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Title: On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

Author: Thomas Carlyle

Release date: November 1, 1997 [eBook #1091]
Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON HEROES,
HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY ***

ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP,
AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY

By Thomas Carlyle

Transcriber's Note:
The text is taken from the printed "Sterling Edition" of Carlyle's
Complete Works, in 20 volumes, with the following modifications made in
the etext version: Italicized text is delimited by underscores, thusly. The
footnote (there is only one) has been embedded directly into text, in
brackets, [thusly]. Greek text has been transliterated into Latin characters
with the notation [Gr.] juxtaposed. Otherwise, the punctuation and spelling
of the print version have been retained.

Contents
LECTURES ON HEROES.

LECTURE I. THE HERO AS DIVINITY. ODIN. PAGANISM:
SCANDINAVIAN MYTHOLOGY.
LECTURE II. THE HERO AS PROPHET. MAHOMET:
ISLAM.
LECTURE III. THE HERO AS POET. DANTE:
SHAKSPEARE.
LECTURE IV. THE HERO AS PRIEST. LUTHER;
REFORMATION: KNOX; PURITANISM.
LECTURE V. THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. JOHNSON,
ROUSSEAU, BURNS.
LECTURE VI. THE HERO AS KING. CROMWELL,
NAPOLEON: MODERN REVOLUTIONISM.

LECTURES ON HEROES.

LECTURE I. THE HERO AS DIVINITY. ODIN.
PAGANISM: SCANDINAVIAN MYTHOLOGY.
[May 5, 1840.]

We have undertaken to discourse here for a little on Great Men, their
manner of appearance in our world's business, how they have shaped
themselves in the world's history, what ideas men formed of them, what
work they did;—on Heroes, namely, and on their reception and
performance; what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs.
Too evidently this is a large topic; deserving quite other treatment than we
can expect to give it at present. A large topic; indeed, an illimitable one;
wide as Universal History itself. For, as I take it, Universal History, the
history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the
History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of
men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators,
of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all
things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer
material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that
dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world's
history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these. Too clearly it
is a topic we shall do no justice to in this place!
One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable
company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without
gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good
and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened
the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as
a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain,
as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness;—in
whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them. On any terms
whatsoever, you will not grudge to wander in such neighborhood for a
while. These Six classes of Heroes, chosen out of widely distant countries
and epochs, and in mere external figure differing altogether, ought, if we

look faithfully at them, to illustrate several things for us. Could we see them
well, we should get some glimpses into the very marrow of the world's
history. How happy, could I but, in any measure, in such times as these,
make manifest to you the meanings of Heroism; the divine relation (for I
may well call it such) which in all times unites a Great Man to other men;
and thus, as it were, not exhaust my subject, but so much as break ground
on it! At all events, I must make the attempt.
It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chief fact with
regard to him. A man's, or a nation of men's. By religion I do not mean here
the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign
and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at
all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees
of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call
religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and
assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative
region of him, if even so deep as that. But the thing a man does practically
believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much
less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for
certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his
duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and
creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere
scepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be
spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell
me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the
kind of things he will do is. Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore,
first of all, What religion they had? Was it Heathenism,—plurality of gods,
mere sensuous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief
recognized element therein Physical Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an
Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; Time, through every
meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced
by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Scepticism, uncertainty and
inquiry whether there was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a
mad one;—doubt as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial?
Answering of this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or
nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their
feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in
them that determined the outward and actual;—their religion, as I say, was

the great fact about them. In these Discourses, limited as we are, it will be
good to direct our survey chiefly to that religious phasis of the matter. That
once known well, all is known. We have chosen as the first Hero in our
series Odin the central figure of Scandinavian Paganism; an emblem to us
of a most extensive province of things. Let us look for a little at the Hero as
Divinity, the oldest primary form of Heroism.
Surely it seems a very strange-looking thing this Paganism; almost
inconceivable to us in these days. A bewildering, inextricable jungle of
delusions, confusions, falsehoods, and absurdities, covering the whole field
of Life! A thing that fills us with astonishment, almost, if it were possible,
with incredulity,—for truly it is not easy to understand that sane men could
ever calmly, with their eyes open, believe and live by such a set of
doctrines. That men should have worshipped their poor fellow-man as a
God, and not him only, but stocks and stones, and all manner of animate
and inanimate objects; and fashioned for themselves such a distracted chaos
of hallucinations by way of Theory of the Universe: all this looks like an
incredible fable. Nevertheless it is a clear fact that they did it. Such hideous
inextricable jungle of misworships, misbeliefs, men, made as we are, did
actually hold by, and live at home in. This is strange. Yes, we may pause in
sorrow and silence over the depths of darkness that are in man; if we rejoice
in the heights of purer vision he has attained to. Such things were and are in
man; in all men; in us too.
Some speculators have a short way of accounting for the Pagan religion:
mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say they; no sane man ever did
believe it,—merely contrived to persuade other men, not worthy of the
name of sane, to believe it! It will be often our duty to protest against this
sort of hypothesis about men's doings and history; and I here, on the very
threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other isms
by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this world.
They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up.
Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more
advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but
quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the
health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of their
being about to die! Let us never forget this. It seems to me a most mournful
hypothesis, that of quackery giving birth to any faith even in savage men.
Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things. We shall not see

into the true heart of anything, if we look merely at the quackeries of it; if
we do not reject the quackeries altogether; as mere diseases, corruptions,
with which our and all men's sole duty is to have done with them, to sweep
them out of our thoughts as out of our practice. Man everywhere is the born
enemy of lies. I find Grand Lamaism itself to have a kind of truth in it.
Read the candid, clear-sighted, rather sceptical Mr. Turner's Account of his
Embassy to that country, and see. They have their belief, these poor Thibet
people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into
every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still
better, belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once
discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no
bounds! This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the
only error here. The Thibet priests have methods of their own of
discovering what Man is Greatest, fit to be supreme over them. Bad
methods: but are they so much worse than our methods,—of understanding
him to be always the eldest-born of a certain genealogy? Alas, it is a
difficult thing to find good methods for!—We shall begin to have a chance
of understanding Paganism, when we first admit that to its followers it was,
at one time, earnestly true. Let us consider it very certain that men did
believe in Paganism; men with open eyes, sound senses, men made
altogether like ourselves; that we, had we been there, should have believed
in it. Ask now, What Paganism could have been?
Another theory, somewhat more respectable, attributes such things to
Allegory. It was a play of poetic minds, say these theorists; a shadowing
forth, in allegorical fable, in personification and visual form, of what such
poetic minds had known and felt of this Universe. Which agrees, add they,
with a primary law of human nature, still everywhere observably at work,
though in less important things, That what a man feels intensely, he
struggles to speak out of him, to see represented before him in visual shape,
and as if with a kind of life and historical reality in it. Now doubtless there
is such a law, and it is one of the deepest in human nature; neither need we
doubt that it did operate fundamentally in this business. The hypothesis
which ascribes Paganism wholly or mostly to this agency, I call a little more
respectable; but I cannot yet call it the true hypothesis. Think, would we
believe, and take with us as our life-guidance, an allegory, a poetic sport?
Not sport but earnest is what we should require. It is a most earnest thing to

be alive in this world; to die is not sport for a man. Man's life never was a
sport to him; it was a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!
I find, therefore, that though these Allegory theorists are on the way
towards truth in this matter, they have not reached it either. Pagan Religion
is indeed an Allegory, a Symbol of what men felt and knew about the
Universe; and all Religions are symbols of that, altering always as that
alters: but it seems to me a radical perversion, and even inversion, of the
business, to put that forward as the origin and moving cause, when it was
rather the result and termination. To get beautiful allegories, a perfect poetic
symbol, was not the want of men; but to know what they were to believe
about this Universe, what course they were to steer in it; what, in this
mysterious Life of theirs, they had to hope and to fear, to do and to forbear
doing. The Pilgrim's Progress is an Allegory, and a beautiful, just and
serious one: but consider whether Bunyan's Allegory could have preceded
the Faith it symbolizes! The Faith had to be already there, standing believed
by everybody;—of which the Allegory could then become a shadow; and,
with all its seriousness, we may say a sportful shadow, a mere play of the
Fancy, in comparison with that awful Fact and scientific certainty which it
poetically strives to emblem. The Allegory is the product of the certainty,
not the producer of it; not in Bunyan's nor in any other case. For Paganism,
therefore, we have still to inquire, Whence came that scientific certainty, the
parent of such a bewildered heap of allegories, errors and confusions? How
was it, what was it?
Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend "explaining," in this place, or
in any place, such a phenomenon as that far-distant distracted cloudy
imbroglio of Paganism,—more like a cloud-field than a distant continent of
firm land and facts! It is no longer a reality, yet it was one. We ought to
understand that this seeming cloud-field was once a reality; that not poetic
allegory, least of all that dupery and deception was the origin of it. Men, I
say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories:
men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for
detecting quacks, for detesting quacks. Let us try if, leaving out both the
quack theory and the allegory one, and listening with affectionate attention
to that far-off confused rumor of the Pagan ages, we cannot ascertain so
much as this at least, That there was a kind of fact at the heart of them; that
they too were not mendacious and distracted, but in their own poor way true
and sane!

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

speak about it. This Universe, ah me—what could the wild man know of it;
what can we yet know? That it is a Force, and thousand-fold Complexity of
Forces; a Force which is not we. That is all; it is not we, it is altogether
different from us. Force, Force, everywhere Force; we ourselves a
mysterious Force in the centre of that. "There is not a leaf rotting on the
highway but has Force in it; how else could it rot?" Nay surely, to the
Atheistic Thinker, if such a one were possible, it must be a miracle too, this
huge illimitable whirlwind of Force, which envelops us here; never-resting
whirlwind, high as Immensity, old as Eternity. What is it? God's Creation,
the religious people answer; it is the Almighty God's! Atheistic science
babbles poorly of it, with scientific nomenclatures, experiments and what
not, as if it were a poor dead thing, to be bottled up in Leyden jars and sold
over counters: but the natural sense of man, in all times, if he will honestly
apply his sense, proclaims it to be a living thing,—ah, an unspeakable,
godlike thing; towards which the best attitude for us, after never so much
science, is awe, devout prostration and humility of soul; worship if not in
words, then in silence.
But now I remark farther: What in such a time as ours it requires a
Prophet or Poet to teach us, namely, the stripping-off of those poor
undevout wrappages, nomenclatures and scientific hearsays,—this, the
ancient earnest soul, as yet unencumbered with these things, did for itself.
The world, which is now divine only to the gifted, was then divine to
whosoever would turn his eye upon it. He stood bare before it face to face.
"All was Godlike or God:"—Jean Paul still finds it so; the giant Jean Paul,
who has power to escape out of hearsays: but there then were no hearsays.
Canopus shining down over the desert, with its blue diamond brightness
(that wild blue spirit-like brightness, far brighter than we ever witness here),
would pierce into the heart of the wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it was
guiding through the solitary waste there. To his wild heart, with all feelings
in it, with no speech for any feeling, it might seem a little eye, that
Canopus, glancing out on him from the great deep Eternity; revealing the
inner Splendor to him. Cannot we understand how these men worshipped
Canopus; became what we call Sabeans, worshipping the stars? Such is to
me the secret of all forms of Paganism. Worship is transcendent wonder;
wonder for which there is now no limit or measure; that is worship. To
these primeval men, all things and everything they saw exist beside them
were an emblem of the Godlike, of some God.

And look what perennial fibre of truth was in that. To us also, through
every star, through every blade of grass, is not a God made visible, if we
will open our minds and eyes? We do not worship in that way now: but is it
not reckoned still a merit, proof of what we call a "poetic nature," that we
recognize how every object has a divine beauty in it; how every object still
verily is "a window through which we may look into Infinitude itself"? He
that can discern the loveliness of things, we call him Poet! Painter, Man of
Genius, gifted, lovable. These poor Sabeans did even what he does,—in
their own fashion. That they did it, in what fashion soever, was a merit:
better than what the entirely stupid man did, what the horse and camel did,
—namely, nothing!
But now if all things whatsoever that we look upon are emblems to us of
the Highest God, I add that more so than any of them is man such an
emblem. You have heard of St. Chrysostom's celebrated saying in reference
to the Shekinah, or Ark of Testimony, visible Revelation of God, among the
Hebrews: "The true Shekinah is Man!" Yes, it is even so: this is no vain
phrase; it is veritably so. The essence of our being, the mystery in us that
calls itself "I,"—ah, what words have we for such things?—is a breath of
Heaven; the Highest Being reveals himself in man. This body, these
faculties, this life of ours, is it not all as a vesture for that Unnamed? "There
is but one Temple in the Universe," says the devout Novalis, "and that is the
Body of Man. Nothing is holier shall that high form. Bending before men is
a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven when we
lay our hand on a human body!" This sounds much like a mere flourish of
rhetoric; but it is not so. If well meditated, it will turn out to be a scientific
fact; the expression, in such words as can be had, of the actual truth of the
thing. We are the miracle of miracles,—the great inscrutable mystery of
God. We cannot understand it, we know not how to speak of it; but we may
feel and know, if we like, that it is verily so.
Well; these truths were once more readily felt than now. The young
generations of the world, who had in them the freshness of young children,
and yet the depth of earnest men, who did not think that they had finished
off all things in Heaven and Earth by merely giving them scientific names,
but had to gaze direct at them there, with awe and wonder: they felt better
what of divinity is in man and Nature; they, without being mad, could
worship Nature, and man more than anything else in Nature. Worship, that
is, as I said above, admire without limit: this, in the full use of their

faculties, with all sincerity of heart, they could do. I consider Hero-worship
to be the grand modifying element in that ancient system of thought. What I
called the perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may say, out of many
roots: every admiration, adoration of a star or natural object, was a root or
fibre of a root; but Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root,
from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown.
And now if worship even of a star had some meaning in it, how much
more might that of a Hero! Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration of
a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I say there is, at bottom,
nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one
higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all
hours, the vivifying influence in man's life. Religion I find stand upon it;
not Paganism only, but far higher and truer religions,—all religion hitherto
known. Hero-worship, heartfelt prostrate admiration, submission, burning,
boundless, for a noblest godlike Form of Man,—is not that the germ of
Christianity itself? The greatest of all Heroes is One—whom we do not
name here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find it
the ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout man's whole history
on earth.
Or coming into lower, less unspeakable provinces, is not all Loyalty akin
to religious Faith also? Faith is loyalty to some inspired Teacher, some
spiritual Hero. And what therefore is loyalty proper, the life-breath of all
society, but an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive admiration for the
truly great? Society is founded on Hero-worship. All dignities of rank, on
which human association rests, are what we may call a Heroarchy
(Government of Heroes),—or a Hierarchy, for it is "sacred" enough withal!
The Duke means Dux, Leader; King is Kon-ning, Kan-ning, Man that
knows or cans. Society everywhere is some representation, not
insupportably inaccurate, of a graduated Worship of Heroes—reverence and
obedience done to men really great and wise. Not insupportably inaccurate,
I say! They are all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries, all representing
gold;—and several of them, alas, always are forged notes. We can do with
some forged false notes; with a good many even; but not with all, or the
most of them forged! No: there have to come revolutions then; cries of
Democracy, Liberty and Equality, and I know not what:—the notes being
all false, and no gold to be had for them, people take to crying in their
despair that there is no gold, that there never was any! "Gold," Hero-

worship, is nevertheless, as it was always and everywhere, and cannot cease
till man himself ceases.
I am well aware that in these days Hero-worship, the thing I call Hero-
worship, professes to have gone out, and finally ceased. This, for reasons
which it will be worth while some time to inquire into, is an age that as it
were denies the existence of great men; denies the desirableness of great
men. Show our critics a great man, a Luther for example, they begin to what
they call "account" for him; not to worship him, but take the dimensions of
him,—and bring him out to be a little kind of man! He was the "creature of
the Time," they say; the Time called him forth, the Time did everything, he
nothing—but what we the little critic could have done too! This seems to
me but melancholy work. The Time call forth? Alas, we have known Times
call loudly enough for their great man; but not find him when they called!
He was not there; Providence had not sent him; the Time, calling its
loudest, had to go down to confusion and wreck because he would not come
when called.
For if we will think of it, no Time need have gone to ruin, could it have
found a man great enough, a man wise and good enough: wisdom to discern
truly what the Time wanted, valor to lead it on the right road thither; these
are the salvation of any Time. But I liken common languid Times, with their
unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and
embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse
distress towards final ruin;—all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the
lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free
force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise
healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he
has once struck on it, into fire like his own. The dry mouldering sticks are
thought to have called him forth. They did want him greatly; but as to
calling him forth—! Those are critics of small vision, I think, who cry:
"See, is it not the sticks that made the fire?" No sadder proof can be given
by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. There is no
sadder symptom of a generation than such general blindness to the spiritual
lightning, with faith only in the heap of barren dead fuel. It is the last
consummation of unbelief. In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find
the Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his epoch;—the
lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt. The History of
the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men.

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

nay can we honestly bow down to anything else? Ah, does not every true
man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really
above him? No nobler or more blessed feeling dwells in man's heart. And to
me it is very cheering to consider that no sceptical logic, or general
triviality, insincerity and aridity of any Time and its influences can destroy
this noble inborn loyalty and worship that is in man. In times of unbelief,
which soon have to become times of revolution, much down-rushing,
sorrowful decay and ruin is visible to everybody. For myself in these days, I
seem to see in this indestructibility of Hero-worship the everlasting
adamant lower than which the confused wreck of revolutionary things
cannot fall. The confused wreck of things crumbling and even crashing and
tumbling all round us in these revolutionary ages, will get down so far; no
farther. It is an eternal corner-stone, from which they can begin to build
themselves up again. That man, in some sense or other, worships Heroes;
that we all of us reverence and must ever reverence Great Men: this is, to
me, the living rock amid all rushings-down whatsoever;—the one fixed
point in modern revolutionary history, otherwise as if bottomless and
shoreless.
So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of
it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine,
the revelation of the workings of God; the Hero is still worshipable: this,
under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have
struggled, as they could, to set forth. I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us
here, is more interesting than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it
continued in these regions of Europe till the eleventh century: eight hundred
years ago the Norwegians were still worshippers of Odin. It is interesting
also as the creed of our fathers; the men whose blood still runs in our veins,
whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways. Strange: they did
believe that, while we believe so differently. Let us look a little at this poor
Norse creed, for many reasons. We have tolerable means to do it; for there
is another point of interest in these Scandinavian mythologies: that they
have been preserved so well.
In that strange island Iceland,—burst up, the geologists say, by fire from
the bottom of the sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava; swallowed many
months of every year in black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in
summertime; towering up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean with its
snow jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid volcanic chasms,

like the waste chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;—where of all places we
least looked for Literature or written memorials, the record of these things
was written down. On the seabord of this wild land is a rim of grassy
country, where cattle can subsist, and men by means of them and of what
the sea yields; and it seems they were poetic men these, men who had deep
thoughts in them, and uttered musically their thoughts. Much would be lost,
had Iceland not been burst up from the sea, not been discovered by the
Northmen! The old Norse Poets were many of them natives of Iceland.
Saemund, one of the early Christian Priests there, who perhaps had a
lingering fondness for Paganism, collected certain of their old Pagan songs,
just about becoming obsolete then,—Poems or Chants of a mythic,
prophetic, mostly all of a religious character: that is what Norse critics call
the Elder or Poetic Edda. Edda, a word of uncertain etymology, is thought
to signify Ancestress. Snorro Sturleson, an Iceland gentleman, an extremely
notable personage, educated by this Saemund's grandson, took in hand next,
near a century afterwards, to put together, among several other books he
wrote, a kind of Prose Synopsis of the whole Mythology; elucidated by new
fragments of traditionary verse. A work constructed really with great
ingenuity, native talent, what one might call unconscious art; altogether a
perspicuous clear work, pleasant reading still: this is the Younger or Prose
Edda. By these and the numerous other Sagas, mostly Icelandic, with the
commentaries, Icelandic or not, which go on zealously in the North to this
day, it is possible to gain some direct insight even yet; and see that old
Norse system of Belief, as it were, face to face. Let us forget that it is
erroneous Religion; let us look at it as old Thought, and try if we cannot
sympathize with it somewhat.
The primary characteristic of this old Northland Mythology I find to be
Impersonation of the visible workings of Nature. Earnest simple recognition
of the workings of Physical Nature, as a thing wholly miraculous,
stupendous and divine. What we now lecture of as Science, they wondered
at, and fell down in awe before, as Religion The dark hostile Powers of
Nature they figure to themselves as "Jotuns," Giants, huge shaggy beings of
a demonic character. Frost, Fire, Sea-tempest; these are Jotuns. The friendly
Powers again, as Summer-heat, the Sun, are Gods. The empire of this
Universe is divided between these two; they dwell apart, in perennial
internecine feud. The Gods dwell above in Asgard, the Garden of the Asen,

or Divinities; Jotunheim, a distant dark chaotic land, is the home of the
Jotuns.
Curious all this; and not idle or inane, if we will look at the foundation of
it! The power of Fire, or Flame, for instance, which we designate by some
trivial chemical name, thereby hiding from ourselves the essential character
of wonder that dwells in it as in all things, is with these old Northmen,
Loke, a most swift subtle Demon, of the brood of the Jotuns. The savages of
the Ladrones Islands too (say some Spanish voyagers) thought Fire, which
they never had seen before, was a devil or god, that bit you sharply when
you touched it, and that lived upon dry wood. From us too no Chemistry, if
it had not Stupidity to help it, would hide that Flame is a wonder. What is
Flame?—Frost the old Norse Seer discerns to be a monstrous hoary Jotun,
the Giant Thrym, Hrym; or Rime, the old word now nearly obsolete here,
but still used in Scotland to signify hoar-frost. Rime was not then as now a
dead chemical thing, but a living Jotun or Devil; the monstrous Jotun Rime
drove home his Horses at night, sat "combing their manes,"—which Horses
were Hail-Clouds, or fleet Frost-Winds. His Cows—No, not his, but a
kinsman's, the Giant Hymir's Cows are Icebergs: this Hymir "looks at the
rocks" with his devil-eye, and they split in the glance of it.
Thunder was not then mere Electricity, vitreous or resinous; it was the
God Donner (Thunder) or Thor,—God also of beneficent Summer-heat. The
thunder was his wrath: the gathering of the black clouds is the drawing
down of Thor's angry brows; the fire-bolt bursting out of Heaven is the all-
rending Hammer flung from the hand of Thor: he urges his loud chariot
over the mountain-tops,—that is the peal; wrathful he "blows in his red
beard,"—that is the rustling storm-blast before the thunder begins. Balder
again, the White God, the beautiful, the just and benignant (whom the early
Christian Missionaries found to resemble Christ), is the Sun, beautifullest of
visible things; wondrous too, and divine still, after all our Astronomies and
Almanacs! But perhaps the notablest god we hear tell of is one of whom
Grimm the German Etymologist finds trace: the God Wunsch, or Wish. The
God Wish; who could give us all that we wished! Is not this the sincerest
and yet rudest voice of the spirit of man? The rudest ideal that man ever
formed; which still shows itself in the latest forms of our spiritual culture.
Higher considerations have to teach us that the God Wish is not the true
God.

Of the other Gods or Jotuns I will mention only for etymology's sake,
that Sea-tempest is the Jotun Aegir, a very dangerous Jotun;—and now to
this day, on our river Trent, as I learn, the Nottingham bargemen, when the
River is in a certain flooded state (a kind of backwater, or eddying swirl it
has, very dangerous to them), call it Eager; they cry out, "Have a care, there
is the Eager coming!" Curious; that word surviving, like the peak of a
submerged world! The oldest Nottingham bargemen had believed in the
God Aegir. Indeed our English blood too in good part is Danish, Norse; or
rather, at bottom, Danish and Norse and Saxon have no distinction, except a
superficial one,—as of Heathen and Christian, or the like. But all over our
Island we are mingled largely with Danes proper,—from the incessant
invasions there were: and this, of course, in a greater proportion along the
east coast; and greatest of all, as I find, in the North Country. From the
Humber upwards, all over Scotland, the Speech of the common people is
still in a singular degree Icelandic; its Germanism has still a peculiar Norse
tinge. They too are "Normans," Northmen,—if that be any great beauty—!
Of the chief god, Odin, we shall speak by and by. Mark at present so
much; what the essence of Scandinavian and indeed of all Paganism is: a
recognition of the forces of Nature as godlike, stupendous, personal
Agencies,—as Gods and Demons. Not inconceivable to us. It is the infant
Thought of man opening itself, with awe and wonder, on this ever-
stupendous Universe. To me there is in the Norse system something very
genuine, very great and manlike. A broad simplicity, rusticity, so very
different from the light gracefulness of the old Greek Paganism,
distinguishes this Scandinavian System. It is Thought; the genuine Thought
of deep, rude, earnest minds, fairly opened to the things about them; a face-
to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of the things,—the first characteristic
of all good Thought in all times. Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as in the
Greek Paganism; a certain homely truthfulness and rustic strength, a great
rude sincerity, discloses itself here. It is strange, after our beautiful Apollo
statues and clear smiling mythuses, to come down upon the Norse Gods
"brewing ale" to hold their feast with Aegir, the Sea-Jotun; sending out Thor
to get the caldron for them in the Jotun country; Thor, after many
adventures, clapping the Pot on his head, like a huge hat, and walking off
with it,—quite lost in it, the ears of the Pot reaching down to his heels! A
kind of vacant hugeness, large awkward gianthood, characterizes that Norse
system; enormous force, as yet altogether untutored, stalking helpless with

large uncertain strides. Consider only their primary mythus of the Creation.
The Gods, having got the Giant Ymer slain, a Giant made by "warm wind,"
and much confused work, out of the conflict of Frost and Fire,—determined
on constructing a world with him. His blood made the Sea; his flesh was the
Land, the Rocks his bones; of his eyebrows they formed Asgard their
Gods'-dwelling; his skull was the great blue vault of Immensity, and the
brains of it became the Clouds. What a Hyper-Brobdignagian business!
Untamed Thought, great, giantlike, enormous;—to be tamed in due time
into the compact greatness, not giantlike, but godlike and stronger than
gianthood, of the Shakspeares, the Goethes!—Spiritually as well as bodily
these men are our progenitors.
I like, too, that representation they have of the tree Igdrasil. All Life is
figured by them as a Tree. Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of Existence, has its roots
deep down in the kingdoms of Hela or Death; its trunk reaches up heaven-
high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe: it is the Tree of
Existence. At the foot of it, in the Death-kingdom, sit Three Nornas, Fates,
—the Past, Present, Future; watering its 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 not every
leaf of it a biography, every fibre there an act or word? Its boughs are
Histories of Nations. The rustle of it is the noise of Human Existence,
onwards from of old. It grows there, the breath of Human Passion rustling
through it;—or storm tost, the storm-wind howling through it like the voice
of all the gods. It is Igdrasil, the Tree of Existence. It is the past, the present,
and the future; what was done, what is doing, what will be done; "the
infinite conjugation of the verb To do." Considering how human things
circulate, each inextricably in communion with all,—how the word I speak
to you to-day is borrowed, not from Ulfila the Moesogoth only, but from all
men since the first man began to speak,—I find no similitude so true as this
of a Tree. Beautiful; altogether beautiful and great. The "Machine of the
Universe,"—alas, do but think of that in contrast!
Well, it is strange enough this old Norse view of Nature; different enough
from what we believe of Nature. Whence it specially came, one would not
like to be compelled to say very minutely! One thing we may say: It came
from the thoughts of Norse men;—from the thought, above all, of the first
Norse man who had an original power of thinking. The First Norse "man of
genius," as we should call him! Innumerable men had passed by, across this

Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals may feel; or
with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men only feel;—till the
great Thinker came, the original man, the Seer; whose shaped spoken
Thought awakes the slumbering capability of all into Thought. It is ever the
way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far
from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from
painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even so!
Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night;—is it not, indeed, the
awakening for them from no-being into being, from death into life? We still
honor such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth: but to these wild
men he was a very magician, a worker of miraculous unexpected blessing
for them; a Prophet, a God!—Thought once awakened does not again
slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man,
generation after generation,—till its full stature is reached, and such System
of Thought can grow no farther; but must give place to another.
For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God,
we fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a
Hero, of worth immeasurable; admiration for whom, transcending the
known bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate
Thinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless
gratitude, would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the
sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assurance to them of their own
destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do here, what to
look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he
first has made Life alive!—We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse
Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he
was a man among men. His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like
view starts into being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it
continues credible there. In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in
sympathetic ink; at his word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every
epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival
of a Thinker in the world—!
One other thing we must not forget; it will explain, a little, the confusion
of these Norse Eddas. They are not one coherent System of Thought; but
properly the summation of several successive systems. All this of the old
Norse Belief which is flung out for us, in one level of distance in the Edda,
like a picture painted on the same canvas, does not at all stand so in the

reality. It stands rather at all manner of distances and depths, of successive
generations since the Belief first began. All Scandinavian thinkers, since the
first of them, contributed to that Scandinavian System of Thought; in ever-
new elaboration and addition, it is the combined work of them all. What
history it had, how it changed from shape to shape, by one thinker's
contribution after another, till it got to the full final shape we see it under in
the Edda, no man will now ever know: its Councils of Trebizond, Councils
of Trent, Athanasiuses, Dantes, Luthers, are sunk without echo in the dark
night! Only that it had such a history we can all know. Wheresover a thinker
appeared, there in the thing he thought of was a contribution, accession, a
change or revolution made. Alas, the grandest "revolution" of all, the one
made by the man Odin himself, is not this too sunk for us like the rest! Of
Odin what history? Strange rather to reflect that he had a history! That this
Odin, in his wild Norse vesture, with his wild beard and eyes, his rude
Norse speech and ways, was a man like us; with our sorrows, joys, with our
limbs, features;—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,"
men will say to-morrow; Odin's day! Of Odin there exists no history; no
document of it; no guess about it worth repeating.
Snorro indeed, in the quietest manner, almost in a brief business style,
writes down, in his Heimskringla, how Odin was a heroic Prince, in the
Black-Sea region, with Twelve Peers, and a great people straitened for
room. How he led these Asen (Asiatics) of his out of Asia; settled them in
the North parts of Europe, by warlike conquest; invented Letters, Poetry
and so forth,—and came by and by to be worshipped as Chief God by these
Scandinavians, his Twelve Peers made into Twelve Sons of his own, Gods
like himself: Snorro has no doubt of this. Saxo Grammaticus, a very curious
Northman of that same century, is still more unhesitating; scruples not to
find out a historical fact in every individual mythus, and writes it down as a
terrestrial event in Denmark or elsewhere. Torfaeus, learned and cautious,
some centuries later, assigns by calculation a date for it: Odin, he says,
came into Europe about the Year 70 before Christ. Of all which, as
grounded on mere uncertainties, found to be untenable now, I need say
nothing. Far, very far beyond the Year 70! Odin's date, adventures, whole
terrestrial history, figure and environment are sunk from us forever into
unknown thousands of years.

Nay Grimm, the German Antiquary, goes so far as to deny that any man
Odin ever existed. He proves it by etymology. The word Wuotan, which is
the original form of Odin, a word spread, as name of their chief Divinity,
over all the Teutonic Nations everywhere; this word, which connects itself,
according to Grimm, with the Latin vadere, with the English wade and such
like,—means primarily Movement, Source of Movement, Power; and is the
fit name of the highest god, not of any man. The word signifies Divinity, he
says, among the old Saxon, German and all Teutonic Nations; the adjectives
formed from it all signify divine, supreme, or something pertaining to the
chief god. Like enough! We must bow to Grimm in matters etymological.
Let us consider it fixed that Wuotan means Wading, force of Movement.
And now still, what hinders it from being the name of a Heroic Man and
Mover, as well as of a god? As for the adjectives, and words formed from it,
—did not the Spaniards in their universal admiration for Lope, get into the
habit of saying "a Lope flower," "a Lope dama," if the flower or woman
were of surpassing beauty? Had this lasted, Lope would have grown, in
Spain, to be an adjective signifying godlike also. Indeed, Adam Smith, in
his Essay on Language, surmises that all adjectives whatsoever were
formed precisely in that way: some very green thing, chiefly notable for its
greenness, got the appellative name Green, and then the next thing
remarkable for that quality, a tree for instance, was named the green tree,—
as we still say "the steam coach," "four-horse coach," or the like. All
primary adjectives, according to Smith, were formed in this way; were at
first substantives and things. We cannot annihilate a man for etymologies
like that! Surely there was a First Teacher and Captain; surely there must
have been an Odin, palpable to the sense at one time; no adjective, but a
real Hero of flesh and blood! The voice of all tradition, history or echo of
history, agrees with all that thought will teach one about it, to assure us of
this.
How the man Odin came to be considered a god, the chief god?—that
surely is a question which nobody would wish to dogmatize upon. I have
said, his people knew no limits to their admiration of him; they had as yet
no scale to measure admiration by. Fancy your own generous heart's-love of
some greatest man expanding till it transcended all bounds, till it filled and
overflowed the whole field of your thought! Or what if this man Odin,—
since a great deep soul, with the afflatus and mysterious tide of vision and
impulse rushing on him he knows not whence, is ever an enigma, a kind of

terror and wonder to himself,—should have felt that perhaps he was divine;
that he was some effluence of the "Wuotan," "Movement", Supreme Power
and Divinity, of whom to his rapt vision all Nature was the awful Flame-
image; that some effluence of Wuotan dwelt here in him! He was not
necessarily false; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest he knew. A great
soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is,—alternates between the
highest height and the lowest depth; can, of all things, the least measure—
Himself! What others take him for, and what he guesses that he may be;
these two items strangely act on one another, help to determine one another.
With all men reverently admiring him; with his own wild soul full of noble
ardors and affections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious new light;
a divine Universe bursting all into godlike beauty round him, and no man to
whom the like ever had befallen, what could he think himself to be?
"Wuotan?" All men answered, "Wuotan!"—
And then consider what mere Time will do in such cases; how if a man
was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead. What an
enormous camera-obscura magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the
human Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship and all that
lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage it. And in the darkness, in the
entire ignorance; without date or document, no book, no Arundel-marble;
only here and there some dumb monumental cairn. Why, in thirty or forty
years, were there no books, any great man would grow mythic, the
contemporaries who had seen him, being once all dead. And in three
hundred years, and in three thousand years—! To attempt theorizing on
such matters would profit little: they are matters which refuse to be
theoremed and diagramed; which Logic ought to know that she cannot
speak of. Enough for us to discern, far in the uttermost distance, some
gleam as of a small real light shining in the centre of that enormous camera-
obscure image; to discern that the centre of it all was not a madness and
nothing, but a sanity and something.
This light, kindled in the great dark vortex of the Norse Mind, dark but
living, waiting only for light; this is to me the centre of the whole. How
such light will then shine out, and with wondrous thousand-fold expansion
spread itself, in forms and colors, depends not on it, so much as on the
National Mind recipient of it. The colors and forms of your light will be
those of the cut-glass it has to shine through.—Curious to think how, for
every man, any the truest fact is modelled by the nature of the man! I said,

