! As it is, vulpine knowingness sits


yet at its hopeless problem, “Given a worldof Knaves, to educe an Honesty from theirunited action;”—how cumbrous a problem,you may see in Chancery Law-Courts, andsome other places! Till at length, by Heaven’sjust anger, but also by Heaven’s great grace,the matter begins to stagnate; and this prob-lem is becoming to all men a palpably hope-less one.—

But with regard to Cromwell and his pur-poses: Hume, and a multitude following him,come upon me here with an admission thatCromwell was sincere at first; a sincere “Fa-natic” at first, but gradually became a “Hyp-ocrite” as things opened round him. This ofthe Fanatic-Hypocrite is Hume’s theory of it;extensively applied since,—to Mahomet andmany others. Think of it seriously, you willfind something in it; not much, not all, veryfar from all. Sincere hero hearts do not sinkin this miserable manner. The Sun flingsforth impurities, gets balefully incrusted withspots; but it does not quench itself, and be-come no Sun at all, but a mass of Darkness!I will venture to say that such never befella great deep Cromwell; I think, never. Na-ture’s own lionhearted Son; Antaeus-like, hisstrength is got by touching the Earth, hisMother; lift him up from the Earth, lift him upinto Hypocrisy, Inanity, his strength is gone.We will not assert that Cromwell was an im-maculate man; that he fell into no faults, noinsincerities among the rest. He was no dilet-tante professor of “perfections,” “immaculateconducts.” He was a rugged Orson, rending


his rough way through actual true work,—doubtless with many a fall therein. Insinceri-ties, faults, very many faults daily and hourly:it was too well known to him; known to Godand 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 fordeath, are those of a Christian heroic man.Broken prayers to God, that He would judgehim and this Cause, He since man could not,in justice yet in pity. They are most touchingwords. He breathed out his wild great soul, itstoils and sins all ended now, into the presenceof his Maker, in this manner.

I, for one, will not call the man a Hypocrite!Hypocrite, mummer, the life of him a meretheatricality; empty barren quack, hungry forthe shouts of mobs? The man had made ob-scurity do very well for him till his head wasgray; and now he was, there as he stood recog-nized unblamed, the virtual King of England.Cannot a man do without King’s Coaches andCloaks? Is it such a blessedness to have clerksforever pestering you with bundles of papersin red tape? A simple Diocletian prefers plant-ing of cabbages; a George Washington, no veryimmeasurable man, does the like. One wouldsay, it is what any genuine man could do; andwould do. The instant his real work were outin the matter of Kingship,—away with it!

Let us remark, meanwhile, how indispens-able everywhere a King is, in all movementsof men. It is strikingly shown, in this veryWar, what becomes of men when they cannotfind a Chief Man, and their enemies can. The


Scotch Nation was all but unanimous in Puri-tanism; zealous and of one mind about it, asin this English end of the Island was alwaysfar from being the case. But there was nogreat Cromwell among them; poor tremulous,hesitating, diplomatic Argyles and such like:none of them had a heart true enough for thetruth, or durst commit himself to the truth.They had no leader; and the scattered Cava-lier party in that country had one: Montrose,the noblest of all the Cavaliers; an accom-plished, gallant-hearted, splendid man; whatone may call the Hero-Cavalier. Well, look atit; on the one hand subjects without a King;on the other a King without subjects! The sub-jects without King can do nothing; the subject-less 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 awild whirlwind; sweeps them, time after time,some five times over, from the field before him.He was at one period, for a short while, mas-ter of all Scotland. One man; but he was aman; a million zealous men, but without theone; they against him were powerless! Per-haps of all the persons in that Puritan strug-gle, from first to last, the single indispensableone was verily Cromwell. To see and dare,and decide; to be a fixed pillar in the welterof uncertainty;–a King among them, whetherthey called him so or not.

Precisely here, however, lies the rub forCromwell. His other proceedings have allfound advocates, and stand generally justi-


fied; but this dismissal of the Rump Parlia-ment and assumption of the Protectorship, iswhat no one can pardon him. He had fairlygrown to be King in England; Chief Man ofthe victorious party in England: but it seemshe could not do without the King’s Cloak, andsold himself to perdition in order to get it. Letus see a little how this was.