The earnest man, speaking to his brother men, must always have stated
what seemed to him a fact, a real Appearance of Nature. But the way in
which such Appearance or fact shaped itself,—what sort of fact it became
for him,—was and is modified by his own laws of thinking; deep, subtle,
but universal, ever-operating laws. The world of Nature, for every man, is
the Fantasy of Himself. This world is the multiplex "Image of his own
Dream." Who knows to what unnamable subtleties of spiritual law all these
Pagan Fables owe their shape! The number Twelve, divisiblest of all, which
could be halved, quartered, parted into three, into six, the most remarkable
number,—this was enough to determine the Signs of the Zodiac, the number
of Odin's Sons, and innumerable other Twelves. Any vague rumor of
number had a tendency to settle itself into Twelve. So with regard to every
other matter. And quite unconsciously too,—with no notion of building up
"Allegories "! But the fresh clear glance of those First Ages would be
prompt in discerning the secret relations of things, and wholly open to obey
these. Schiller finds in the Cestus of Venus an everlasting aesthetic truth as
to the nature of all Beauty; curious:—but he is careful not to insinuate that
the old Greek Mythists had any notion of lecturing about the "Philosophy of
Criticism"!—On the whole, we must leave those boundless regions. Cannot
we conceive that Odin was a reality? Error indeed, error enough: but sheer
falsehood, idle fables, allegory aforethought,—we will not believe that our
Fathers believed in these.
Odin's Runes are a significant feature of him. Runes, and the miracles of
"magic" he worked by them, make a great feature in tradition. Runes are the
Scandinavian Alphabet; suppose Odin to have been the inventor of Letters,
as well as "magic," among that people! It is the greatest invention man has
ever made! this of marking down the unseen thought that is in him by
written characters. It is a kind of second speech, almost as miraculous as the
first. You remember the astonishment and incredulity of Atahualpa the
Peruvian King; how he made the Spanish Soldier who was guarding him
scratch Dios on his thumb-nail, that he might try the next soldier with it, to
ascertain whether such a miracle was possible. If Odin brought Letters
among his people, he might work magic enough!
Writing by Runes has some air of being original among the Norsemen:
not a Phoenician Alphabet, but a native Scandinavian one. Snorro tells us
farther that Odin invented Poetry; the music of human speech, as well as
that miraculous runic marking of it. Transport yourselves into the early

childhood of nations; the first beautiful morning-light of our Europe, when
all yet lay in fresh young radiance as of a great sunrise, and our Europe was
first beginning to think, to be! Wonder, hope; infinite radiance of hope and
wonder, as of a young child's thoughts, in the hearts of these strong men!
Strong sons of Nature; and here was not only a wild Captain and Fighter;
discerning with his wild flashing eyes what to do, with his wild lion-heart
daring and doing it; but a Poet too, all that we mean by a Poet, Prophet,
great devout Thinker and Inventor,—as the truly Great Man ever is. A Hero
is a Hero at all points; in the soul and thought of him first of all. This Odin,
in his rude semi-articulate way, had a word to speak. A great heart laid open
to take in this great Universe, and man's Life here, and utter a great word
about it. A Hero, as I say, in his own rude manner; a wise, gifted, noble-
hearted man. And now, if we still admire such a man beyond all others,
what must these wild Norse souls, first awakened into thinking, have made
of him! To them, as yet without names for it, he was noble and noblest;
Hero, Prophet, God; Wuotan, the greatest of all. Thought is Thought,
however it speak or spell itself. Intrinsically, I conjecture, this Odin must
have been of the same sort of stuff as the greatest kind of men. A great
thought in the wild deep heart of him! The rough words he articulated, are
they not the rudimental roots of those English words we still use? He
worked so, in that obscure element. But he was as a light kindled in it; a
light of Intellect, rude Nobleness of heart, the only kind of lights we have
yet; a Hero, as I say: and he had to shine there, and make his obscure
element a little lighter,—as is still the task of us all.
We will fancy him to be the Type Norseman; the finest Teuton whom that
race had yet produced. The rude Norse heart burst up into boundless
admiration round him; into adoration. He is as a root of so many great
things; the fruit of him is found growing from deep thousands of years, over
the whole field of Teutonic Life. Our own Wednesday, as I said, is it not still
Odin's Day? Wednesbury, Wansborough, Wanstead, Wandsworth: Odin
grew into England too, these are still leaves from that root! He was the
Chief God to all the Teutonic Peoples; their Pattern Norseman;—in such
way did they admire their Pattern Norseman; that was the fortune he had in
the world.
Thus if the man Odin himself have vanished utterly, there is this huge
Shadow of him which still projects itself over the whole History of his
People. For this Odin once admitted to be God, we can understand well that

the whole Scandinavian Scheme of Nature, or dim No-scheme, whatever it
might before have been, would now begin to develop itself altogether
differently, and grow thenceforth in a new manner. What this Odin saw into,
and taught with his runes and his rhymes, the whole Teutonic People laid to
heart and carried forward. His way of thought became their way of thought:
—such, under new conditions, is the history of every great thinker still. In
gigantic confused lineaments, like some enormous camera-obscure shadow
thrown upwards from the dead deeps of the Past, and covering the whole
Northern Heaven, is not that Scandinavian Mythology in some sort the
Portraiture of this man Odin? The gigantic image of his natural face, legible
or not legible there, expanded and confused in that manner! Ah, Thought, I
say, is always Thought. No great man lives in vain. The History of the
world is but the Biography of great men.
To me there is something very touching in this primeval figure of
Heroism; in such artless, helpless, but hearty entire reception of a Hero by
his fellow-men. Never so helpless in shape, it is the noblest of feelings, and
a feeling in some shape or other perennial as man himself. If I could show
in any measure, what I feel deeply for a long time now, That it is the vital
element of manhood, the soul of man's history here in our world,—it would
be the chief use of this discoursing at present. We do not now call our great
men Gods, nor admire without limit; ah no, with limit enough! But if we
have no great men, or do not admire at all,—that were a still worse case.
This poor Scandinavian Hero-worship, that whole Norse way of looking
at the Universe, and adjusting oneself there, has an indestructible merit for
us. A rude childlike way of recognizing the divineness of Nature, the
divineness of Man; most rude, yet heartfelt, robust, giantlike; betokening
what a giant of a man this child would yet grow to!—It was a truth, and is
none. Is it not as the half-dumb stifled voice of the long-buried generations
of our own Fathers, calling out of the depths of ages to us, in whose veins
their blood still runs: "This then, this is what we made of the world: this is
all the image and notion we could form to ourselves of this great mystery of
a Life and Universe. Despise it not. You are raised high above it, to large
free scope of vision; but you too are not yet at the top. No, your notion too,
so much enlarged, is but a partial, imperfect one; that matter is a thing no
man will ever, in time or out of time, comprehend; after thousands of years
of ever-new expansion, man will find himself but struggling to comprehend

again a part of it: the thing is larger shall man, not to be comprehended by
him; an Infinite thing!"
The essence of the Scandinavian, as indeed of all Pagan Mythologies, we
found to be recognition of the divineness of Nature; sincere communion of
man with the mysterious invisible Powers visibly seen at work in the world
round him. This, I should say, is more sincerely done in the Scandinavian
than in any Mythology I know. Sincerity is the great characteristic of it.
Superior sincerity (far superior) consoles us for the total want of old
Grecian grace. Sincerity, I think, is better than grace. I feel that these old
Northmen wore looking into Nature with open eye and soul: most earnest,
honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a great-hearted simplicity and depth
and freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, unfearing way. A right valiant,
true old race of men. Such recognition of Nature one finds to be the chief
element of Paganism; recognition of Man, and his Moral Duty, though this
too is not wanting, comes to be the chief element only in purer forms of
religion. Here, indeed, is a great distinction and epoch in Human Beliefs; a
great landmark in the religious development of Mankind. Man first puts
himself in relation with Nature and her Powers, wonders and worships over
those; not till a later epoch does he discern that all Power is Moral, that the
grand point is the distinction for him of Good and Evil, of Thou shalt and
Thou shalt not.
With regard to all these fabulous delineations in the Edda, I will remark,
moreover, as indeed was already hinted, that most probably they must have
been of much newer date; most probably, even from the first, were
comparatively idle for the old Norsemen, and as it were a kind of Poetic
sport. Allegory and Poetic Delineation, as I said above, cannot be religious
Faith; the Faith itself must first be there, then Allegory enough will gather
round it, as the fit body round its soul. The Norse Faith, I can well suppose,
like other Faiths, was most active while it lay mainly in the silent state, and
had not yet much to say about itself, still less to sing.
Among those shadowy Edda matters, amid all that fantastic congeries of
assertions, and traditions, in their musical Mythologies, the main practical
belief a man could have was probably not much more than this: of the
Valkyrs and the Hall of Odin; of an inflexible Destiny; and that the one
thing needful for a man was to be brave. The Valkyrs are Choosers of the
Slain: a Destiny inexorable, which it is useless trying to bend or soften, has

appointed who is to be slain; this was a fundamental point for the Norse
believer;—as indeed it is for all earnest men everywhere, for a Mahomet, a
Luther, for a Napoleon too. It lies at the basis this for every such man; it is
the woof out of which his whole system of thought is woven. The Valkyrs;
and then that these Choosers lead the brave to a heavenly Hall of Odin;
only the base and slavish being thrust elsewhither, into the realms of Hela
the Death-goddess: I take this to have been the soul of the whole Norse
Belief. They understood in their heart that it was indispensable to be brave;
that Odin would have no favor for them, but despise and thrust them out, if
they were not brave. Consider too whether there is not something in this! It
is an everlasting duty, valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave.
Valor is still value. The first duty for a man is still that of subduing Fear.
We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then. A man's acts are
slavish, not true but specious; his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a
slave and coward, till he have got Fear under his feet. Odin's creed, if we
disentangle the real kernel of it, is true to this hour. A man shall and must be
valiant; he must march forward, and quit himself like a man,—trusting
imperturbably in the appointment and choice of the upper Powers; and, on
the whole, not fear at all. Now and always, the completeness of his victory
over Fear will determine how much of a man he is.
It is doubtless very savage that kind of valor of the old Northmen. Snorro
tells us they thought it a shame and misery not to die in battle; and if natural
death seemed to be coming on, they would cut wounds in their flesh, that
Odin might receive them as warriors slain. Old kings, about to die, had their
body laid into a ship; the ship sent forth, with sails set and slow fire burning
it; that, once out at sea, it might blaze up in flame, and in such manner bury
worthily the old hero, at once in the sky and in the ocean! Wild bloody
valor; yet valor of its kind; better, I say, than none. In the old Sea-kings too,
what an indomitable rugged energy! Silent, with closed lips, as I fancy
them, unconscious that they were specially brave; defying the wild ocean
with its monsters, and all men and things;—progenitors of our own Blakes
and Nelsons! No Homer sang these Norse Sea-kings; but Agamemnon's was
a small audacity, and of small fruit in the world, to some of them;—to
Hrolf's of Normandy, for instance! Hrolf, or Rollo Duke of Normandy, the
wild Sea-king, has a share in governing England at this hour.
Nor was it altogether nothing, even that wild sea-roving and battling,
through so many generations. It needed to be ascertained which was the

strongest kind of men; who were to be ruler over whom. Among the
Northland Sovereigns, too, I find some who got the title Wood-cutter;
Forest-felling Kings. Much lies in that. I suppose at bottom many of them
were forest-fellers as well as fighters, though the Skalds talk mainly of the
latter,—misleading certain critics not a little; for no nation of men could
ever live by fighting alone; there could not produce enough come out of
that! I suppose the right good fighter was oftenest also the right good forest-
feller,—the right good improver, discerner, doer and worker in every kind;
for true valor, different enough from ferocity, is the basis of all. A more
legitimate kind of valor that; showing itself against the untamed Forests and
dark brute Powers of Nature, to conquer Nature for us. In the same direction
have not we their descendants since carried it far? May such valor last
forever with us!
That the man Odin, speaking with a Hero's voice and heart, as with an
impressiveness out of Heaven, told his People the infinite importance of
Valor, how man thereby became a god; and that his People, feeling a
response to it in their own hearts, believed this message of his, and thought
it a message out of Heaven, and him a Divinity for telling it them: this
seems to me the primary seed-grain of the Norse Religion, from which all
manner of mythologies, symbolic practices, speculations, allegories, songs
and sagas would naturally grow. Grow,—how strangely! I called it a small
light shining and shaping in the huge vortex of Norse darkness. Yet the
darkness itself was alive; consider that. It was the eager inarticulate
uninstructed Mind of the whole Norse People, longing only to become
articulate, to go on articulating ever farther! The living doctrine grows,
grows;—like a Banyan-tree; the first seed is the essential thing: any branch
strikes itself down into the earth, becomes a new root; and so, in endless
complexity, we have a whole wood, a whole jungle, one seed the parent of
it all. Was not the whole Norse Religion, accordingly, in some sense, what
we called "the enormous shadow of this man's likeness"? Critics trace some
affinity in some Norse mythuses, of the Creation and such like, with those
of the Hindoos. The Cow Adumbla, "licking the rime from the rocks," has a
kind of Hindoo look. A Hindoo Cow, transported into frosty countries.
Probably enough; indeed we may say undoubtedly, these things will have a
kindred with the remotest lands, with the earliest times. Thought does not
die, but only is changed. The first man that began to think in this Planet of
ours, he was the beginner of all. And then the second man, and the third

man;—nay, every true Thinker to this hour is a kind of Odin, teaches men
his way of thought, spreads a shadow of his own likeness over sections of
the History of the World.
Of the distinctive poetic character or merit of this Norse Mythology I
have not room to speak; nor does it concern us much. Some wild
Prophecies we have, as the Voluspa in the Elder Edda; of a rapt, earnest,
sibylline sort. But they were comparatively an idle adjunct of the matter,
men who as it were but toyed with the matter, these later Skalds; and it is
their songs chiefly that survive. In later centuries, I suppose, they would go
on singing, poetically symbolizing, as our modern Painters paint, when it
was no longer from the innermost heart, or not from the heart at all. This is
everywhere to be well kept in mind.
Gray's fragments of Norse Lore, at any rate, will give one no notion of it;
—any more than Pope will of Homer. It is no square-built gloomy palace of
black ashlar marble, shrouded in awe and horror, as Gray gives it us: no;
rough as the North rocks, as the Iceland deserts, it is; with a heartiness,
homeliness, even a tint of good humor and robust mirth in the middle of
these fearful things. The strong old Norse heart did not go upon theatrical
sublimities; they had not time to tremble. I like much their robust
simplicity; their veracity, directness of conception. Thor "draws down his
brows" in a veritable Norse rage; "grasps his hammer till the knuckles grow
white." Beautiful traits of pity too, an honest pity. Balder "the white God"
dies; the beautiful, benignant; he is the Sungod. They try all Nature for a
remedy; but he is dead. Frigga, his mother, sends Hermoder to seek or see
him: nine days and nine nights he rides through gloomy deep valleys, a
labyrinth of gloom; arrives at the Bridge with its gold roof: the Keeper says,
"Yes, Balder did pass here; but the Kingdom of the Dead is down yonder,
far towards the North." Hermoder rides on; leaps Hell-gate, Hela's gate;
does see Balder, and speak with him: Balder cannot be delivered.
Inexorable! Hela will not, for Odin or any God, give him up. The beautiful
and gentle has to remain there. His Wife had volunteered to go with him, to
die with him. They shall forever remain there. He sends his ring to Odin;
Nanna his wife sends her thimble to Frigga, as a remembrance.—Ah me—!
For indeed Valor is the fountain of Pity too;—of Truth, and all that is
great and good in man. The robust homely vigor of the Norse heart attaches
one much, in these delineations. Is it not a trait of right honest strength, says

Uhland, who has written a fine Essay on Thor, that the old Norse heart finds
its friend in the Thunder-god? That it is not frightened away by his thunder;
but finds that Summer-heat, the beautiful noble summer, must and will have
thunder withal! The Norse heart loves this Thor and his hammer-bolt; sports
with him. Thor is Summer-heat: the god of Peaceable Industry as well as
Thunder. He is the Peasant's friend; his true henchman and attendant is
Thialfi, Manual Labor. Thor himself engages in all manner of rough
manual work, scorns no business for its plebeianism; is ever and anon
travelling to the country of the Jotuns, harrying those chaotic Frost-
monsters, subduing them, at least straitening and damaging them. There is a
great broad humor in some of these things.
Thor, as we saw above, goes to Jotun-land, to seek Hymir's Caldron, that
the Gods may brew beer. Hymir the huge Giant enters, his gray beard all
full of hoar-frost; splits pillars with the very glance of his eye; Thor, after
much rough tumult, snatches the Pot, claps it on his head; the "handles of it
reach down to his heels." The Norse Skald has a kind of loving sport with
Thor. This is the Hymir whose cattle, the critics have discovered, are
Icebergs. Huge untutored Brobdignag genius,—needing only to be tamed
down; into Shakspeares, Dantes, Goethes! It is all gone now, that old Norse
work,—Thor the Thunder-god changed into Jack the Giant-killer: but the
mind that made it is here yet. How strangely things grow, and die, and do
not die! There are twigs of that great world-tree of Norse Belief still
curiously traceable. This poor Jack of the Nursery, with his miraculous
shoes of swiftness, coat of darkness, sword of sharpness, he is one. Hynde
Etin, and still more decisively Red Etin of Ireland, in the Scottish Ballads,
these are both derived from Norseland; Etin is evidently a Jotun. Nay,
Shakspeare's Hamlet is a twig too of this same world-tree; there seems no
doubt of that. Hamlet, Amleth I find, is really a mythic personage; and his
Tragedy, of the poisoned Father, poisoned asleep by drops in his ear, and the
rest, is a Norse mythus! Old Saxo, as his wont was, made it a Danish
history; Shakspeare, out of Saxo, made it what we see. That is a twig of the
world-tree that has grown, I think;—by nature or accident that one has
grown!
In fact, these old Norse songs have a truth in them, an inward perennial
truth and greatness,—as, indeed, all must have that can very long preserve
itself by tradition alone. It is a greatness not of mere body and gigantic
bulk, but a rude greatness of soul. There is a sublime uncomplaining

melancholy traceable in these old hearts. A great free glance into the very
deeps of thought. They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen, what
Meditation has taught all men in all ages, That this world is after all but a
show,—a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All deep souls see into
that,—the Hindoo Mythologist, the German Philosopher,—the Shakspeare,
the earnest Thinker, wherever he may be:

"We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!"

One of Thor's expeditions, to Utgard (the Outer Garden, central seat of
Jotun-land), is remarkable in this respect. Thialfi was with him, and Loke.
After various adventures, they entered upon Giant-land; wandered over
plains, wild uncultivated places, among stones and trees. At nightfall they
noticed a house; and as the door, which indeed formed one whole side of
the house, was open, they entered. It was a simple habitation; one large hall,
altogether empty. They stayed there. Suddenly in the dead of the night loud
noises alarmed them. Thor grasped his hammer; stood in the door, prepared
for fight. His companions within ran hither and thither in their terror,
seeking some outlet in that rude hall; they found a little closet at last, and
took refuge there. Neither had Thor any battle: for, lo, in the morning it
turned out that the noise had been only the snoring of a certain enormous
but peaceable Giant, the Giant Skrymir, who lay peaceably sleeping near
by; and this that they took for a house was merely his Glove, thrown aside
there; the door was the Glove-wrist; the little closet they had fled into was
the Thumb! Such a glove;—I remark too that it had not fingers as ours
have, but only a thumb, and the rest undivided: a most ancient, rustic glove!
Skrymir now carried their portmanteau all day; Thor, however, had his
own suspicions, did not like the ways of Skrymir; determined at night to put
an end to him as he slept. Raising his hammer, he struck down into the
Giant's face a right thunder-bolt blow, of force to rend rocks. The Giant
merely awoke; rubbed his cheek, and said, Did a leaf fall? Again Thor
struck, so soon as Skrymir again slept; a better blow than before; but the
Giant only murmured, Was that a grain of sand? Thor's third stroke was
with both his hands (the "knuckles white" I suppose), and seemed to dint
deep into Skrymir's visage; but he merely checked his snore, and remarked,
There must be sparrows roosting in this tree, I think; what is that they have
dropt?—At the gate of Utgard, a place so high that you had to "strain your
neck bending back to see the top of it," Skrymir went his ways. Thor and

his companions were admitted; invited to take share in the games going on.
To Thor, for his part, they handed a Drinking-horn; it was a common feat,
they told him, to drink this dry at one draught. Long and fiercely, three
times over, Thor drank; but made hardly any impression. He was a weak
child, they told him: could he lift that Cat he saw there? Small as the feat
seemed, Thor with his whole godlike strength could not; he bent up the
creature's back, could not raise its feet off the ground, could at the utmost
raise one foot. Why, you are no man, said the Utgard people; there is an Old
Woman that will wrestle you! Thor, heartily ashamed, seized this haggard
Old Woman; but could not throw her.
And now, on their quitting Utgard, the chief Jotun, escorting them
politely a little way, said to Thor: "You are beaten then:—yet be not so
much ashamed; there was deception of appearance in it. That Horn you
tried to drink was the Sea; you did make it ebb; but who could drink that,
the bottomless! The Cat you would have lifted,—why, that is the Midgard-
snake, the Great World-serpent, which, tail in mouth, girds and keeps up the
whole created world; had you torn that up, the world must have rushed to
ruin! As for the Old Woman, she was Time, Old Age, Duration: with her
what can wrestle? No man nor no god with her; gods or men, she prevails
over all! And then those three strokes you struck,—look at these three
valleys; your three strokes made these!" Thor looked at his attendant Jotun:
it was Skrymir;—it was, say Norse critics, the old chaotic rocky Earth in
person, and that glove-house was some Earth-cavern! But Skrymir had
vanished; Utgard with its sky-high gates, when Thor grasped his hammer to
smite them, had gone to air; only the Giant's voice was heard mocking:
"Better come no more to Jotunheim!"—
This is of the allegoric period, as we see, and half play, not of the
prophetic and entirely devout: but as a mythus is there not real antique
Norse gold in it? More true metal, rough from the Mimer-stithy, than in
many a famed Greek Mythus shaped far better! A great broad Brobdignag
grin of true humor is in this Skrymir; mirth resting on earnestness and
sadness, as the rainbow on black tempest: only a right valiant heart is
capable of that. It is the grim humor of our own Ben Jonson, rare old Ben;
runs in the blood of us, I fancy; for one catches tones of it, under a still
other shape, out of the American Backwoods.

That is also a very striking conception that of the Ragnarok,
Consummation, or Twilight of the Gods. It is in the Voluspa Song;
seemingly a very old, prophetic idea. The Gods and Jotuns, the divine
Powers and the chaotic brute ones, after long contest and partial victory by
the former, meet at last in universal world-embracing wrestle and duel;
World-serpent against Thor, strength against strength; mutually extinctive;
and ruin, "twilight" sinking into darkness, swallows the created Universe.
The old Universe with its Gods is sunk; but it is not final death: there is to
be a new Heaven and a new Earth; a higher supreme God, and Justice to
reign among men. Curious: this law of mutation, which also is a law written
in man's inmost thought, had been deciphered by these old earnest Thinkers
in their rude style; and how, though all dies, and even gods die, yet all death
is but a phoenix fire-death, and new-birth into the Greater and the Better! It
is the fundamental Law of Being for a creature made of Time, living in this
Place of Hope. All earnest men have seen into it; may still see into it.
And now, connected with this, let us glance at the last mythus of the
appearance of Thor; and end there. I fancy it to be the latest in date of all
these fables; a sorrowing protest against the advance of Christianity,—set
forth reproachfully by some Conservative Pagan. King Olaf has been
harshly blamed for his over-zeal in introducing Christianity; surely I should
have blamed him far more for an under-zeal in that! He paid dear enough
for it; he died by the revolt of his Pagan people, in battle, in the year 1033,
at Stickelstad, near that Drontheim, where the chief Cathedral of the North
has now stood for many centuries, dedicated gratefully to his memory as
Saint Olaf. The mythus about Thor is to this effect. King Olaf, the Christian
Reform King, is sailing with fit escort along the shore of Norway, from
haven to haven; dispensing justice, or doing other royal work: on leaving a
certain haven, it is found that a stranger, of grave eyes and aspect, red
beard, of stately robust figure, has stept in. The courtiers address him; his
answers surprise by their pertinency and depth: at length he is brought to
the King. The stranger's conversation here is not less remarkable, as they
sail along the beautiful shore; but after some time, he addresses King Olaf
thus: "Yes, King Olaf, it is all beautiful, with the sun shining on it there;
green, fruitful, a right fair home for you; and many a sore day had Thor,
many a wild fight with the rock Jotuns, before he could make it so. And
now you seem minded to put away Thor. King Olaf, have a care!" said the
stranger, drawing down his brows;—and when they looked again, he was

nowhere to be found.—This is the last appearance of Thor on the stage of
this world!
Do we not see well enough how the Fable might arise, without unveracity
on the part of any one? It is the way most Gods have come to appear among
men: thus, if in Pindar's time "Neptune was seen once at the Nemean
Games," what was this Neptune too but a "stranger of noble grave
aspect,"—fit to be "seen"! There is something pathetic, tragic for me in this
last voice of Paganism. Thor is vanished, the whole Norse world has
vanished; and will not return ever again. In like fashion to that, pass away
the highest things. All things that have been in this world, all things that are
or will be in it, have to vanish: we have our sad farewell to give them.
That Norse Religion, a rude but earnest, sternly impressive Consecration
of Valor (so we may define it), sufficed for these old valiant Northmen.
Consecration of Valor is not a bad thing! We will take it for good, so far as
it goes. Neither is there no use in knowing something about this old
Paganism of our Fathers. Unconsciously, and combined with higher things,
it is in us yet, that old Faith withal! To know it consciously, brings us into
closer and clearer relation with the Past,—with our own possessions in the
Past. For the whole Past, as I keep repeating, is the possession of the
Present; the Past had always something true, and is a precious possession.
In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our
common Human Nature that has been developing itself. The actual True is
the sum of all these; not any one of them by itself constitutes what of
Human Nature is hitherto developed. Better to know them all than misknow
them. "To which of these Three Religions do you specially adhere?"
inquires Meister of his Teacher. "To all the Three!" answers the other: "To
all the Three; for they by their union first constitute the True Religion."

LECTURE II. THE HERO AS PROPHET.
MAHOMET: ISLAM.
[May 8, 1840.]

From the first rude times of Paganism among the Scandinavians in the
North, we advance to a very different epoch of religion, among a very
different people: Mahometanism among the Arabs. A great change; what a
change and progress is indicated here, in the universal condition and
thoughts of men!
The Hero is not now regarded as a God among his fellowmen; but as one
God-inspired, as a Prophet. It is the second phasis of Hero-worship: the first
or oldest, we may say, has passed away without return; in the history of the
world there will not again be any man, never so great, whom his fellowmen
will take for a god. Nay we might rationally ask, Did any set of human
beings ever really think the man they saw there standing beside them a god,
the maker of this world? Perhaps not: it was usually some man they
remembered, or had seen. But neither can this any more be. The Great Man
is not recognized henceforth as a god any more.
It was a rude gross error, that of counting the Great Man a god. Yet let us
say that it is at all times difficult to know what he is, or how to account of
him and receive him! The most significant feature in the history of an epoch
is the manner it has of welcoming a Great Man. Ever, to the true instincts of
men, there is something godlike in him. Whether they shall take him to be a
god, to be a prophet, or what they shall take him to be? that is ever a grand
question; by their way of answering that, we shall see, as through a little
window, into the very heart of these men's spiritual condition. For at bottom
the Great Man, as he comes from the hand of Nature, is ever the same kind
of thing: Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns; I hope to make it appear that these
are all originally of one stuff; that only by the world's reception of them,
and the shapes they assume, are they so immeasurably diverse. The worship
of Odin astonishes us,—to fall prostrate before the Great Man, into
deliquium of love and wonder over him, and feel in their hearts that he was

a denizen of the skies, a god! This was imperfect enough: but to welcome,
for example, a Burns as we did, was that what we can call perfect? The
most precious gift that Heaven can give to the Earth; a man of "genius" as
we call it; the Soul of a Man actually sent down from the skies with a
God's-message to us,—this we waste away as an idle artificial firework,
sent to amuse us a little, and sink it into ashes, wreck and ineffectuality:
such reception of a Great Man I do not call very perfect either! Looking
into the heart of the thing, one may perhaps call that of Burns a still uglier
phenomenon, betokening still sadder imperfections in mankind's ways, than
the Scandinavian method itself! To fall into mere unreasoning deliquium of
love and admiration, was not good; but such unreasoning, nay irrational
supercilious no-love at all is perhaps still worse!—It is a thing forever
changing, this of Hero-worship: different in each age, difficult to do well in
any age. Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the age, one may say, is
to do it well.
We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the
one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but I
do esteem him a true one. Farther, as there is no danger of our becoming,
any of us, Mahometans, I mean to say all the good of him I justly can. It is
the way to get at his secret: let us try to understand what he meant with the
world; what the world meant and means with him, will then be a more
answerable question. Our current hypothesis about Mahomet, that he was a
scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass
of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to any one. The
lies, which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to
ourselves only. When Pococke inquired of Grotius, Where the proof was of
that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's ear, and pass
for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there was no proof! It
is really time to dismiss all that. The word this man spoke has been the life-
guidance now of a hundred and eighty millions of men these twelve
hundred years. These hundred and eighty millions were made by God as
well as we. A greater number of God's creatures believe in Mahomet's word
at this hour, than in any other word whatever. Are we to suppose that it was
a miserable piece of spiritual legerdemain, this which so many creatures of
the Almighty have lived by and died by? I, for my part, cannot form any
such supposition. I will believe most things sooner than that. One would be

entirely at a loss what to think of this world at all, if quackery so grew and
were sanctioned here.
Alas, such theories are very lamentable. If we would attain to knowledge
of anything in God's true Creation, let us disbelieve them wholly! They are
the product of an Age of Scepticism: they indicate the saddest spiritual
paralysis, and mere death-life of the souls of men: more godless theory, I
think, was never promulgated in this Earth. A false man found a religion?
Why, a false man cannot build a brick house! If he do not know and follow
truly the properties of mortar, burnt clay and what else be works in, it is no
house that he makes, but a rubbish-heap. It will not stand for twelve
centuries, to lodge a hundred and eighty millions; it will fall straightway. A
man must conform himself to Nature's laws, be verily in communion with
Nature and the truth of things, or Nature will answer him, No, not at all!
Speciosities are specious—ah me!—a Cagliostro, many Cagliostros,
prominent world-leaders, do prosper by their quackery, for a day. It is like a
forged bank-note; they get it passed out of their worthless hands: others, not
they, have to smart for it. Nature bursts up in fire-flames, French
Revolutions and such like, proclaiming with terrible veracity that forged
notes are forged.
But of a Great Man especially, of him I will venture to assert that it is
incredible he should have been other than true. It seems to me the primary
foundation of him, and of all that can lie in him, this. No Mirabeau,
Napoleon, Burns, Cromwell, no man adequate to do anything, but is first of
all in right earnest about it; what I call a sincere man. I should say sincerity,
a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any
way heroic. Not the sincerity that calls itself sincere; ah no, that is a very
poor matter indeed;—a shallow braggart conscious sincerity; oftenest self-
conceit mainly. The Great Man's sincerity is of the kind he cannot speak of,
is not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he is conscious rather of insincerity; for
what man can walk accurately by the law of truth for one day? No, the
Great Man does not boast himself sincere, far from that; perhaps does not
ask himself if he is so: I would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on
himself; he cannot help being sincere! The great Fact of Existence is great
to him. Fly as he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of this
Reality. His mind is so made; he is great by that, first of all. Fearful and
wonderful, real as Life, real as Death, is this Universe to him. Though all
men should forget its truth, and walk in a vain show, he cannot. At all

moments the Flame-image glares in upon him; undeniable, there, there!—I
wish you to take this as my primary definition of a Great Man. A little man
may have this, it is competent to all men that God has made: but a Great
Man cannot be without it.
Such a man is what we call an original man; he comes to us at first-hand.
A messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with tidings to us. We may
call him Poet, Prophet, God;—in one way or other, we all feel that the
words he utters are as no other man's words. Direct from the Inner Fact of
things;—he lives, and has to live, in daily communion with that. Hearsays
cannot hide it from him; he is blind, homeless, miserable, following
hearsays; it glares in upon him. Really his utterances, are they not a kind of
"revelation;"—what we must call such for want of some other name? It is
from the heart of the world that he comes; he is portion of the primal reality
of things. God has made many revelations: but this man too, has not God
made him, the latest and newest of all? The "inspiration of the Almighty
giveth him understanding:" we must listen before all to him.
This Mahomet, then, we will in no wise consider as an Inanity and
Theatricality, a poor conscious ambitious schemer; we cannot conceive him
so. The rude message he delivered was a real one withal; an earnest
confused voice from the unknown Deep. The man's words were not false,
nor his workings here below; no Inanity and Simulacrum; a fiery mass of
Life cast up from the great bosom of Nature herself. To kindle the world;
the world's Maker had ordered it so. Neither can the faults, imperfections,
insincerities even, of Mahomet, if such were never so well proved against
him, shake this primary fact about him.
On the whole, we make too much of faults; the details of the business
hide the real centre of it. Faults? The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be
conscious of none. Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might
know better. Who is called there "the man according to God's own heart"?
David, the Hebrew King, had fallen into sins enough; blackest crimes; there
was no want of sins. And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask, Is this
your man according to God's heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but
a shallow one. What are faults, what are the outward details of a life; if the
inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended
struggle of it, be forgotten? "It is not in man that walketh to direct his
steps." Of all acts, is not, for a man, repentance the most divine? The

deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin;—
that is death; the heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility and
fact; is dead: it is "pure" as dead dry sand is pure. David's life and history,
as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem
ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare here below. All earnest
souls will ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an earnest human soul
towards what is good and best. Struggle often baffled, sore baffled, down as
into entire wreck; yet a struggle never ended; ever, with tears, repentance,
true unconquerable purpose, begun anew. Poor human nature! Is not a man's
walking, in truth, always that: "a succession of falls"? Man can do no other.
In this wild element of a Life, he has to struggle onwards; now fallen, deep-
abased; and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleeding heart, he has to rise
again, struggle again still onwards. That his struggle be a faithful
unconquerable one: that is the question of questions. We will put up with
many sad details, if the soul of it were true. Details by themselves will
never teach us what it is. I believe we misestimate Mahomet's faults even as
faults: but the secret of him will never be got by dwelling there. We will
leave all this behind us; and assuring ourselves that he did mean some true
thing, ask candidly what it was or might be.
These Arabs Mahomet was born among are certainly a notable people.
Their country itself is notable; the fit habitation for such a race. Savage
inaccessible rock-mountains, great grim deserts, alternating with beautiful
strips of verdure: wherever water is, there is greenness, beauty; odoriferous
balm-shrubs, date-trees, frankincense-trees. Consider that wide waste
horizon of sand, empty, silent, like a sand-sea, dividing habitable place from
habitable. You are all alone there, left alone with the Universe; by day a
fierce sun blazing down on it with intolerable radiance; by night the great
deep Heaven with its stars. Such a country is fit for a swift-handed, deep-
hearted race of men. There is something most agile, active, and yet most
meditative, enthusiastic in the Arab character. The Persians are called the
French of the East; we will call the Arabs Oriental Italians. A gifted noble
people; a people of wild strong feelings, and of iron restraint over these: the
characteristic of noble-mindedness, of genius. The wild Bedouin welcomes
the stranger to his tent, as one having right to all that is there; were it his
worst enemy, he will slay his foal to treat him, will serve him with sacred
hospitality for three days, will set him fairly on his way;—and then, by
another law as sacred, kill him if he can. In words too as in action. They are

not a loquacious people, taciturn rather; but eloquent, gifted when they do
speak. An earnest, truthful kind of men. They are, as we know, of Jewish
kindred: but with that deadly terrible earnestness of the Jews they seem to
combine something graceful, brilliant, which is not Jewish. They had
"Poetic contests" among them before the time of Mahomet. Sale says, at
Ocadh, in the South of Arabia, there were yearly fairs, and there, when the
merchandising was done, Poets sang for prizes:—the wild people gathered
to hear that.
One Jewish quality these Arabs manifest; the outcome of many or of all
high qualities: what we may call religiosity. From of old they had been
zealous worshippers, according to their light. They worshipped the stars, as
Sabeans; worshipped many natural objects,—recognized them as symbols,
immediate manifestations, of the Maker of Nature. It was wrong; and yet
not wholly wrong. All God's works are still in a sense symbols of God. Do
we not, as I urged, still account it a merit to recognize a certain
inexhaustible significance, "poetic beauty" as we name it, in all natural
objects whatsoever? A man is a poet, and honored, for doing that, and
speaking or singing it,—a kind of diluted worship. They had many
Prophets, these Arabs; Teachers each to his tribe, each according to the light
he had. But indeed, have we not from of old the noblest of proofs, still
palpable to every one of us, of what devoutness and noble-mindedness had
dwelt in these rustic thoughtful peoples? Biblical critics seem agreed that
our own Book of Job was written in that region of the world. I call that,
apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with
pen. One feels, indeed, as if it were not Hebrew; such a noble universality,
different from noble patriotism or sectarianism, reigns in it. A noble Book;
all men's Book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending Problem,
—man's destiny, and God's ways with him here in this earth. And all in such
free flowing outlines; grand in its sincerity, in its simplicity; in its epic
melody, and repose of reconcilement. There is the seeing eye, the mildly
understanding heart. So true every way; true eyesight and vision for all
things; material things no less than spiritual: the Horse,—"hast thou clothed
his neck with thunder?"—he "laughs at the shaking of the spear!" Such
living likenesses were never since drawn. Sublime sorrow, sublime
reconciliation; oldest choral melody as of the heart of mankind;—so soft,
and great; as the summer midnight, as the world with its seas and stars!

There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary
merit.—
To the idolatrous Arabs one of the most ancient universal objects of
worship was that Black Stone, still kept in the building called Caabah, at
Mecca. Diodorus Siculus mentions this Caabah in a way not to be mistaken,
as the oldest, most honored temple in his time; that is, some half-century
before our Era. Silvestre de Sacy says there is some likelihood that the
Black Stone is an aerolite. In that case, some man might see it fall out of
Heaven! It stands now beside the Well Zemzem; the Caabah is built over
both. A Well is in all places a beautiful affecting object, gushing out like life
from the hard earth;—still more so in those hot dry countries, where it is the
first condition of being. The Well Zemzem has its name from the bubbling
sound of the waters, zem-zem; they think it is the Well which Hagar found
with her little Ishmael in the wilderness: the aerolite and it have been sacred
now, and had a Caabah over them, for thousands of years. A curious object,
that Caabah! There it stands at this hour, in the black cloth-covering the
Sultan sends it yearly; "twenty-seven cubits high;" with circuit, with double
circuit of pillars, with festoon-rows of lamps and quaint ornaments: the
lamps will be lighted again this night,—to glitter again under the stars. An
authentic fragment of the oldest Past. It is the Keblah of all Moslem: from
Delhi all onwards to Morocco, the eyes of innumerable praying men are
turned towards it, five times, this day and all days: one of the notablest
centres in the Habitation of Men.
It had been from the sacredness attached to this Caabah Stone and
Hagar's Well, from the pilgrimings of all tribes of Arabs thither, that Mecca
took its rise as a Town. A great town once, though much decayed now. It
has no natural advantage for a town; stands in a sandy hollow amid bare
barren hills, at a distance from the sea; its provisions, its very bread, have to
be imported. But so many pilgrims needed lodgings: and then all places of
pilgrimage do, from the first, become places of trade. The first day pilgrims
meet, merchants have also met: where men see themselves assembled for
one object, they find that they can accomplish other objects which depend
on meeting together. Mecca became the Fair of all Arabia. And thereby
indeed the chief staple and warehouse of whatever Commerce there was
between the Indian and the Western countries, Syria, Egypt, even Italy. It
had at one time a population of 100,000; buyers, forwarders of those
Eastern and Western products; importers for their own behoof of provisions

and corn. The government was a kind of irregular aristocratic republic, not
without a touch of theocracy. Ten Men of a chief tribe, chosen in some
rough way, were Governors of Mecca, and Keepers of the Caabah. The
Koreish were the chief tribe in Mahomet's time; his own family was of that
tribe. The rest of the Nation, fractioned and cut asunder by deserts, lived
under similar rude patriarchal governments by one or several: herdsmen,
carriers, traders, generally robbers too; being oftenest at war one with
another, or with all: held together by no open bond, if it were not this
meeting at the Caabah, where all forms of Arab Idolatry assembled in
common adoration;—held mainly by the inward indissoluble bond of a
common blood and language. In this way had the Arabs lived for long ages,
unnoticed by the world; a people of great qualities, unconsciously waiting
for the day when they should become notable to all the world. Their
Idolatries appear to have been in a tottering state; much was getting into
confusion and fermentation among them. Obscure tidings of the most
important Event ever transacted in this world, the Life and Death of the
Divine Man in Judea, at once the symptom and cause of immeasurable
change to all people in the world, had in the course of centuries reached into
Arabia too; and could not but, of itself, have produced fermentation there.
It was among this Arab people, so circumstanced, in the year 570 of our
Era, that the man Mahomet was born. He was of the family of Hashem, of
the Koreish tribe as we said; though poor, connected with the chief persons
of his country. Almost at his birth he lost his Father; at the age of six years
his Mother too, a woman noted for her beauty, her worth and sense: he fell
to the charge of his Grandfather, an old man, a hundred years old. A good
old man: Mahomet's Father, Abdallah, had been his youngest favorite son.
He saw in Mahomet, with his old life-worn eyes, a century old, the lost
Abdallah come back again, all that was left of Abdallah. He loved the little
orphan Boy greatly; used to say, They must take care of that beautiful little
Boy, nothing in their kindred was more precious than he. At his death, while
the boy was still but two years old, he left him in charge to Abu Thaleb the
eldest of the Uncles, as to him that now was head of the house. By this
Uncle, a just and rational man as everything betokens, Mahomet was
brought up in the best Arab way.
Mahomet, as he grew up, accompanied his Uncle on trading journeys and
such like; in his eighteenth year one finds him a fighter following his Uncle
in war. But perhaps the most significant of all his journeys is one we find

noted as of some years' earlier date: a journey to the Fairs of Syria. The
young man here first came in contact with a quite foreign world,—with one
foreign element of endless moment to him: the Christian Religion. I know
not what to make of that "Sergius, the Nestorian Monk," whom Abu Thaleb
and he are said to have lodged with; or how much any monk could have
taught one still so young. Probably enough it is greatly exaggerated, this of
the Nestorian Monk. Mahomet was only fourteen; had no language but his
own: much in Syria must have been a strange unintelligible whirlpool to
him. But the eyes of the lad were open; glimpses of many things would
doubtless be taken in, and lie very enigmatic as yet, which were to ripen in
a strange way into views, into beliefs and insights one day. These journeys
to Syria were probably the beginning of much to Mahomet.
One other circumstance we must not forget: that he had no school-
learning; of the thing we call school-learning none at all. The art of writing
was but just introduced into Arabia; it seems to be the true opinion that
Mahomet never could write! Life in the Desert, with its experiences, was all
his education. What of this infinite Universe he, from his dim place, with
his own eyes and thoughts, could take in, so much and no more of it was he
to know. Curious, if we will reflect on it, this of having no books. Except by
what he could see for himself, or hear of by uncertain rumor of speech in
the obscure Arabian Desert, he could know nothing. The wisdom that had
been before him or at a distance from him in the world, was in a manner as
good as not there for him. Of the great brother souls, flame-beacons through
so many lands and times, no one directly communicates with this great soul.
He is alone there, deep down in the bosom of the Wilderness; has to grow
up so,—alone with Nature and his own Thoughts.
But, from an early age, he had been remarked as a thoughtful man. His
companions named him "Al Amin, The Faithful." A man of truth and
fidelity; true in what he did, in what he spake and thought. They noted that
he always meant something. A man rather taciturn in speech; silent when
there was nothing to be said; but pertinent, wise, sincere, when he did
speak; always throwing light on the matter. This is the only sort of speech
worth speaking! Through life we find him to have been regarded as an
altogether solid, brotherly, genuine man. A serious, sincere character; yet
amiable, cordial, companionable, jocose even;—a good laugh in him
withal: there are men whose laugh is as untrue as anything about them; who
cannot laugh. One hears of Mahomet's beauty: his fine sagacious honest

face, brown florid complexion, beaming black eyes;—I somehow like too
that vein on the brow, which swelled up black when he was in anger: like
the "horseshoe vein" in Scott's Redgauntlet. It was a kind of feature in the
Hashem family, this black swelling vein in the brow; Mahomet had it
prominent, as would appear. A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-
meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light; of wild worth, all
uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there.
How he was placed with Kadijah, a rich Widow, as her Steward, and
travelled in her business, again to the Fairs of Syria; how he managed all, as
one can well understand, with fidelity, adroitness; how her gratitude, her
regard for him grew: the story of their marriage is altogether a graceful
intelligible one, as told us by the Arab authors. He was twenty-five; she
forty, though still beautiful. He seems to have lived in a most affectionate,
peaceable, wholesome way with this wedded benefactress; loving her truly,
and her alone. It goes greatly against the impostor theory, the fact that he
lived in this entirely unexceptionable, entirely quiet and commonplace way,
till the heat of his years was done. He was forty before he talked of any
mission from Heaven. All his irregularities, real and supposed, date from
after his fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died. All his "ambition,"
seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an honest life; his "fame," the mere
good opinion of neighbors that knew him, had been sufficient hitherto. Not
till he was already getting old, the prurient heat of his life all burnt out, and
peace growing to be the chief thing this world could give him, did he start
on the "career of ambition;" and, belying all his past character and
existence, set up as a wretched empty charlatan to acquire what he could
now no longer enjoy! For my share, I have no faith whatever in that.
Ah no: this deep-hearted Son of the Wilderness, with his beaming black
eyes and open social deep soul, had other thoughts in him than ambition. A
silent great soul; he was one of those who cannot but be in earnest; whom
Nature herself has appointed to be sincere. While others walk in formulas
and hearsays, contented enough to dwell there, this man could not screen
himself in formulas; he was alone with his own soul and the reality of
things. The great Mystery of Existence, as I said, glared in upon him, with
its terrors, with its splendors; no hearsays could hide that unspeakable fact,
"Here am I!" Such sincerity, as we named it, has in very truth something of
divine. The word of such a man is a Voice direct from Nature's own Heart.
Men do and must listen to that as to nothing else;—all else is wind in

comparison. From of old, a thousand thoughts, in his pilgrimings and
wanderings, had been in this man: What am I? What is this unfathomable
Thing I live in, which men name Universe? What is Life; what is Death?
What am I to believe? What am I to do? The grim rocks of Mount Hara, of
Mount Sinai, the stern sandy solitudes answered not. The great Heaven
rolling silent overhead, with its blue-glancing stars, answered not. There
was no answer. The man's own soul, and what of God's inspiration dwelt
there, had to answer!
It is the thing which all men have to ask themselves; which we too have
to ask, and answer. This wild man felt it to be of infinite moment; all other
things of no moment whatever in comparison. The jargon of argumentative
Greek Sects, vague traditions of Jews, the stupid routine of Arab Idolatry:
there was no answer in these. A Hero, as I repeat, has this first distinction,
which indeed we may call first and last, the Alpha and Omega of his whole
Heroism, That he looks through the shows of things into things. Use and
wont, respectable hearsay, respectable formula: all these are good, or are not
good. There is something behind and beyond all these, which all these must
correspond with, be the image of, or they are—Idolatries; "bits of black
wood pretending to be God;" to the earnest soul a mockery and
abomination. Idolatries never so gilded, waited on by heads of the Koreish,
will do nothing for this man. Though all men walk by them, what good is
it? The great Reality stands glaring there upon him. He there has to answer
it, or perish miserably. Now, even now, or else through all Eternity never!
Answer it; thou must find an answer.—Ambition? What could all Arabia do
for this man; with the crown of Greek Heraclius, of Persian Chosroes, and
all crowns in the Earth;—what could they all do for him? It was not of the
Earth he wanted to hear tell; it was of the Heaven above and of the Hell
beneath. All crowns and sovereignties whatsoever, where would they in a
few brief years be? To be Sheik of Mecca or Arabia, and have a bit of gilt
wood put into your hand,—will that be one's salvation? I decidedly think,
not. We will leave it altogether, this impostor hypothesis, as not credible;
not very tolerable even, worthy chiefly of dismissal by us.
Mahomet had been wont to retire yearly, during the month Ramadhan,
into solitude and silence; as indeed was the Arab custom; a praiseworthy
custom, which such a man, above all, would find natural and useful.
Communing with his own heart, in the silence of the mountains; himself
silent; open to the "small still voices:" it was a right natural custom!

Mahomet was in his fortieth year, when having withdrawn to a cavern in
Mount Hara, near Mecca, during this Ramadhan, to pass the month in
prayer, and meditation on those great questions, he one day told his wife
Kadijah, who with his household was with him or near him this year, That
by the unspeakable special favor of Heaven he had now found it all out;
was in doubt and darkness no longer, but saw it all. That all these Idols and
Formulas were nothing, miserable bits of wood; that there was One God in
and over all; and we must leave all Idols, and look to Him. That God is
great; and that there is nothing else great! He is the Reality. Wooden Idols
are not real; He is real. He made us at first, sustains us yet; we and all things
are but the shadow of Him; a transitory garment veiling the Eternal
Splendor. "Allah akbar, God is great;"—and then also "Islam," That we
must submit to God. That our whole strength lies in resigned submission to
Him, whatsoever He do to us. For this world, and for the other! The thing
He sends to us, were it death and worse than death, shall be good, shall be
best; we resign ourselves to God.—"If this be Islam," says Goethe, "do we
not all live in Islam?" Yes, all of us that have any moral life; we all live so.
It has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submit to
Necessity,—Necessity will make him submit,—but to know and believe
well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the wisest, the
best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pretension of scanning this
great God's-World in his small fraction of a brain; to know that it had verily,
though deep beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;
—that his part in it was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout
silence follow that; not questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable.
I say, this is yet the only true morality known. A man is right and
invincible, virtuous and on the road towards sure conquest, precisely while
he joins himself to the great deep Law of the World, in spite of all
superficial laws, temporary appearances, profit-and-loss calculations; he is
victorious while he co-operates with that great central Law, not victorious
otherwise:—and surely his first chance of co-operating with it, or getting
into the course of it, is to know with his whole soul that it is; that it is good,
and alone good! This is the soul of Islam; it is properly the soul of
Christianity;—for Islam is definable as a confused form of Christianity; had
Christianity not been, neither had it been. Christianity also commands us,
before all, to be resigned to God. We are to take no counsel with flesh and
blood; give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes: to know that we

know nothing; that the worst and cruelest to our eyes is not what it seems;
that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God above, and
say, It is good and wise, God is great! "Though He slay me, yet will I trust
in Him." Islam means in its way Denial of Self, Annihilation of Self. This is
yet the highest Wisdom that Heaven has revealed to our Earth.
Such light had come, as it could, to illuminate the darkness of this wild
Arab soul. A confused dazzling splendor as of life and Heaven, in the great
darkness which threatened to be death: he called it revelation and the angel
Gabriel;—who of us yet can know what to call it? It is the "inspiration of
the Almighty" that giveth us understanding. To know; to get into the truth of
anything, is ever a mystic act,—of which the best Logics can but babble on
the surface. "Is not Belief the true god-announcing Miracle?" says Novalis.
—That Mahomet's whole soul, set in flame with this grand Truth
vouchsafed him, should feel as if it were important and the only important
thing, was very natural. That Providence had unspeakably honored him by
revealing it, saving him from death and darkness; that he therefore was
bound to make known the same to all creatures: this is what was meant by
"Mahomet is the Prophet of God;" this too is not without its true meaning.
—
The good Kadijah, we can fancy, listened to him with wonder, with
doubt: at length she answered: Yes, it was true this that he said. One can
fancy too the boundless gratitude of Mahomet; and how of all the
kindnesses she had done him, this of believing the earnest struggling word
he now spoke was the greatest. "It is certain," says Novalis, "my Conviction
gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it." It is a boundless
favor.—He never forgot this good Kadijah. Long afterwards, Ayesha his
young favorite wife, a woman who indeed distinguished herself among the
Moslem, by all manner of qualities, through her whole long life; this young
brilliant Ayesha was, one day, questioning him: "Now am not I better than
Kadijah? She was a widow; old, and had lost her looks: you love me better
than you did her?"—"No, by Allah!" answered Mahomet: "No, by Allah!
She believed in me when none else would believe. In the whole world I had
but one friend, and she was that!"—Seid, his Slave, also believed in him;
these with his young Cousin Ali, Abu Thaleb's son, were his first converts.
He spoke of his Doctrine to this man and that; but the most treated it with
ridicule, with indifference; in three years, I think, he had gained but thirteen

followers. His progress was slow enough. His encouragement to go on, was
altogether the usual encouragement that such a man in such a case meets.
After some three years of small success, he invited forty of his chief
kindred to an entertainment; and there stood up and told them what his
pretension was: that he had this thing to promulgate abroad to all men; that
it was the highest thing, the one thing: which of them would second him in
that? Amid the doubt and silence of all, young Ali, as yet a lad of sixteen,
impatient of the silence, started up, and exclaimed in passionate fierce
language, That he would! The assembly, among whom was Abu Thaleb,
Ali's Father, could not be unfriendly to Mahomet; yet the sight there, of one
unlettered elderly man, with a lad of sixteen, deciding on such an enterprise
against all mankind, appeared ridiculous to them; the assembly broke up in
laughter. Nevertheless it proved not a laughable thing; it was a very serious
thing! As for this young Ali, one cannot but like him. A noble-minded
creature, as he shows himself, now and always afterwards; full of affection,
of fiery daring. Something chivalrous in him; brave as a lion; yet with a
grace, a truth and affection worthy of Christian knighthood. He died by
assassination in the Mosque at Bagdad; a death occasioned by his own
generous fairness, confidence in the fairness of others: he said, If the wound
proved not unto death, they must pardon the Assassin; but if it did, then
they must slay him straightway, that so they two in the same hour might
appear before God, and see which side of that quarrel was the just one!
Mahomet naturally gave offence to the Koreish, Keepers of the Caabah,
superintendents of the Idols. One or two men of influence had joined him:
the thing spread slowly, but it was spreading. Naturally he gave offence to
everybody: Who is this that pretends to be wiser than we all; that rebukes us
all, as mere fools and worshippers of wood! Abu Thaleb the good Uncle
spoke with him: Could he not be silent about all that; believe it all for
himself, and not trouble others, anger the chief men, endanger himself and
them all, talking of it? Mahomet answered: If the Sun stood on his right
hand and the Moon on his left, ordering him to hold his peace, he could not
obey! No: there was something in this Truth he had got which was of
Nature herself; equal in rank to Sun, or Moon, or whatsoever thing Nature
had made. It would speak itself there, so long as the Almighty allowed it, in
spite of Sun and Moon, and all Koreish and all men and things. It must do
that, and could do no other. Mahomet answered so; and, they say, "burst

into tears." Burst into tears: he felt that Abu Thaleb was good to him; that
the task he had got was no soft, but a stern and great one.
He went on speaking to who would listen to him; publishing his Doctrine
among the pilgrims as they came to Mecca; gaining adherents in this place
and that. Continual contradiction, hatred, open or secret danger attended
him. His powerful relations protected Mahomet himself; but by and by, on
his own advice, all his adherents had to quit Mecca, and seek refuge in
Abyssinia over the sea. The Koreish grew ever angrier; laid plots, and
swore oaths among them, to put Mahomet to death with their own hands.
Abu Thaleb was dead, the good Kadijah was dead. Mahomet is not
solicitous of sympathy from us; but his outlook at this time was one of the
dismalest. He had to hide in caverns, escape in disguise; fly hither and
thither; homeless, in continual peril of his life. More than once it seemed all
over with him; more than once it turned on a straw, some rider's horse
taking fright or the like, whether Mahomet and his Doctrine had not ended
there, and not been heard of at all. But it was not to end so.
In the thirteenth year of his mission, finding his enemies all banded
against him, forty sworn men, one out of every tribe, waiting to take his
life, and no continuance possible at Mecca for him any longer, Mahomet
fled to the place then called Yathreb, where he had gained some adherents;
the place they now call Medina, or "Medinat al Nabi, the City of the
Prophet," from that circumstance. It lay some two hundred miles off,
through rocks and deserts; not without great difficulty, in such mood as we
may fancy, he escaped thither, and found welcome. The whole East dates its
era from this Flight, hegira as they name it: the Year 1 of this Hegira is 622
of our Era, the fifty-third of Mahomet's life. He was now becoming an old
man; his friends sinking round him one by one; his path desolate,
encompassed with danger: unless he could find hope in his own heart, the
outward face of things was but hopeless for him. It is so with all men in the
like case. Hitherto Mahomet had professed to publish his Religion by the
way of preaching and persuasion alone. But now, driven foully out of his
native country, since unjust men had not only given no ear to his earnest
Heaven's-message, the deep cry of his heart, but would not even let him live
if he kept speaking it,—the wild Son of the Desert resolved to defend
himself, like a man and Arab. If the Koreish will have it so, they shall have
it. Tidings, felt to be of infinite moment to them and all men, they would
not listen to these; would trample them down by sheer violence, steel and

murder: well, let steel try it then! Ten years more this Mahomet had; all of
fighting of breathless impetuous toil and struggle; with what result we
know.
Much has been said of Mahomet's propagating his Religion by the sword.
It is no doubt far nobler what we have to boast of the Christian Religion,
that it propagated itself peaceably in the way of preaching and conviction.
Yet withal, if we take this for an argument of the truth or falsehood of a
religion, there is a radical mistake in it. The sword indeed: but where will
you get your sword! Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a
minority of one. In one man's head alone, there it dwells as yet. One man
alone of the whole world believes it; there is one man against all men. That
he take a sword, and try to propagate with that, will do little for him. You
must first get your sword! On the whole, a thing will propagate itself as it
can. We do not find, of the Christian Religion either, that it always
disdained the sword, when once it had got one. Charlemagne's conversion
of the Saxons was not by preaching. I care little about the sword: I will
allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or
implement it has, or can lay hold of. We will let it preach, and pamphleteer,
and fight, and to the uttermost bestir itself, and do, beak and claws,
whatsoever is in it; very sure that it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing
which does not deserve to be conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot
put away, but only what is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is
umpire, and can do no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature,
what we call truest, that thing and not the other will be found growing at
last.
Here however, in reference to much that there is in Mahomet and his
success, we are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness,
composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into
the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw,
barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into
the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat,—the whole rubbish she silently
absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish. The yellow wheat is
growing there; the good Earth is silent about all the rest,—has silently
turned all the rest to some benefit too, and makes no complaint about it! So
everywhere in Nature! She is true and not a lie; and yet so great, and just,
and motherly in her truth. She requires of a thing only that it be genuine of
heart; she will protect it if so; will not, if not so. There is a soul of truth in

all the things she ever gave harbor to. Alas, is not this the history of all
highest Truth that comes or ever came into the world? The body of them all
is imperfection, an element of light in darkness: to us they have to come
embodied in mere Logic, in some merely scientific Theorem of the
Universe; which cannot be complete; which cannot but be found, one day,
incomplete, erroneous, and so die and disappear. The body of all Truth dies;
and yet in all, I say, there is a soul which never dies; which in new and ever-
nobler embodiment lives immortal as man himself! It is the way with
Nature. The genuine essence of Truth never dies. That it be genuine, a voice
from the great Deep of Nature, there is the point at Nature's judgment-seat.
What we call pure or impure, is not with her the final question. Not how
much chaff is in you; but whether you have any wheat. Pure? I might say to
many a man: Yes, you are pure; pure enough; but you are chaff,—insincere
hypothesis, hearsay, formality; you never were in contact with the great
heart of the Universe at all; you are properly neither pure nor impure; you
are nothing, Nature has no business with you.
Mahomet's Creed we called a kind of Christianity; and really, if we look
at the wild rapt earnestness with which it was believed and laid to heart, I
should say a better kind than that of those miserable Syrian Sects, with their
vain janglings about Homoiousion and Homoousion, the head full of
worthless noise, the heart empty and dead! The truth of it is embedded in
portentous error and falsehood; but the truth of it makes it be believed, not
the falsehood: it succeeded by its truth. A bastard kind of Christianity, but a
living kind; with a heart-life in it; not dead, chopping barren logic merely!
Out of all that rubbish of Arab idolatries, argumentative theologies,
traditions, subtleties, rumors and hypotheses of Greeks and Jews, with their
idle wire-drawings, this wild man of the Desert, with his wild sincere heart,
earnest as death and life, with his great flashing natural eyesight, had seen
into the kernel of the matter. Idolatry is nothing: these Wooden Idols of
yours, "ye rub them with oil and wax, and the flies stick on them,"—these
are wood, I tell you! They can do nothing for you; they are an impotent
blasphemous presence; a horror and abomination, if ye knew them. God
alone is; God alone has power; He made us, He can kill us and keep us
alive: "Allah akbar, God is great." Understand that His will is the best for
you; that howsoever sore to flesh and blood, you will find it the wisest,
best: you are bound to take it so; in this world and in the next, you have no
other thing that you can do!

And now if the wild idolatrous men did believe this, and with their fiery
hearts lay hold of it to do it, in what form soever it came to them, I say it
was well worthy of being believed. In one form or the other, I say it is still
the one thing worthy of being believed by all men. Man does hereby
become the high-priest of this Temple of a World. He is in harmony with
the Decrees of the Author of this World; cooperating with them, not vainly
withstanding them: I know, to this day, no better definition of Duty than that
same. All that is right includes itself in this of co-operating with the real
Tendency of the World: you succeed by this (the World's Tendency will
succeed), you are good, and in the right course there. Homoiousion,
Homoousion, vain logical jangle, then or before or at any time, may jangle
itself out, and go whither and how it likes: this is the thing it all struggles to
mean, if it would mean anything. If it do not succeed in meaning this, it
means nothing. Not that Abstractions, logical Propositions, be correctly
worded or incorrectly; but that living concrete Sons of Adam do lay this to
heart: that is the important point. Islam devoured all these vain jangling
Sects; and I think had right to do so. It was a Reality, direct from the great
Heart of Nature once more. Arab idolatries, Syrian formulas, whatsoever
was not equally real, had to go up in flame,—mere dead fuel, in various
senses, for this which was fire.
It was during these wild warfarings and strugglings, especially after the
Flight to Mecca, that Mahomet dictated at intervals his Sacred Book, which
they name Koran, or Reading, "Thing to be read." This is the Work he and
his disciples made so much of, asking all the world, Is not that a miracle?
The Mahometans regard their Koran with a reverence which few Christians
pay even to their Bible. It is admitted every where as the standard of all law
and all practice; the thing to be gone upon in speculation and life; the
message sent direct out of Heaven, which this Earth has to conform to, and
walk by; the thing to be read. Their Judges decide by it; all Moslem are
bound to study it, seek in it for the light of their life. They have mosques
where it is all read daily; thirty relays of priests take it up in succession, get
through the whole each day. There, for twelve hundred years, has the voice
of this Book, at all moments, kept sounding through the ears and the hearts
of so many men. We hear of Mahometan Doctors that had read it seventy
thousand times!
Very curious: if one sought for "discrepancies of national taste," here
surely were the most eminent instance of that! We also can read the Koran;

our Translation of it, by Sale, is known to be a very fair one. I must say, it is
as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble,
crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most
crude, incondite;—insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of
duty could carry any European through the Koran. We read in it, as we
might in the State-Paper Office, unreadable masses of lumber, that perhaps
we may get some glimpses of a remarkable man. It is true we have it under
disadvantages: the Arabs see more method in it than we. Mahomet's
followers found the Koran lying all in fractions, as it had been written down
at first promulgation; much of it, they say, on shoulder-blades of mutton,
flung pell-mell into a chest: and they published it, without any discoverable
order as to time or otherwise;—merely trying, as would seem, and this not
very strictly, to put the longest chapters first. The real beginning of it, in
that way, lies almost at the end: for the earliest portions were the shortest.
Read in its historical sequence it perhaps would not be so bad. Much of it,
too, they say, is rhythmic; a kind of wild chanting song, in the original. This
may be a great point; much perhaps has been lost in the Translation here.
Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any mortal ever
could consider this Koran as a Book written in Heaven, too good for the
Earth; as a well-written book, or indeed as a book at all; and not a
bewildered rhapsody; written, so far as writing goes, as badly as almost any
book ever was! So much for national discrepancies, and the standard of
taste.
Yet I should say, it was not unintelligible how the Arabs might so love it.
When once you get this confused coil of a Koran fairly off your hands, and
have it behind you at a distance, the essential type of it begins to disclose
itself; and in this there is a merit quite other than the literary one. If a book
come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-
craft are of small amount to that. One would say the primary character of
the Koran is this of its genuineness, of its being a bona-fide book. Prideaux,
I know, and others have represented it as a mere bundle of juggleries;
chapter after chapter got up to excuse and varnish the author's successive
sins, forward his ambitions and quackeries: but really it is time to dismiss
all that. I do not assert Mahomet's continual sincerity: who is continually
sincere? But I confess I can make nothing of the critic, in these times, who
would accuse him of deceit prepense; of conscious deceit generally, or
perhaps at all;—still more, of living in a mere element of conscious deceit,

and writing this Koran as a forger and juggler would have done! Every
candid eye, I think, will read the Koran far otherwise than so. It is the
confused ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot
even read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in
words. With a kind of breathless intensity he strives to utter himself; the
thoughts crowd on him pell-mell: for very multitude of things to say, he can
get nothing said. The meaning that is in him shapes itself into no form of
composition, is stated in no sequence, method, or coherence;—they are not
shaped at all, these thoughts of his; flung out unshaped, as they struggle and
tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate state. We said "stupid:" yet natural
stupidity is by no means the character of Mahomet's Book; it is natural
uncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking; in the haste and
pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himself into fit
speech. The panting breathless haste and vehemence of a man struggling in
the thick of battle for life and salvation; this is the mood he is in! A
headlong haste; for very magnitude of meaning, he cannot get himself
articulated into words. The successive utterances of a soul in that mood,
colored by the various vicissitudes of three-and-twenty years; now well
uttered, now worse: this is the Koran.
For we are to consider Mahomet, through these three-and-twenty years,
as the centre of a world wholly in conflict. Battles with the Koreish and
Heathen, quarrels among his own people, backslidings of his own wild
heart; all this kept him in a perpetual whirl, his soul knowing rest no more.
In wakeful nights, as one may fancy, the wild soul of the man, tossing amid
these vortices, would hail any light of a decision for them as a veritable
light from Heaven; any making-up of his mind, so blessed, indispensable
for him there, would seem the inspiration of a Gabriel. Forger and juggler?
No, no! This great fiery heart, seething, simmering like a great furnace of
thoughts, was not a juggler's. His Life was a Fact to him; this God's
Universe an awful Fact and Reality. He has faults enough. The man was an
uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still
clinging to him: we must take him for that. But for a wretched Simulacrum,
a hungry Impostor without eyes or heart, practicing for a mess of pottage
such blasphemous swindlery, forgery of celestial documents, continual
high-treason against his Maker and Self, we will not and cannot take him.
Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what had
rendered it precious to the wild Arab men. It is, after all, the first and last

merit in a book; gives rise to merits of all kinds,—nay, at bottom, it alone
can give rise to merit of any kind. Curiously, through these incondite
masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint, ejaculation in the Koran, a vein
of true direct insight, of what we might almost call poetry, is found
straggling. The body of the Book is made up of mere tradition, and as it
were vehement enthusiastic extempore preaching. He returns forever to the
old stories of the Prophets as they went current in the Arab memory: how
Prophet after Prophet, the Prophet Abraham, the Prophet Hud, the Prophet
Moses, Christian and other real and fabulous Prophets, had come to this
Tribe and to that, warning men of their sin; and been received by them even
as he Mahomet was,—which is a great solace to him. These things he
repeats ten, perhaps twenty times; again and ever again, with wearisome
iteration; has never done repeating them. A brave Samuel Johnson, in his
forlorn garret, might con over the Biographies of Authors in that way! This
is the great staple of the Koran. But curiously, through all this, comes ever
and anon some glance as of the real thinker and seer. He has actually an eye
for the world, this Mahomet: with a certain directness and rugged vigor, he
brings home still, to our heart, the thing his own heart has been opened to. I
make but little of his praises of Allah, which many praise; they are
borrowed I suppose mainly from the Hebrew, at least they are far surpassed
there. But the eye that flashes direct into the heart of things, and sees the
truth of them; this is to me a highly interesting object. Great Nature's own
gift; which she bestows on all; but which only one in the thousand does not
cast sorrowfully away: it is what I call sincerity of vision; the test of a
sincere heart.
Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can work
no miracles. I? "I am a Public Preacher;" appointed to preach this doctrine
to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old been all
one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is it not wonderful,
the work of Allah; wholly "a sign to you," if your eyes were open! This
Earth, God made it for you; "appointed paths in it;" you can live in it, go to
and fro on it.—The clouds in the dry country of Arabia, to Mahomet they
are very wonderful: Great clouds, he says, born in the deep bosom of the
Upper Immensity, where do they come from! They hang there, the great
black monsters; pour down their rain-deluges "to revive a dead earth," and
grass springs, and "tall leafy palm-trees with their date-clusters hanging
round. Is not that a sign?" Your cattle too,—Allah made them; serviceable

dumb creatures; they change the grass into milk; you have your clothing
from them, very strange creatures; they come ranking home at evening-
time, "and," adds he, "and are a credit to you!" Ships also,—he talks often
about ships: Huge moving mountains, they spread out their cloth wings, go
bounding through the water there, Heaven's wind driving them; anon they
lie motionless, God has withdrawn the wind, they lie dead, and cannot stir!
Miracles? cries he: What miracle would you have? Are not you yourselves
there? God made you, "shaped you out of a little clay." Ye were small once;
a few years ago ye were not at all. Ye have beauty, strength, thoughts, "ye
have compassion on one another." Old age comes on you, and gray hairs;
your strength fades into feebleness; ye sink down, and again are not. "Ye
have compassion on one another:" this struck me much: Allah might have
made you having no compassion on one another,—how had it been then!
This is a great direct thought, a glance at first-hand into the very fact of
things. Rude vestiges of poetic genius, of whatsoever is best and truest, are
visible in this man. A strong untutored intellect; eyesight, heart: a strong
wild man,—might have shaped himself into Poet, King, Priest, any kind of
Hero.
To his eyes it is forever clear that this world wholly is miraculous. He
sees what, as we said once before, all great thinkers, the rude Scandinavians
themselves, in one way or other, have contrived to see: That this so solid-
looking material world is, at bottom, in very deed, Nothing; is a visual and
factual Manifestation of God's power and presence,—a shadow hung out by
Him on the bosom of the void Infinite; nothing more. The mountains, he
says, these great rock-mountains, they shall dissipate themselves "like
clouds;" melt into the Blue as clouds do, and not be! He figures the Earth,
in the Arab fashion, Sale tells us, as an immense Plain or flat Plate of
ground, the mountains are set on that to steady it. At the Last Day they shall
disappear "like clouds;" the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl itself off
into wreck, and as dust and vapor vanish in the Inane. Allah withdraws his
hand from it, and it ceases to be. The universal empire of Allah, presence
everywhere of an unspeakable Power, a Splendor, and a Terror not to be
named, as the true force, essence and reality, in all things whatsoever, was
continually clear to this man. What a modern talks of by the name, Forces
of Nature, Laws of Nature; and does not figure as a divine thing; not even
as one thing at all, but as a set of things, undivine enough,—salable,
curious, good for propelling steamships! With our Sciences and

Cyclopaedias, we are apt to forget the divineness, in those laboratories of
ours. We ought not to forget it! That once well forgotten, I know not what
else were worth remembering. Most sciences, I think were then a very dead
thing; withered, contentious, empty;—a thistle in late autumn. The best
science, without this, is but as the dead timber; it is not the growing tree and
forest,—which gives ever-new timber, among other things! Man cannot
know either, unless he can worship in some way. His knowledge is a
pedantry, and dead thistle, otherwise.
Much has been said and written about the sensuality of Mahomet's
Religion; more than was just. The indulgences, criminal to us, which he
permitted, were not of his appointment; he found them practiced,
unquestioned from immemorial time in Arabia; what he did was to curtail
them, restrict them, not on one but on many sides. His Religion is not an
easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers
five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not "succeed by being an
easy religion." As if indeed any religion, or cause holding of religion, could
succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic
action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense,—sugar-plums of any kind, in
this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler.
The poor swearing soldier, hired to be shot, has his "honor of a soldier,"
different from drill-regulations and the shilling a day. It is not to taste sweet
things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's
Heaven as a god-made Man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs.
Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero.
They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty,
abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of
man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all
lower considerations. Not happiness, but something higher: one sees this
even in the frivolous classes, with their "point of honor" and the like. Not
by flattering our appetites; no, by awakening the Heroic that slumbers in
every heart, can any Religion gain followers.
Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual
man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary,
intent mainly on base enjoyments,—nay on enjoyments of any kind. His
household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread and water:
sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They
record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own

cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men
toil for. Not a bad man, I should say; something better in him than hunger
of any sort,—or these wild Arab men, fighting and jostling three-and-
twenty years at his hand, in close contact with him always, would not have
reverenced him so! They were wild men, bursting ever and anon into
quarrel, into all kinds of fierce sincerity; without right worth and manhood,
no man could have commanded them. They called him Prophet, you say?
Why, he stood there face to face with them; bare, not enshrined in any
mystery; visibly clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes; fighting,
counselling, ordering in the midst of them: they must have seen what kind
of a man he was, let him be called what you like! No emperor with his
tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting. During three-
and-twenty years of rough actual trial. I find something of a veritable Hero
necessary for that, of itself.
His last words are a prayer; broken ejaculations of a heart struggling up,
in trembling hope, towards its Maker. We cannot say that his religion made
him worse; it made him better; good, not bad. Generous things are recorded
of him: when he lost his Daughter, the thing he answers is, in his own
dialect, every way sincere, and yet equivalent to that of Christians, "The
Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord."
He answered in like manner of Seid, his emancipated well-beloved Slave,
the second of the believers. Seid had fallen in the War of Tabuc, the first of
Mahomet's fightings with the Greeks. Mahomet said, It was well; Seid had
done his Master's work, Seid had now gone to his Master: it was all well
with Seid. Yet Seid's daughter found him weeping over the body;—the old
gray-haired man melting in tears! "What do I see?" said she.—"You see a
friend weeping over his friend."—He went out for the last time into the
mosque, two days before his death; asked, If he had injured any man? Let
his own back bear the stripes. If he owed any man? A voice answered, "Yes,
me three drachms," borrowed on such an occasion. Mahomet ordered them
to be paid: "Better be in shame now," said he, "than at the Day of
Judgment."—You remember Kadijah, and the "No, by Allah!" Traits of that
kind show us the genuine man, the brother of us all, brought visible through
twelve centuries,—the veritable Son of our common Mother.
Withal I like Mahomet for his total freedom from cant. He is a rough self-
helping son of the wilderness; does not pretend to be what he is not. There
is no ostentatious pride in him; but neither does he go much upon humility:

he is there as he can be, in cloak and shoes of his own clouting; speaks
plainly to all manner of Persian Kings, Greek Emperors, what it is they are
bound to do; knows well enough, about himself, "the respect due unto
thee." In a life-and-death war with Bedouins, cruel things could not fail; but
neither are acts of mercy, of noble natural pity and generosity wanting.
Mahomet makes no apology for the one, no boast of the other. They were
each the free dictate of his heart; each called for, there and then. Not a
mealy-mouthed man! A candid ferocity, if the case call for it, is in him; he
does not mince matters! The War of Tabuc is a thing he often speaks of: his
men refused, many of them, to march on that occasion; pleaded the heat of
the weather, the harvest, and so forth; he can never forget that. Your
harvest? It lasts for a day. What will become of your harvest through all
Eternity? Hot weather? Yes, it was hot; "but Hell will be hotter!" Sometimes
a rough sarcasm turns up: He says to the unbelievers, Ye shall have the just
measure of your deeds at that Great Day. They will be weighed out to you;
ye shall not have short weight!—Everywhere he fixes the matter in his eye;
he sees it: his heart, now and then, is as if struck dumb by the greatness of
it. "Assuredly," he says: that word, in the Koran, is written down sometimes
as a sentence by itself: "Assuredly."
No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and
Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it!
Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth,
toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other
imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having
been open to Truth;—"living in a vain show." Such a man not only utters
and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral
principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of
life-death. The very falsehoods of Mahomet are truer than the truths of such
a man. He is the insincere man: smooth-polished, respectable in some times
and places; inoffensive, says nothing harsh to anybody; most cleanly,—just
as carbonic acid is, which is death and poison.
We will not praise Mahomet's moral precepts as always of the superfinest
sort; yet it can be said that there is always a tendency to good in them; that
they are the true dictates of a heart aiming towards what is just and true.
The sublime forgiveness of Christianity, turning of the other cheek when the
one has been smitten, is not here: you are to revenge yourself, but it is to be
in measure, not overmuch, or beyond justice. On the other hand, Islam, like

any great Faith, and insight into the essence of man, is a perfect equalizer of
men: the soul of one believer outweighs all earthly kingships; all men,
according to Islam too, are equal. Mahomet insists not on the propriety of
giving alms, but on the necessity of it: he marks down by law how much
you are to give, and it is at your peril if you neglect. The tenth part of a
man's annual income, whatever that may be, is the property of the poor, of
those that are afflicted and need help. Good all this: the natural voice of
humanity, of pity and equity dwelling in the heart of this wild Son of Nature
speaks so.
Mahomet's Paradise is sensual, his Hell sensual: true; in the one and the
other there is enough that shocks all spiritual feeling in us. But we are to
recollect that the Arabs already had it so; that Mahomet, in whatever he
changed of it, softened and diminished all this. The worst sensualities, too,
are the work of doctors, followers of his, not his work. In the Koran there is
really very little said about the joys of Paradise; they are intimated rather
than insisted on. Nor is it forgotten that the highest joys even there shall be
spiritual; the pure Presence of the Highest, this shall infinitely transcend all
other joys. He says, "Your salutation shall be, Peace." Salam, Have Peace!
—the thing that all rational souls long for, and seek, vainly here below, as
the one blessing. "Ye shall sit on seats, facing one another: all grudges shall
be taken away out of your hearts." All grudges! Ye shall love one another
freely; for each of you, in the eyes of his brothers, there will be Heaven
enough!
In reference to this of the sensual Paradise and Mahomet's sensuality, the
sorest chapter of all for us, there were many things to be said; which it is
not convenient to enter upon here. Two remarks only I shall make, and
therewith leave it to your candor. The first is furnished me by Goethe; it is a
casual hint of his which seems well worth taking note of. In one of his
Delineations, in Meister's Travels it is, the hero comes upon a Society of
men with very strange ways, one of which was this: "We require," says the
Master, "that each of our people shall restrict himself in one direction,"
shall go right against his desire in one matter, and make himself do the thing
he does not wish, "should we allow him the greater latitude on all other
sides." There seems to me a great justness in this. Enjoying things which are
pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery
by them that is. Let a man assert withal that he is king over his habitudes;
that he could and would shake them off, on cause shown: this is an

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

On the whole, we will repeat that this Religion of Mahomet's is a kind of
Christianity; has a genuine element of what is spiritually highest looking
through it, not to be hidden by all its imperfections. The Scandinavian God
Wish, the god of all rude men,—this has been enlarged into a Heaven by
Mahomet; but a Heaven symbolical of sacred Duty, and to be earned by
faith and well-doing, by valiant action, and a divine patience which is still
more valiant. It is Scandinavian Paganism, and a truly celestial element
superadded to that. Call it not false; look not at the falsehood of it, look at
the truth of it. For these twelve centuries, it has been the religion and life-
guidance of the fifth part of the whole kindred of Mankind. Above all
things, it has been a religion heartily believed. These Arabs believe their
religion, and try to live by it! No Christians, since the early ages, or only
perhaps the English Puritans in modern times, have ever stood by their
Faith as the Moslem do by theirs,—believing it wholly, fronting Time with
it, and Eternity with it. This night the watchman on the streets of Cairo
when he cries, "Who goes?" will hear from the passenger, along with his
answer, "There is no God but God." Allah akbar, Islam, sounds through the
souls, and whole daily existence, of these dusky millions. Zealous
missionaries preach it abroad among Malays, black Papuans, brutal
Idolaters;—displacing what is worse, nothing that is better or good.
To the Arab Nation it was as a birth from darkness into light; Arabia first
became alive by means of it. A poor shepherd people, roaming unnoticed in
its deserts since the creation of the world: a Hero-Prophet was sent down to
them with a word they could believe: see, the unnoticed becomes world-
notable, the small has grown world-great; within one century afterwards,
Arabia is at Grenada on this hand, at Delhi on that;—glancing in valor and
splendor and the light of genius, Arabia shines through long ages over a
great section of the world. Belief is great, life-giving. The history of a
Nation becomes fruitful, soul-elevating, great, so soon as it believes. These
Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century,—is it not as if a spark had
fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed black unnoticeable sand; but
lo, the sand proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to
Grenada! I said, the Great Man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the
rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.

LECTURE III. THE HERO AS POET. DANTE:
SHAKSPEARE.
[May 12, 1840.]