England, Scotland, Ireland, all lying nowsubdued at the feet of the Puritan Parliament,the practical question arose, What was to bedone with it? How will you govern these Na-tions, which Providence in a wondrous wayhas given up to your disposal? Clearly thosehundred surviving members of the Long Par-liament, who sit there as supreme authority,cannot continue forever to sit. What is tobe done?—It was a question which theoreti-cal constitution-builders may find easy to an-swer; but to Cromwell, looking there into thereal practical facts of it, there could be nonemore complicated. He asked of the Parlia-ment, What it was they would decide upon? Itwas for the Parliament to say. Yet the Soldierstoo, however contrary to Formula, they whohad purchased this victory with their blood,it seemed to them that they also should havesomething to say in it! We will not “for allour fighting have nothing but a little piece ofpaper.” We understand that the Law of God’sGospel, to which He through us has given thevictory, shall establish itself, or try to estab-lish itself, in this land!

For three years, Cromwell says, this ques-tion had been sounded in the ears of the Par-


liament. They could make no answer; nothingbut talk, talk. Perhaps it lies in the nature ofparliamentary bodies; perhaps no Parliamentcould in such case make any answer but eventhat of talk, talk! Nevertheless the questionmust and shall be answered. You sixty menthere, becoming fast odious, even despicable,to the whole nation, whom the nation alreadycalls Rump Parliament, you cannot continueto sit there: who or what then is to follow?“Free Parliament,” right of Election, Constitu-tional Formulas of one sort or the other,—thething is a hungry Fact coming on us, which wemust answer or be devoured by it! And whoare you that prate of Constitutional Formu-las, rights of Parliament? You have had to killyour King, to make Pride’s Purges, to expeland banish by the law of the stronger whoso-ever would not let your Cause prosper: thereare but fifty or threescore of you left there, de-bating in these days. Tell us what we shall do;not in the way of Formula, but of practicableFact!

How they did finally answer, remains ob-scure to this day. The diligent Godwin him-self admits that he cannot make it out. Thelikeliest is, that this poor Parliament stillwould not, and indeed could not dissolve anddisperse; that when it came to the pointof actually dispersing, they again, for thetenth or twentieth time, adjourned it,—andCromwell’s patience failed him. But we willtake the favorablest hypothesis ever startedfor the Parliament; the favorablest, though Ibelieve it is not the true one, but too favorable.


According to this version: At the uttermostcrisis, when Cromwell and his Officers weremet on the one hand, and the fifty or sixtyRump Members on the other, it was suddenlytold Cromwell that the Rump in its despairwas answering in a very singular way; thatin their splenetic envious despair, to keep outthe Army at least, these men were hurryingthrough the House a kind of Reform Bill,—Parliament to be chosen by the whole of Eng-land; equable electoral division into districts;free suffrage, and the rest of it! A very ques-tionable, or indeed for them an unquestion-able thing. Reform Bill, free suffrage of En-glishmen? Why, the Royalists themselves, si-lenced indeed but not exterminated, perhapsoutnumber us; the great numerical majority ofEngland was always indifferent to our Cause,merely looked at it and submitted to it. It isin weight and force, not by counting of heads,that we are the majority! And now with yourFormulas and Reform Bills, the whole matter,sorely won by our swords, shall again launchitself to sea; become a mere hope, and like-lihood, small even as a likelihood? And itis not a likelihood; it is a certainty, whichwe have won, by God’s strength and our ownright hands, and do now hold here. Cromwellwalked down to these refractory Members; in-terrupted them in that rapid speed of theirReform Bill;—ordered them to begone, andtalk there no more.—Can we not forgive him?Can we not understand him? John Milton,who looked on it all near at hand, could ap-plaud him. The Reality had swept the Formu-


las away before it. I fancy, most men who wererealities in England might see into the neces-sity of that.