The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old ages;
not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain rudeness of
conception, which the progress of mere scientific knowledge puts an end to.
There needs to be, as it were, a world vacant, or almost vacant of scientific
forms, if men in their loving wonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a
god or one speaking with the voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past.
We are now to see our Hero in the less ambitious, but also less questionable,
character of Poet; a character which does not pass. The Poet is a heroic
figure belonging to all ages; whom all ages possess, when once he is
produced, whom the newest age as the oldest may produce;—and will
produce, always when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul; in no
age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a Poet.
Hero, Prophet, Poet,—many different names, in different times, and
places, do we give to Great Men; according to varieties we note in them,
according to the sphere in which they have displayed themselves! We might
give many more names, on this same principle. I will remark again,
however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood, that the different
sphere constitutes the grand origin of such distinction; that the Hero can be
Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, according to the kind of world
he finds himself born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man
that could not be all sorts of men. The Poet who could merely sit on a chair,
and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not
sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior
too. I fancy there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator,
Philosopher;—in one or the other degree, he could have been, he is all
these. So too I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that great glowing
heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears that were in it,
could not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts in

that way, had his course of life and education led him thitherward. The
grand fundamental character is that of Great Man; that the man be great.
Napoleon has words in him which are like Austerlitz Battles. Louis
Fourteenth's Marshals are a kind of poetical men withal; the things Turenne
says are full of sagacity and geniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. The
great heart, the clear deep-seeing eye: there it lies; no man whatever, in
what province soever, can prosper at all without these. Petrarch and
Boccaccio did diplomatic messages, it seems, quite well: one can easily
believe it; they had done things a little harder than these! Burns, a gifted
song-writer, might have made a still better Mirabeau. Shakspeare,—one
knows not what he could not have made, in the supreme degree.
True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not make all great
men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. Varieties of aptitude
doubtless; but infinitely more of circumstance; and far oftenest it is the
latter only that are looked to. But it is as with common men in the learning
of trades. You take any man, as yet a vague capability of a man, who could
be any kind of craftsman; and make him into a smith, a carpenter, a mason:
he is then and thenceforth that and nothing else. And if, as Addison
complains, you sometimes see a street-porter, staggering under his load on
spindle-shanks, and near at hand a tailor with the frame of a Samson
handling a bit of cloth and small Whitechapel needle,—it cannot be
considered that aptitude of Nature alone has been consulted here either!—
The Great Man also, to what shall he be bound apprentice? Given your
Hero, is he to become Conqueror, King, Philosopher, Poet? It is an
inexplicably complex controversial-calculation between the world and him!
He will read the world and its laws; the world with its laws will be there to
be read. What the world, on this matter, shall permit and bid is, as we said,
the most important fact about the world.—
Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them. In
some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; Vates means both
Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well
understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they are
still the same; in this most important respect especially, That they have
penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the Universe; what
Goethe calls "the open secret." "Which is the great secret?" asks one.
—"The open secret,"—open to all, seen by almost none! That divine
mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, "the Divine Idea of the

World, that which lies at the bottom of Appearance," as Fichte styles it; of
which all Appearance, from the starry sky to the grass of the field, but
especially the Appearance of Man and his work, is but the vesture, the
embodiment that renders it visible. This divine mystery is in all times and in
all places; veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly overlooked;
and the Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect, as the
realized Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace matter,
—as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some upholsterer had
put together! It could do no good, at present, to speak much about this; but
it is a pity for every one of us if we do not know it, live ever in the
knowledge of it. Really a most mournful pity;—a failure to live at all, if we
live otherwise!
But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the Vates,
whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hither to make
it more impressively known to us. That always is his message; he is to
reveal that to us,—that sacred mystery which he more than others lives ever
present with. While others forget it, he knows it;—I might say, he has been
driven to know it; without consent asked of him, he finds himself living in
it, bound to live in it. Once more, here is no Hearsay, but a direct Insight
and Belief; this man too could not help being a sincere man! Whosoever
may live in the shows of things, it is for him a necessity of nature to live in
the very fact of things. A man once more, in earnest with the Universe,
though all others were but toying with it. He is a Vates, first of all, in virtue
of being sincere. So far Poet and Prophet, participators in the "open secret,"
are one.
With respect to their distinction again: The Vates Prophet, we might say,
has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Good and Evil,
Duty and Prohibition; the Vates Poet on what the Germans call the aesthetic
side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we may call a revealer of what we
are to do, the other of what we are to love. But indeed these two provinces
run into one another, and cannot be disjoined. The Prophet too has his eye
on what we are to love: how else shall he know what it is we are to do? The
highest Voice ever heard on this earth said withal, "Consider the lilies of the
field; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was
not arrayed like one of these." A glance, that, into the deepest deep of
Beauty. "The lilies of the field,"—dressed finer than earthly princes,
springing up there in the humble furrow-field; a beautiful eye looking out

on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty! How could the rude Earth make
these, if her Essence, rugged as she looks and is, were not inwardly Beauty?
In this point of view, too, a saying of Goethe's, which has staggered several,
may have meaning: "The Beautiful," he intimates, "is higher than the Good;
the Beautiful includes in it the Good." The true Beautiful; which however, I
have said somewhere, "differs from the false as Heaven does from
Vauxhall!" So much for the distinction and identity of Poet and Prophet.—
In ancient and also in modern periods we find a few Poets who are
accounted perfect; whom it were a kind of treason to find fault with. This is
noteworthy; this is right: yet in strictness it is only an illusion. At bottom,
clearly enough, there is no perfect Poet! A vein of Poetry exists in the hearts
of all men; no man is made altogether of Poetry. We are all poets when we
read a poem well. The "imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante," is
not that the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own? No one but
Shakspeare can embody, out of Saxo Grammaticus, the story of Hamlet as
Shakspeare did: but every one models some kind of story out of it; every
one embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in defining. Where
there is no specific difference, as between round and square, all definition
must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has so much more of the poetic
element developed in him as to have become noticeable, will be called Poet
by his neighbors. World-Poets too, those whom we are to take for perfect
Poets, are settled by critics in the same way. One who rises so far above the
general level of Poets will, to such and such critics, seem a Universal Poet;
as he ought to do. And yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary distinction. All
Poets, all men, have some touches of the Universal; no man is wholly made
of that. Most Poets are very soon forgotten: but not the noblest Shakspeare
or Homer of them can be remembered forever;—a day comes when he too
is not!
Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a difference between true
Poetry and true Speech not poetical: what is the difference? On this point
many things have been written, especially by late German Critics, some of
which are not very intelligible at first. They say, for example, that the Poet
has an infinitude in him; communicates an Unendlichkeit, a certain
character of "infinitude," to whatsoever he delineates. This, though not very
precise, yet on so vague a matter is worth remembering: if well meditated,
some meaning will gradually be found in it. For my own part, I find
considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction of Poetry being metrical,

having music in it, being a Song. Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one
might say this as soon as anything else: If your delineation be authentically
musical, musical not in word only, but in heart and substance, in all the
thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it, then it will be
poetical; if not, not.—Musical: how much lies in that! A musical thought is
one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing;
detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it;
the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and
has a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are
melodious; naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes
deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has
on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the
edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!
Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has something of song in it:
not a parish in the world but has its parish-accent;—the rhythm or tune to
which the people there sing what they have to say! Accent is a kind of
chanting; all men have accent of their own,—though they only notice that
of others. Observe too how all passionate language does of itself become
musical,—with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a man
even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. It
seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were
but wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all things.
The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the
inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was
perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call musical Thought. The Poet is
he who thinks in that manner. At bottom, it turns still on power of intellect;
it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep
enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere
music, if you can only reach it.
The Vates Poet, with his melodious Apocalypse of Nature, seems to hold
a poor rank among us, in comparison with the Vates Prophet; his function,
and our esteem of him for his function, alike slight. The Hero taken as
Divinity; the Hero taken as Prophet; then next the Hero taken only as Poet:
does it not look as if our estimate of the Great Man, epoch after epoch, were
continually diminishing? We take him first for a god, then for one god-
inspired; and now in the next stage of it, his most miraculous word gains
from us only the recognition that he is a Poet, beautiful verse-maker, man of

genius, or such like!—It looks so; but I persuade myself that intrinsically it
is not so. If we consider well, it will perhaps appear that in man still there is
the same altogether peculiar admiration for the Heroic Gift, by what name
soever called, that there at any time was.
I should say, if we do not now reckon a Great Man literally divine, it is
that our notions of God, of the supreme unattainable Fountain of Splendor,
Wisdom and Heroism, are ever rising higher; not altogether that our
reverence for these qualities, as manifested in our like, is getting lower. This
is worth taking thought of. Sceptical Dilettantism, the curse of these ages, a
curse which will not last forever, does indeed in this the highest province of
human things, as in all provinces, make sad work; and our reverence for
great men, all crippled, blinded, paralytic as it is, comes out in poor plight,
hardly recognizable. Men worship the shows of great men; the most
disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship. The dreariest,
fatalest faith; believing which, one would literally despair of human things.
Nevertheless look, for example, at Napoleon! A Corsican lieutenant of
artillery; that is the show of him: yet is he not obeyed, worshipped after his
sort, as all the Tiaraed and Diademed of the world put together could not
be? High Duchesses, and ostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish rustic,
Burns;—a strange feeling dwelling in each that they never heard a man like
this; that, on the whole, this is the man! In the secret heart of these people it
still dimly reveals itself, though there is no accredited way of uttering it at
present, that this rustic, with his black brows and flashing sun-eyes, and
strange words moving laughter and tears, is of a dignity far beyond all
others, incommensurable with all others. Do not we feel it so? But now,
were Dilettantism, Scepticism, Triviality, and all that sorrowful brood, cast
out of us,—as, by God's blessing, they shall one day be; were faith in the
shows of things entirely swept out, replaced by clear faith in the things, so
that a man acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the other non-
extant; what a new livelier feeling towards this Burns were it!
Nay here in these ages, such as they are, have we not two mere Poets, if
not deified, yet we may say beatified? Shakspeare and Dante are Saints of
Poetry; really, if we will think of it, canonized, so that it is impiety to
meddle with them. The unguided instinct of the world, working across all
these perverse impediments, has arrived at such result. Dante and
Shakspeare are a peculiar Two. They dwell apart, in a kind of royal solitude;
none equal, none second to them: in the general feeling of the world, a

certain transcendentalism, a glory as of complete perfection, invests these
two. They are canonized, though no Pope or Cardinals took hand in doing
it! Such, in spite of every perverting influence, in the most unheroic times,
is still our indestructible reverence for heroism.—We will look a little at
these Two, the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakspeare: what little it is
permitted us to say here of the Hero as Poet will most fitly arrange itself in
that fashion.
Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and
his Book; yet, on the whole, with no great result. His Biography is, as it
were, irrecoverably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering, sorrow-stricken
man, not much note was taken of him while he lived; and the most of that
has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes. It is five centuries since
he ceased writing and living here. After all commentaries, the Book itself is
mainly what we know of him. The Book;—and one might add that Portrait
commonly attributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, you cannot help
inclining to think genuine, whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face;
perhaps of all faces that I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on
vacancy, with the simple laurel wound round it; the deathless sorrow and
pain, the known victory which is also deathless;—significant of the whole
history of Dante! I think it is the mournfulest face that ever was painted
from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face. There is in it, as
foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle affection as of a child; but
all this is as if congealed into sharp contradiction, into abnegation, isolation,
proud hopeless pain. A soft ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable,
grim-trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a
silent pain too, a silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of godlike
disdain of the thing that is eating out his heart,—as if it were withal a mean
insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and strangle were
greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and lifelong
unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection all converted into
indignation: an implacable indignation; slow, equable, silent, like that of a
god! The eye too, it looks out as in a kind of surprise, a kind of inquiry,
Why the world was of such a sort? This is Dante: so he looks, this "voice of
ten silent centuries," and sings us "his mystic unfathomable song."
The little that we know of Dante's Life corresponds well enough with this
Portrait and this Book. He was born at Florence, in the upper class of
society, in the year 1265. His education was the best then going; much

school-divinity, Aristotelean logic, some Latin classics,—no inconsiderable
insight into certain provinces of things: and Dante, with his earnest
intelligent nature, we need not doubt, learned better than most all that was
learnable. He has a clear cultivated understanding, and of great subtlety;
this best fruit of education he had contrived to realize from these
scholastics. He knows accurately and well what lies close to him; but, in
such a time, without printed books or free intercourse, he could not know
well what was distant: the small clear light, most luminous for what is near,
breaks itself into singular chiaroscuro striking on what is far off. This was
Dante's learning from the schools. In life, he had gone through the usual
destinies; been twice out campaigning as a soldier for the Florentine State,
been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifth year, by natural gradation of talent
and service, become one of the Chief Magistrates of Florence. He had met
in boyhood a certain Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful little girl of his own age
and rank, and grown up thenceforth in partial sight of her, in some distant
intercourse with her. All readers know his graceful affecting account of this;
and then of their being parted; of her being wedded to another, and of her
death soon after. She makes a great figure in Dante's Poem; seems to have
made a great figure in his life. Of all beings it might seem as if she, held
apart from him, far apart at last in the dim Eternity, were the only one he
had ever with his whole strength of affection loved. She died: Dante himself
was wedded; but it seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy, the rigorous
earnest man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make
happy.
We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with him as
he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podesta, or whatsoever they call it,
of Florence, well accepted among neighbors,—and the world had wanted
one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence would have
had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries continued
voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there will be ten of them
and more) had no Divina Commedia to hear! We will complain of nothing.
A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante; and he, struggling like a man
led towards death and crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give him the
choice of his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what was really
happy, what was really miserable.
In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or some other
confused disturbances rose to such a height, that Dante, whose party had

seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast unexpectedly forth into
banishment; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe and wandering. His
property was all confiscated and more; he had the fiercest feeling that it was
entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight of God and man. He tried what was in
him to get reinstated; tried even by warlike surprisal, with arms in his hand:
but it would not do; bad only had become worse. There is a record, I
believe, still extant in the Florence Archives, dooming this Dante,
wheresoever caught, to be burnt alive. Burnt alive; so it stands, they say: a
very curious civic document. Another curious document, some considerable
number of years later, is a Letter of Dante's to the Florentine Magistrates,
written in answer to a milder proposal of theirs, that he should return on
condition of apologizing and paying a fine. He answers, with fixed stern
pride: "If I cannot return without calling myself guilty, I will never return,
nunquam revertar."
For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wandered from
patron to patron, from place to place; proving, in his own bitter words,
"How hard is the path, Come e duro calle." The wretched are not cheerful
company. Dante, poor and banished, with his proud earnest nature, with his
moody humors, was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch reports of him
that being at Can della Scala's court, and blamed one day for his gloom and
taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like way. Della Scala stood among
his courtiers, with mimes and buffoons (nebulones ac histriones) making
him heartily merry; when turning to Dante, he said: "Is it not strange, now,
that this poor fool should make himself so entertaining; while you, a wise
man, sit there day after day, and have nothing to amuse us with at all?"
Dante answered bitterly: "No, not strange; your Highness is to recollect the
Proverb, Like to Like;"—given the amuser, the amusee must also be given!
Such a man, with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, was
not made to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be evident to him that
he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of benefit, in this earth. The
earthly world had cast him forth, to wander, wander; no living heart to love
him now; for his sore miseries there was no solace here.
The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself on him; that
awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, with its Florences and
banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence thou shalt never
see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt surely see! What is
Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life altogether? ETERNITY:

thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, art thou and all things bound! The great
soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made its home more and more in that
awful other world. Naturally his thoughts brooded on that, as on the one
fact important for him. Bodied or bodiless, it is the one fact important for
all men:—but to Dante, in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of
scientific shape; he no more doubted of that Malebolge Pool, that it all lay
there with its gloomy circles, with its alti guai, and that he himself should
see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went thither.
Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in speechless thought
and awe, bursts forth at length into "mystic unfathomable song;" and this
his Divine Comedy, the most remarkable of all modern Books, is the result.
It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see, a
proud thought for him at times, That he, here in exile, could do this work;
that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him from doing it, or
even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that it was great; the
greatest a man could do. "If thou follow thy star, Se tu segui tua stella,"—so
could the Hero, in his forsakenness, in his extreme need, still say to himself:
"Follow thou thy star, thou shalt not fail of a glorious haven!" The labor of
writing, we find, and indeed could know otherwise, was great and painful
for him; he says, This Book, "which has made me lean for many years." Ah
yes, it was won, all of it, with pain and sore toil,—not in sport, but in grim
earnest. His Book, as indeed most good Books are, has been written, in
many senses, with his heart's blood. It is his whole history, this Book. He
died after finishing it; not yet very old, at the age of fifty-six;—broken-
hearted rather, as is said. He lies buried in his death-city Ravenna: Hic
claudor Dantes patriis extorris ab oris. The Florentines begged back his
body, in a century after; the Ravenna people would not give it. "Here am I
Dante laid, shut out from my native shores."
I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls it "a mystic
unfathomable Song;" and such is literally the character of it. Coleridge
remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a sentence
musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is
something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and soul, word and
idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song: we said before, it was
the Heroic of Speech! All old Poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically
Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is
not sung is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling

lines,—to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader,
for most part! What we wants to get at is the thought the man had, if he had
any: why should he twist it into jingle, if he could speak it out plainly? It is
only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of melody, and the very
tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark, become musical by the
greatness, depth and music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to
rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic of
Speakers,—whose speech is Song. Pretenders to this are many; and to an
earnest reader, I doubt, it is for most part a very melancholy, not to say an
insupportable business, that of reading rhyme! Rhyme that had no inward
necessity to be rhymed;—it ought to have told us plainly, without any
jingle, what it was aiming at. I would advise all men who can speak their
thought, not to sing it; to understand that, in a serious time, among serious
men, there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely as we love the
true song, and are charmed by it as by something divine, so shall we hate
the false song, and account it a mere wooden noise, a thing hollow,
superfluous, altogether an insincere and offensive thing.
I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his Divine Comedy that it is,
in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there is a canto
fermo; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his simple terza rima,
doubtless helped him in this. One reads along naturally with a sort of lilt.
But I add, that it could not be otherwise; for the essence and material of the
work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity,
makes it musical;—go deep enough, there is music everywhere. A true
inward symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it,
proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of the character of
music. The three kingdoms, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, look out on one
another like compartments of a great edifice; a great supernatural world-
cathedral, piled up there, stern, solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It is,
at bottom, the sincerest of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be the
measure of worth. It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts; and it
goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people of Verona,
when they saw him on the streets, used to say, "Eccovi 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 long severe sorrow and struggle; as the like of
him is pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come out divine are not
accomplished otherwise. Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue

itself, is it not the daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind;—
true effort, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought.
In all ways we are "to become perfect through suffering."—But, as I say, no
work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has all been as if
molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made him "lean" for many
years. Not the general whole only; every compartment of it is worked out,
with intense earnestness, into truth, into clear visuality. Each answers to the
other; each fits in its place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and
polished. It is the soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the middle ages,
rendered forever rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intense
one: but a task which is done.
Perhaps one would say, intensity, with the much that depends on it, is the
prevailing character of Dante's genius. Dante does not come before us as a
large catholic mind; rather as a narrow, and even sectarian mind: it is partly
the fruit of his age and position, but partly too of his own nature. His
greatness has, in all senses, concentred itself into fiery emphasis and depth.
He is world-great not because he is worldwide, but because he is world-
deep. Through all objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being.
I know nothing so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to begin with
the outermost development of his intensity, consider how he paints. He has
a great power of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents that and
nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of the Hall of Dite: red
pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of
gloom;—so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and forever! It is as an
emblem of the whole genius of Dante. There is a brevity, an abrupt
precision in him: Tacitus is not briefer, more condensed; and then in Dante
it seems a natural condensation, spontaneous to the man. One smiting word;
and then there is silence, nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent
than words. It is strange with what a sharp decisive grace he snatches the
true likeness of a matter: cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus,
the blustering giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke; it is "as the sails sink, the
mast being suddenly broken." Or that poor Brunetto Latini, with the cotto
aspetto, "face baked," parched brown and lean; and the "fiery snow" that
falls on them there, a "fiery snow without wind," slow, deliberate, never-
ending! Or the lids of those Tombs; square sarcophaguses, in that silent
dim-burning Hall, each with its Soul in torment; the lids laid open there;
they are to be shut at the Day of Judgment, through Eternity. And how

Farinata rises; and how Cavalcante falls—at hearing of his Son, and the past
tense "fue"! The very movements in Dante have something brief; swift,
decisive, almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his genius this sort
of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent, passionate,
with its quick abrupt movements, its silent "pale rages," speaks itself in
these things.
For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a
man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is
physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a
likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of doing
it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could not have
discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it, unless he had, what
we may call, sympathized with it,—had sympathy in him to bestow on
objects. He must have been sincere about it too; sincere and sympathetic: a
man without worth cannot give you the likeness of any object; he dwells in
vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay, about all objects. And
indeed may we not say that intellect altogether expresses itself in this power
of discerning what an object is? Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may
have will come out here. Is it even of business, a matter to be done? The
gifted man is he who sees the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside as
surplusage: it is his faculty too, the man of business's faculty, that he discern
the true likeness, not the false superficial one, of the thing he has got to
work in. And how much of morality is in the kind of insight we get of
anything; "the eye seeing in all things what it brought with it the faculty of
seeing"! To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the
jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, the Painters tell us, is the best of all
Portrait-painters withal. No most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of
any object. In the commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will
take away with him.
Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness as of
fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is every way noble, and the
outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what qualities in that! A
thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of eternal black. A small flute-
voice of infinite wail speaks there, into our very heart of hearts. A touch of
womanhood in it too: della bella persona, che mi fu tolta; and how, even in
the Pit of woe, it is a solace that he will never part from 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
of this poor Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat upon the
Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet also infinite
rigor of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante discerned that she was
made. What a paltry notion is that of his Divine Comedy's being a poor
splenetic impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into Hell whom he could
not be avenged upon on earth! I suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's,
was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not
know rigor cannot pity either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic,—
sentimentality, or little better. I know not in the world an affection equal to
that of Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like the
wail of AEolian harps, soft, soft; like a child's young heart;—and then that
stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of his towards his Beatrice; their
meeting together in the Paradiso; his gazing in her pure transfigured eyes,
her that had been purified by death so long, separated from him so far:—
one likens it to the song of angels; it is among the purest utterances of
affection, perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of a human soul.
For the intense Dante is intense in all things; he has got into the essence
of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion too as reasoner, is but
the result of all other sorts of intensity. Morally great, above all, we must
call him; it is the beginning of all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as
his love;—as indeed, what are they but the inverse or converse of his love?
"A Dio spiacenti ed a' nemici sui, Hateful to God and to the enemies of
God:" lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion; "Non
ragionam di lor, We will not speak of them, look only and pass." Or think
of this; "They have not the hope to die, Non han speranza di morte." One
day, it had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of Dante, that he,
wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full surely die; "that
Destiny itself could not doom him not to die." Such words are in this man.
For rigor, earnestness and depth, he is not to be paralleled in the modern
world; to seek his parallel we must go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with
the antique Prophets there.
I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the
Inferno to the two other parts of the Divine Commedia. Such preference
belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and is like to be a
transient feeling. The Purgatorio and Paradiso, especially the former, one
would almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing that

Purgatorio, "Mountain of Purification;" an emblem of the noblest
conception of that age. If sin is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous,
awful, yet in Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand
Christian act. It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The tremolar dell'
onde, that "trembling" of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of
morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an altered
mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company still with
heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of demons and reprobate is underfoot; a
soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher, to the Throne of
Mercy itself. "Pray for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to
him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me," my daughter Giovanna; "I think
her mother loves me no more!" They toil painfully up by that winding
steep, "bent down like corbels of a building," some of them,—crushed
together so "for the sin of pride;" yet nevertheless in years, in ages and
aeons, they shall have reached the top, which is heaven's gate, and by
Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too of all, when one has
prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises,
when one soul has perfected repentance and got its sin and misery left
behind! I call all this a noble embodiment of a true noble thought.
But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, are
indispensable to one another. The Paradiso, a kind of inarticulate music to
me, is the redeeming side of the Inferno; the Inferno without it were untrue.
All three make up the true Unseen World, as figured in the Christianity of
the Middle Ages; a thing forever memorable, forever true in the essence of
it, to all men. It was perhaps delineated in no human soul with such depth of
veracity as in this of Dante's; a man sent to sing it, to keep it long
memorable. Very notable with what brief simplicity he passes out of the
every-day reality, into the Invisible one; and in the second or third stanza,
we find ourselves in the World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among things
palpable, indubitable! To Dante they were so; the real world, as it is called,
and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely higher Fact of a World.
At bottom, the one was as preternatural as the other. Has not each man a
soul? He will not only be a spirit, but is one. To the earnest Dante it is all
one visible Fact; he believes it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that.
Sincerity, I say again, is the saving merit, now as always.
Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematic
representation of his Belief about this Universe:—some Critic in a future

age, like those Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceased altogether
to think as Dante did, may find this too all an "Allegory," perhaps an idle
Allegory! It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of the soul of
Christianity. It expresses, as in huge world-wide architectural emblems,
how the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the two polar elements of
this Creation, on which it all turns; that these two differ not by preferability
of one to the other, but by incompatibility absolute and infinite; that the one
is excellent and high as light and Heaven, the other hideous, black as
Gehenna and the Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence, with
everlasting Pity,—all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle Ages had it, is
emblemed here. Emblemed: and yet, as I urged the other day, with what
entire truth of purpose; how unconscious of any embleming! Hell,
Purgatory, Paradise: these things were not fashioned as emblems; was there,
in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all of their being emblems!
Were they not indubitable awful facts; the whole heart of man taking them
for practically true, all Nature everywhere confirming them? So is it always
in these things. Men do not believe an Allegory. The future Critic, whatever
his new thought may be, who considers this of Dante to have been all got
up as an Allegory, will commit one sore mistake!—Paganism we
recognized as a veracious expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling of
man towards the Universe; veracious, true once, and still not without worth
for us. But mark here the difference of Paganism and Christianism; one
great difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; the
destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men in this
world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law of
Man. One was for the sensuous nature: a rude helpless utterance of the first
Thought of men,—the chief recognized virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear.
The other was not for the sensuous nature, but for the moral. What a
progress is here, if in that one respect only—!
And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in a very
strange way, found a voice. The Divina Commedia is of Dante's writing; yet
in truth it belongs to ten Christian centuries, only the finishing of it is
Dante's. So always. The craftsman there, the smith with that metal of his,
with these tools, with these cunning methods,—how little of all he does is
properly his work! All past inventive men work there with him;—as indeed
with all of us, in all things. Dante is the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the
Thought they lived by stands here, in everlasting music. These sublime

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

it all gone. Like a dream; like the dust of King Agamemnon! Greece was;
Greece, except in the words it spoke, is not.
The uses of this Dante? We will not say much about his "uses." A human
soul who has once got into that primal element of Song, and sung forth fitly
somewhat therefrom, has worked in the depths of our existence; feeding
through long times the life-roots of all excellent human things whatsoever,
—in a way that "utilities" will not succeed well in calculating! We will not
estimate the Sun by the quantity of gaslight it saves us; Dante shall be
invaluable, or of no value. One remark I may make: the contrast in this
respect between the Hero-Poet and the Hero-Prophet. In a hundred years,
Mahomet, as we saw, had his Arabians at Grenada and at Delhi; Dante's
Italians seem to be yet very much where they were. Shall we say, then,
Dante's effect on the world was small in comparison? Not so: his arena is
far more restricted; but also it is far nobler, clearer;—perhaps not less but
more important. Mahomet speaks to great masses of men, in the coarse
dialect adapted to such; a dialect filled with inconsistencies, crudities,
follies: on the great masses alone can he act, and there with good and with
evil strangely blended. Dante speaks to the noble, the pure and great, in all
times and places. Neither does he grow obsolete, as the other does. Dante
burns as a pure star, fixed there in the firmament, at which the great and the
high of all ages kindle themselves: he is the possession of all the chosen of
the world for uncounted time. Dante, one calculates, may long survive
Mahomet. In this way the balance may be made straight again.
But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on the world, by
what we can judge of their effect there, that a man and his work are
measured. Effect? Influence? Utility? Let a man do his work; the fruit of it
is the care of Another than he. It will grow its own fruit; and whether
embodied in Caliph Thrones and Arabian Conquests, so that it "fills all
Morning and Evening Newspapers," and all Histories, 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 Arabian Caliph, in so far only as he did
something, was something. If the great Cause of Man, and Man's work in
God's Earth, got no furtherance from the Arabian Caliph, then no matter
how many scimetars he drew, how many gold piasters pocketed, and what
uproar and blaring he made in this world,—he was but a loud-sounding
inanity and futility; at bottom, he was not at all. Let us honor the great
empire of Silence, once more! The boundless treasury which we do not

jingle in our pockets, or count up and present before men! It is perhaps, of
all things, the usefulest for each of us to do, in these loud times.—
As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically
the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe, its
Inner Life; so Shakspeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer Life of
our Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies, humors, ambitions,
what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at the world, men then had.
As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece; so in Shakspeare and
Dante, after thousands of years, what our modern Europe was, in Faith and
in Practice, will still be legible. Dante has given us the Faith or soul;
Shakspeare, in a not less noble way, has given us the Practice or body. This
latter also we were to have; a man was sent for it, the man Shakspeare. Just
when that chivalry way of life had reached its last finish, and was on the
point of breaking down into slow or swift dissolution, as we now see it
everywhere, this other sovereign Poet, with his seeing eye, with his
perennial singing voice, was sent to take note of it, to give long-enduring
record of it. Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce as the central fire of the world;
Shakspeare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as the Sun, the upper light of the
world. Italy produced the one world-voice; we English had the honor of
producing the other.
Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident, this man came to us. I
think always, so great, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is this Shakspeare,
had the Warwickshire Squire not prosecuted him for deer-stealing, we had
perhaps never heard of him as a Poet! The woods and skies, the rustic Life
of Man in Stratford there, had been enough for this man! But indeed that
strange outbudding of our whole English Existence, which we call the
Elizabethan Era, did not it too come as of its own accord? The "Tree
Igdrasil" buds and withers by its own laws,—too deep for our scanning. Yet
it does bud and wither, and every bough and leaf of it is there, by fixed
eternal laws; not a Sir Thomas Lucy but comes at the hour fit for him.
Curious, I say, and not sufficiently considered: how everything does co-
operate with all; not a leaf rotting on the highway but is indissoluble portion
of solar and stellar systems; no thought, word or act of man but has sprung
withal out of all men, and works sooner or later, recognizably or
irrecognizable, on all men! It is all a Tree: circulation of sap and influences,
mutual communication of every minutest leaf with the lowest talon of a
root, with every other greatest and minutest portion of the whole. The Tree

Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the Kingdoms of Hela and Death, and
whose boughs overspread the highest Heaven—!
In some sense it may be said that this glorious Elizabethan Era with its
Shakspeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had preceded it, is
itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages. The Christian
Faith, which was the theme of Dante's Song, had produced this Practical
Life which Shakspeare was to sing. For Religion then, as it now and always
is, was the soul of Practice; the primary vital fact in men's life. And remark
here, as rather curious, that Middle-Age Catholicism was abolished, so far
as Acts of Parliament could abolish it, before Shakspeare, the noblest
product of it, made his appearance. He did make his appearance
nevertheless. Nature at her own time, with Catholicism or what else might
be necessary, sent him forth; taking small thought of Acts of Parliament.
King Henrys, Queen Elizabeths go their way; and Nature too goes hers.
Acts of Parliament, on the whole, are small, notwithstanding the noise they
make. What Act of Parliament, debate at St. Stephen's, on the hustings or
elsewhere, was it that brought this Shakspeare into being? No dining at
Freemason's Tavern, opening subscription-lists, selling of shares, and
infinite other jangling and true or false endeavoring! This Elizabethan Era,
and all its nobleness and blessedness, came without proclamation,
preparation of ours. Priceless Shakspeare was the free gift of Nature; given
altogether silently;—received altogether silently, as if it had been a thing of
little account. And yet, very literally, it is a priceless thing. One should look
at that side of matters too.
Of this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a
little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the best
judgment not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing
to the conclusion, that Shakspeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the
greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in
the way of Literature. On the whole, I know not such a power of vision,
such a faculty of thought, if we take all the characters of it, in any other
man. Such a calmness of depth; placid joyous strength; all things imaged in
that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea! It
has been said, that in the constructing of Shakspeare's Dramas there is, apart
from all other "faculties" as they are called, an understanding manifested,
equal to that in Bacon's Novum Organum That is true; and it is not a truth
that strikes every one. It would become more apparent if we tried, any of us

for himself, how, out of Shakspeare's dramatic materials, we could fashion
such a result! The built house seems all so fit,—every way as it should be,
as if it came there by its own law and the nature of things,—we forget the
rude disorderly quarry it was shaped from. The very perfection of the house,
as if Nature herself had made it, hides the builder's merit. Perfect, more
perfect than any other man, we may call Shakspeare in this: he discerns,
knows as by instinct, what condition he works under, what his materials are,
what his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitory glance of
insight that will suffice; it is deliberate illumination of the whole matter; it
is a calmly seeing eye; a great intellect, in short. How a man, of some wide
thing that he has witnessed, will construct a narrative, what kind of picture
and delineation he will give of it,—is the best measure you could get of
what intellect is in the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall stand
prominent; which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true
beginning, the true sequence and ending? To find out this, you task the
whole force of insight that is in the man. He must understand the thing;
according to the depth of his understanding, will the fitness of his answer
be. You will try him so. Does like join itself to like; does the spirit of
method stir in that confusion, so that its embroilment becomes order? Can
the man say, Fiat lux, Let there be light; and out of chaos make a world?
Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this.
Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting,
delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakspeare is great.
All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is unexampled, I
think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakspeare. The thing he looks at
reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost heart, and generic secret: it
dissolves itself as in light before him, so that he discerns the perfect
structure of it. Creative, we said: poetic creation, what is this too but seeing
the thing sufficiently? The word that will describe the thing, follows of
itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not Shakspeare's
morality, his valor, candor, tolerance, truthfulness; his whole victorious
strength and greatness, which can triumph over such obstructions, visible
there too? Great as the world. No twisted, poor convex-concave mirror,
reflecting all objects with its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly
level mirror;—that is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly
related to all things and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly spectacle how
this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a

Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their round completeness;
loving, just, the equal brother of all. Novum Organum, and all the intellect
you will find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; earthy, material, poor
in comparison with this. Among modern men, one finds, in strictness,
almost nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of
Shakspeare, reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he saw the object;
you may say what he himself says of Shakspeare: "His characters are like
watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like
others, and the inward mechanism also is all visible."
The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things; what
Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped up in these often
rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye that
something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things? You can laugh
over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way or other genially
relate yourself to them;—you can, at lowest, hold your peace about them,
turn away your own and others' face from them, till the hour come for
practically exterminating and extinguishing them! At bottom, it is the Poet's
first gift, as it is all men's, that he have intellect enough. He will be a Poet if
he have: a Poet in word; or failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act.
Whether he write at all; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend
on accidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents,—perhaps on
his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his boyhood!
But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart of things, and
the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has a harmony in the
heart of it, or it would not hold together and exist), is not the result of habits
or accidents, but the gift of Nature herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic
Man in what sort soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all,
See. If you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together,
jingling sensibilities against each other, and name yourself a Poet; there is
no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or
speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask,
when they brought him a new pupil, "But are ye sure he's not a dunce?"
Why, really one might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed
for whatsoever function; and consider it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye
sure he's not a dunce? There is, in this world, no other entirely fatal person.
For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct
measure of the man. If called to define Shakspeare's faculty, I should say

superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that. What indeed
are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things separable;
as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet and
arms. That is a capital error. Then again, we hear of a man's "intellectual
nature," and of his "moral nature," as if these again were divisible, and
existed apart. Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such forms of
utterance; we must speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are to speak at all.
But words ought not to harden into things for us. It seems to me, our
apprehension of this matter is, for most part, radically falsified thereby. We
ought to know withal, and to keep forever in mind, that these divisions are
at bottom but names; that man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which
dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what we call
imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of
the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other,
physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know all
of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is
this but another side of the one vital Force whereby he is and works? All
that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may see how a man would
fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or want of courage, is
visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he has formed, no less than in
the stroke he strikes. He is one; and preaches the same Self abroad in all
these ways.
Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but, consider
it,—without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a thoroughly
immoral man could not know anything at all! To know a thing, what we can
call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathize with it: that is, be
virtuously related to it. If he have not the justice to put down his own
selfishness at every turn, the courage to stand by the dangerous-true at
every turn, how shall he know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in
his knowledge. Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and
the pusillanimous forever a sealed book: what such can know of Nature is
mean, superficial, small; for the uses of the day merely.—But does not the
very Fox know something of Nature? Exactly so: it knows where the geese
lodge! The human Reynard, very frequent everywhere in the world, what
more does he know but this and the like of this? Nay, it should be
considered too, that if the Fox had not a certain vulpine morality, he could
not even know where the geese were, or get at the geese! If he spent his

time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his own misery, his ill usage by
Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and so forth; and had not courage,
promptitude, practicality, and other suitable vulpine gifts and graces, he
would catch no geese. We may say of the Fox too, that his morality and
insight are of the same dimensions; different faces of the same internal
unity of vulpine life!—These things are worth stating; for the contrary of
them acts with manifold very baleful perversion, in this time: what
limitations, modifications they require, your own candor will supply.
If I say, therefore, that Shakspeare is the greatest of Intellects, I have said
all concerning him. But there is more in Shakspeare's intellect than we have
yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it
than he himself is aware of. Novalis beautifully remarks of him, that those
Dramas of his are Products of Nature too, deep as Nature herself. I find a
great truth in this saying. Shakspeare's Art is not Artifice; the noblest worth
of it is not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows up from the deeps of
Nature, through this noble sincere soul, who is a voice of Nature. The latest
generations of men will find new meanings in Shakspeare, new elucidations
of their own human being; "new harmonies with the infinite structure of the
Universe; concurrences with later ideas, affinities with the higher powers
and senses of man." This well deserves meditating. It is Nature's highest
reward to a true simple great soul, that he get thus to be a part of herself.
Such a man's works, whatsoever he with utmost conscious exertion and
forethought shall accomplish, grow up withal unconsciously, from the
unknown deeps in him;—as the oak-tree grows from the Earth's bosom, as
the mountains and waters shape themselves; with a symmetry grounded on
Nature's own laws, conformable to all Truth whatsoever. How much in
Shakspeare lies hid; his sorrows, his silent struggles known to himself;
much that was not known at all, not speakable at all: like roots, like sap and
forces working underground! Speech is great; but Silence is greater.
Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable. I will not blame
Dante for his misery: it is as battle without victory; but true battle,—the
first, indispensable thing. Yet I call Shakspeare greater than Dante, in that
he fought truly, and did conquer. Doubt it not, he had his own sorrows:
those Sonnets of his will even testify expressly in what deep waters he had
waded, and swum struggling for his life;—as what man like him ever failed
to have to do? It seems to me a heedless notion, our common one, that he
sat like a bird on the bough; and sang forth, free and off-hand, never

knowing the troubles of other men. Not so; with no man is it so. How could
a man travel forward from rustic deer-poaching to such tragedy-writing, and
not fall in with sorrows by the way? Or, still better, how could a man
delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Macbeth, so many suffering heroic
hearts, if his own heroic heart had never suffered?—And now, in contrast
with all this, observe his mirthfulness, his genuine overflowing love of
laughter! You would say, in no point does he exaggerate but only in
laughter. Fiery objurgations, words that pierce and burn, are to be found in
Shakspeare; yet he is always in measure here; never what Johnson would
remark as a specially "good hater." But his laughter seems to pour from him
in floods; he heaps all manner of ridiculous nicknames on the butt he is
bantering, tumbles and tosses him in all sorts of horse-play; you would say,
with his whole heart laughs. And then, if not always the finest, it is always a
genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No man
who can laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these things. It is some
poor character only desiring to laugh, and have the credit of wit, that does
so. Laughter means sympathy; good laughter is not "the crackling of thorns
under the pot." Even at stupidity and pretension this Shakspeare does not
laugh otherwise than genially. Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts;
and we dismiss them covered with explosions of laughter: but we like the
poor fellows only the better for our laughing; and hope they will get on well
there, and continue Presidents of the City-watch. Such laughter, like
sunshine on the deep sea, is very beautiful to me.
We have no room to speak of Shakspeare's individual works; though
perhaps there is much still waiting to be said on that head. Had we, for
instance, all his plays reviewed as Hamlet, in Wilhelm Meister, is! A thing
which might, one day, be done. August Wilhelm Schlegel has a remark on
his Historical Plays, Henry Fifth and the others, which is worth
remembering. He calls them a kind of National Epic. Marlborough, you
recollect, said, he knew no English History but what he had learned from
Shakspeare. There are really, if we look to it, few as memorable Histories.
The great salient points are admirably seized; all rounds itself off, into a
kind of rhythmic coherence; it is, as Schlegel says, epic;—as indeed all
delineation by a great thinker will be. There are right beautiful things in
those Pieces, which indeed together form one beautiful thing. That battle of
Agincourt strikes me as one of the most perfect things, in its sort, we
anywhere have of Shakspeare's. The description of the two hosts: the worn-

out, jaded English; the dread hour, big with destiny, when the battle shall
begin; and then that deathless valor: "Ye good yeomen, whose limbs were
made in England!" There is a noble Patriotism in it,—far other than the
"indifference" you sometimes hear ascribed to Shakspeare. A true English
heart breathes, calm and strong, through the whole business; not boisterous,
protrusive; all the better for that. There is a sound in it like the ring of steel.
This man too had a right stroke in him, had it come to that!
But I will say, of Shakspeare's works generally, that we have no full
impress of him there; even as full as we have of many men. His works are
so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that was in
him. All his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory, imperfect,
written under cramping circumstances; giving only here and there a note of
the full utterance of the man. Passages there are that come upon you like
splendor out of Heaven; bursts of radiance, illuminating the very heart of
the thing: you say, "That is true, spoken once and forever; wheresoever and
whensoever there is an open human soul, that will be recognized as true!"
Such bursts, however, make us feel that the surrounding matter is not
radiant; that it is, in part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakspeare had to
write for the Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could,
into that and no other mould. It was with him, then, as it is with us all. No
man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his own free
Thought before us; but his Thought as he could translate it into the stone
that was given, with the tools that were given. Disjecta membra are all that
we find of any Poet, or of any man.
Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakspeare may recognize that he too
was a Prophet, in his way; of an insight analogous to the Prophetic, though
he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to this man also divine;
unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven; "We are such stuff as Dreams
are made of!" That scroll in Westminster Abbey, which few read with
understanding, is of the depth of any seer. But the man sang; did not preach,
except musically. We called Dante the melodious Priest of Middle-Age
Catholicism. May we not call Shakspeare the still more melodious Priest of
a true Catholicism, the "Universal Church" of the Future and of all times?
No narrow superstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or
perversion: a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousand-fold hidden
beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature; which let all men worship as
they can! We may say without offence, that there rises a kind of universal

Psalm out of this Shakspeare too; not unfit to make itself heard among the
still more sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony with these, if we understood
them, but in harmony!—I cannot call this Shakspeare a "Sceptic," as some
do; his indifference to the creeds and theological quarrels of his time
misleading them. No: neither unpatriotic, though he says little about his
Patriotism; nor sceptic, though he says little about his Faith. Such
"indifference" was the fruit of his greatness withal: his whole heart was in
his own grand sphere of worship (we may call it such); these other
controversies, vitally important to other men, were not vital to him.
But call it worship, call it what you will, is it not a right glorious thing,
and set of things, this that Shakspeare has brought us? For myself, I feel
that there is actually a kind of sacredness in the fact of such a man being
sent into this Earth. Is he not an eye to us all; a blessed heaven-sent Bringer
of Light?—And, at bottom, was it not perhaps far better that this
Shakspeare, every way an unconscious man, was conscious of no Heavenly
message? He did not feel, like Mahomet, because he saw into those internal
Splendors, that he specially was the "Prophet of God:" and was he not
greater than Mahomet in that? Greater; and also, if we compute strictly, as
we did in Dante's case, more successful. It was intrinsically an error that
notion of Mahomet's, of his supreme Prophethood; and has come down to
us inextricably involved in error to this day; dragging along with it such a
coil of fables, impurities, intolerances, as makes it a questionable step for
me here and now to say, as I have done, that Mahomet was a true Speaker at
all, and not rather an ambitious charlatan, perversity and simulacrum; no
Speaker, but a Babbler! Even in Arabia, as I compute, Mahomet will have
exhausted himself and become obsolete, while this Shakspeare, this Dante
may still be young;—while this Shakspeare may still pretend to be a Priest
of Mankind, of Arabia as of other places, for unlimited periods to come!
Compared with any speaker or singer one knows, even with Aeschylus or
Homer, why should he not, for veracity and universality, last like them? He
is sincere as they; reaches deep down like them, to the universal and
perennial. But as for Mahomet, I think it had been better for him not to be
so conscious! Alas, poor Mahomet; all that he was conscious of was a mere
error; a futility and triviality,—as indeed such ever is. The truly great in him
too was the unconscious: that he was a wild Arab lion of the desert, and did
speak out with that great thunder-voice of his, not by words which 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 absurdity; we do not
believe, like him, that God wrote that! The Great Man here too, as always,
is a Force of Nature. Whatsoever is truly great in him springs up from the
inarticulate deeps.
Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of a
Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of
Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many
thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account him a
god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us;—on which point there were much to
be said. But I will say rather, or repeat: In spite of the sad state Hero-
worship now lies in, consider what this Shakspeare has actually become
among us. Which Englishman we ever made, in this land of ours, which
million of Englishmen, would we not give up rather than the Stratford
Peasant? There is no regiment of highest Dignitaries that we would sell him
for. He is the grandest thing we have yet done. For our honor among foreign
nations, as an ornament to our English Household, what item is there that
we would not surrender rather than him? Consider now, if they asked us,
Will you give up your Indian Empire or your Shakspeare, you English;
never have had any Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakspeare?
Really it were a grave question. Official persons would answer doubtless in
official language; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to
answer: Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without
Shakspeare! Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this
Shakspeare does not go, he lasts forever with us; we cannot give up our
Shakspeare!
Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him merely as a real,
marketable, tangibly useful possession. England, before long, this Island of
ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in America, in New
Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there will be a Saxondom
covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what is it that can keep all
these together into virtually one Nation, so that they do not fall out and
fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike intercourse, helping one another? This
is justly regarded as the greatest practical problem, the thing all manner of
sovereignties and governments are here to accomplish: what is it that will
accomplish this? Acts of Parliament, administrative prime-ministers cannot.
America is parted from us, so far as Parliament could part it. Call it not
fantastic, for there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is an English King,

whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of Parliaments, can
dethrone! This King Shakspeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty,
over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs;
indestructible; really more valuable in that point of view than any other
means or appliance whatsoever? We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all
the Nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from
New York, wheresoever, under what sort of Parish-Constable soever,
English men and women are, they will say to one another: "Yes, this
Shakspeare is ours; we produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of
one blood and kind with him." The most common-sense politician, too, if he
pleases, may think of that.
Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice;
that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it
means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered, scattered asunder,
not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity at all; yet the noble Italy is
actually one: Italy produced its Dante; Italy can speak! The Czar of all the
Russias, he is strong with so many bayonets, Cossacks and cannons; and
does a great feat in keeping such a tract of Earth politically together; but he
cannot yet speak. Something great in him, but it is a dumb greatness. He has
had no voice of genius, to be heard of all men and times. He must learn to
speak. He is a great dumb monster hitherto. His cannons and Cossacks will
all have rusted into nonentity, while that Dante's voice is still audible. The
Nation that has a Dante is bound together as no dumb Russia can be.—We
must here end what we had to say of the Hero-Poet.

LECTURE IV. THE HERO AS PRIEST.
LUTHER; REFORMATION: KNOX;
PURITANISM.
[May 15, 1840.]

Our present discourse is to be of the Great Man as Priest. We have
repeatedly endeavored to explain that all sorts of Heroes are intrinsically of
the same material; that given a great soul, open to the Divine Significance
of Life, then there is given a man fit to speak of this, to sing of this, to fight
and work for this, in a great, victorious, enduring manner; there is given a
Hero,—the outward shape of whom will depend on the time and the
environment he finds himself in. The Priest too, as I understand it, is a kind
of Prophet; in him too there is required to be a light of inspiration, as we
must name it. He presides over the worship of the people; is the Uniter of
them with the Unseen Holy. He is the spiritual Captain of the people; as the
Prophet is their spiritual King with many captains: he guides them
heavenward, by wise guidance through this Earth and its work. The ideal of
him is, that he too be what we can call a voice from the unseen Heaven;
interpreting, even as the Prophet did, and in a more familiar manner
unfolding the same to men. The unseen Heaven,—the "open secret of the
Universe,"—which so few have an eye for! He is the Prophet shorn of his
more awful splendor; burning with mild equable radiance, as the
enlightener of daily life. This, I say, is the ideal of a Priest. So in old times;
so in these, and in all times. One knows very well that, in reducing ideals to
practice, great latitude of tolerance is needful; very great. But a Priest who
is not this at all, who does not any longer aim or try to be this, is a character
—of whom we had rather not speak in this place.
Luther and Knox were by express vocation Priests, and did faithfully
perform that function in its common sense. Yet it will suit us better here to
consider them chiefly in their historical character, rather as Reformers than
Priests. There have been other Priests perhaps equally notable, in calmer
times, for doing faithfully the office of a Leader of Worship; bringing down,

by faithful heroism in that kind, a light from Heaven into the daily life of
their people; leading them forward, as under God's guidance, in the way
wherein they were to go. But when this same way was a rough one, of
battle, confusion and danger, the spiritual Captain, who led through that,
becomes, especially to us who live under the fruit of his leading, more
notable than any other. He is the warfaring and battling Priest; who led his
people, not to quiet faithful labor as in smooth times, but to faithful
valorous conflict, in times all violent, dismembered: a more perilous
service, and a more memorable one, be it higher or not. These two men we
will account our best Priests, inasmuch as they were our best Reformers.
Nay I may ask, Is not every true Reformer, by the nature of him, a Priest
first of all? He appeals to Heaven's invisible justice against Earth's visible
force; knows that it, the invisible, is strong and alone strong. He is a
believer in the divine truth of things; a seer, seeing through the shows of
things; a worshipper, in one way or the other, of the divine truth of things; a
Priest, that is. If he be not first a Priest, he will never be good for much as a
Reformer.
Thus then, as we have seen Great Men, in various situations, building up
Religions, heroic Forms of human Existence in this world, Theories of Life
worthy to be sung by a Dante, Practices of Life by a Shakspeare,—we are
now to see the reverse process; which also is necessary, which also may be
carried on in the Heroic manner. Curious how this should be necessary: yet
necessary it is. The mild shining of the Poet's light has to give place to the
fierce lightning of the Reformer: unfortunately the Reformer too is a
personage that cannot fail in History! The Poet indeed, with his mildness,
what is he but the product and ultimate adjustment of Reform, or Prophecy,
with its fierceness? No wild Saint Dominics and Thebaid Eremites, there
had been no melodious Dante; rough Practical Endeavor, Scandinavian and
other, from Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila to Cranmer, enabled
Shakspeare to speak. Nay the finished Poet, I remark sometimes, is a
symptom that his epoch itself has reached perfection and is finished; that
before long there will be a new epoch, new Reformers needed.
Doubtless it were finer, could we go along always in the way of music;
be tamed and taught by our Poets, as the rude creatures were by their
Orpheus of old. Or failing this rhythmic musical way, how good were it
could we get so much as into the equable way; I mean, if peaceable Priests,
reforming from day to day, would always suffice us! But it is not so; even

this latter has not yet been realized. Alas, the battling Reformer too is, from
time to time, a needful and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never
wanting: the very things that were once indispensable furtherances become
obstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us,—a business
often of enormous difficulty. It is notable enough, surely, how a Theorem or
spiritual Representation, so we may call it, which once took in the whole
Universe, and was completely satisfactory in all parts of it to the highly
discursive acute intellect of Dante, one of the greatest in the world,—had in
the course of another century become dubitable to common intellects;
become deniable; and is now, to every one of us, flatly incredible, obsolete
as Odin's Theorem! To Dante, human Existence, and God's ways with men,
were all well represented by those Malebolges, Purgatorios; to Luther not
well. How was this? Why could not Dante's Catholicism continue; but
Luther's Protestantism must needs follow? Alas, nothing will continue.
I do not make much of "Progress of the Species," as handled in these
times of ours; nor do I think you would care to hear much about it. The talk
on that subject is too often of the most extravagant, confused sort. Yet I may
say, the fact itself seems certain enough; nay we can trace out the inevitable
necessity of it in the nature of things. Every man, as I have stated
somewhere, is not only a learner but a doer: he learns with the mind given
him what has been; but with the same mind he discovers farther, he invents
and devises somewhat of his own. Absolutely without originality there is no
man. No man whatever believes, or can believe, exactly what his
grandfather believed: he enlarges somewhat, by fresh discovery, his view of
the Universe, and consequently his Theorem of the Universe,—which is an
infinite Universe, and can never be embraced wholly or finally by any view
or Theorem, in any conceivable enlargement: he enlarges somewhat, I say;
finds somewhat that was credible to his grandfather incredible to him, false
to him, inconsistent with some new thing he has discovered or observed. It
is the history of every man; and in the history of Mankind we see it summed
up into great historical amounts,—revolutions, new epochs. Dante's
Mountain of Purgatory does not stand "in the ocean of the other
Hemisphere," when Columbus has once sailed thither! Men find no such
thing extant in the other Hemisphere. It is not there. It must cease to be
believed to be there. So with all beliefs whatsoever in this world,—all
Systems of Belief, and Systems of Practice that spring from these.

If we add now the melancholy fact, that when Belief waxes uncertain,
Practice too becomes unsound, and errors, injustices and miseries
everywhere more and more prevail, we shall see material enough for
revolution. At all turns, a man who will do faithfully, needs to believe
firmly. If he have to ask at every turn the world's suffrage; if he cannot
dispense with the world's suffrage, and make his own suffrage serve, he is a
poor eye-servant; the work committed to him will be misdone. Every such
man is a daily contributor to the inevitable downfall. Whatsoever work he
does, dishonestly, with an eye to the outward look of it, is a new offence,
parent of new misery to somebody or other. Offences accumulate till they
become insupportable; and are then violently burst through, cleared off as
by explosion. Dante's sublime Catholicism, incredible now in theory, and
defaced still worse by faithless, doubting and dishonest practice, has to be
torn asunder by a Luther, Shakspeare's noble Feudalism, as beautiful as it
once looked and was, has to end in a French Revolution. The accumulation
of offences is, as we say, too literally exploded, blasted asunder
volcanically; and there are long troublous periods, before matters come to a
settlement again.
Surely it were mournful enough to look only at this face of the matter,
and find in all human opinions and arrangements merely the fact that they
were uncertain, temporary, subject to the law of death! At bottom, it is not
so: all death, here too we find, is but of the body, not of the essence or soul;
all destruction, by violent revolution or howsoever it be, is but new creation
on a wider scale. Odinism was Valor; Christianism was Humility, a nobler
kind of Valor. No thought that ever dwelt honestly as true in the heart of
man but was an honest insight into God's truth on man's part, and has an
essential truth in it which endures through all changes, an everlasting
possession for us all. And, on the other hand, what a melancholy notion is
that, which has to represent all men, in all countries and times except our
own, as having spent their life in blind condemnable error, mere lost
Pagans, Scandinavians, Mahometans, only that we might have the true
ultimate knowledge! All generations of men were lost and wrong, only that
this present little section of a generation might be saved and right. They all
marched forward there, all generations since the beginning of the world,
like the Russian soldiers into the ditch of Schweidnitz Fort, only to fill up
the ditch with their dead bodies, that we might march over and take the
place! It is an incredible hypothesis.

Such incredible hypothesis we have seen maintained with fierce
emphasis; and this or the other poor individual man, with his sect of
individual men, marching as over the dead bodies of all men, towards sure
victory but when he too, with his hypothesis and ultimate infallible credo,
sank into the ditch, and became a dead body, what was to be said?—Withal,
it is an important fact in the nature of man, that he tends to reckon his own
insight as final, and goes upon it as such. He will always do it, I suppose, in
one or the other way; but it must be in some wider, wiser way than this. Are
not all true men that live, or that ever lived, soldiers of the same army,
enlisted, under Heaven's captaincy, to do battle against the same enemy, the
empire of Darkness and Wrong? Why should we misknow one another,
fight not against the enemy but against ourselves, from mere difference of
uniform? All uniforms shall be good, so they hold in them true valiant men.
All fashions of arms, the Arab turban and swift scimetar, Thor's strong
hammer smiting down Jotuns, shall be welcome. Luther's battle-voice,
Dante's march-melody, all genuine things are with us, not against us. We are
all under one Captain, soldiers of the same host.—Let us now look a little at
this Luther's fighting; what kind of battle it was, and how he comported
himself in it. Luther too was of our spiritual Heroes; a Prophet to his
country and time.
As introductory to the whole, a remark about Idolatry will perhaps be in
place here. One of Mahomet's characteristics, which indeed belongs to all
Prophets, is unlimited implacable zeal against Idolatry. It is the grand theme
of Prophets: Idolatry, the worshipping of dead Idols as the Divinity, is a
thing they cannot away with, but have to denounce continually, and brand
with inexpiable reprobation; it is the chief of all the sins they see done
under the sun. This is worth noting. We will not enter here into the
theological question about Idolatry. Idol is Eidolon, a thing seen, a symbol.
It is not God, but a Symbol of God; and perhaps one may question whether
any the most benighted mortal ever took it for more than a Symbol. I fancy,
he did not think that the poor image his own hands had made was God; but
that God was emblemed by it, that God was in it some way or other. And
now in this sense, one may ask, Is not all worship whatsoever a worship by
Symbols, by eidola, or things seen? Whether seen, rendered visible as an
image or picture to the bodily eye; or visible only to the inward eye, to the
imagination, to the intellect: this makes a superficial, but no substantial
difference. It is still a Thing Seen, significant of Godhead; an Idol. The

most rigorous Puritan has his Confession of Faith, and intellectual
Representation of Divine things, and worships thereby; thereby is worship
first made possible for him. All creeds, liturgies, religious forms,
conceptions that fitly invest religious feelings, are in this sense eidola,
things seen. All worship whatsoever must proceed by Symbols, by Idols:—
we may say, all Idolatry is comparative, and the worst Idolatry is only more
idolatrous.
Where, then, lies the evil of it? Some fatal evil must lie in it, or earnest
prophetic men would not on all hands so reprobate it. Why is Idolatry so
hateful to Prophets? It seems to me as if, in the worship of those poor
wooden symbols, the thing that had chiefly provoked the Prophet, and filled
his inmost soul with indignation and aversion, was not exactly what
suggested itself to his own thought, and came out of him in words to others,
as the thing. The rudest heathen that worshipped Canopus, or the Caabah
Black-Stone, he, as we saw, was superior to the horse that worshipped
nothing at all! Nay there was a kind of lasting merit in that poor act of his;
analogous to what is still meritorious in Poets: recognition of a certain
endless divine beauty and significance in stars and all natural objects
whatsoever. Why should the Prophet so mercilessly condemn him? The
poorest mortal worshipping his Fetish, while his heart is full of it, may be
an object of pity, of contempt and avoidance, if you will; but cannot surely
be an object of hatred. Let his heart be honestly full of it, the whole space of
his dark narrow mind illuminated thereby; in one word, let him entirely
believe in his Fetish,—it will then be, I should say, if not well with him, yet
as well as it can readily be made to be, and you will leave him alone,
unmolested there.
But here enters the fatal circumstance of Idolatry, that, in the era of the
Prophets, no man's mind is any longer honestly filled with his Idol or
Symbol. Before the Prophet can arise who, seeing through it, knows it to be
mere wood, many men must have begun dimly to doubt that it was little
more. Condemnable Idolatry is insincere Idolatry. Doubt has eaten out the
heart of it: a human soul is seen clinging spasmodically to an Ark of the
Covenant, which it half feels now to have become a Phantasm. This is one
of the balefulest sights. Souls are no longer filled with their Fetish; but only
pretend to be filled, and would fain make themselves feel that they are
filled. "You do not believe," said Coleridge; "you only believe that you
believe." It is the final scene in all kinds of Worship and Symbolism; the

sure symptom that death is now nigh. It is equivalent to what we call
Formulism, and Worship of Formulas, in these days of ours. No more
immoral act can be done by a human creature; for it is the beginning of all
immorality, or rather it is the impossibility henceforth of any morality
whatsoever: the innermost moral soul is paralyzed thereby, cast into fatal
magnetic sleep! Men are no longer sincere men. I do not wonder that the
earnest man denounces this, brands it, prosecutes it with inextinguishable
aversion. He and it, all good and it, are at death-feud. Blamable Idolatry is
Cant, and even what one may call Sincere-Cant. Sincere-Cant: that is worth
thinking of! Every sort of Worship ends with this phasis.
I find Luther to have been a Breaker of Idols, no less than any other
Prophet. The wooden gods of the Koreish, made of timber and bees-wax,
were not more hateful to Mahomet than Tetzel's Pardons of Sin, made of
sheepskin and ink, were to Luther. It is the property of every Hero, in every
time, in every place and situation, that he come back to reality; that he stand
upon things, and not shows of things. According as he loves, and venerates,
articulately or with deep speechless thought, the awful realities of things, so
will the hollow shows of things, however regular, decorous, accredited by
Koreishes or Conclaves, be intolerable and detestable to him. Protestantism,
too, is the work of a Prophet: the prophet-work of that sixteenth century.
The first stroke of honest demolition to an ancient thing grown false and
idolatrous; preparatory afar off to a new thing, which shall be true, and
authentically divine!
At first view it might seem as if Protestantism were entirely destructive
to this that we call Hero-worship, and represent as the basis of all possible
good, religious or social, for mankind. One often hears it said that
Protestantism introduced a new era, radically different from any the world
had ever seen before: the era of "private judgment," as they call it. By this
revolt against the Pope, every man became his own Pope; and learnt, among
other things, that he must never trust any Pope, or spiritual Hero-captain,
any more! Whereby, is not spiritual union, all hierarchy and subordination
among men, henceforth an impossibility? So we hear it said.—Now I need
not deny that Protestantism was a revolt against spiritual sovereignties,
Popes and much else. Nay I will grant that English Puritanism, revolt
against earthly sovereignties, was the second act of it; that the enormous
French Revolution itself was the third act, whereby all sovereignties earthly
and spiritual were, as might seem, abolished or made sure of abolition.

Protestantism is the grand root from which our whole subsequent European
History branches out. For the spiritual will always body itself forth in the
temporal history of men; the spiritual is the beginning of the temporal. And
now, sure enough, the cry is everywhere for Liberty and Equality,
Independence and so forth; instead of Kings, Ballot-boxes and Electoral
suffrages: it seems made out that any Hero-sovereign, or loyal obedience of
men to a man, in things temporal or things spiritual, has passed away
forever from the world. I should despair of the world altogether, if so. One
of my deepest convictions is, that it is not so. Without sovereigns, true
sovereigns, temporal and spiritual, I see nothing possible but an anarchy;
the hatefulest of things. But I find Protestantism, whatever anarchic
democracy it have produced, to be the beginning of new genuine
sovereignty and order. I find it to be a revolt against false sovereigns; the
painful but indispensable first preparative for true sovereigns getting place
among us! This is worth explaining a little.
Let us remark, therefore, in the first place, that this of "private judgment"
is, at bottom, not a new thing in the world, but only new at that epoch of the
world. There is nothing generically new or peculiar in the Reformation; it
was a return to Truth and Reality in opposition to Falsehood and
Semblance, as all kinds of Improvement and genuine Teaching are and have
been. Liberty of private judgment, if we will consider it, must at all times
have existed in the world. Dante had not put out his eyes, or tied shackles
on himself; he was at home in that Catholicism of his, a free-seeing soul in
it,—if many a poor Hogstraten, Tetzel, and Dr. Eck had now become slaves
in it. Liberty of judgment? No iron chain, or outward force of any kind,
could ever compel the soul of a man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own
indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign, and believe there, by
the grace of God alone! The sorriest sophistical Bellarmine, preaching
sightless faith and passive obedience, must first, by some kind of
conviction, have abdicated his right to be convinced. His "private judgment"
indicated that, as the advisablest step he could take. The right of private
judgment will subsist, in full force, wherever true men subsist. A true man
believes with his whole judgment, with all the illumination and discernment
that is in him, and has always so believed. A false man, only struggling to
"believe that he believes," will naturally manage it in some other way.
Protestantism said to this latter, Woe! and to the former, Well done! At
bottom, it was no new saying; it was a return to all old sayings that ever had

been said. Be genuine, be sincere: that was, once more, the meaning of it.
Mahomet believed with his whole mind; Odin with his whole mind,—he,
and all true Followers of Odinism. They, by their private judgment, had
"judged "—so.
And now I venture to assert, that the exercise of private judgment,
faithfully gone about, does by no means necessarily end in selfish
independence, isolation; but rather ends necessarily in the opposite of that.
It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half-
belief and untruth that make it. A man protesting against error is on the way
towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth. There is no
communion possible among men who believe only in hearsays. The heart of
each is lying dead; has no power of sympathy even with things,—or he
would believe them and not hearsays. No sympathy even with things; how
much less with his fellow-men! He cannot unite with men; he is an anarchic
man. Only in a world of sincere men is unity possible;—and there, in the
long-run, it is as good as certain.
For observe one thing, a thing too often left out of view, or rather
altogether lost sight of in this controversy: That it is not necessary a man
should himself have discovered the truth he is to believe in, and never so
sincerely to believe in. A Great Man, we said, was always sincere, as the
first condition of him. But a man need not be great in order to be sincere;
that is not the necessity of Nature and all Time, but only of certain corrupt
unfortunate epochs of Time. A man can believe, and make his own, in the
most genuine way, what he has received from another;—and with boundless
gratitude to that other! The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes
it for himself, not for another. Every son of Adam can become a sincere
man, an original man, in this sense; no mortal is doomed to be an insincere
man. Whole ages, what we call ages of Faith, are original; all men in them,
or the most of men in them, sincere. These are the great and fruitful ages:
every worker, in all spheres, is a worker not on semblance but on substance;
every work issues in a result: the general sum of such work is great; for all
of it, as genuine, tends towards one goal; all of it is additive, none of it
subtractive. There is true union, true kingship, loyalty, all true and blessed
things, so far as the poor Earth can produce blessedness for men.

Hero-worship? Ah me, that a man be self-subsistent, original, true, or
what we call it, is surely the farthest in the world from indisposing him to
reverence and believe other men's truth! It only disposes, necessitates and
invincibly compels him to disbelieve other men's dead formulas, hearsays
and untruths. A man embraces truth with his eyes open, and because his
eyes are open: does he need to shut them before he can love his Teacher of
truth? He alone can love, with a right gratitude and genuine loyalty of soul,
the Hero-Teacher who has delivered him out of darkness into light. Is not
such a one a true Hero and Serpent-queller; worthy of all reverence! The
black monster, Falsehood, our one enemy in this world, lies prostrate by his
valor; it was he that conquered the world for us!—See, accordingly, was not
Luther himself reverenced as a true Pope, or Spiritual Father, being verily
such? Napoleon, from amid boundless revolt of Sansculottism, became a
King. Hero-worship never dies, nor can die. Loyalty and Sovereignty are
everlasting in the world:—and there is this in them, that they are grounded
not on garnitures and semblances, but on realities and sincerities. Not by
shutting your eyes, your "private judgment;" no, but by opening them, and
by having something to see! Luther's message was deposition and abolition
to all false Popes and Potentates, but life and strength, though afar off, to
new genuine ones.
All this of Liberty and Equality, Electoral suffrages, Independence and so
forth, we will take, therefore, to be a temporary phenomenon, by no means
a final one. Though likely to last a long time, with sad enough
embroilments for us all, we must welcome it, as the penalty of sins that are
past, the pledge of inestimable benefits that are coming. In all ways, it
behooved men to quit simulacra and return to fact; cost what it might, that
did behoove to be done. With spurious Popes, and Believers having no
private judgment,—quacks pretending to command over dupes,—what can
you do? Misery and mischief only. You cannot make an association out of
insincere men; you cannot build an edifice except by plummet and level,—
at right-angles to one another! In all this wild revolutionary work, from
Protestantism downwards, I see the blessedest result preparing itself: not
abolition of Hero-worship, but rather what I would call a whole World of
Heroes. If Hero mean sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero?
A world all sincere, a believing world: the like has been; the like will again
be,—cannot help being. That were the right sort of Worshippers for Heroes:

never could the truly Better be so reverenced as where all were True and
Good!—But we must hasten to Luther and his Life.
Luther's birthplace was Eisleben in Saxony; he came into the world there
on the 10th of November, 1483. It was an accident that gave this honor to
Eisleben. His parents, poor mine-laborers in a village of that region, named
Mohra, had gone to the Eisleben Winter-Fair: in the tumult of this scene the
Frau Luther was taken with travail, found refuge in some poor house there,
and the boy she bore was named MARTIN LUTHER. Strange enough to
reflect upon it. This poor Frau Luther, she had gone with her husband to
make her small merchandisings; perhaps to sell the lock of yarn she had
been spinning, to buy the small winter-necessaries for her narrow hut or
household; in the whole world, that day, there was not a more entirely
unimportant-looking pair of people than this Miner and his Wife. And yet
what were all Emperors, Popes and Potentates, in comparison? There was
born here, once more, a Mighty Man; whose light was to flame as the
beacon over long centuries and epochs of the world; the whole world and its
history was waiting for this man. It is strange, it is great. It leads us back to
another Birth-hour, in a still meaner environment, Eighteen Hundred years
ago,—of which it is fit that we say nothing, that we think only in silence;
for what words are there! The Age of Miracles past? The Age of Miracles is
forever here—!
I find it altogether suitable to Luther's function in this Earth, and
doubtless wisely ordered to that end by the Providence presiding over him
and us and all things, that he was born poor, and brought up poor, one of the
poorest of men. He had to beg, as the school-children in those times did;
singing for alms and bread, from door to door. Hardship, rigorous Necessity
was the poor boy's companion; no man nor no thing would put on a false
face to flatter Martin Luther. Among things, not among the shows of things,
had he to grow. A boy of rude figure, yet with weak health, with his large
greedy soul, full of all faculty and sensibility, he suffered greatly. But it was
his task to get acquainted with realities, and keep acquainted with them, at
whatever cost: his task was to bring the whole world back to reality, for it
had dwelt too long with semblance! A youth nursed up in wintry
whirlwinds, in desolate darkness and difficulty, that he may step forth at last
from his stormy Scandinavia, strong as a true man, as a god: a Christian
Odin,—a right Thor once more, with his thunder-hammer, to smite asunder
ugly enough Jotuns and Giant-monsters!

Perhaps the turning incident of his life, we may fancy, was that death of
his friend Alexis, by lightning, at the gate of Erfurt. Luther had struggled up
through boyhood, better and worse; displaying, in spite of all hindrances,
the largest intellect, eager to learn: his father judging doubtless that he
might promote himself in the world, set him upon the study of Law. This
was the path to rise; Luther, with little will in it either way, had consented:
he was now nineteen years of age. Alexis and he had been to see the old
Luther people at Mansfeldt; were got back again near Erfurt, when a
thunder-storm came on; the bolt struck Alexis, he fell dead at Luther's feet.
What is this Life of ours?—gone in a moment, burnt up like a scroll, into
the blank Eternity! What are all earthly preferments, Chancellorships,
Kingships? They lie shrunk together—there! The Earth has opened on
them; in a moment they are not, and Eternity is. Luther, struck to the heart,
determined to devote himself to God and God's service alone. In spite of all
dissuasions from his father and others, he became a Monk in the Augustine
Convent at Erfurt.
This was probably the first light-point in the history of Luther, his purer
will now first decisively uttering itself; but, for the present, it was still as
one light-point in an element all of darkness. He says he was a pious monk,
ich bin ein frommer Monch gewesen; faithfully, painfully struggling to work
out the truth of this high act of his; but it was to little purpose. His misery
had not lessened; had rather, as it were, increased into infinitude. The
drudgeries he had to do, as novice in his Convent, all sorts of slave-work,
were not his grievance: the deep earnest soul of the man had fallen into all
manner of black scruples, dubitations; he believed himself likely to die
soon, and far worse than die. One hears with a new interest for poor Luther
that, at this time, he lived in terror of the unspeakable misery; fancied that
he was doomed to eternal reprobation. Was it not the humble sincere nature
of the man? What was he, that he should be raised to Heaven! He that had
known only misery, and mean slavery: the news was too blessed to be
credible. It could not become clear to him how, by fasts, vigils, formalities
and mass-work, a man's soul could be saved. He fell into the blackest
wretchedness; had to wander staggering as on the verge of bottomless
Despair.
It must have been a most blessed discovery, that of an old Latin Bible
which he found in the Erfurt Library about this time. He had never seen the
Book before. It taught him another lesson than that of fasts and vigils. A

brother monk too, of pious experience, was helpful. Luther learned now that
a man was saved not by singing masses, but by the infinite grace of God: a
more credible hypothesis. He gradually got himself founded, as on the rock.
No wonder he should venerate the Bible, which had brought this blessed
help to him. He prized it as the Word of the Highest must be prized by such
a man. He determined to hold by that; as through life and to death he firmly
did.
This, then, is his deliverance from darkness, his final triumph over
darkness, what we call his conversion; for himself the most important of all
epochs. That he should now grow daily in peace and clearness; that,
unfolding now the great talents and virtues implanted in him, he should rise
to importance in his Convent, in his country, and be found more and more
useful in all honest business of life, is a natural result. He was sent on
missions by his Augustine Order, as a man of talent and fidelity fit to do
their business well: the Elector of Saxony, Friedrich, named the Wise, a
truly wise and just prince, had cast his eye on him as a valuable person;
made him Professor in his new University of Wittenberg, Preacher too at
Wittenberg; in both which capacities, as in all duties he did, this Luther, in
the peaceable sphere of common life, was gaining more and more esteem
with all good men.
It was in his twenty-seventh year that he first saw Rome; being sent
thither, as I said, on mission from his Convent. Pope Julius the Second, and
what was going on at Rome, must have filled the mind of Luther with
amazement. He had come as to the Sacred City, throne of God's High-priest
on Earth; and he found it—what we know! Many thoughts it must have
given the man; many which we have no record of, which perhaps he did not
himself know how to utter. This Rome, this scene of false priests, clothed
not in the beauty of holiness, but in far other vesture, is false: but what is it
to Luther? A mean man he, how shall he reform a world? That was far from
his thoughts. A humble, solitary man, why should he at all meddle with the
world? It was the task of quite higher men than he. His business was to
guide his own footsteps wisely through the world. Let him do his own
obscure duty in it well; the rest, horrible and dismal as it looks, is in God's
hand, not in his.
It is curious to reflect what might have been the issue, had Roman Popery
happened to pass this Luther by; to go on in its great wasteful orbit, and not

come athwart his little path, and force him to assault it! Conceivable enough
that, in this case, he might have held his peace about the abuses of Rome;
left Providence, and God on high, to deal with them! A modest quiet man;
not prompt he to attack irreverently persons in authority. His clear task, as I
say, was to do his own duty; to walk wisely in this world of confused
wickedness, and save his own soul alive. But the Roman High-priesthood
did come athwart him: afar off at Wittenberg he, Luther, could not get lived
in honesty for it; he remonstrated, resisted, came to extremity; was struck
at, struck again, and so it came to wager of battle between them! This is
worth attending to in Luther's history. Perhaps no man of so humble,
peaceable a disposition ever filled the world with contention. We cannot but
see that he would have loved privacy, quiet diligence in the shade; that it
was against his will he ever became a notoriety. Notoriety: what would that
do for him? The goal of his march through this world was the Infinite
Heaven; an indubitable goal for him: in a few years, he should either have
attained that, or lost it forever! We will say nothing at all, I think, of that
sorrowfulest of theories, of its being some mean shopkeeper grudge, of the
Augustine Monk against the Dominican, that first kindled the wrath of
Luther, and produced the Protestant Reformation. We will say to the people
who maintain it, if indeed any such exist now: Get first into the sphere of
thought by which it is so much as possible to judge of Luther, or of any man
like Luther, otherwise than distractedly; we may then begin arguing with
you.
The Monk Tetzel, sent out carelessly in the way of trade, by Leo Tenth,—
who merely wanted to raise a little money, and for the rest seems to have
been a Pagan rather than a Christian, so far as he was anything,—arrived at
Wittenberg, and drove his scandalous trade there. Luther's flock bought
Indulgences; in the confessional of his Church, people pleaded to him that
they had already got their sins pardoned. Luther, if he would not be found
wanting at his own post, a false sluggard and coward at the very centre of
the little space of ground that was his own and no other man's, had to step
forth against Indulgences, and declare aloud that they were a futility and
sorrowful mockery, that no man's sins could be pardoned by them. It was
the beginning of the whole Reformation. We know how it went; forward
from this first public challenge of Tetzel, on the last day of October, 1517,
through remonstrance and argument;—spreading ever wider, rising ever
higher; till it became unquenchable, and enveloped all the world. Luther's

heart's desire was to have this grief and other griefs amended; his thought
was still far other than that of introducing separation in the Church, or
revolting against the Pope, Father of Christendom.—The elegant Pagan
Pope cared little about this Monk and his doctrines; wished, however, to
have done with the noise of him: in a space of some three years, having
tried various softer methods, he thought good to end it by fire. He dooms
the Monk's writings to be burnt by the hangman, and his body to be sent
bound to Rome,—probably for a similar purpose. It was the way they had
ended with Huss, with Jerome, the century before. A short argument, fire.
Poor Huss: he came to that Constance Council, with all imaginable
promises and safe-conducts; an earnest, not rebellious kind of man: they
laid him instantly in a stone dungeon "three feet wide, six feet high, seven
feet long;" burnt the true voice of him out of this world; choked it in smoke
and fire. That was not well done!
I, for one, pardon Luther for now altogether revolting against the Pope.
The elegant Pagan, by this fire-decree of his, had kindled into noble just
wrath the bravest heart then living in this world. The bravest, if also one of
the humblest, peaceablest; it was now kindled. These words of mine, words
of truth and soberness, aiming faithfully, as human inability would allow, to
promote God's truth on Earth, and save men's souls, you, God's vicegerent
on earth, answer them by the hangman and fire? You will burn me and
them, for answer to the God's-message they strove to bring you? You are
not God's vicegerent; you are another's than his, I think! I take your Bull, as
an emparchmented Lie, and burn it. You will do what you see good next:
this is what I do.—It was on the 10th of December, 1520, three years after
the beginning of the business, that Luther, "with a great concourse of
people," took this indignant step of burning the Pope's fire-decree "at the
Elster-Gate of Wittenberg." Wittenberg looked on "with shoutings;" the
whole world was looking on. The Pope should not have provoked that
"shout"! It was the shout of the awakening of nations. The quiet German
heart, modest, patient of much, had at length got more than it could bear.
Formulism, Pagan Popeism, and other Falsehood and corrupt Semblance
had ruled long enough: and here once more was a man found who durst tell
all men that God's-world stood not on semblances but on realities; that Life
was a truth, and not a lie!
At bottom, as was said above, we are to consider Luther as a Prophet
Idol-breaker; a bringer-back of men to reality. It is the function of great men