The strong daring man, therefore, has setall manner of Formulas and logical superfi-cialities against him; has dared appeal to thegenuine Fact of this England, Whether it willsupport him or not? It is curious to see howhe struggles to govern in some constitutionalway; find some Parliament to support him;but cannot. His first Parliament, the one theycall Barebones’s Parliament, is, so to speak, aConvocation of the Notables. From all quar-ters of England the leading Ministers andchief Puritan Officials nominate the men mostdistinguished by religious reputation, influ-ence and attachment to the true Cause: theseare assembled to shape out a plan. They sanc-tioned what was past; shaped as they couldwhat was to come. They were scornfully calledBarebones’s Parliament: the man’s name, itseems, was not Barebones, but Barbone,—agood enough man. Nor was it a jest, theirwork; it was a most serious reality,—a trialon the part of these Puritan Notables howfar the Law of Christ could become the Lawof this England. There were men of senseamong them, men of some quality; men ofdeep piety I suppose the most of them were.They failed, it seems, and broke down, en-deavoring to reform the Court of Chancery!They dissolved themselves, as incompetent;delivered up their power again into the handsof the Lord General Cromwell, to do with itwhat he liked and could.


What will he do with it? The Lord Gen-eral Cromwell, “Commander-in-chief of all theForces raised and to be raised;” he hereby seeshimself, at this unexampled juncture, as itwere the one available Authority left in Eng-land, nothing between England and utter An-archy but him alone. Such is the undeniableFact of his position and England’s, there andthen. What will he do with it? After delib-eration, he decides that he will accept it; willformally, with public solemnity, say and vowbefore God and men, “Yes, the Fact is so, andI will do the best I can with it!” Protector-ship, Instrument of Government,—these arethe external forms of the thing; worked outand sanctioned as they could in the circum-stances be, by the Judges, by the leading Of-ficial people, “Council of Officers and Personsof interest in the Nation:” and as for the thingitself, undeniably enough, at the pass mattershad now come to, there was no alternative butAnarchy or that. Puritan England might ac-cept it or not; but Puritan England was, inreal truth, saved from suicide thereby!—I be-lieve the Puritan People did, in an inarticu-late, grumbling, yet on the whole grateful andreal way, accept this anomalous act of Oliver’s;at least, he and they together made it good,and always better to the last. But in theirParliamentary articulate way, they had theirdifficulties, and never knew fully what to sayto it!—

Oliver’s second Parliament, properly hisfirst regular Parliament, chosen by the rulelaid down in the Instrument of Government,


did assemble, and worked;—but got, beforelong, into bottomless questions as to the Pro-tector’s right, as to “usurpation,” and so forth;and had at the earliest legal day to be dis-missed. Cromwell’s concluding Speech tothese men is a remarkable one. So likewiseto his third Parliament, in similar rebukefor their pedantries and obstinacies. Mostrude, chaotic, all these Speeches are; but mostearnest-looking. You would say, it was a sin-cere helpless man; not used to speak the greatinorganic thought of him, but to act it rather!A helplessness of utterance, in such burst-ing fulness of meaning. He talks much about“births of Providence:” All these changes, somany victories and events, were not fore-thoughts, and theatrical contrivances of men,of me or of men; it is blind blasphemers thatwill persist in calling them so! He insistswith a heavy sulphurous wrathful emphasison this. As he well might. As if a Cromwellin that dark huge game he had been play-ing, the world wholly thrown into chaos roundhim, had foreseen it all, and played it all offlike a precontrived puppet-show by wood andwire! These things were foreseen by no man,he says; no man could tell what a day wouldbring forth: they were “births of Providence,”God’s finger guided us on, and we came atlast to clear height of victory, God’s Cause tri-umphant in these Nations; and you as a Par-liament could assemble together, and say inwhat manner all this could be organized, re-duced into rational feasibility among the af-fairs of men. You were to help with your wise


counsel in doing that. “You have had suchan opportunity as no Parliament in Englandever had.” Christ’s Law, the Right and True,was to be in some measure made the Lawof this land. In place of that, you have gotinto your idle pedantries, constitutionalities,bottomless cavillings and questionings aboutwritten laws for my coming here;—and wouldsend the whole matter into Chaos again, be-cause I have no Notary’s parchment, but onlyGod’s voice from the battle-whirlwind, for be-ing President among you! That opportunityis gone; and we know not when it will return.You have had your constitutional Logic; andMammon’s Law, not Christ’s Law, rules yetin this land. “God be judge between you andme!” These are his final words to them: Takeyou your constitution-formulas in your hand;and I my informal struggles, purposes, reali-ties and acts; and “God be judge between youand me!”—