and teachers. Mahomet said, These idols of yours are wood; you put wax
and oil on them, the flies stick on them: they are not God, I tell you, they
are black wood! Luther said to the Pope, This thing of yours that you call a
Pardon of Sins, it is a bit of rag-paper with ink. It is nothing else; it, and so
much like it, is nothing else. God alone can pardon sins. Popeship, spiritual
Fatherhood of God's Church, is that a vain semblance, of cloth and
parchment? It is an awful fact. God's Church is not a semblance, Heaven
and Hell are not semblances. I stand on this, since you drive me to it.
Standing on this, I a poor German Monk am stronger than you all. I stand
solitary, friendless, but on God's Truth; you with your tiaras, triple-hats,
with your treasuries and armories, thunders spiritual and temporal, stand on
the Devil's Lie, and are not so strong—!
The Diet of Worms, Luther's appearance there on the 17th of April, 1521,
may be considered as the greatest scene in Modern European History; the
point, indeed, from which the whole subsequent history of civilization takes
its rise. After multiplied negotiations, disputations, it had come to this. The
young Emperor Charles Fifth, with all the Princes of Germany, Papal
nuncios, dignitaries spiritual and temporal, are assembled there: Luther is to
appear and answer for himself, whether he will recant or not. The world's
pomp and power sits there on this hand: on that, stands up for God's Truth,
one man, the poor miner Hans Luther's Son. Friends had reminded him of
Huss, advised him not to go; he would not be advised. A large company of
friends rode out to meet him, with still more earnest warnings; he answered,
"Were there as many Devils in Worms as there are roof-tiles, I would on."
The people, on the morrow, as he went to the Hall of the Diet, crowded the
windows and house-tops, some of them calling out to him, in solemn words,
not to recant: "Whosoever denieth me before men!" they cried to him,—as
in a kind of solemn petition and adjuration. Was it not in reality our petition
too, the petition of the whole world, lying in dark bondage of soul,
paralyzed under a black spectral Nightmare and triple-hatted Chimera,
calling itself Father in God, and what not: "Free us; it rests with thee; desert
us not!"
Luther did not desert us. His speech, of two hours, distinguished itself by
its respectful, wise and honest tone; submissive to whatsoever could
lawfully claim submission, not submissive to any more than that. His
writings, he said, were partly his own, partly derived from the Word of God.
As to what was his own, human infirmity entered into it; unguarded anger,

blindness, many things doubtless which it were a blessing for him could he
abolish altogether. But as to what stood on sound truth and the Word of
God, he could not recant it. How could he? "Confute me," he concluded,
"by proofs of Scripture, or else by plain just arguments: I cannot recant
otherwise. For it is neither safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience.
Here stand I; I can do no other: God assist me!"—It is, as we say, the
greatest moment in the Modern History of Men. English Puritanism,
England and its Parliaments, Americas, and vast work these two centuries;
French Revolution, Europe and its work everywhere at present: the germ of
it all lay there: had Luther in that moment done other, it had all been
otherwise! The European World was asking him: Am I to sink ever lower
into falsehood, stagnant putrescence, loathsome accursed death; or, with
whatever paroxysm, to cast the falsehoods out of me, and be cured and live?
—
Great wars, contentions and disunion followed out of this Reformation;
which last down to our day, and are yet far from ended. Great talk and
crimination has been made about these. They are lamentable, undeniable;
but after all, what has Luther or his cause to do with them? It seems strange
reasoning to charge the Reformation with all this. When Hercules turned the
purifying river into King Augeas's stables, I have no doubt the confusion
that resulted was considerable all around: but I think it was not Hercules's
blame; it was some other's blame! The Reformation might bring what
results it liked when it came, but the Reformation simply could not help
coming. To all Popes and Popes' advocates, expostulating, lamenting and
accusing, the answer of the world is: Once for all, your Popehood has
become untrue. No matter how good it was, how good you say it is, we
cannot believe it; the light of our whole mind, given us to walk by from
Heaven above, finds it henceforth a thing unbelievable. We will not believe
it, we will not try to believe it,—we dare not! The thing is untrue; we were
traitors against the Giver of all Truth, if we durst pretend to think it true.
Away with it; let whatsoever likes come in the place of it: with it we can
have no farther trade!—Luther and his Protestantism is not responsible for
wars; the false Simulacra that forced him to protest, they are responsible.
Luther did what every man that God has made has not only the right, but
lies under the sacred duty, to do: answered a Falsehood when it questioned
him, Dost thou believe me?—No!—At what cost soever, without counting
of costs, this thing behooved to be done. Union, organization spiritual and

material, a far nobler than any Popedom or Feudalism in their truest days, I
never doubt, is coming for the world; sure to come. But on Fact alone, not
on Semblance and Simulacrum, will it be able either to come, or to stand
when come. With union grounded on falsehood, and ordering us to speak
and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is
peaceable, the noisome grave is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not
a dead one!
And yet, in prizing justly the indispensable blessings of the New, let us
not be unjust to the Old. The Old was true, if it no longer is. In Dante's days
it needed no sophistry, self-blinding or other dishonesty, to get itself
reckoned true. It was good then; nay there is in the soul of it a deathless
good. The cry of "No Popery" is foolish enough in these days. The
speculation that Popery is on the increase, building new chapels and so
forth, may pass for one of the idlest ever started. Very curious: to count up a
few Popish chapels, listen to a few Protestant logic-choppings,—to much
dull-droning drowsy inanity that still calls itself Protestant, and say: See,
Protestantism is dead; Popeism is more alive than it, will be alive after it!—
Drowsy inanities, not a few, that call themselves Protestant are dead; but
Protestantism has not died yet, that I hear of! Protestantism, if we will look,
has in these days produced its Goethe, its Napoleon; German Literature and
the French Revolution; rather considerable signs of life! Nay, at bottom,
what else is alive but Protestantism? The life of most else that one meets is
a galvanic one merely,—not a pleasant, not a lasting sort of life!
Popery can build new chapels; welcome to do so, to all lengths. Popery
cannot come back, any more than Paganism can,—which also still lingers in
some countries. But, indeed, it is with these things, as with the ebbing of the
sea: you look at the waves oscillating hither, thither on the beach; for
minutes you cannot tell how it is going; look in half an hour where it is,—
look in half a century where your Popehood is! Alas, would there were no
greater danger to our Europe than the poor old Pope's revival! Thor may as
soon try to revive.—And withal this oscillation has a meaning. The poor old
Popehood will not die away entirely, as Thor has done, for some time yet;
nor ought it. We may say, the Old never dies till this happen, Till all the soul
of good that was in it have got itself transfused into the practical New.
While a good work remains capable of being done by the Romish form; or,
what is inclusive of all, while a pious life remains capable of being led by it,
just so long, if we consider, will this or the other human soul adopt it, go

about as a living witness of it. So long it will obtrude itself on the eye of us
who reject it, till we in our practice too have appropriated whatsoever of
truth was in it. Then, but also not till then, it will have no charm more for
any man. It lasts here for a purpose. Let it last as long as it can.—
Of Luther I will add now, in reference to all these wars and bloodshed,
the noticeable fact that none of them began so long as he continued living.
The controversy did not get to fighting so long as he was there. To me it is
proof of his greatness in all senses, this fact. How seldom do we find a man
that has stirred up some vast commotion, who does not himself perish,
swept away in it! Such is the usual course of revolutionists. Luther
continued, in a good degree, sovereign of this greatest revolution; all
Protestants, of what rank or function soever, looking much to him for
guidance: and he held it peaceable, continued firm at the centre of it. A man
to do this must have a kingly faculty: he must have the gift to discern at all
turns where the true heart of the matter lies, and to plant himself
courageously on that, as a strong true man, that other true men may rally
round him there. He will not continue leader of men otherwise. Luther's
clear deep force of judgment, his force of all sorts, of silence, of tolerance
and moderation, among others, are very notable in these circumstances.
Tolerance, I say; a very genuine kind of tolerance: he distinguishes what
is essential, and what is not; the unessential may go very much as it will. A
complaint comes to him that such and such a Reformed Preacher "will not
preach without a cassock." Well, answers Luther, what harm will a cassock
do the man? "Let him have a cassock to preach in; let him have three
cassocks if he find benefit in them!" His conduct in the matter of Karlstadt's
wild image-breaking; of the Anabaptists; of the Peasants' War, shows a
noble strength, very different from spasmodic violence. With sure prompt
insight he discriminates what is what: a strong just man, he speaks forth
what is the wise course, and all men follow him in that. Luther's Written
Works give similar testimony of him. The dialect of these speculations is
now grown obsolete for us; but one still reads them with a singular
attraction. And indeed the mere grammatical diction is still legible enough;
Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest: his dialect became the
language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty
Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in
no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a
man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged

sterling sense and strength. He dashes out illumination from him; his
smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter.
Good humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness and depth: this man could
have been a Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write one. I call
him a great Thinker; as indeed his greatness of heart already betokens that.
Richter says of Luther's words, "His words are half-battles." They may be
called so. The essential quality of him was, that he could fight and conquer;
that he was a right piece of human Valor. No more valiant man, no mortal
heart to be called braver, that one has record of, ever lived in that Teutonic
Kindred, whose character is valor. His defiance of the "Devils" in Worms
was not a mere boast, as the like might be if now spoken. It was a faith of
Luther's that there were Devils, spiritual denizens of the Pit, continually
besetting men. Many times, in his writings, this turns up; and a most small
sneer has been grounded on it by some. In the room of the Wartburg where
he sat translating the Bible, they still show you a black spot on the wall; the
strange memorial of one of these conflicts. Luther sat translating one of the
Psalms; he was worn down with long labor, with sickness, abstinence from
food: there rose before him some hideous indefinable Image, which he took
for the Evil One, to forbid his work: Luther started up, with fiend-defiance;
flung his inkstand at the spectre, and it disappeared! The spot still remains
there; a curious monument of several things. Any apothecary's apprentice
can now tell us what we are to think of this apparition, in a scientific sense:
but the man's heart that dare rise defiant, face to face, against Hell itself, can
give no higher proof of fearlessness. The thing he will quail before exists
not on this Earth or under it.—Fearless enough! "The Devil is aware,"
writes he on one occasion, "that this does not proceed out of fear in me. I
have seen and defied innumerable Devils. Duke George," of Leipzig, a
great enemy of his, "Duke George is not equal to one Devil,"—far short of a
Devil! "If I had business at Leipzig, I would ride into Leipzig, though it
rained Duke Georges for nine days running." What a reservoir of Dukes to
ride into—!
At the same time, they err greatly who imagine that this man's courage
was ferocity, mere coarse disobedient obstinacy and savagery, as many do.
Far from that. There may be an absence of fear which arises from the
absence of thought or affection, from the presence of hatred and stupid fury.
We do not value the courage of the tiger highly! With Luther it was far
otherwise; no accusation could be more unjust than this of mere ferocious

violence brought against him. A most gentle heart withal, full of pity and
love, as indeed the truly valiant heart ever is. The tiger before a stronger foe
—flies: the tiger is not what we call valiant, only fierce and cruel. I know
few things more touching than those soft breathings of affection, soft as a
child's or a mother's, in this great wild heart of Luther. So honest,
unadulterated with any cant; homely, rude in their utterance; pure as water
welling from the rock. What, in fact, was all that down-pressed mood of
despair and reprobation, which we saw in his youth, but the outcome of pre-
eminent thoughtful gentleness, affections too keen and fine? It is the course
such men as the poor Poet Cowper fall into. Luther to a slight observer
might have seemed a timid, weak man; modesty, affectionate shrinking
tenderness the chief distinction of him. It is a noble valor which is roused in
a heart like this, once stirred up into defiance, all kindled into a heavenly
blaze.
In Luther's Table-Talk, a posthumous Book of anecdotes and sayings
collected by his friends, the most interesting now of all the Books
proceeding from him, we have many beautiful unconscious displays of the
man, and what sort of nature he had. His behavior at the death-bed of his
little Daughter, so still, so great and loving, is among the most affecting
things. He is resigned that his little Magdalene should die, yet longs
inexpressibly that she might live;—follows, in awe-struck thought, the
flight of her little soul through those unknown realms. Awe-struck; most
heartfelt, we can see; and sincere,—for after all dogmatic creeds and
articles, he feels what nothing it is that we know, or can know: His little
Magdalene shall be with God, as God wills; for Luther too that is all; Islam
is all.
Once, he looks out from his solitary Patmos, the Castle of Coburg, in the
middle of the night: The great vault of Immensity, long flights of clouds
sailing through it,—dumb, gaunt, huge:—who supports all that? "None ever
saw the pillars of it; yet it is supported." God supports it. We must know
that God is great, that God is good; and trust, where we cannot see.—
Returning home from Leipzig once, he is struck by the beauty of the
harvest-fields: How it stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fair taper stem,
its golden head bent, all rich and waving there,—the meek Earth, at God's
kind bidding, has produced it once again; the bread of man!—In the garden
at Wittenberg one evening at sunset, a little bird has perched for the night:
That little bird, says Luther, above it are the stars and deep Heaven of

worlds; yet it has folded its little wings; gone trustfully to rest there as in its
home: the Maker of it has given it too a home!—Neither are mirthful turns
wanting: there is a great free human heart in this man. The common speech
of him has a rugged nobleness, idiomatic, expressive, genuine; gleams here
and there with beautiful poetic tints. One feels him to be a great brother
man. His love of Music, indeed, is not this, as it were, the summary of all
these affections in him? Many a wild unutterability he spoke forth from him
in the tones of his flute. The Devils fled from his flute, he says. Death-
defiance on the one hand, and such love of music on the other; I could call
these the two opposite poles of a great soul; between these two all great
things had room.
Luther's face is to me expressive of him; in Kranach's best portraits I find
the true Luther. A rude plebeian face; with its huge crag-like brows and
bones, the emblem of rugged energy; at first, almost a repulsive face. Yet in
the eyes especially there is a wild silent sorrow; an unnamable melancholy,
the element of all gentle and fine affections; giving to the rest the true stamp
of nobleness. Laughter was in this Luther, as we said; but tears also were
there. Tears also were appointed him; tears and hard toil. The basis of his
life was Sadness, Earnestness. In his latter days, after all triumphs and
victories, he expresses himself heartily weary of living; he considers that
God alone can and will regulate the course things are taking, and that
perhaps the Day of Judgment is not far. As for him, he longs for one thing:
that God would release him from his labor, and let him depart and be at rest.
They understand little of the man who cite this in discredit of him!—I will
call this Luther a true Great Man; great in intellect, in courage, affection
and integrity; one of our most lovable and precious men. Great, not as a
hewn obelisk; but as an Alpine mountain,—so simple, honest, spontaneous,
not setting up to be great at all; there for quite another purpose than being
great! Ah yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the Heavens;
yet in the clefts of it fountains, green beautiful valleys with flowers! A right
Spiritual Hero and Prophet; once more, a true Son of Nature and Fact, for
whom these centuries, and many that are to come yet, will be thankful to
Heaven.
The most interesting phasis which the Reformation anywhere assumes,
especially for us English, is that of Puritanism. In Luther's own country
Protestantism soon dwindled into a rather barren affair: not a religion or
faith, but rather now a theological jangling of argument, the proper seat of it

not the heart; the essence of it sceptical contention: which indeed has
jangled more and more, down to Voltaireism itself,—through Gustavus-
Adolphus contentions onwards to French-Revolution ones! But in our
Island there arose a Puritanism, which even got itself established as a
Presbyterianism and National Church among the Scotch; which came forth
as a real business of the heart; and has produced in the world very notable
fruit. In some senses, one may say it is the only phasis of Protestantism that
ever got to the rank of being a Faith, a true heart-communication with
Heaven, and of exhibiting itself in History as such. We must spare a few
words for Knox; himself a brave and remarkable man; but still more
important as Chief Priest and Founder, which one may consider him to be,
of the Faith that became Scotland's, New England's, Oliver Cromwell's.
History will have something to say about this, for some time to come!
We may censure Puritanism as we please; and no one of us, I suppose,
but would find it a very rough defective thing. But we, and all men, may
understand that it was a genuine thing; for Nature has adopted it, and it has
grown, and grows. I say sometimes, that all goes by wager-of-battle in this
world; that strength, well understood, is the measure of all worth. Give a
thing time; if it can succeed, it is a right thing. Look now at American
Saxondom; and at that little Fact of the sailing of the Mayflower, two
hundred years ago, from Delft Haven in Holland! Were we of open sense as
the Greeks were, we had found a Poem here; one of Nature's own Poems,
such as she writes in broad facts over great continents. For it was properly
the beginning of America: there were straggling settlers in America before,
some material as of a body was there; but the soul of it was first this. These
poor men, driven out of their own country, not able well to live in Holland,
determine on settling in the New World. Black untamed forests are there,
and wild savage creatures; but not so cruel as Star-chamber hangmen. They
thought the Earth would yield them food, if they tilled honestly; the
everlasting heaven would stretch, there too, overhead; they should be left in
peace, to prepare for Eternity by living well in this world of Time;
worshipping in what they thought the true, not the idolatrous way. They
clubbed their small means together; hired a ship, the little ship Mayflower,
and made ready to set sail.
In Neal's History of the Puritans [Neal (London, 1755), i. 490] is an
account of the ceremony of their departure: solemnity, we might call it
rather, for it was a real act of worship. Their minister went down with them

to the beach, and their brethren whom they were to leave behind; all joined
in solemn prayer, That God would have pity on His poor children, and go
with them into that waste wilderness, for He also had made that, He was
there also as well as here.—Hah! These men, I think, had a work! The weak
thing, weaker than a child, becomes strong one day, if it be a true thing.
Puritanism was only despicable, laughable then; but nobody can manage to
laugh at it now. Puritanism has got weapons and sinews; it has firearms,
war-navies; it has cunning in its ten fingers, strength in its right arm; it can
steer ships, fell forests, remove mountains;—it is one of the strongest things
under this sun at present!
In the history of Scotland, too, I can find properly but one epoch: we may
say, it contains nothing of world-interest at all but this Reformation by
Knox. A poor barren country, full of continual broils, dissensions,
massacrings; a people in the last state of rudeness and destitution; little
better perhaps than Ireland at this day. Hungry fierce barons, not so much as
able to form any arrangement with each other how to divide what they
fleeced from these poor drudges; but obliged, as the Colombian Republics
are at this day, to make of every alteration a revolution; no way of changing
a ministry but by hanging the old ministers on gibbets: this is a historical
spectacle of no very singular significance! "Bravery" enough, I doubt not;
fierce fighting in abundance: but not braver or fiercer than that of their old
Scandinavian Sea-king ancestors; whose exploits we have not found worth
dwelling on! It is a country as yet without a soul: nothing developed in it
but what is rude, external, semi-animal. And now at the Reformation, the
internal life is kindled, as it were, under the ribs of this outward material
death. A cause, the noblest of causes kindles itself, like a beacon set on
high; high as Heaven, yet attainable from Earth;—whereby the meanest
man becomes not a Citizen only, but a Member of Christ's visible Church; a
veritable Hero, if he prove a true man!
Well; this is what I mean by a whole "nation of heroes;" a believing
nation. There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-
created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul! The
like has been seen, we find. The like will be again seen, under wider forms
than the Presbyterian: there can be no lasting good done till then.—
Impossible! say some. Possible? Has it not been, in this world, as a
practiced fact? Did Hero-worship fail in Knox's case? Or are we made of
other clay now? Did the Westminster Confession of Faith add some new

property to the soul of man? God made the soul of man. He did not doom
any soul of man to live as a Hypothesis and Hearsay, in a world filled with
such, and with the fatal work and fruit of such—!
But to return: This that Knox did for his Nation, I say, we may really call
a resurrection as from death. It was not a smooth business; but it was
welcome surely, and cheap at that price, had it been far rougher. On the
whole, cheap at any price!—as life is. The people began to live: they needed
first of all to do that, at what cost and costs soever. Scotch Literature and
Thought, Scotch Industry; James Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert
Burns: I find Knox and the Reformation acting in the heart's core of every
one of these persons and phenomena; I find that without the Reformation
they would not have been. Or what of Scotland? The Puritanism of Scotland
became that of England, of New England. A tumult in the High Church of
Edinburgh spread into a universal battle and struggle over all these realms;
—there came out, after fifty years' struggling, what we all call the "Glorious
Revolution" a Habeas Corpus Act, Free Parliaments, and much else!—
Alas, is it not too true what we said, That many men in the van do always,
like Russian soldiers, march into the ditch of Schweidnitz, and fill it up with
their dead bodies, that the rear may pass over them dry-shod, and gain the
honor? How many earnest rugged Cromwells, Knoxes, poor Peasant
Covenanters, wrestling, battling for very life, in rough miry places, have to
struggle, and suffer, and fall, greatly censured, bemired,—before a beautiful
Revolution of Eighty-eight can step over them in official pumps and silk-
stockings, with universal three-times-three!
It seems to me hard measure that this Scottish man, now after three
hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit before the world;
intrinsically for having been, in such way as it was then possible to be, the
bravest of all Scotchmen! Had he been a poor Half-and-half, he could have
crouched into the corner, like so many others; Scotland had not been
delivered; and Knox had been without blame. He is the one Scotchman to
whom, of all others, his country and the world owe a debt. He has to plead
that Scotland would forgive him for having been worth to it any million
"unblamable" Scotchmen that need no forgiveness! He bared his breast to
the battle; had to row in French galleys, wander forlorn in exile, in clouds
and storms; was censured, shot at through his windows; had a right sore
fighting life: if this world were his place of recompense, he had made but a
bad venture of it. I cannot apologize for Knox. To him it is very indifferent,

these two hundred and fifty years or more, what men say of him. But we,
having got above all those details of his battle, and living now in clearness
on the fruits of his victory, we, for our own sake, ought to look through the
rumors and controversies enveloping the man, into the man himself.
For one thing, I will remark that this post of Prophet to his Nation was
not of his seeking; Knox had lived forty years quietly obscure, before he
became conspicuous. He was the son of poor parents; had got a college
education; become a Priest; adopted the Reformation, and seemed well
content to guide his own steps by the light of it, nowise unduly intruding it
on others. He had lived as Tutor in gentlemen's families; preaching when
any body of persons wished to hear his doctrine: resolute he to walk by the
truth, and speak the truth when called to do it; not ambitious of more; not
fancying himself capable of more. In this entirely obscure way he had
reached the age of forty; was with the small body of Reformers who were
standing siege in St. Andrew's Castle,—when one day in their chapel, the
Preacher after finishing his exhortation to these fighters in the forlorn hope,
said suddenly, That there ought to be other speakers, that all men who had a
priest's heart and gift in them ought now to speak;—which gifts and heart
one of their own number, John Knox the name of him, had: Had he not?
said the Preacher, appealing to all the audience: what then is his duty? The
people answered affirmatively; it was a criminal forsaking of his post, if
such a man held the word that was in him silent. Poor Knox was obliged to
stand up; he attempted to reply; he could say no word;—burst into a flood
of tears, and ran out. It is worth remembering, that scene. He was in
grievous trouble for some days. He felt what a small faculty was his for this
great work. He felt what a baptism he was called to be baptized withal. He
"burst into tears."
Our primary characteristic of a Hero, that he is sincere, applies
emphatically to Knox. It is not denied anywhere that this, whatever might
be his other qualities or faults, is among the truest of men. With a singular
instinct he holds to the truth and fact; the truth alone is there for him, the
rest a mere shadow and deceptive nonentity. However feeble, forlorn the
reality may seem, on that and that only can he take his stand. In the Galleys
of the River Loire, whither Knox and the others, after their Castle of St.
Andrew's was taken, had been sent as Galley-slaves,—some officer or
priest, one day, presented them an Image of the Virgin Mother, requiring
that they, the blasphemous heretics, should do it reverence. Mother? Mother

of God? said Knox, when the turn came to him: This is no Mother of God:
this is "a pented bredd,"—a piece of wood, I tell you, with paint on it! She
is fitter for swimming, I think, than for being worshipped, added Knox; and
flung the thing into the river. It was not very cheap jesting there: but come
of it what might, this thing to Knox was and must continue nothing other
than the real truth; it was a pented bredd: worship it he would not.
He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of courage; the
Cause they had was the true one, and must and would prosper; the whole
world could not put it down. Reality is of God's making; it is alone strong.
How many pented bredds, pretending to be real, are fitter to swim than to
be worshipped!—This Knox cannot live but by fact: he clings to reality as
the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. He is an instance to us how a man, by
sincerity itself, becomes heroic: it is the grand gift he has. We find in Knox
a good honest intellectual talent, no transcendent one;—a narrow,
inconsiderable man, as compared with Luther: but in heartfelt instinctive
adherence to truth, in sincerity, as we say, he has no superior; nay, one
might ask, What equal he has? The heart of him is of the true Prophet cast.
"He lies there," said the Earl of Morton at his grave, "who never feared the
face of man." He resembles, more than any of the moderns, an Old-Hebrew
Prophet. The same inflexibility, intolerance, rigid narrow-looking adherence
to God's truth, stern rebuke in the name of God to all that forsake truth: an
Old-Hebrew Prophet in the guise of an Edinburgh Minister of the Sixteenth
Century. We are to take him for that; not require him to be other.
Knox's conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh visits he used to make in her
own palace, to reprove her there, have been much commented upon. Such
cruelty, such coarseness fills us with indignation. On reading the actual
narrative of the business, what Knox said, and what Knox meant, I must say
one's tragic feeling is rather disappointed. They are not so coarse, these
speeches; they seem to me about as fine as the circumstances would permit!
Knox was not there to do the courtier; he came on another errand. Whoever,
reading these colloquies of his with the Queen, thinks they are vulgar
insolences of a plebeian priest to a delicate high lady, mistakes the purport
and essence of them altogether. It was unfortunately not possible to be
polite with the Queen of Scotland, unless one proved untrue to the Nation
and Cause of Scotland. A man who did not wish to see the land of his birth
made a hunting-field for intriguing ambitious Guises, and the Cause of God
trampled underfoot of Falsehoods, Formulas and the Devil's Cause, had no

method of making himself agreeable! "Better that women weep," said
Morton, "than that bearded men be forced to weep." Knox was the
constitutional opposition-party in Scotland: the Nobles of the country,
called by their station to take that post, were not found in it; Knox had to
go, or no one. The hapless Queen;—but the still more hapless Country, if
she were made happy! Mary herself was not without sharpness enough,
among her other qualities: "Who are you," said she once, "that presume to
school the nobles and sovereign of this realm?"—"Madam, a subject born
within the same," answered he. Reasonably answered! If the "subject" have
truth to speak, it is not the "subject's" footing that will fail him here.—
We blame Knox for his intolerance. Well, surely it is good that each of us
be as tolerant as possible. Yet, at bottom, after all the talk there is and has
been about it, what is tolerance? Tolerance has to tolerate the unessential;
and to see well what that is. Tolerance has to be noble, measured, just in its
very wrath, when it can tolerate no longer. But, on the whole, we are not
altogether here to tolerate! We are here to resist, to control and vanquish
withal. We do not "tolerate" Falsehoods, Thieveries, Iniquities, when they
fasten on us; we say to them, Thou art false, thou art not tolerable! We are
here to extinguish Falsehoods, and put an end to them, in some wise way! I
will not quarrel so much with the way; the doing of the thing is our great
concern. In this sense Knox was, full surely, intolerant.
A man sent to row in French Galleys, and such like, for teaching the
Truth in his own land, cannot always be in the mildest humor! I am not
prepared to say that Knox had a soft temper; nor do I know that he had what
we call an ill temper. An ill nature he decidedly had not. Kind honest
affections dwelt in the much-enduring, hard-worn, ever-battling man. That
he could rebuke Queens, and had such weight among those proud turbulent
Nobles, proud enough whatever else they were; and could maintain to the
end a kind of virtual Presidency and Sovereignty in that wild realm, he who
was only "a subject born within the same:" this of itself will prove to us that
he was found, close at hand, to be no mean acrid man; but at heart a
healthful, strong, sagacious man. Such alone can bear rule in that kind.
They blame him for pulling down cathedrals, and so forth, as if he were a
seditious rioting demagogue: precisely the reverse is seen to be the fact, in
regard to cathedrals and the rest of it, if we examine! Knox wanted no
pulling down of stone edifices; he wanted leprosy and darkness to be
thrown out of the lives of men. Tumult was not his element; it was the

tragic feature of his life that he was forced to dwell so much in that. Every
such man is the born enemy of Disorder; hates to be in it: but what then?
Smooth Falsehood is not Order; it is the general sum-total of Disorder.
Order is Truth,—each thing standing on the basis that belongs to it: Order
and Falsehood cannot subsist together.
Withal, unexpectedly enough, this Knox has a vein of drollery in him;
which I like much, in combination with his other qualities. He has a true
eye for the ridiculous. His History, with its rough earnestness, is curiously
enlivened with this. When the two Prelates, entering Glasgow Cathedral,
quarrel about precedence; march rapidly up, take to hustling one another,
twitching one another's rochets, and at last flourishing their crosiers like
quarter-staves, it is a great sight for him every way! Not mockery, scorn,
bitterness alone; though there is enough of that too. But a true, loving,
illuminating laugh mounts up over the earnest visage; not a loud laugh; you
would say, a laugh in the eyes most of all. An honest-hearted, brotherly
man; brother to the high, brother also to the low; sincere in his sympathy
with both. He had his pipe of Bourdeaux too, we find, in that old Edinburgh
house of his; a cheery social man, with faces that loved him! They go far
wrong who think this Knox was a gloomy, spasmodic, shrieking fanatic.
Not at all: he is one of the solidest of men. Practical, cautious-hopeful,
patient; a most shrewd, observing, quietly discerning man. In fact, he has
very much the type of character we assign to the Scotch at present: a certain
sardonic taciturnity is in him; insight enough; and a stouter heart than he
himself knows of. He has the power of holding his peace over many things
which do not vitally concern him,—"They? what are they?" But the thing
which does vitally concern him, that thing he will speak of; and in a tone
the whole world shall be made to hear: all the more emphatic for his long
silence.
This Prophet of the Scotch is to me no hateful man!—He had a sore fight
of an existence; wrestling with Popes and Principalities; in defeat,
contention, life-long struggle; rowing as a galley-slave, wandering as an
exile. A sore fight: but he won it. "Have you hope?" they asked him in his
last moment, when he could no longer speak. He lifted his finger, "pointed
upwards with his finger," and so died. Honor to him! His works have not
died. The letter of his work dies, as of all men's; but the spirit of it never.

One word more as to the letter of Knox's work. The unforgivable offence
in him is, that he wished to set up Priests over the head of Kings. In other
words, he strove to make the Government of Scotland a Theocracy. This
indeed is properly the sum of his offences, the essential sin; for which what
pardon can there be? It is most true, he did, at bottom, consciously or
unconsciously, mean a Theocracy, or Government of God. He did mean that
Kings and Prime Ministers, and all manner of persons, in public or private,
diplomatizing or whatever else they might be doing, should walk according
to the Gospel of Christ, and understand that this was their Law, supreme
over all laws. He hoped once to see such a thing realized; and the Petition,
Thy Kingdom come, no longer an empty word. He was sore grieved when
he saw greedy worldly Barons clutch hold of the Church's property; when
he expostulated that it was not secular property, that it was spiritual
property, and should be turned to true churchly uses, education, schools,
worship;—and the Regent Murray had to answer, with a shrug of the
shoulders, "It is a devout imagination!" This was Knox's scheme of right
and truth; this he zealously endeavored after, to realize it. If we think his
scheme of truth was too narrow, was not true, we may rejoice that he could
not realize it; that it remained after two centuries of effort, unrealizable, and
is a "devout imagination" still. But how shall we blame him for struggling
to realize it? Theocracy, Government of God, is precisely the thing to be
struggled for! All Prophets, zealous Priests, are there for that purpose.
Hildebrand wished a Theocracy; Cromwell wished it, fought for it;
Mahomet attained it. Nay, is it not what all zealous men, whether called
Priests, Prophets, or whatsoever else called, do essentially wish, and must
wish? That right and truth, or God's Law, reign supreme among men, this is
the Heavenly Ideal (well named in Knox's time, and namable in all times, a
revealed "Will of God") towards which the Reformer will insist that all be
more and more approximated. All true Reformers, as I said, are by the
nature of them Priests, and strive for a Theocracy.
How far such Ideals can ever be introduced into Practice, and at what
point our impatience with their non-introduction ought to begin, is always a
question. I think we may say safely, Let them introduce themselves as far as
they can contrive to do it! If they are the true faith of men, all men ought to
be more or less impatient always where they are not found introduced.
There will never be wanting Regent Murrays enough to shrug their
shoulders, and say, "A devout imagination!" We will praise the Hero-priest

rather, who does what is in him to bring them in; and wears out, in toil,
calumny, contradiction, a noble life, to make a God's Kingdom of this
Earth. The Earth will not become too godlike!

LECTURE V. THE HERO AS MAN OF
LETTERS. JOHNSON, ROUSSEAU, BURNS.
[May 19, 1840.]

Hero-Gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are forms of Heroism that belong to
the old ages, make their appearance in the remotest times; some of them
have ceased to be possible long since, and cannot any more show
themselves in this world. The Hero as Man of Letters, again, of which class
we are to speak to-day, is altogether a product of these new ages; and so
long as the wondrous art of Writing, or of Ready-writing which we call
Printing, subsists, he may be expected to continue, as one of the main forms
of Heroism for all future ages. He is, in various respects, a very singular
phenomenon.
He is new, I say; he has hardly lasted above a century in the world yet.
Never, till about a hundred years ago, was there seen any figure of a Great
Soul living apart in that anomalous manner; endeavoring to speak forth the
inspiration that was in him by Printed Books, and find place and subsistence
by what the world would please to give him for doing that. Much had been
sold and bought, and left to make its own bargain in the market-place; but
the inspired wisdom of a Heroic Soul never till then, in that naked manner.
He, with his copy-rights and copy-wrongs, in his squalid garret, in his rusty
coat; ruling (for this is what he does), from his grave, after death, whole
nations and generations who would, or would not, give him bread while
living,—is a rather curious spectacle! Few shapes of Heroism can be more
unexpected.
Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strange shapes:
the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign is his
aspect in the world! It seemed absurd to us, that men, in their rude
admiration, should take some wise great Odin for a god, and worship him as
such; some wise great Mahomet for one god-inspired, and religiously
follow his Law for twelve centuries: but that a wise great Johnson, a Burns,
a Rousseau, should be taken for some idle nondescript, extant in the world

to amuse idleness, and have a few coins and applauses thrown him, that he
might live thereby; this perhaps, as before hinted, will one day seem a still
absurder phasis of things!—Meanwhile, since it is the spiritual always that
determines the material, this same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as
our most important modern person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all.
What he teaches, the whole world will do and make. The world's manner of
dealing with him is the most significant feature of the world's general
position. Looking well at his life, we may get a glance, as deep as is readily
possible for us, into the life of those singular centuries which have produced
him, in which we ourselves live and work.
There are genuine Men of Letters, and not genuine; as in every kind there
is a genuine and a spurious. If hero be taken to mean genuine, then I say the
Hero as Man of Letters will be found discharging a function for us which is
ever honorable, ever the highest; and was once well known to be the
highest. He is uttering forth, in such way as he has, the inspired soul of him;
all that a man, in any case, can do. I say inspired; for what we call
"originality," "sincerity," "genius," the heroic quality we have no good name
for, signifies that. The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things,
in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists always, unseen to most, under
the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in that; he declares that abroad, by act or
speech as it may be in declaring himself abroad. His life, as we said before,
is a piece of the everlasting heart of Nature herself: all men's life is,—but
the weak many know not the fact, and are untrue to it, in most times; the
strong few are strong, heroic, perennial, because it cannot be hidden from
them. The Man of Letters, like every Hero, is there to proclaim this in such
sort as he can. Intrinsically it is the same function which the old generations
named a man Prophet, Priest, Divinity for doing; which all manner of
Heroes, by speech or by act, are sent into the world to do.
Fichte the German Philosopher delivered, some forty years ago at
Erlangen, a highly remarkable Course of Lectures on this subject: "Ueber
das Wesen des Gelehrten, On the Nature of the Literary Man." Fichte, in
conformity with the Transcendental Philosophy, of which he was a
distinguished teacher, declares first: That all things which we see or work
with in this Earth, especially we ourselves and all persons, are as a kind of
vesture or sensuous Appearance: that under all there lies, as the essence of
them, what he calls the "Divine Idea of the World;" this is the Reality which
"lies at the bottom of all Appearance." To the mass of men no such Divine

Idea is recognizable in the world; they live merely, says Fichte, among the
superficialities, practicalities and shows of the world, not dreaming that
there is anything divine under them. But the Man of Letters is sent hither
specially that he may discern for himself, and make manifest to us, this
same Divine Idea: in every new generation it will manifest itself in a new
dialect; and he is there for the purpose of doing that. Such is Fichte's
phraseology; with which we need not quarrel. It is his way of naming what I
here, by other words, am striving imperfectly to name; what there is at
present no name for: The unspeakable Divine Significance, full of splendor,
of wonder and terror, that lies in the being of every man, of every thing,—
the Presence of the God who made every man and thing. Mahomet taught
this in his dialect; Odin in his: it is the thing which all thinking hearts, in
one dialect or another, are here to teach.
Fichte calls the Man of Letters, therefore, a Prophet, or as he prefers to
phrase it, a Priest, continually unfolding the Godlike to men: Men of Letters
are a perpetual Priesthood, from age to age, teaching all men that a God is
still present in their life, that all "Appearance," whatsoever we see in the
world, is but as a vesture for the "Divine Idea of the World," for "that which
lies at the bottom of Appearance." In the true Literary Man there is thus
ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the
world; the world's Priest;—guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark
pilgrimage through the waste of Time. Fichte discriminates with sharp zeal
the true Literary Man, what we here call the Hero as Man of Letters, from
multitudes of false unheroic. Whoever lives not wholly in this Divine Idea,
or living partially in it, struggles not, as for the one good, to live wholly in
it,—he is, let him live where else he like, in what pomps and prosperities he
like, no Literary Man; he is, says Fichte, a "Bungler, Stumper." Or at best, if
he belong to the prosaic provinces, he may be a "Hodman;" Fichte even
calls him elsewhere a "Nonentity," and has in short no mercy for him, no
wish that he should continue happy among us! This is Fichte's notion of the
Man of Letters. It means, in its own form, precisely what we here mean.
In this point of view, I consider that, for the last hundred years, by far the
notablest of all Literary Men is Fichte's countryman, Goethe. To that man
too, in a strange way, there was given what we may call a life in the Divine
Idea of the World; vision of the inward divine mystery: and strangely, out of
his Books, the world rises imaged once more as godlike, the workmanship
and temple of a God. Illuminated all, not in fierce impure fire-splendor as of

Mahomet, but in mild celestial radiance;—really a Prophecy in these most
unprophetic times; to my mind, by far the greatest, though one of the
quietest, among all the great things that have come to pass in them. Our
chosen specimen of the Hero as Literary Man would be this Goethe. And it
were a very pleasant plan for me here to discourse of his heroism: for I
consider him to be a true Hero; heroic in what he said and did, and perhaps
still more in what he did not say and did not do; to me a noble spectacle: a
great heroic ancient man, speaking and keeping silence as an ancient Hero,
in the guise of a most modern, high-bred, high-cultivated Man of Letters!
We have had no such spectacle; no man capable of affording such, for the
last hundred and fifty years.
But at present, such is the general state of knowledge about Goethe, it
were worse than useless to attempt speaking of him in this case. Speak as I
might, Goethe, to the great majority of you, would remain problematic,
vague; no impression but a false one could be realized. Him we must leave
to future times. Johnson, Burns, Rousseau, three great figures from a prior
time, from a far inferior state of circumstances, will suit us better here.
Three men of the Eighteenth Century; the conditions of their life far more
resemble what those of ours still are in England, than what Goethe's in
Germany were. Alas, these men did not conquer like him; they fought
bravely, and fell. They were not heroic bringers of the light, but heroic
seekers of it. They lived under galling conditions; struggling as under
mountains of impediment, and could not unfold themselves into clearness,
or victorious interpretation of that "Divine Idea." It is rather the Tombs of
three Literary Heroes that I have to show you. There are the monumental
heaps, under which three spiritual giants lie buried. Very mournful, but also
great and full of interest for us. We will linger by them for a while.
Complaint is often made, in these times, of what we call the disorganized
condition of society: how ill many forces of society fulfil their work; how
many powerful are seen working in a wasteful, chaotic, altogether
unarranged manner. It is too just a complaint, as we all know. But perhaps if
we look at this of Books and the Writers of Books, we shall find here, as it
were, the summary of all other disorganizations;—a sort of heart, from
which, and to which all other confusion circulates in the world! Considering
what Book writers do in the world, and what the world does with Book
writers, I should say, It is the most anomalous thing the world at present has
to show.—We should get into a sea far beyond sounding, did we attempt to

give account of this: but we must glance at it for the sake of our subject.
The worst element in the life of these three Literary Heroes was, that they
found their business and position such a chaos. On the beaten road there is
tolerable travelling; but it is sore work, and many have to perish, fashioning
a path through the impassable!
Our pious Fathers, feeling well what importance lay in the speaking of
man to men, founded churches, made endowments, regulations; everywhere
in the civilized world there is a Pulpit, environed with all manner of
complex dignified appurtenances and furtherances, that therefrom a man
with the tongue may, to best advantage, address his fellow-men. They felt
that this was the most important thing; that without this there was no good
thing. It is a right pious work, that of theirs; beautiful to behold! But now
with the art of Writing, with the art of Printing, a total change has come
over that business. The Writer of a Book, is not he a Preacher preaching not
to this parish or that, on this day or that, but to all men in all times and
places? Surely it is of the last importance that he do his work right, whoever
do it wrong;—that the eye report not falsely, for then all the other members
are astray! Well; how he may do his work, whether he do it right or wrong,
or do it at all, is a point which no man in the world has taken the pains to
think of. To a certain shopkeeper, trying to get some money for his books, if
lucky, he is of some importance; to no other man of any. Whence he came,
whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived, by what he might be
furthered on his course, no one asks. He is an accident in society. He
wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is as the spiritual
light, either the guidance or the misguidance!
Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has
devised. Odin's Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero; Books
written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the
soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when
the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed,
many-engined,—they are precious, great: but what do they become?
Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is
gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks:
but the Books of Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally
lives: can be called up again into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a
Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in

magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession
of men.
Do not Books still accomplish miracles, as Runes were fabled to do?
They persuade men. Not the wretchedest circulating-library novel, which
foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages, but will help to regulate the
actual practical weddings and households of those foolish girls. So "Celia"
felt, so "Clifford" acted: the foolish Theorem of Life, stamped into those
young brains, comes out as a solid Practice one day. Consider whether any
Rune in the wildest imagination of Mythologist ever did such wonders as,
on the actual firm Earth, some Books have done! What built St. Paul's
Cathedral? Look at the heart of the matter, it was that divine Hebrew
BOOK,—the word partly of the man Moses, an outlaw tending his
Midianitish herds, four thousand years ago, in the wildernesses of Sinai! It
is the strangest of things, yet nothing is truer. With the art of Writing, of
which Printing is a simple, an inevitable and comparatively insignificant
corollary, the true reign of miracles for mankind commenced. It related,
with a wondrous new contiguity and perpetual closeness, the Past and
Distant with the Present in time and place; all times and all places with this
our actual Here and Now. All things were altered for men; all modes of
important work of men: teaching, preaching, governing, and all else.
To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a notable, respectable
product of the modern ages. Their existence too is modified, to the very
basis of it, by the existence of Books. Universities arose while there were
yet no Books procurable; while a man, for a single Book, had to give an
estate of land. That, in those circumstances, when a man had some
knowledge to communicate, he should do it by gathering the learners round
him, face to face, was a necessity for him. If you wanted to know what
Abelard knew, you must go and listen to Abelard. Thousands, as many as
thirty thousand, went to hear Abelard and that metaphysical theology of his.
And now for any other teacher who had also something of his own to teach,
there was a great convenience opened: so many thousands eager to learn
were already assembled yonder; of all places the best place for him was
that. For any third teacher it was better still; and grew ever the better, the
more teachers there came. It only needed now that the King took notice of
this new phenomenon; combined or agglomerated the various schools into
one school; gave it edifices, privileges, encouragements, and named it
Universitas, or School of all Sciences: the University of Paris, in its

essential characters, was there. The model of all subsequent Universities;
which down even to these days, for six centuries now, have gone on to
found themselves. Such, I conceive, was the origin of Universities.
It is clear, however, that with this simple circumstance, facility of getting
Books, the whole conditions of the business from top to bottom were
changed. Once invent Printing, you metamorphosed all Universities, or
superseded them! The Teacher needed not now to gather men personally
round him, that he might speak to them what he knew: print it in a Book,
and all learners far and wide, for a trifle, had it each at his own fireside,
much more effectually to learn it!—Doubtless there is still peculiar virtue in
Speech; even writers of Books may still, in some circumstances, find it
convenient to speak also,—witness our present meeting here! There is, one
would say, and must ever remain while man has a tongue, a distinct
province for Speech as well as for Writing and Printing. In regard to all
things this must remain; to Universities among others. But the limits of the
two have nowhere yet been pointed out, ascertained; much less put in
practice: the University which would completely take in that great new fact,
of the existence of Printed Books, and stand on a clear footing for the
Nineteenth Century as the Paris one did for the Thirteenth, has not yet come
into existence. If we think of it, all that a University, or final highest School
can do for us, is still but what the first School began doing,—teach us to
read. We learn to read, in various languages, in various sciences; we learn
the alphabet and letters of all manner of Books. But the place where we are
to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves! It
depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their
best for us. The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.
But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, all is changed, in its
preaching, in its working, by the introduction of Books. The Church is the
working recognized Union of our Priests or Prophets, of those who by wise
teaching guide the souls of men. While there was no Writing, even while
there was no Easy-writing, or Printing, the preaching of the voice was the
natural sole method of performing this. But now with Books!—He that can
write a true Book, to persuade England, is not he the Bishop and
Archbishop, the Primate of England and of All England? I many a time say,
the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these are the real
working effective Church of a modern country. Nay not only our preaching,
but even our worship, is not it too accomplished by means of Printed

Books? The noble sentiment which a gifted soul has clothed for us in
melodious words, which brings melody into our hearts,—is not this
essentially, if we will understand it, of the nature of worship? There are
many, in all countries, who, in this confused time, have no other method of
worship. He who, in any way, shows us better than we knew before that a
lily of the fields is beautiful, does he not show it us as an effluence of the
Fountain of all Beauty; as the handwriting, made visible there, of the great
Maker of the Universe? He has sung for us, made us sing with him, a little
verse of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How much more he who sings, who
says, or in any way brings home to our heart the noble doings, feelings,
darings and endurances of a brother man! He has verily touched our hearts
as with a live coal from the altar. Perhaps there is no worship more
authentic.
Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an "apocalypse of Nature," a
revealing of the "open secret." It may well enough be named, in Fichte's
style, a "continuous revelation" of the Godlike in the Terrestrial and
Common. The Godlike does ever, in very truth, endure there; is brought out,
now in this dialect, now in that, with various degrees of clearness: all true
gifted Singers and Speakers are, consciously or unconsciously, doing so.
The dark stormful indignation of a Byron, so wayward and perverse, may
have touches of it; nay the withered mockery of a French sceptic,—his
mockery of the False, a love and worship of the True. How much more the
sphere-harmony of a Shakspeare, of a Goethe; the cathedral music of a
Milton! They are something too, those humble genuine lark-notes of a
Burns,—skylark, starting from the humble furrow, far overhead into the
blue depths, and singing to us so genuinely there! For all true singing is of
the nature of worship; as indeed all true working may be said to be,—
whereof such singing is but the record, and fit melodious representation, to
us. Fragments of a real "Church Liturgy" and "Body of Homilies," strangely
disguised from the common eye, are to be found weltering in that huge
froth-ocean of Printed Speech we loosely call Literature! Books are our
Church too.
Or turning now to the Government of men. Witenagemote, old
Parliament, was a great thing. The affairs of the nation were there
deliberated and decided; what we were to do as a nation. But does not,
though the name Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now,
everywhere and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, out of

Parliament altogether? Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament;
but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more
important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it
is a literal fact,—very momentous to us in these times. Literature is our
Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say
often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable.
Writing brings Printing; brings universal everyday extempore Printing, as
we see at present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation,
becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-
making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what
revenues or garnitures. the requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which
others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite. The nation is
governed by all that has tongue in the nation: Democracy is virtually there.
Add only, that whatsoever power exists will have itself, by and by,
organized; working secretly under bandages, obscurations, obstructions, it
will never rest till it get to work free, unencumbered, visible to all.
Democracy virtually extant will insist on becoming palpably extant.—
On all sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of the things which
man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful and
worthy are the things we call Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper with
black ink on them;—from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew
BOOK, what have they not done, what are they not doing!—For indeed,
whatever be the outward form of the thing (bits of paper, as we say, and
black ink), is it not verily, at bottom, the highest act of man's faculty that
produces a Book? It is the Thought of man; the true thaumaturgic virtue; by
which man works all things whatsoever. All that he does, and brings to pass,
is the vesture of a Thought. This London City, with all its houses, palaces,
steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what
is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One;—a huge
immeasurable Spirit of a THOUGHT, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke,
dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest
of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that
brick.—The thing we called "bits of paper with traces of black ink," is the
purest embodiment a Thought of man can have. No wonder it is, in all
ways, the activest and noblest.
All this, of the importance and supreme importance of the Man of Letters
in modern Society, and how the Press is to such a degree superseding the

Pulpit, the Senate, the Senatus Academicus and much else, has been
admitted for a good while; and recognized often enough, in late times, with
a sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment. It seems to me, the
Sentimental by and by will have to give place to the Practical. If Men of
Letters are so incalculably influential, actually performing such work for us
from age to age, and even from day to day, then I think we may conclude
that Men of Letters will not always wander like unrecognized unregulated
Ishmaelites among us! Whatsoever thing, as I said above, has virtual
unnoticed power will cast off its wrappages, bandages, and step forth one
day with palpably articulated, universally visible power. That one man wear
the clothes, and take the wages, of a function which is done by quite
another: there can be no profit in this; this is not right, it is wrong. And yet,
alas, the making of it right,—what a business, for long times to come! Sure
enough, this that we call Organization of the Literary Guild is still a great
way off, encumbered with all manner of complexities. If you asked me what
were the best possible organization for the Men of Letters in modern
society; the arrangement of furtherance and regulation, grounded the most
accurately on the actual facts of their position and of the world's position,—
I should beg to say that the problem far exceeded my faculty! It is not one
man's faculty; it is that of many successive men turned earnestly upon it,
that will bring out even an approximate solution. What the best arrangement
were, none of us could say. But if you ask, Which is the worst? I answer:
This which we now have, that Chaos should sit umpire in it; this is the
worst. To the best, or any good one, there is yet a long way.
One remark I must not omit, That royal or parliamentary grants of money
are by no means the chief thing wanted! To give our Men of Letters
stipends, endowments and all furtherance of cash, will do little towards the
business. On the whole, one is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of
money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is no evil to be poor; that
there ought to be Literary Men poor,—to show whether they are genuine or
not! Mendicant Orders, bodies of good men doomed to beg, were instituted
in the Christian Church; a most natural and even necessary development of
the spirit of Christianity. It was itself founded on Poverty, on Sorrow,
Contradiction, Crucifixion, every species of worldly Distress and
Degradation. We may say, that he who has not known those things, and
learned from them the priceless lessons they have to teach, has missed a
good opportunity of schooling. To beg, and go barefoot, in coarse woollen

cloak with a rope round your loins, and be despised of all the world, was no
beautiful business;—nor an honorable one in any eye, till the nobleness of
those who did so had made it honored of some!
Begging is not in our course at the present time: but for the rest of it, who
will say that a Johnson is not perhaps the better for being poor? It is needful
for him, at all rates, to know that outward profit, that success of any kind is
not the goal he has to aim at. Pride, vanity, ill-conditioned egoism of all
sorts, are bred in his heart, as in every heart; need, above all, to be cast out
of his heart,—to be, with whatever pangs, torn out of it, cast forth from it,
as a thing worthless. Byron, born rich and noble, made out even less than
Burns, poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in that same "best possible
organization" as yet far off, Poverty may still enter as an important
element? What if our Men of Letters, men setting up to be Spiritual Heroes,
were still then, as they now are, a kind of "involuntary monastic order;"
bound still to this same ugly Poverty,—till they had tried what was in it too,
till they had learned to make it too do for them! Money, in truth, can do
much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it
there; and even spurn it back, when it wishes to get farther.
Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season for them, the fit
assigner of them, all settled,—how is the Burns to be recognized that merits
these? He must pass through the ordeal, and prove himself. This ordeal; this
wild welter of a chaos which is called Literary Life: this too is a kind of
ordeal! There is clear truth in the idea that a struggle from the lower classes
of society, towards the upper regions and rewards of society, must ever
continue. Strong men are born there, who ought to stand elsewhere than
there. The manifold, inextricably complex, universal struggle of these
constitutes, and must constitute, what is called the progress of society. For
Men of Letters, as for all other sorts of men. How to regulate that struggle?
There is the whole question. To leave it as it is, at the mercy of blind
Chance; a whirl of distracted atoms, one cancelling the other; one of the
thousand arriving saved, nine hundred and ninety-nine lost by the way; your
royal Johnson languishing inactive in garrets, or harnessed to the yoke of
Printer Cave; your Burns dying broken-hearted as a Gauger; your Rousseau
driven into mad exasperation, kindling French Revolutions by his
paradoxes: this, as we said, is clearly enough the worst regulation. The best,
alas, is far from us!

And yet there can be no doubt but it is coming; advancing on us, as yet
hidden in the bosom of centuries: this is a prophecy one can risk. For so
soon as men get to discern the importance of a thing, they do infallibly set
about arranging it, facilitating, forwarding it; and rest not till, in some
approximate degree, they have accomplished that. I say, of all Priesthoods,
Aristocracies, Governing Classes at present extant in the world, there is no
class comparable for importance to that Priesthood of the Writers of Books.
This is a fact which he who runs may read,—and draw inferences from.
"Literature will take care of itself," answered Mr. Pitt, when applied to for
some help for Burns. "Yes," adds Mr. Southey, "it will take care of itself;
and of you too, if you do not look to it!"
The result to individual Men of Letters is not the momentous one; they
are but individuals, an infinitesimal fraction of the great body; they can
struggle on, and live or else die, as they have been wont. But it deeply
concerns the whole society, whether it will set its light on high places, to
walk thereby; or trample it under foot, and scatter it in all ways of wild
waste (not without conflagration), as heretofore! Light is the one thing
wanted for the world. Put wisdom in the head of the world, the world will
fight its battle victoriously, and be the best world man can make it. I called
this anomaly of a disorganic Literary Class the heart of all other anomalies,
at once product and parent; some good arrangement for that would be as the
punctum saliens of a new vitality and just arrangement for all. Already, in
some European countries, in France, in Prussia, one traces some beginnings
of an arrangement for the Literary Class; indicating the gradual possibility
of such. I believe that it is possible; that it will have to be possible.
By far the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese is one on which
we cannot arrive at clearness, but which excites endless curiosity even in
the dim state: this namely, that they do attempt to make their Men of Letters
their Governors! It would be rash to say, one understood how this was done,
or with what degree of success it was done. All such things must be very
unsuccessful; yet a small degree of success is precious; the very attempt
how precious! There does seem to be, all over China, a more or less active
search everywhere to discover the men of talent that grow up in the young
generation. Schools there are for every one: a foolish sort of training, yet
still a sort. The youths who distinguish themselves in the lower school are
promoted into favorable stations in the higher, that they may still more
distinguish themselves,—forward and forward: it appears to be out of these

that the Official Persons, and incipient Governors, are taken. These are they
whom they try first, whether they can govern or not. And surely with the
best hope: for they are the men that have already shown intellect. Try them:
they have not governed or administered as yet; perhaps they cannot; but
there is no doubt they have some Understanding,—without which no man
can! Neither is Understanding a tool, as we are too apt to figure; "it is a
hand which can handle any tool." Try these men: they are of all others the
best worth trying.—Surely there is no kind of government, constitution,
revolution, social apparatus or arrangement, that I know of in this world, so
promising to one's scientific curiosity as this. The man of intellect at the top
of affairs: this is the aim of all constitutions and revolutions, if they have
any aim. For the man of true intellect, as I assert and believe always, is the
noble-hearted man withal, the true, just, humane and valiant man. Get him
for governor, all is got; fail to get him, though you had Constitutions
plentiful as blackberries, and a Parliament in every village, there is nothing
yet got—!
These things look strange, truly; and are not such as we commonly
speculate upon. But we are fallen into strange times; these things will
require to be speculated upon; to be rendered practicable, to be in some way
put in practice. These, and many others. On all hands of us, there is the
announcement, audible enough, that the old Empire of Routine has ended;
that to say a thing has long been, is no reason for its continuing to be. The
things which have been are fallen into decay, are fallen into incompetence;
large masses of mankind, in every society of our Europe, are no longer
capable of living at all by the things which have been. When millions of
men can no longer by their utmost exertion gain food for themselves, and
"the third man for thirty-six weeks each year is short of third-rate potatoes,"
the things which have been must decidedly prepare to alter themselves!—I
will now quit this of the organization of Men of Letters.
Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest on those Literary Heroes of ours was
not the want of organization for Men of Letters, but a far deeper one; out of
which, indeed, this and so many other evils for the Literary Man, and for all
men, had, as from their fountain, taken rise. That our Hero as Man of
Letters had to travel without highway, companionless, through an inorganic
chaos,—and to leave his own life and faculty lying there, as a partial
contribution towards pushing some highway through it: this, had not his
faculty itself been so perverted and paralyzed, he might have put up with,

might have considered to be but the common lot of Heroes. His fatal misery
was the spiritual paralysis, so we may name it, of the Age in which his life
lay; whereby his life too, do what he might, was half paralyzed! The
Eighteenth was a Sceptical Century; in which little word there is a whole
Pandora's Box of miseries. Scepticism means not intellectual Doubt alone,
but moral Doubt; all sorts of infidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis.
Perhaps, in few centuries that one could specify since the world began, was
a life of Heroism more difficult for a man. That was not an age of Faith,—
an age of Heroes! The very possibility of Heroism had been, as it were,
formally abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever;
Triviality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. The "age of
miracles" had been, or perhaps had not been; but it was not any longer. An
effete world; wherein Wonder, Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell;—
in one word, a godless world!
How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time,—compared
not with the Christian Shakspeares and Miltons, but with the old Pagan
Skalds, with any species of believing men! The living TREE Igdrasil, with
the melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs, deep-rooted as
Hela, has died out into the clanking of a World-MACHINE. "Tree" and
"Machine:" contrast these two things. I, for my share, declare the world to
be no machine! I say that it does not go by wheel-and-pinion "motives"
self-interests, checks, balances; that there is something far other in it than
the clank of spinning-jennies, and parliamentary majorities; and, on the
whole, that it is not a machine at all!—The old Norse Heathen had a truer
motion of God's-world than these poor Machine-Sceptics: the old Heathen
Norse were sincere men. But for these poor Sceptics there was no sincerity,
no truth. Half-truth and hearsay was called truth. Truth, for most men,
meant plausibility; to be measured by the number of votes you could get.
They had lost any notion that sincerity was possible, or of what sincerity
was. How many Plausibilities asking, with unaffected surprise and the air of
offended virtue, What! am not I sincere? Spiritual Paralysis, I say, nothing
left but a Mechanical life, was the characteristic of that century. For the
common man, unless happily he stood below his century and belonged to
another prior one, it was impossible to be a Believer, a Hero; he lay buried,
unconscious, under these baleful influences. To the strongest man, only
with infinite struggle and confusion was it possible to work himself half

loose; and lead as it were, in an enchanted, most tragical way, a spiritual
death-in-life, and be a Half-Hero!
Scepticism is the name we give to all this; as the chief symptom, as the
chief origin of all this. Concerning which so much were to be said! It would
take many Discourses, not a small fraction of one Discourse, to state what
one feels about that Eighteenth Century and its ways. As indeed this, and
the like of this, which we now call Scepticism, is precisely the black malady
and life-foe, against which all teaching and discoursing since man's life
began has directed itself: the battle of Belief against Unbelief is the never-
ending battle! Neither is it in the way of crimination that one would wish to
speak. Scepticism, for that century, we must consider as the decay of old
ways of believing, the preparation afar off for new better and wider ways,—
an inevitable thing. We will not blame men for it; we will lament their hard
fate. We will understand that destruction of old forms is not destruction of
everlasting substances; that Scepticism, as sorrowful and hateful as we see
it, is not an end but a beginning.
The other day speaking, without prior purpose that way, of Bentham's
theory of man and man's life, I chanced to call it a more beggarly one than
Mahomet's. I am bound to say, now when it is once uttered, that such is my
deliberate opinion. Not that one would mean offence against the man
Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe him. Bentham himself,
and even the creed of Bentham, seems to me comparatively worthy of
praise. It is a determinate being what all the world, in a cowardly half-and-
half manner, was tending to be. Let us have the crisis; we shall either have
death or the cure. I call this gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach
towards new Faith. It was a laying-down of cant; a saying to oneself: "Well
then, this world is a dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation and selfish
Hunger; let us see what, by checking and balancing, and good adjustment of
tooth and pinion, can be made of it!" Benthamism has something complete,
manful, in such fearless committal of itself to what it finds true; you may
call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its eyes put out! It is the culminating
point, and fearless ultimatum, of what lay in the half-and-half state,
pervading man's whole existence in that Eighteenth Century. It seems to me,
all deniers of Godhood, and all lip-believers of it, are bound to be
Benthamites, if they have courage and honesty. Benthamism is an eyeless
Heroism: the Human Species, like a hapless blinded Samson grinding in the
Philistine Mill, clasps convulsively the pillars of its Mill; brings huge ruin

down, but ultimately deliverance withal. Of Bentham I meant to say no
harm.
But this I do say, and would wish all men to know and lay to heart, that
he who discerns nothing but Mechanism in the Universe has in the fatalest
way missed the secret of the Universe altogether. That all Godhood should
vanish out of men's conception of this Universe seems to me precisely the
most brutal error,—I will not disparage Heathenism by calling it a Heathen
error,—that men could fall into. It is not true; it is false at the very heart of
it. A man who thinks so will think wrong about all things in the world; this
original sin will vitiate all other conclusions he can form. One might call it
the most lamentable of Delusions,—not forgetting Witchcraft itself!
Witchcraft worshipped at least a living Devil; but this worships a dead iron
Devil; no God, not even a Devil! Whatsoever is noble, divine, inspired,
drops thereby out of life. There remains everywhere in life a despicable
caput-mortuum; the mechanical hull, all soul fled out of it. How can a man
act heroically? The "Doctrine of Motives" will teach him that it is, under
more or less disguise, nothing but a wretched love of Pleasure, fear of Pain;
that Hunger, of applause, of cash, of whatsoever victual it may be, is the
ultimate fact of man's life. Atheism, in brief;—which does indeed
frightfully punish itself. The man, I say, is become spiritually a paralytic
man; this godlike Universe a dead mechanical steam-engine, all working by
motives, checks, balances, and I know not what; wherein, as in the
detestable belly of some Phalaris'-Bull of his own contriving, he the poor
Phalaris sits miserably dying!
Belief I define to be the healthy act of a man's mind. It is a mysterious
indescribable process, that of getting to believe;—indescribable, as all vital
acts are. We have our mind given us, not that it may cavil and argue, but
that it may see into something, give us clear belief and understanding about
something, whereon we are then to proceed to act. Doubt, truly, is not itself
a crime. Certainly we do not rush out, clutch up the first thing we find, and
straightway believe that! All manner of doubt, inquiry, [Gr.] skepsis as it is
named, about all manner of objects, dwells in every reasonable mind. It is
the mystic working of the mind, on the object it is getting to know and
believe. Belief comes out of all this, above ground, like the tree from its
hidden roots. But now if, even on common things, we require that a man
keep his doubts silent, and not babble of them till they in some measure
become affirmations or denials; how much more in regard to the highest

things, impossible to speak of in words at all! That a man parade his doubt,
and get to imagine that debating and logic (which means at best only the
manner of telling us your thought, your belief or disbelief, about a thing) is
the triumph and true work of what intellect he has: alas, this is as if you
should overturn the tree, and instead of green boughs, leaves and fruits,
show us ugly taloned roots turned up into the air,—and no growth, only
death and misery going on!
For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a
chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing
something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for
him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in
his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that
he will not get. We call those ages in which he gets so low the mournfulest,
sickest and meanest of all ages. The world's heart is palsied, sick: how can
any limb of it be whole? Genuine Acting ceases in all departments of the
world's work; dexterous Similitude of Acting begins. The world's wages are
pocketed, the world's work is not done. Heroes have gone out; Quacks have
come in. Accordingly, what Century, since the end of the Roman world,
which also was a time of scepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, so
abounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth? Consider them, with their tumid
sentimental vaporing about virtue, benevolence,—the wretched Quack-
squadron, Cagliostro at the head of them! Few men were without quackery;
they had got to consider it a necessary ingredient and amalgam for truth.
Chatham, our brave Chatham himself, comes down to the House, all wrapt
and bandaged; he "has crawled out in great bodily suffering," and so on;—
forgets, says Walpole, that he is acting the sick man; in the fire of debate,
snatches his arm from the sling, and oratorically swings and brandishes it!
Chatham himself lives the strangest mimetic life, half-hero, half-quack, all
along. For indeed the world is full of dupes; and you have to gain the
world's suffrage! How the duties of the world will be done in that case,
what quantities of error, which means failure, which means sorrow and
misery, to some and to many, will gradually accumulate in all provinces of
the world's business, we need not compute.
It seems to me, you lay your finger here on the heart of the world's
maladies, when you call it a Sceptical World. An insincere world; a godless
untruth of a world! It is out of this, as I consider, that the whole tribe of
social pestilences, French Revolutions, Chartisms, and what not, have

derived their being,—their chief necessity to be. This must alter. Till this
alter, nothing can beneficially alter. My one hope of the world, my
inexpugnable consolation in looking at the miseries of the world, is that this
is altering. Here and there one does now find a man who knows, as of old,
that this world is a Truth, and no Plausibility and Falsity; that he himself is
alive, not dead or paralytic; and that the world is alive, instinct with
Godhood, beautiful and awful, even as in the beginning of days! One man
once knowing this, many men, all men, must by and by come to know it. It
lies there clear, for whosoever will take the spectacles off his eyes and
honestly look, to know! For such a man the Unbelieving Century, with its
unblessed Products, is already past; a new century is already come. The old
unblessed Products and Performances, as solid as they look, are Phantasms,
preparing speedily to vanish. To this and the other noisy, very great-looking
Simulacrum with the whole world huzzaing at its heels, he can say,
composedly stepping aside: Thou art not true; thou art not extant, only
semblant; go thy way!—Yes, hollow Formulism, gross Benthamism, and
other unheroic atheistic Insincerity is visibly and even rapidly declining. An
unbelieving Eighteenth Century is but an exception,—such as now and then
occurs. I prophesy that the world will once more become sincere; a
believing world; with many Heroes in it, a heroic world! It will then be a
victorious world; never till then.
Or indeed what of the world and its victories? Men speak too much about
the world. Each one of us here, let the world go how it will, and be
victorious or not victorious, has he not a Life of his own to lead? One Life;
a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us
forevermore! It were well for us to live not as fools and simulacra, but as
wise and realities. The world's being saved will not save us; nor the world's
being lost destroy us. We should look to ourselves: there is great merit here
in the "duty of staying at home"! And, on the whole, to say truth, I never
heard of "world's" being "saved" in any other way. That mania of saving
worlds is itself a piece of the Eighteenth Century with its windy
sentimentalism. Let us not follow it too far. For the saving of the world I
will trust confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a little to my own
saving, which I am more competent to!—In brief, for the world's sake, and
for our own, we will rejoice greatly that Scepticism, Insincerity, Mechanical
Atheism, with all their poison-dews, are going, and as good as gone.—

Now it was under such conditions, in those times of Johnson, that our
Men of Letters had to live. Times in which there was properly no truth in
life. Old truths had fallen nigh dumb; the new lay yet hidden, not trying to
speak. That Man's Life here below was a Sincerity and Fact, and would
forever continue such, no new intimation, in that dusk of the world, had yet
dawned. No intimation; not even any French Revolution,—which we define
to be a Truth once more, though a Truth clad in hell-fire! How different was
the Luther's pilgrimage, with its assured goal, from the Johnson's, girt with
mere traditions, suppositions, grown now incredible, unintelligible!
Mahomet's Formulas were of "wood waxed and oiled," and could be burnt
out of one's way: poor Johnson's were far more difficult to burn.—The
strong man will ever find work, which means difficulty, pain, to the full
measure of his strength. But to make out a victory, in those circumstances
of our poor Hero as Man of Letters, was perhaps more difficult than in any.
Not obstruction, disorganization, Bookseller Osborne and Fourpence-
halfpenny a day; not this alone; but the light of his own soul was taken from
him. No landmark on the Earth; and, alas, what is that to having no loadstar
in the Heaven! We need not wonder that none of those Three men rose to
victory. That they fought truly is the highest praise. With a mournful
sympathy we will contemplate, if not three living victorious Heroes, as I
said, the Tombs of three fallen Heroes! They fell for us too; making a way
for us. There are the mountains which they hurled abroad in their confused
War of the Giants; under which, their strength and life spent, they now lie
buried.
I have already written of these three Literary Heroes, expressly or
incidentally; what I suppose is known to most of you; what need not be
spoken or written a second time. They concern us here as the singular
Prophets of that singular age; for such they virtually were; and the aspect
they and their world exhibit, under this point of view, might lead us into
reflections enough! I call them, all three, Genuine Men more or less;
faithfully, for most part unconsciously, struggling to be genuine, and plant
themselves on the everlasting truth of things. This to a degree that
eminently distinguishes them from the poor artificial mass of their
contemporaries; and renders them worthy to be considered as Speakers, in
some measure, of the everlasting truth, as Prophets in that age of theirs. By
Nature herself a noble necessity was laid on them to be so. They were men
of such magnitude that they could not live on unrealities,—clouds, froth and

all inanity gave way under them: there was no footing for them but on firm
earth; no rest or regular motion for them, if they got not footing there. To a
certain extent, they were Sons of Nature once more in an age of Artifice;
once more, Original Men.
As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by nature, one of our
great English souls. A strong and noble man; so much left undeveloped in
him to the last: in a kindlier element what might he not have been,—Poet,
Priest, sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a man must not complain of his
"element," of his "time," or the like; it is thriftless work doing so. His time
is bad: well then, he is there to make it better!—Johnson's youth was poor,
isolated, hopeless, very miserable. Indeed, it does not seem possible that, in
any the favorablest outward circumstances, Johnson's life could have been
other than a painful one. The world might have had more of profitable work
out of him, or less; but his effort against the world's work could never have
been a light one. Nature, in return for his nobleness, had said to him, Live in
an element of diseased sorrow. Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the nobleness
were intimately and even inseparably connected with each other. At all
events, poor Johnson had to go about girt with continual hypochondria,
physical and spiritual pain. Like a Hercules with the burning Nessus'-shirt
on him, which shoots in on him dull incurable misery: the Nessus'-shirt not
to be stript off, which is his own natural skin! In this manner he had to live.
Figure him there, with his scrofulous diseases, with his great greedy heart,
and unspeakable chaos of thoughts; stalking mournful as a stranger in this
Earth; eagerly devouring what spiritual thing he could come at: school-
languages and other merely grammatical stuff, if there were nothing better!
The largest soul that was in all England; and provision made for it of
"fourpence-halfpenny a day." Yet a giant invincible soul; a true man's. One
remembers always that story of the shoes at Oxford: the rough, seamy-
faced, rawboned College Servitor stalking about, in winter-season, with his
shoes worn out; how the charitable Gentleman Commoner secretly places a
new pair at his door; and the rawboned Servitor, lifting them, looking at
them near, with his dim eyes, with what thoughts,—pitches them out of
window! Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will; but not beggary: we
cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help here; a whole world of
squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of nobleness and
manfulness withal. It is a type of the man's life, this pitching away of the
shoes. An original man;—not a second-hand, borrowing or begging man.

Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such shoes as we ourselves
can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on that;—on the reality
and substance which Nature gives us, not on the semblance, on the thing
she has given another than us—!
And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there
ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was really
higher than he? Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what
is over them; only small mean souls are otherwise. I could not find a better
proof of what I said the other day, That the sincere man was by nature the
obedient man; that only in a World of Heroes was there loyal Obedience to
the Heroic. The essence of originality is not that it be new: Johnson
believed altogether in the old; he found the old opinions credible for him, fit
for him; and in a right heroic manner lived under them. He is well worth
study in regard to that. For we are to say that Johnson was far other than a
mere man of words and formulas; he was a man of truths and facts. He
stood by the old formulas; the happier was it for him that he could so stand:
but in all formulas that he could stand by, there needed to be a most genuine
substance. Very curious how, in that poor Paper-age, so barren, artificial,
thick-quilted with Pedantries, Hearsays, the great Fact of this Universe
glared in, forever wonderful, indubitable, unspeakable, divine-infernal,
upon this man too! How he harmonized his Formulas with it, how he
managed at all under such circumstances: that is a thing worth seeing. A
thing "to be looked at with reverence, with pity, with awe." That Church of
St. Clement Danes, where Johnson still worshipped in the era of Voltaire, is
to me a venerable place.
It was in virtue of his sincerity, of his speaking still in some sort from the
heart of Nature, though in the current artificial dialect, that Johnson was a
Prophet. Are not all dialects "artificial"? Artificial things are not all false;—
nay every true Product of Nature will infallibly shape itself; we may say all
artificial things are, at the starting of them, true. What we call "Formulas"
are not in their origin bad; they are indispensably good. Formula is method,
habitude; found wherever man is found. Formulas fashion themselves as
Paths do, as beaten Highways, leading toward some sacred or high object,
whither many men are bent. Consider it. One man, full of heartfelt earnest
impulse, finds out a way of doing somewhat,—were it of uttering his soul's
reverence for the Highest, were it but of fitly saluting his fellow-man. An
inventor was needed to do that, a poet; he has articulated the dim-struggling

thought that dwelt in his own and many hearts. This is his way of doing
that; these are his footsteps, the beginning of a "Path." And now see: the
second men travels naturally in the footsteps of his foregoer, it is the easiest
method. In the footsteps of his foregoer; yet with improvements, with
changes where such seem good; at all events with enlargements, the Path
ever widening itself as more travel it;—till at last there is a broad Highway
whereon the whole world may travel and drive. While there remains a City
or Shrine, or any Reality to drive to, at the farther end, the Highway shall be
right welcome! When the City is gone, we will forsake the Highway. In this
manner all Institutions, Practices, Regulated Things in the world have come
into existence, and gone out of existence. Formulas all begin by being full
of substance; you may call them the skin, the articulation into shape, into
limbs and skin, of a substance that is already there: they had not been there
otherwise. Idols, as we said, are not idolatrous till they become doubtful,
empty for the worshipper's heart. Much as we talk against Formulas, I hope
no one of us is ignorant withal of the high significance of true Formulas;
that they were, and will ever be, the indispensablest furniture of our
habitation in this world.—
Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his "sincerity." He has no
suspicion of his being particularly sincere,—of his being particularly
anything! A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or "scholar" as he calls
himself, trying hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not to
starve, but to live—without stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in him. He
does not "engrave Truth on his watch-seal;" no, but he stands by truth,
speaks by it, works and lives by it. Thus it ever is. Think of it once more.
The man whom Nature has appointed to do great things is, first of all,
furnished with that openness to Nature which renders him incapable of
being insincere! To his large, open, deep-feeling heart Nature is a Fact: all
hearsay is hearsay; the unspeakable greatness of this Mystery of Life, let
him acknowledge it or not, nay even though he seem to forget it or deny it,
is ever present to him,—fearful and wonderful, on this hand and on that. He
has a basis of sincerity; unrecognized, because never questioned or capable
of question. Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell, Napoleon: all the Great Men I
ever heard of have this as the primary material of them. Innumerable
commonplace men are debating, are talking everywhere their commonplace
doctrines, which they have learned by logic, by rote, at second-hand: to that
kind of man all this is still nothing. He must have truth; truth which he feels

to be true. How shall he stand otherwise? His whole soul, at all moments, in
all ways, tells him that there is no standing. He is under the noble necessity
of being true. Johnson's way of thinking about this world is not mine, any
more than Mahomet's was: but I recognize the everlasting element of heart-
sincerity in both; and see with pleasure how neither of them remains
ineffectual. Neither of them is as chaff sown; in both of them is something
which the seedfield will grow.
Johnson was a Prophet to his people; preached a Gospel to them,—as all
like him always do. The highest Gospel he preached we may describe as a
kind of Moral Prudence: "in a world where much is to be done, and little is
to be known," see how you will do it! A thing well worth preaching. "A
world where much is to be done, and little is to be known:" do not sink
yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of Doubt, of wretched god-
forgetting Unbelief;—you were miserable then, powerless, mad: how could
you do or work at all? Such Gospel Johnson preached and taught;—
coupled, theoretically and practically, with this other great Gospel, "Clear
your mind of Cant!" Have no trade with Cant: stand on the cold mud in the
frosty weather, but let it be in your own real torn shoes: "that will be better
for you," as Mahomet says! I call this, I call these two things joined
together, a great Gospel, the greatest perhaps that was possible at that time.
Johnson's Writings, which once had such currency and celebrity, are now
as it were disowned by the young generation. It is not wonderful; Johnson's
opinions are fast becoming obsolete: but his style of thinking and of living,
we may hope, will never become obsolete. I find in Johnson's Books the
indisputablest traces of a great intellect and great heart;—ever welcome,
under what obstructions and perversions soever. They are sincere words,
those of his; he means things by them. A wondrous buckram style,—the
best he could get to then; a measured grandiloquence, stepping or rather
stalking along in a very solemn way, grown obsolete now; sometimes a
tumid size of phraseology not in proportion to the contents of it: all this you
will put up with. For the phraseology, tumid or not, has always something
within it. So many beautiful styles and books, with nothing in them;—a
man is a malefactor to the world who writes such! They are the avoidable
kind!—Had Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced
there a great intellect, a genuine man. Looking to its clearness of definition,
its general solidity, honesty, insight and successful method, it may be called
the best of all Dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it