We said above what shapeless, involvedchaotic things the printed Speeches ofCromwell are. Wilfully ambiguous, unintelli-gible, say the most: a hypocrite shroudinghimself in confused Jesuitic jargon! To methey do not seem so. I will say rather, they af-forded the first glimpses I could ever get intothe reality of this Cromwell, nay into the pos-sibility of him. Try to believe that he meanssomething, search lovingly what that may be:you will find a real speech lying imprisonedin these broken rude tortuous utterances; ameaning in the great heart of this inarticu-late man! You will, for thc first time, begin


to see that he was a man; not an enigmaticchimera, unintelligible to you, incredible toyou. The Histories and Biographies writtenof this Cromwell, written in shallow scepti-cal generations that could not know or con-ceive of a deep believing man, are far moreobscure than Cromwell’s Speeches. You lookthrough them only into the infinite vague ofBlack and the Inane. “Heats and jealousies,”says Lord Clarendon himself: “heats and jeal-ousies,” mere crabbed whims, theories andcrotchets; these induced slow sober quiet En-glishmen to lay down their ploughs and work;and fly into red fury of confused war againstthe best-conditioned of Kings! Try if you canfind that true. Scepticism writing about Be-lief may have great gifts; but it is really ultravires there. It is Blindness laying down theLaws of Optics.—

Cromwell’s third Parliament split on thesame rock as his second. Ever the constitu-tional Formula: How came you there? Showus some Notary parchment! Blind pedants:—“Why, surely the same power which makesyou a Parliament, that, and something more,made me a Protector!” If my Protectorshipis nothing, what in the name of wonder isyour Parliamenteership, a reflex and creationof that?—

Parliaments having failed, there remainednothing but the way of Despotism. MilitaryDictators, each with his district, to coercethe Royalist and other gainsayers, to governthem, if not by act of Parliament, then by thesword. Formula shall not carry it, while the


Reality is here! I will go on, protecting op-pressed Protestants abroad, appointing justjudges, wise managers, at home, cherishingtrue Gospel ministers; doing the best I can tomake England a Christian England, greaterthan old Rome, the Queen of Protestant Chris-tianity; I, since you will not help me; I whileGod leaves me life!—Why did he not give itup; retire into obscurity again, since the Lawwould not acknowledge him? cry several.That is where they mistake. For him therewas no giving of it up! Prime ministers havegoverned countries, Pitt, Pombal, Choiseul;and their word was a law while it held: butthis Prime Minister was one that could not getresigned. Let him once resign, Charles Stuartand the Cavaliers waited to kill him; to killthe Cause and him. Once embarked, thereis no retreat, no return. This Prime Ministercould retire no-whither except into his tomb.

One is sorry for Cromwell in his old days.His complaint is incessant of the heavy bur-den Providence has laid on him. Heavy; whichhe must bear till death. Old Colonel Hutchin-son, as his wife relates it, Hutchinson, his oldbattle-mate, coming to see him on some indis-pensable business, much against his will,—Cromwell “follows him to the door,” in a mostfraternal, domestic, conciliatory style; begsthat he would be reconciled to him, his oldbrother in arms; says how much it grieveshim to be misunderstood, deserted by truefellow-soldiers, dear to him from of old: therigorous Hutchinson, cased in his Republi-can formula, sullenly goes his way.—And the


man’s head now white; his strong arm grow-ing weary with its long work! I think alwaystoo of his poor Mother, now very old, living inthat Palace of his; a right brave woman; asindeed they lived all an honest God-fearingHousehold there: if she heard a shot go off,she thought it was her son killed. He hadto come to her at least once a day, that shemight see with her own eyes that he was yetliving. The poor old Mother!—What had thisman gained; what had he gained? He had alife of sore strife and toil, to his last day. Fame,ambition, place in History? His dead body washung in chains, his “place in History,”—placein History forsooth!—has been a place of ig-nominy, accusation, blackness and disgrace;and here, this day, who knows if it is not rashin me to be among the first that ever venturedto pronounce him not a knave and liar, but agenuinely honest man! Peace to him. Did henot, in spite of all, accomplish much for us? Wewalk smoothly over his great rough heroic life;step over his body sunk in the ditch there. Weneed not spurn it, as we step on it!—Let theHero rest. It was not to men’s judgment thathe appealed; nor have men judged him verywell.

Precisely a century and a year after this ofPuritanism had got itself hushed up into de-cent composure, and its results made smooth,in 1688, there broke out a far deeper explo-sion, much more difficult to hush up, knownto all mortals, and like to be long known, bythe name of French Revolution. It is prop-erly the third and final act of Protestantism;


the explosive confused return of mankind toReality and Fact, now that they were perish-ing of Semblance and Sham. We call our En-glish Puritanism the second act: “Well then,the Bible is true; let us go by the Bible!” “InChurch,” said Luther; “In Church and State,”said Cromwell, “let us go by what actually isGod’s Truth.” Men have to return to reality;they cannot live on semblance. The FrenchRevolution, or third act, we may well call thefinal one; for lower than that savage San-sculottism men cannot go. They stand thereon the nakedest haggard Fact, undeniable inall seasons and circumstances; and may andmust begin again confidently to build up fromthat. The French explosion, like the Englishone, got its King,—who had no Notary parch-ment to show for himself. We have still toglance for a moment at Napoleon, our secondmodern King.

Napoleon does by no means seem to me sogreat a man as Cromwell. His enormous vic-tories which reached over all Europe, whileCromwell abode mainly in our little England,are but as the high stilts on which the manis seen standing; the stature of the man isnot altered thereby. I find in him no suchsincerity as in Cromwell; only a far inferiorsort. No silent walking, through long years,with the Awful Unnamable of this Universe;“walking with God,” as he called it; and faithand strength in that alone: latent thoughtand valor, content to lie latent, then burst outas in blaze of Heaven’s lightning! Napoleonlived in an age when God was no longer be-


lieved; the meaning of all Silence, Latency,was thought to be Nonentity: he had to be-gin not out of the Puritan Bible, but out ofpoor Sceptical Encyclopedies. This was thelength the man carried it. Meritorious to getso far. His compact, prompt, every way ar-ticulate character is in itself perhaps small,compared with our great chaotic inarticulateCromwell’s. Instead of “dumb Prophet strug-gling to speak,” we have a portentous mix-ture of the Quack withal! Hume’s notion ofthe Fanatic-Hypocrite, with such truth as ithas, will apply much better to Napoleon thanit did to Cromwell, to Mahomet or the like,—where indeed taken strictly it has hardly anytruth at all. An element of blamable ambitionshows itself, from the first, in this man; getsthe victory over him at last, and involves himand his work in ruin.

“False as a bulletin” became a proverb inNapoleon’s time. He makes what excuse hecould for it: that it was necessary to misleadthe enemy, to keep up his own men’s courage,and so forth. On the whole, there are no ex-cuses. A man in no case has liberty to telllies. It had been, in the long-run, better forNapoleon too if he had not told any. In fact, ifa man have any purpose reaching beyond thehour and day, meant to be found extant nextday, what good can it ever be to promulgatelies? The lies are found out; ruinous penalty isexacted for them. No man will believe the liarnext time even when he speaks truth, when itis of the last importance that he be believed.The old cry of wolf!—A Lie is no-thing; you


cannot of nothing make something; you makenothing at last, and lose your labor into thebargain.

Yet Napoleon had a sincerity: we are todistinguish between what is superficial andwhat is fundamental in insincerity. Acrossthese outer manoeuverings and quackeries ofhis, which were many and most blamable, letus discern withal that the man had a cer-tain instinctive ineradicable feeling for real-ity; and did base himself upon fact, so longas he had any basis. He has an instinct ofNature better than his culture was. His sa-vans, Bourrienne tells us, in that voyage toEgypt were one evening busily occupied ar-guing that there could be no God. They hadproved it, to their satisfaction, by all mannerof logic. Napoleon looking up into the stars,answers, “Very ingenious, Messieurs: but whomade all that?” The Atheistic logic runs offfrom him like water; the great Fact stares himin the face: “Who made all that?” So too inPractice: he, as every man that can be great,or have victory in this world, sees, throughall entanglements, the practical heart of thematter; drives straight towards that. Whenthe steward of his Tuileries Palace was ex-hibiting the new upholstery, with praises, anddemonstration how glorious it was, and howcheap withal, Napoleon, making little answer,asked for a pair of scissors, clips one of thegold tassels from a window-curtain, put it inhis pocket, and walked on. Some days after-wards, he produced it at the right moment,to the horror of his upholstery functionary;


it was not gold but tinsel! In St. Helena, itis notable how he still, to his last days, in-sists on the practical, the real. “Why talk andcomplain; above all, why quarrel with one an-other? There is no result in it; it comes tonothing that one can do. Say nothing, if onecan do nothing!” He speaks often so, to hispoor discontented followers; he is like a pieceof silent strength in the middle of their morbidquerulousness there.

And accordingly was there not what wecan call a faith in him, genuine so far as itwent? That this new enormous Democracy as-serting itself here in the French Revolutionis an unsuppressible Fact, which the wholeworld, with its old forces and institutions, can-not put down; this was a true insight of his,and took his conscience and enthusiasm alongwith it,—a faith. And did he not interpretthe dim purport of it well? “La carriere ou-verte aux talens, The implements to him whocan handle them:” this actually is the truth,and even the whole truth; it includes what-ever the French Revolution or any Revolution,could mean. Napoleon, in his first period,was a true Democrat. And yet by the natureof him, fostered too by his military trade, heknew that Democracy, if it were a true thingat all, could not be an anarchy: the man hada heart-hatred for anarchy. On that Twenti-eth of June (1792), Bourrienne and he sat in acoffee-house, as the mob rolled by: Napoleonexpresses the deepest contempt for persons inauthority that they do not restrain this rab-ble. On the Tenth of August he wonders why


there is no man to command these poor Swiss;they would conquer if there were. Such a faithin Democracy, yet hatred of anarchy, it is thatcarries Napoleon through all his great work.Through his brilliant Italian Campaigns, on-wards to the Peace of Leoben, one would say,his inspiration is: “Triumph to the FrenchRevolution; assertion of it against these Aus-trian Simulacra that pretend to call it a Simu-lacrum!” Withal, however, he feels, and has aright to feel, how necessary a strong Authorityis; how the Revolution cannot prosper or lastwithout such. To bridle in that great devour-ing, self-devouring French Revolution; to tameit, so that its intrinsic purpose can be madegood, that it may become organic, and be ableto live among other organisms and formedthings, not as a wasting destruction alone: isnot this still what he partly aimed at, as thetrue purport of his life; nay what he actuallymanaged to do? Through Wagrams, Austerl-itzes; triumph after triumph,—he triumphedso far. There was an eye to see in this man,a soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to bethe King. All men saw that he was such. Thecommon soldiers used to say on the march:“These babbling Avocats, up at Paris; all talkand no work! What wonder it runs all wrong?We shall have to go and put our Petit Caporalthere!” They went, and put him there; theyand France at large. Chief-consulship, Em-perorship, victory over Europe;—till the poorLieutenant of La Fere, not unnaturally, mightseem to himself the greatest of all men thathad been in the world for some ages.


But at this point, I think, the fatalcharlatan-element got the upper hand. Heapostatized from his old faith in Facts, tookto believing in Semblances; strove to connecthimself with Austrian Dynasties, Popedoms,with the old false Feudalities which he oncesaw clearly to be false;—considered that hewould found “his Dynasty” and so forth; thatthe enormous French Revolution meant onlythat! The man was “given up to strong delu-sion, that he should believe a lie;” a fearfulbut most sure thing. He did not know truefrom false now when he looked at them,—the fearfulest penalty a man pays for yield-ing to untruth of heart. Self and false ambi-tion had now become his god: self-deceptiononce yielded to, all other deceptions follownaturally more and more. What a paltrypatchwork of theatrical paper-mantles, tinseland mummery, had this man wrapt his owngreat reality in, thinking to make it more realthereby! His hollow Pope’s-Concordat, pre-tending to be a re-establishment of Catholi-cism, felt by himself to be the method ofextirpating it, “la vaccine de la religion:”his ceremonial Coronations, consecrations bythe old Italian Chimera in Notre-Dame,—“wanting nothing to complete the pomp ofit,” as Augereau said, “nothing but the half-million of men who had died to put an end toall that”! Cromwell’s Inauguration was by theSword and Bible; what we must call a gen-uinely true one. Sword and Bible were bornebefore him, without any chimera: were notthese the real emblems of Puritanism; its true


decoration and insignia? It had used themboth in a very real manner, and pretended tostand by them now! But this poor Napoleonmistook: he believed too much in the Dupa-bility of men; saw no fact deeper in man thanHunger and this! He was mistaken. Like aman that should build upon cloud; his houseand he fall down in confused wreck, and de-part out of the world.

Alas, in all of us this charlatan-element ex-ists; and might be developed, were the temp-tation strong enough. “Lead us not into temp-tation”! But it is fatal, I say, that it be de-veloped. The thing into which it enters asa cognizable ingredient is doomed to be alto-gether transitory; and, however huge it maylook, is in itself small. Napoleon’s working,accordingly, what was it with all the noise itmade? A flash as of gunpowder wide-spread;a blazing-up as of dry heath. For an hour thewhole Universe seems wrapt in smoke andflame; but only for an hour. It goes out: theUniverse with its old mountains and streams,its stars above and kind soil beneath, is stillthere.

The Duke of Weimar told his friends al-ways, To be of courage; this Napoleonism wasunjust, a falsehood, and could not last. Itis true doctrine. The heavier this Napoleontrampled on the world, holding it tyrannouslydown, the fiercer would the world’s recoilagainst him be, one day. Injustice pays itselfwith frightful compound-interest. I am notsure but he had better have lost his best parkof artillery, or had his best regiment drowned


in the sea, than shot that poor German Book-seller, Palm! It was a palpable tyrannous mur-derous injustice, which no man, let him paintan inch thick, could make out to be other. Itburnt deep into the hearts of men, it and thelike of it; suppressed fire flashed in the eyesof men, as they thought of it,—waiting theirday! Which day came: Germany rose roundhim.—What Napoleon did will in the long-runamount to what he did justly; what Naturewith her laws will sanction. To what of re-ality was in him; to that and nothing more.The rest was all smoke and waste. La carriereouverte aux talens: that great true Message,which has yet to articulate and fulfil itself ev-erywhere, he left in a most inarticulate state.He was a great ebauche, a rude-draught nevercompleted; as indeed what great man is other?Left in too rude a state, alas!

His notions of the world, as he expressesthem there at St. Helena, are almost tragicalto consider. He seems to feel the most unaf-fected surprise that it has all gone so; that heis flung out on the rock here, and the World isstill moving on its axis. France is great, andall-great: and at bottom, he is France. Eng-land itself, he says, is by Nature only an ap-pendage of France; “another Isle of Oleron toFrance.” So it was by Nature, by Napoleon-Nature; and yet look how in fact—here am I!He cannot understand it: inconceivable thatthe reality has not corresponded to his pro-gram of it; that France was not all-great, thathe was not France. “Strong delusion,” that heshould believe the thing to be which is not!


The compact, clear-seeing, decisive Italian na-ture of him, strong, genuine, which he oncehad, has enveloped itself, half-dissolved itself,in a turbid atmosphere of French fanfaron-ade. The world was not disposed to be trod-den down underfoot; to be bound into masses,and built together, as he liked, for a pedestalto France and him: the world had quite otherpurposes in view! Napoleon’s astonishment isextreme. But alas, what help now? He hadgone that way of his; and Nature also hadgone her way. Having once parted with Real-ity, he tumbles helpless in Vacuity; no rescuefor him. He had to sink there, mournfully asman seldom did; and break his great heart,and die,—this poor Napoleon: a great imple-ment too soon wasted, till it was useless: ourlast Great Man!

Our last, in a double sense. For here fi-nally these wide roamings of ours through somany times and places, in search and studyof Heroes, are to terminate. I am sorry forit: there was pleasure for me in this business,if also much pain. It is a great subject, anda most grave and wide one, this which, notto be too grave about it, I have named Hero-worship. It enters deeply, as I think, into thesecret of Mankind’s ways and vitalest inter-ests in this world, and is well worth explain-ing at present. With six months, instead of sixdays, we might have done better. I promisedto break ground on it; I know not whether Ihave even managed to do that. I have had totear it up in the rudest manner in order toget into it at all. Often enough, with these


abrupt utterances thrown out isolated, unex-plained, has your tolerance been put to thetrial. Tolerance, patient candor, all-hoping fa-vor and kindness, which I will not speak of atpresent. The accomplished and distinguished,the beautiful, the wise, something of what isbest in England, have listened patiently to myrude words. With many feelings, I heartilythank you all; and say, Good be with you all!

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Heroes and Hero Worship