stands there like a great solid square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically
complete: you judge that a true Builder did it.
One word, in spite of our haste, must be granted to poor Bozzy. He
passes for a mean, inflated, gluttonous creature; and was so in many senses.
Yet the fact of his reverence for Johnson will ever remain noteworthy. The
foolish conceited Scotch Laird, the most conceited man of his time,
approaching in such awe-struck attitude the great dusty irascible Pedagogue
in his mean garret there: it is a genuine reverence for Excellence; a worship
for Heroes, at a time when neither Heroes nor worship were surmised to
exist. Heroes, it would seem, exist always, and a certain worship of them!
We will also take the liberty to deny altogether that of the witty Frenchman,
that no man is a Hero to his valet-de-chambre. Or if so, it is not the Hero's
blame, but the Valet's: that his soul, namely, is a mean valet-soul! He
expects his Hero to advance in royal stage-trappings, with measured step,
trains borne behind him, trumpets sounding before him. It should stand
rather, No man can be a Grand-Monarque to his valet-de-chambre. Strip
your Louis Quatorze of his king-gear, and there is left nothing but a poor
forked radish with a head fantastically carved;—admirable to no valet. The
Valet does not know a Hero when he sees him! Alas, no: it requires a kind
of Hero to do that;—and one of the world's wants, in this as in other senses,
is for most part want of such.
On the whole, shall we not say, that Boswell's admiration was well
bestowed; that he could have found no soul in all England so worthy of
bending down before? Shall we not say, of this great mournful Johnson too,
that he guided his difficult confused existence wisely; led it well, like a right
valiant man? That waste chaos of Authorship by trade; that waste chaos of
Scepticism in religion and politics, in life-theory and life-practice; in his
poverty, in his dust and dimness, with the sick body and the rusty coat: he
made it do for him, like a brave man. Not wholly without a loadstar in the
Eternal; he had still a loadstar, as the brave all need to have: with his eye set
on that, he would change his course for nothing in these confused vortices
of the lower sea of Time. "To the Spirit of Lies, bearing death and hunger,
he would in nowise strike his flag." Brave old Samuel: ultimus
Romanorum!
Of Rousseau and his Heroism I cannot say so much. He is not what I call
a strong man. A morbid, excitable, spasmodic man; at best, intense rather

than strong. He had not "the talent of Silence," an invaluable talent; which
few Frenchmen, or indeed men of any sort in these times, excel in! The
suffering man ought really "to consume his own smoke;" there is no good in
emitting smoke till you have made it into fire,—which, in the metaphorical
sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming! Rousseau has not depth or
width, not calm force for difficulty; the first characteristic of true greatness.
A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is
not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then.
He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the
strong man. We need forever, especially in these loud-shrieking days, to
remind ourselves of that. A man who cannot hold his peace, till the time
come for speaking and acting, is no right man.
Poor Rousseau's face is to me expressive of him. A high but narrow
contracted intensity in it: bony brows; deep, strait-set eyes, in which there is
something bewildered-looking,—bewildered, peering with lynx-eagerness.
A face full of misery, even ignoble misery, and also of the antagonism
against that; something mean, plebeian there, redeemed only by intensity:
the face of what is called a Fanatic,—a sadly contracted Hero! We name
him here because, with all his drawbacks, and they are many, he has the
first and chief characteristic of a Hero: he is heartily in earnest. In earnest,
if ever man was; as none of these French Philosophers were. Nay, one
would say, of an earnestness too great for his otherwise sensitive, rather
feeble nature; and which indeed in the end drove him into the strangest
incoherences, almost delirations. There had come, at last, to be a kind of
madness in him: his Ideas possessed him like demons; hurried him so about,
drove him over steep places—!
The fault and misery of Rousseau was what we easily name by a single
word, Egoism; which is indeed the source and summary of all faults and
miseries whatsoever. He had not perfected himself into victory over mere
Desire; a mean Hunger, in many sorts, was still the motive principle of him.
I am afraid he was a very vain man; hungry for the praises of men. You
remember Genlis's experience of him. She took Jean Jacques to the Theatre;
he bargaining for a strict incognito,—"He would not be seen there for the
world!" The curtain did happen nevertheless to be drawn aside: the Pit
recognized Jean Jacques, but took no great notice of him! He expressed the
bitterest indignation; gloomed all evening, spake no other than surly words.
The glib Countess remained entirely convinced that his anger was not at

being seen, but at not being applauded when seen. How the whole nature of
the man is poisoned; nothing but suspicion, self-isolation, fierce moody
ways! He could not live with anybody. A man of some rank from the
country, who visited him often, and used to sit with him, expressing all
reverence and affection for him, comes one day; finds Jean Jacques full of
the sourest unintelligible humor. "Monsieur," said Jean Jacques, with
flaming eyes, "I know why you come here. You come to see what a poor
life I lead; how little is in my poor pot that is boiling there. Well, look into
the pot! There is half a pound of meat, one carrot and three onions; that is
all: go and tell the whole world that, if you like, Monsieur!"—A man of this
sort was far gone. The whole world got itself supplied with anecdotes, for
light laughter, for a certain theatrical interest, from these perversions and
contortions of poor Jean Jacques. Alas, to him they were not laughing or
theatrical; too real to him! The contortions of a dying gladiator: the crowded
amphitheatre looks on with entertainment; but the gladiator is in agonies
and dying.
And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passionate appeals to Mothers,
with his contrat-social, with his celebrations of Nature, even of savage life
in Nature, did once more touch upon Reality, struggle towards Reality; was
doing the function of a Prophet to his Time. As he could, and as the Time
could! Strangely through all that defacement, degradation and almost
madness, there is in the inmost heart of poor Rousseau a spark of real
heavenly fire. Once more, out of the element of that withered mocking
Philosophism, Scepticism and Persiflage, there has arisen in this man the
ineradicable feeling and knowledge that this Life of ours is true: not a
Scepticism, Theorem, or Persiflage, but a Fact, an awful Reality. Nature had
made that revelation to him; had ordered him to speak it out. He got it
spoken out; if not well and clearly, then ill and dimly,—as clearly as he
could. Nay what are all errors and perversities of his, even those stealings of
ribbons, aimless confused miseries and vagabondisms, if we will interpret
them kindly, but the blinkard dazzlement and staggerings to and fro of a
man sent on an errand he is too weak for, by a path he cannot yet find? Men
are led by strange ways. One should have tolerance for a man, hope of him;
leave him to try yet what he will do. While life lasts, hope lasts for every
man.
Of Rousseau's literary talents, greatly celebrated still among his
countrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like himself, are what I call

unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. There is a sensuality in Rousseau.
Combined with such an intellectual gift as his, it makes pictures of a certain
gorgeous attractiveness: but they are not genuinely poetical. Not white
sunlight: something operatic; a kind of rose-pink, artificial bedizenment. It
is frequent, or rather it is universal, among the French since his time.
Madame de Stael has something of it; St. Pierre; and down onwards to the
present astonishing convulsionary "Literature of Desperation," it is
everywhere abundant. That same rose-pink is not the right hue. Look at a
Shakspeare, at a Goethe, even at a Walter Scott! He who has once seen into
this, has seen the difference of the True from the Sham-True, and will
discriminate them ever afterwards.
We had to observe in Johnson how much good a Prophet, under all
disadvantages and disorganizations, can accomplish for the world. In
Rousseau we are called to look rather at the fearful amount of evil which,
under such disorganization, may accompany the good. Historically it is a
most pregnant spectacle, that of Rousseau. Banished into Paris garrets, in
the gloomy company of his own Thoughts and Necessities there; driven
from post to pillar; fretted, exasperated till the heart of him went mad, he
had grown to feel deeply that the world was not his friend nor the world's
law. It was expedient, if any way possible, that such a man should not have
been set in flat hostility with the world. He could be cooped into garrets,
laughed at as a maniac, left to starve like a wild beast in his cage;—but he
could not be hindered from setting the world on fire. The French Revolution
found its Evangelist in Rousseau. His semi-delirious speculations on the
miseries of civilized life, the preferability of the savage to the civilized, and
such like, helped well to produce a whole delirium in France generally.
True, you may well ask, What could the world, the governors of the world,
do with such a man? Difficult to say what the governors of the world could
do with him! What he could do with them is unhappily clear enough,—
guillotine a great many of them! Enough now of Rousseau.
It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbelieving second-hand
Eighteenth Century, that of a Hero starting up, among the artificial
pasteboard figures and productions, in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like a
little well in the rocky desert places,—like a sudden splendor of Heaven in
the artificial Vauxhall! People knew not what to make of it. They took it for
a piece of the Vauxhall fire-work; alas, it let itself be so taken, though
struggling half-blindly, as in bitterness of death, against that! Perhaps no

man had such a false reception from his fellow-men. Once more a very
wasteful life-drama was enacted under the sun.
The tragedy of Burns's life is known to all of you. Surely we may say, if
discrepancy between place held and place merited constitute perverseness
of lot for a man, no lot could be more perverse then Burns's. Among those
second-hand acting-figures, mimes for most part, of the Eighteenth Century,
once more a giant Original Man; one of those men who reach down to the
perennial Deeps, who take rank with the Heroic among men: and he was
born in a poor Ayrshire hut. The largest soul of all the British lands came
among us in the shape of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant.
His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things; did not succeed in
any; was involved in continual difficulties. The Steward, Factor as the
Scotch call him, used to send letters and threatenings, Burns says, "which
threw us all into tears." The brave, hard-toiling, hard-suffering Father, his
brave heroine of a wife; and those children, of whom Robert was one! In
this Earth, so wide otherwise, no shelter for them. The letters "threw us all
into tears:" figure it. The brave Father, I say always;—a silent Hero and
Poet; without whom the son had never been a speaking one! Burns's
Schoolmaster came afterwards to London, learnt what good society was;
but declares that in no meeting of men did he ever enjoy better discourse
than at the hearth of this peasant. And his poor "seven acres of nursery-
ground,"—not that, nor the miserable patch of clay-farm, nor anything he
tried to get a living by, would prosper with him; he had a sore unequal
battle all his days. But he stood to it valiantly; a wise, faithful,
unconquerable man;—swallowing down how many sore sufferings daily
into silence; fighting like an unseen Hero,—nobody publishing newspaper
paragraphs about his nobleness; voting pieces of plate to him! However, he
was not lost; nothing is lost. Robert is there the outcome of him,—and
indeed of many generations of such as him.
This Burns appeared under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor, born
only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that, in a rustic
special dialect, known only to a small province of the country he lived in.
Had he written, even what he did write, in the general language of England,
I doubt not he had already become universally recognized as being, or
capable to be, one of our greatest men. That he should have tempted so
many to penetrate through the rough husk of that dialect of his, is proof that

there lay something far from common within it. He has gained a certain
recognition, and is continuing to do so over all quarters of our wide Saxon
world: wheresoever a Saxon dialect is spoken, it begins to be understood,
by personal inspection of this and the other, that one of the most
considerable Saxon men of the Eighteenth Century was an Ayrshire Peasant
named Robert Burns. Yes, I will say, here too was a piece of the right Saxon
stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world;—rock, yet
with wells of living softness in it! A wild impetuous whirlwind of passion
and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly melody dwelling in the
heart of it. A noble rough genuineness; homely, rustic, honest; true
simplicity of strength; with its lightning-fire, with its soft dewy pity;—like
the old Norse Thor, the Peasant-god!
Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and worth, has told me that
Robert, in his young days, in spite of their hardship, was usually the gayest
of speech; a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter, sense and heart; far pleasanter
to hear there, stript cutting peats in the bog, or such like, than he ever
afterwards knew him. I can well believe it. This basis of mirth ("fond
gaillard," as old Marquis Mirabeau calls it), a primal element of sunshine
and joyfulness, coupled with his other deep and earnest qualities, is one of
the most attractive characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope dwells in
him; spite of his tragical history, he is not a mourning man. He shakes his
sorrows gallantly aside; bounds forth victorious over them. It is as the lion
shaking "dew-drops from his mane;" as the swift-bounding horse, that
laughs at the shaking of the spear.—But indeed, Hope, Mirth, of the sort
like Burns's, are they not the outcome properly of warm generous affection,
—such as is the beginning of all to every man?
You would think it strange if I called Burns the most gifted British soul
we had in all that century of his: and yet I believe the day is coming when
there will be little danger in saying so. His writings, all that he did under
such obstructions, are only a poor fragment of him. Professor Stewart
remarked very justly, what indeed is true of all Poets good for much, that
his poetry was not any particular faculty; but the general result of a
naturally vigorous original mind expressing itself in that way. Burns's gifts,
expressed in conversation, are the theme of all that ever heard him. All
kinds of gifts: from the gracefulest utterances of courtesy, to the highest fire
of passionate speech; loud floods of mirth, soft wailings of affection,
laconic emphasis, clear piercing insight; all was in him. Witty duchesses

celebrate him as a man whose speech "led them off their feet." This is
beautiful: but still more beautiful that which Mr. Lockhart has recorded,
which I have more than once alluded to, How the waiters and ostlers at inns
would get out of bed, and come crowding to hear this man speak! Waiters
and ostlers:—they too were men, and here was a man! I have heard much
about his speech; but one of the best things I ever heard of it was, last year,
from a venerable gentleman long familiar with him. That it was speech
distinguished by always having something in it. "He spoke rather little than
much," this old man told me; "sat rather silent in those early days, as in the
company of persons above him; and always when he did speak, it was to
throw new light on the matter." I know not why any one should ever speak
otherwise!—But if we look at his general force of soul, his healthy
robustness every way, the rugged downrightness, penetration, generous
valor and manfulness that was in him,—where shall we readily find a
better-gifted man?
Among the great men of the Eighteenth Century, I sometimes feel as if
Burns might be found to resemble Mirabeau more than any other. They
differ widely in vesture; yet look at them intrinsically. There is the same
burly thick-necked strength of body as of soul;—built, in both cases, on
what the old Marquis calls a fond gaillard. By nature, by course of
breeding, indeed by nation, Mirabeau has much more of bluster; a noisy,
forward, unresting man. But the characteristic of Mirabeau too is veracity
and sense, power of true insight, superiority of vision. The thing that he
says is worth remembering. It is a flash of insight into some object or other:
so do both these men speak. The same raging passions; capable too in both
of manifesting themselves as the tenderest noble affections. Wit; wild
laughter, energy, directness, sincerity: these were in both. The types of the
two men are not dissimilar. Burns too could have governed, debated in
National Assemblies; politicized, as few could. Alas, the courage which had
to exhibit itself in capture of smuggling schooners in the Solway Frith; in
keeping silence over so much, where no good speech, but only inarticulate
rage was possible: this might have bellowed forth Ushers de Breze and the
like; and made itself visible to all men, in managing of kingdoms, in ruling
of great ever-memorable epochs! But they said to him reprovingly, his
Official Superiors said, and wrote: "You are to work, not think." Of your
thinking-faculty, the greatest in this land, we have no need; you are to gauge
beer there; for that only are you wanted. Very notable;—and worth

mentioning, though we know what is to be said and answered! As if
Thought, Power of Thinking, were not, at all times, in all places and
situations of the world, precisely the thing that was wanted. The fatal man,
is he not always the unthinking man, the man who cannot think and see; but
only grope, and hallucinate, and missee the nature of the thing he works
with? He mis-sees it, mistakes it as we say; takes it for one thing, and it is
another thing,—and leaves him standing like a Futility there! He is the fatal
man; unutterably fatal, put in the high places of men.—"Why complain of
this?" say some: "Strength is mournfully denied its arena; that was true
from of old." Doubtless; and the worse for the arena, answer I!
Complaining profits little; stating of the truth may profit. That a Europe,
with its French Revolution just breaking out, finds no need of a Burns
except for gauging beer,—is a thing I, for one, cannot rejoice at—!
Once more we have to say here, that the chief quality of Burns is the
sincerity of him. So in his Poetry, so in his Life. The song he sings is not of
fantasticalities; it is of a thing felt, really there; the prime merit of this, as of
all in him, and of his Life generally, is truth. The Life of Burns is what we
may call a great tragic sincerity. A sort of savage sincerity,—not cruel, far
from that; but wild, wrestling naked with the truth of things. In that sense,
there is something of the savage in all great men.
Hero-worship,—Odin, Burns? Well; these Men of Letters too were not
without a kind of Hero-worship: but what a strange condition has that got
into now! The waiters and ostlers of Scotch inns, prying about the door,
eager to catch any word that fell from Burns, were doing unconscious
reverence to the Heroic. Johnson had his Boswell for worshipper. Rousseau
had worshippers enough; princes calling on him in his mean garret; the
great, the beautiful doing reverence to the poor moon-struck man. For
himself a most portentous contradiction; the two ends of his life not to be
brought into harmony. He sits at the tables of grandees; and has to copy
music for his own living. He cannot even get his music copied: "By dint of
dining out," says he, "I run the risk of dying by starvation at home." For his
worshippers too a most questionable thing! If doing Hero-worship well or
badly be the test of vital well-being or ill-being to a generation, can we say
that these generations are very first-rate?—And yet our heroic Men of
Letters do teach, govern, are kings, priests, or what you like to call them;
intrinsically there is no preventing it by any means whatever. The world has
to obey him who thinks and sees in the world. The world can alter the

manner of that; can either have it as blessed continuous summer sunshine,
or as unblessed black thunder and tornado,—with unspeakable difference of
profit for the world! The manner of it is very alterable; the matter and fact
of it is not alterable by any power under the sky. Light; or, failing that,
lightning: the world can take its choice. Not whether we call an Odin god,
prophet, priest, or what we call him; but whether we believe the word he
tells us: there it all lies. If it be a true word, we shall have to believe it;
believing it, we shall have to do it. What name or welcome we give him or
it, is a point that concerns ourselves mainly. It, the new Truth, new deeper
revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verily of the nature of a message
from on high; and must and will have itself obeyed.—
My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns's history,—his visit to
Edinburgh. Often it seems to me as if his demeanor there were the highest
proof he gave of what a fund of worth and genuine manhood was in him. If
we think of it, few heavier burdens could be laid on the strength of a man.
So sudden; all common Lionism. which ruins innumerable men, was as
nothing to this. It is as if Napoleon had been made a King of, not gradually,
but at once from the Artillery Lieutenancy in the Regiment La Fere. Burns,
still only in his twenty-seventh year, is no longer even a ploughman; he is
flying to the West Indies to escape disgrace and a jail. This month he is a
ruined peasant, his wages seven pounds a year, and these gone from him:
next month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing down jewelled
Duchesses to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes! Adversity is sometimes hard
upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred
that will stand adversity. I admire much the way in which Burns met all
this. Perhaps no man one could point out, was ever so sorely tried, and so
little forgot himself. Tranquil, unastonished; not abashed, not inflated,
neither awkwardness nor affectation: he feels that he there is the man
Robert Burns; that the "rank is but the guinea-stamp;" that the celebrity is
but the candle-light, which will show what man, not in the least make him a
better or other man! Alas, it may readily, unless he look to it, make him a
worse man; a wretched inflated wind-bag,—inflated till he burst, and
become a dead lion; for whom, as some one has said, "there is no
resurrection of the body;" worse than a living dog!—Burns is admirable
here.
And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these Lion-hunters were the
ruin and death of Burns. It was they that rendered it impossible for him to

live! They gathered round him in his Farm; hindered his industry; no place
was remote enough from them. He could not get his Lionism forgotten,
honestly as he was disposed to do so. He falls into discontents, into
miseries, faults; the world getting ever more desolate for him; health,
character, peace of mind, all gone;—solitary enough now. It is tragical to
think of! These men came but to see him; it was out of no sympathy with
him, nor no hatred to him. They came to get a little amusement; they got
their amusement;—and the Hero's life went for it!
Richter says, in the Island of Sumatra there is a kind of "Light-chafers,"
large Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits, and illuminate the ways with
at night. Persons of condition can thus travel with a pleasant radiance,
which they much admire. Great honor to the Fire-flies! But—!

LECTURE VI. THE HERO AS KING.
CROMWELL, NAPOLEON: MODERN
REVOLUTIONISM.
[May 22, 1840.]

We come now to the last form of Heroism; that which we call Kingship.
The Commander over Men; he to whose will our wills are to be
subordinated, and loyally surrender themselves, and find their welfare in
doing so, may be reckoned the most important of Great Men. He is
practically the summary for us of all the various figures of Heroism; Priest,
Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of spiritual dignity we can fancy to reside
in a man, embodies itself here, to command over us, to furnish us with
constant practical teaching, to tell us for the day and hour what we are to
do. He is called Rex, Regulator, Roi: our own name is still better; King,
Konning, which means Can-ning, Able-man.
Numerous considerations, pointing towards deep, questionable, and
indeed unfathomable regions, present themselves here: on the most of
which we must resolutely for the present forbear to speak at all. As Burke
said that perhaps fair Trial by Jury was the soul of Government, and that all
legislation, administration, parliamentary debating, and the rest of it, went
on, in "order to bring twelve impartial men into a jury-box;"—so, by much
stronger reason, may I say here, that the finding of your Ableman and
getting him invested with the symbols of ability, with dignity, worship
(worth-ship), royalty, kinghood, or whatever we call it, so that he may
actually have room to guide according to his faculty of doing it,—is the
business, well or ill accomplished, of all social procedure whatsoever in this
world! Hustings-speeches, Parliamentary motions, Reform Bills, French
Revolutions, all mean at heart this; or else nothing. Find in any country the
Ablest Man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally
reverence him: you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot-
box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other
machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit. It is in the perfect state; an

ideal country. The Ablest Man; he means also the truest-hearted, justest, the
Noblest Man: what he tells us to do must be precisely the wisest, fittest, that
we could anywhere or anyhow learn;—the thing which it will in all ways
behoove US, with right loyal thankfulness and nothing doubting, to do! Our
doing and life were then, so far as government could regulate it, well
regulated; that were the ideal of constitutions.
Alas, we know very well that Ideals can never be completely embodied
in practice. Ideals must ever lie a very great way off; and we will right
thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation
thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale
of perfection the meagre product of reality" in this poor world of ours. We
will esteem him no wise man; we will esteem him a sickly, discontented,
foolish man. And yet, on the other hand, it is never to be forgotten that
Ideals do exist; that if they be not approximated to at all, the whole matter
goes to wreck! Infallibly. No bricklayer builds a wall perfectly
perpendicular, mathematically this is not possible; a certain degree of
perpendicularity suffices him; and he, like a good bricklayer, who must
have done with his job, leaves it so. And yet if he sway too much from the
perpendicular; above all, if he throw plummet and level quite away from
him, and pile brick on brick heedless, just as it comes to hand—! Such
bricklayer, I think, is in a bad way. He has forgotten himself: but the Law of
Gravitation does not forget to act on him; he and his wall rush down into
confused welter of ruin—!
This is the history of all rebellions, French Revolutions, social explosions
in ancient or modern times. You have put the too Unable Man at the head of
affairs! The too ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man. You have forgotten that
there is any rule, or natural necessity whatever, of putting the Able Man
there. Brick must lie on brick as it may and can. Unable Simulacrum of
Ability, quack, in a word, must adjust himself with quack, in all manner of
administration of human things;—which accordingly lie unadministered,
fermenting into unmeasured masses of failure, of indigent misery: in the
outward, and in the inward or spiritual, miserable millions stretch out the
hand for their due supply, and it is not there. The "law of gravitation" acts;
Nature's laws do none of them forget to act. The miserable millions burst
forth into Sansculottism, or some other sort of madness: bricks and
bricklayer lie as a fatal chaos—!

Much sorry stuff, written some hundred years ago or more, about the
"Divine right of Kings," moulders unread now in the Public Libraries of this
country. Far be it from us to disturb the calm process by which it is
disappearing harmlessly from the earth, in those repositories! At the same
time, not to let the immense rubbish go without leaving us, as it ought,
some soul of it behind—I will say that it did mean something; something
true, which it is important for us and all men to keep in mind. To assert that
in whatever man you chose to lay hold of (by this or the other plan of
clutching at him); and claps a round piece of metal on the head of, and
called King,—there straightway came to reside a divine virtue, so that he
became a kind of god, and a Divinity inspired him with faculty and right to
rule over you to all lengths: this,—what can we do with this but leave it to
rot silently in the Public Libraries? But I will say withal, and that is what
these Divine-right men meant, That in Kings, and in all human Authorities,
and relations that men god-created can form among each other, there is
verily either a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong; one or the other of
these two! For it is false altogether, what the last Sceptical Century taught
us, that this world is a steam-engine. There is a God in this world; and a
God's-sanction, or else the violation of such, does look out from all ruling
and obedience, from all moral acts of men. There is no act more moral
between men than that of rule and obedience. Woe to him that claims
obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is! God's
law is in that, I say, however the Parchment-laws may run: there is a Divine
Right or else a Diabolic Wrong at the heart of every claim that one man
makes upon another.
It can do none of us harm to reflect on this: in all the relations of life it
will concern us; in Loyalty and Royalty, the highest of these. I esteem the
modern error, That all goes by self-interest and the checking and balancing
of greedy knaveries, and that in short, there is nothing divine whatever in
the association of men, a still more despicable error, natural as it is to an
unbelieving century, than that of a "divine right" in people called Kings. I
say, Find me the true Konning, King, or Able-man, and he has a divine right
over me. That we knew in some tolerable measure how to find him, and that
all men were ready to acknowledge his divine right when found: this is
precisely the healing which a sick world is everywhere, in these ages,
seeking after! The true King, as guide of the practical, has ever something
of the Pontiff in him,—guide of the spiritual, from which all practice has its

rise. This too is a true saying, That the King is head of the Church.—But we
will leave the Polemic stuff of a dead century to lie quiet on its
bookshelves.
Certainly it is a fearful business, that of having your Ableman to seek,
and not knowing in what manner to proceed about it! That is the world's sad
predicament in these times of ours. They are times of revolution, and have
long been. The bricklayer with his bricks, no longer heedful of plummet or
the law of gravitation, have toppled, tumbled, and it all welters as we see!
But the beginning of it was not the French Revolution; that is rather the end,
we can hope. It were truer to say, the beginning was three centuries farther
back: in the Reformation of Luther. That the thing which still called itself
Christian Church had become a Falsehood, and brazenly went about
pretending to pardon men's sins for metallic coined money, and to do much
else which in the everlasting truth of Nature it did not now do: here lay the
vital malady. The inward being wrong, all outward went ever more and
more wrong. Belief died away; all was Doubt, Disbelief. The builder cast
away his plummet; said to himself, "What is gravitation? Brick lies on brick
there!" Alas, does it not still sound strange to many of us, the assertion that
there is a God's-truth in the business of god-created men; that all is not a
kind of grimace, an "expediency," diplomacy, one knows not what—!
From that first necessary assertion of Luther's, "You, self-styled Papa,
you are no Father in God at all; you are—a Chimera, whom I know not how
to name in polite language!"—from that onwards to the shout which rose
round Camille Desmoulins in the Palais-Royal, "Aux armes!" when the
people had burst up against all manner of Chimeras,—I find a natural
historical sequence. That shout too, so frightful, half-infernal, was a great
matter. Once more the voice of awakened nations;—starting confusedly, as
out of nightmare, as out of death-sleep, into some dim feeling that Life was
real; that God's-world was not an expediency and diplomacy! Infernal;—
yes, since they would not have it otherwise. Infernal, since not celestial or
terrestrial! Hollowness, insincerity has to cease; sincerity of some sort has
to begin. Cost what it may, reigns of terror, horrors of French Revolution or
what else, we have to return to truth. Here is a Truth, as I said: a Truth clad
in hell-fire, since they would not but have it so—!
A common theory among considerable parties of men in England and
elsewhere used to be, that the French Nation had, in those days, as it were

gone mad; that the French Revolution was a general act of insanity, a
temporary conversion of France and large sections of the world into a kind
of Bedlam. The Event had risen and raged; but was a madness and
nonentity,—gone now happily into the region of Dreams and the
Picturesque!—To such comfortable philosophers, the Three Days of July,
1830, must have been a surprising phenomenon. Here is the French Nation
risen again, in musketry and death-struggle, out shooting and being shot, to
make that same mad French Revolution good! The sons and grandsons of
those men, it would seem, persist in the enterprise: they do not disown it;
they will have it made good; will have themselves shot, if it be not made
good. To philosophers who had made up their life-system, on that
"madness" quietus, no phenomenon could be more alarming. Poor Niebuhr,
they say, the Prussian Professor and Historian, fell broken-hearted in
consequence; sickened, if we can believe it, and died of the Three Days! It
was surely not a very heroic death;—little better than Racine's, dying
because Louis Fourteenth looked sternly on him once. The world had stood
some considerable shocks, in its time; might have been expected to survive
the Three Days too, and be found turning on its axis after even them! The
Three Days told all mortals that the old French Revolution, mad as it might
look, was not a transitory ebullition of Bedlam, but a genuine product of
this Earth where we all live; that it was verily a Fact, and that the world in
general would do well everywhere to regard it as such.
Truly, without the French Revolution, one would not know what to make
of an age like this at all. We will hail the French Revolution, as shipwrecked
mariners might the sternest rock, in a world otherwise all of baseless sea
and waves. A true Apocalypse, though a terrible one, to this false withered
artificial time; testifying once more that Nature is preternatural; if not
divine, then diabolic; that Semblance is not Reality; that it has to become
Reality, or the world will take fire under it,—burn it into what it is, namely
Nothing! Plausibility has ended; empty Routine has ended; much has ended.
This, as with a Trump of Doom, has been proclaimed to all men. They are
the wisest who will learn it soonest. Long confused generations before it be
learned; peace impossible till it be! The earnest man, surrounded, as ever,
with a world of inconsistencies, can await patiently, patiently strive to do
his work, in the midst of that. Sentence of Death is written down in Heaven
against all that; sentence of Death is now proclaimed on the Earth against it:
this he with his eyes may see. And surely, I should say, considering the

other side of the matter, what enormous difficulties lie there, and how fast,
fearfully fast, in all countries, the inexorable demand for solution of them is
pressing on,—he may easily find other work to do than laboring in the
Sansculottic province at this time of day!
To me, in these circumstances, that of "Hero-worship" becomes a fact
inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world at
present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management of the world.
Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that men ever instituted,
sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of Heroes being sent us; our
faculty, our necessity, to reverence Heroes when sent: it shines like a
polestar through smoke-clouds, dust-clouds, and all manner of down-
rushing and conflagration.
Hero-worship would have sounded very strange to those workers and
fighters in the French Revolution. Not reverence for Great Men; not any
hope or belief, or even wish, that Great Men could again appear in the
world! Nature, turned into a "Machine," was as if effete now; could not any
longer produce Great Men:—I can tell her, she may give up the trade
altogether, then; we cannot do without Great Men!—But neither have I any
quarrel with that of "Liberty and Equality;" with the faith that, wise great
men being impossible, a level immensity of foolish small men would
suffice. It was a natural faith then and there. "Liberty and Equality; no
Authority needed any longer. Hero-worship, reverence for such Authorities,
has proved false, is itself a falsehood; no more of it! We have had such
forgeries, we will now trust nothing. So many base plated coins passing in
the market, the belief has now become common that no gold any longer
exists,—and even that we can do very well without gold!" I find this,
among other things, in that universal cry of Liberty and Equality; and find it
very natural, as matters then stood.
And yet surely it is but the transition from false to true. Considered as the
whole truth, it is false altogether;—the product of entire sceptical blindness,
as yet only struggling to see. Hero-worship exists forever, and everywhere:
not Loyalty alone; it extends from divine adoration down to the lowest
practical regions of life. "Bending before men," if it is not to be a mere
empty grimace, better dispensed with than practiced, is Hero-worship,—a
recognition that there does dwell in that presence of our brother something
divine; that every created man, as Novalis said, is a "revelation in the

Flesh." They were Poets too, that devised all those graceful courtesies
which make life noble! Courtesy is not a falsehood or grimace; it need not
be such. And Loyalty, religious Worship itself, are still possible; nay still
inevitable.
May we not say, moreover, while so many of our late Heroes have
worked rather as revolutionary men, that nevertheless every Great Man,
every genuine man, is by the nature of him a son of Order, not of Disorder?
It is a tragical position for a true man to work in revolutions. He seems an
anarchist; and indeed a painful element of anarchy does encumber him at
every step,—him to whose whole soul anarchy is hostile, hateful. His
mission is Order; every man's is. He is here to make what was disorderly,
chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary of Order. Is not all
work of man in this world a making of Order? The carpenter finds rough
trees; shapes them, constrains them into square fitness, into purpose and
use. We are all born enemies of Disorder: it is tragical for us all to be
concerned in image-breaking and down-pulling; for the Great Man, more a
man than we, it is doubly tragical.
Thus too all human things, maddest French Sansculottisms, do and must
work towards Order. I say, there is not a man in them, raging in the thickest
of the madness, but is impelled withal, at all moments, towards Order. His
very life means that; Disorder is dissolution, death. No chaos but it seeks a
centre to revolve round. While man is man, some Cromwell or Napoleon is
the necessary finish of a Sansculottism.—Curious: in those days when
Hero-worship was the most incredible thing to every one, how it does come
out nevertheless, and assert itself practically, in a way which all have to
credit. Divine right, take it on the great scale, is found to mean divine might
withal! While old false Formulas are getting trampled everywhere into
destruction, new genuine Substances unexpectedly unfold themselves
indestructible. In rebellious ages, when Kingship itself seems dead and
abolished, Cromwell, Napoleon step forth again as Kings. The history of
these men is what we have now to look at, as our last phasis of Heroism.
The old ages are brought back to us; the manner in which Kings were made,
and Kingship itself first took rise, is again exhibited in the history of these
Two.
We have had many civil wars in England; wars of Red and White Roses,
wars of Simon de Montfort; wars enough, which are not very memorable.

But that war of the Puritans has a significance which belongs to no one of
the others. Trusting to your candor, which will suggest on the other side
what I have not room to say, I will call it a section once more of that great
universal war which alone makes up the true History of the World,—the
war of Belief against Unbelief! The struggle of men intent on the real
essence of things, against men intent on the semblances and forms of
things. The Puritans, to many, seem mere savage Iconoclasts, fierce
destroyers of Forms; but it were more just to call them haters of untrue
Forms. I hope we know how to respect Laud and his King as well as them.
Poor Laud seems to me to have been weak and ill-starred, not dishonest an
unfortunate Pedant rather than anything worse. His "Dreams" and
superstitions, at which they laugh so, have an affectionate, lovable kind of
character. He is like a College-Tutor, whose whole world is forms, College-
rules; whose notion is that these are the life and safety of the world. He is
placed suddenly, with that unalterable luckless notion of his, at the head not
of a College but of a Nation, to regulate the most complex deep-reaching
interests of men. He thinks they ought to go by the old decent regulations;
nay that their salvation will lie in extending and improving these. Like a
weak man, he drives with spasmodic vehemence towards his purpose;
cramps himself to it, heeding no voice of prudence, no cry of pity: He will
have his College-rules obeyed by his Collegians; that first; and till that,
nothing. He is an ill-starred Pedant, as I said. He would have it the world
was a College of that kind, and the world was not that. Alas, was not his
doom stern enough? Whatever wrongs he did, were they not all frightfully
avenged on him?
It is meritorious to insist on forms; Religion and all else naturally clothes
itself in forms. Everywhere the formed world is the only habitable one. The
naked formlessness of Puritanism is not the thing I praise in the Puritans; it
is the thing I pity,—praising only the spirit which had rendered that
inevitable! All substances clothe themselves in forms: but there are suitable
true forms, and then there are untrue unsuitable. As the briefest definition,
one might say, Forms which grow round a substance, if we rightly
understand that, will correspond to the real nature and purport of it, will be
true, good; forms which are consciously put round a substance, bad. I invite
you to reflect on this. It distinguishes true from false in Ceremonial Form,
earnest solemnity from empty pageant, in all human things.

There must be a veracity, a natural spontaneity in forms. In the
commonest meeting of men, a person making, what we call, "set speeches,"
is not he an offence? In the mere drawing-room, whatsoever courtesies you
see to be grimaces, prompted by no spontaneous reality within, are a thing
you wish to get away from. But suppose now it were some matter of vital
concernment, some transcendent matter (as Divine Worship is), about which
your whole soul, struck dumb with its excess of feeling, knew not how to
form itself into utterance at all, and preferred formless silence to any
utterance there possible,—what should we say of a man coming forward to
represent or utter it for you in the way of upholsterer-mummery? Such a
man,—let him depart swiftly, if he love himself! You have lost your only
son; are mute, struck down, without even tears: an importunate man
importunately offers to celebrate Funeral Games for him in the manner of
the Greeks! Such mummery is not only not to be accepted,—it is hateful,
unendurable. It is what the old Prophets called "Idolatry," worshipping of
hollow shows; what all earnest men do and will reject. We can partly
understand what those poor Puritans meant. Laud dedicating that St.
Catherine Creed's Church, in the manner we have it described; with his
multiplied ceremonial bowings, gesticulations, exclamations: surely it is
rather the rigorous formal Pedant, intent on his "College-rules," than the
earnest Prophet intent on the essence of the matter!
Puritanism found such forms insupportable; trampled on such forms;—
we have to excuse it for saying, No form at all rather than such! It stood
preaching in its bare pulpit, with nothing but the Bible in its hand. Nay, a
man preaching from his earnest soul into the earnest souls of men: is not
this virtually the essence of all Churches whatsoever? The nakedest,
savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any semblance, however dignified.
Besides, it will clothe itself with due semblance by and by, if it be real. No
fear of that; actually no fear at all. Given the living man, there will be found
clothes for him; he will find himself clothes. But the suit-of-clothes
pretending that it is both clothes and man—! We cannot "fight the French"
by three hundred thousand red uniforms; there must be men in the inside of
them! Semblance, I assert, must actually not divorce itself from Reality. If
Semblance do,—why then there must be men found to rebel against
Semblance, for it has become a lie! These two Antagonisms at war here, in
the case of Laud and the Puritans, are as old nearly as the world. They went

to fierce battle over England in that age; and fought out their confused
controversy to a certain length, with many results for all of us.
In the age which directly followed that of the Puritans, their cause or
themselves were little likely to have justice done them. Charles Second and
his Rochesters were not the kind of men you would set to judge what the
worth or meaning of such men might have been. That there could be any
faith or truth in the life of a man, was what these poor Rochesters, and the
age they ushered in, had forgotten. Puritanism was hung on gibbets,—like
the bones of the leading Puritans. Its work nevertheless went on
accomplishing itself. All true work of a man, hang the author of it on what
gibbet you like, must and will accomplish itself. We have our Habeas-
Corpus, our free Representation of the People; acknowledgment, wide as
the world, that all men are, or else must, shall, and will become, what we
call free men;—men with their life grounded on reality and justice, not on
tradition, which has become unjust and a chimera! This in part, and much
besides this, was the work of the Puritans.
And indeed, as these things became gradually manifest, the character of
the Puritans began to clear itself. Their memories were, one after another,
taken down from the gibbet; nay a certain portion of them are now, in these
days, as good as canonized. Eliot, Hampden, Pym, nay Ludlow,
Hutchinson, Vane himself, are admitted to be a kind of Heroes; political
Conscript Fathers, to whom in no small degree we owe what makes us a
free England: it would not be safe for anybody to designate these men as
wicked now. Few Puritans of note but find their apologists somewhere, and
have a certain reverence paid them by earnest men. One Puritan, I think,
and almost he alone, our poor Cromwell, seems to hang yet on the gibbet,
and find no hearty apologist anywhere. Him neither saint nor sinner will
acquit of great wickedness. A man of ability, infinite talent, courage, and so
forth: but he betrayed the Cause. Selfish ambition, dishonesty, duplicity; a
fierce, coarse, hypocritical Tartuffe; turning all that noble Struggle for
constitutional Liberty into a sorry farce played for his own benefit: this and
worse is the character they give of Cromwell. And then there come
contrasts with Washington and others; above all, with these noble Pyms and
Hampdens, whose noble work he stole for himself, and ruined into a futility
and deformity.

This view of Cromwell seems to me the not unnatural product of a
century like the Eighteenth. As we said of the Valet, so of the Sceptic: He
does not know a Hero when he sees him! The Valet expected purple
mantles, gilt sceptres, bodyguards and flourishes of trumpets: the Sceptic of
the Eighteenth century looks for regulated respectable Formulas,
"Principles," or what else he may call them; a style of speech and conduct
which has got to seem "respectable," which can plead for itself in a
handsome articulate manner, and gain the suffrages of an enlightened
sceptical Eighteenth century! It is, at bottom, the same thing that both the
Valet and he expect: the garnitures of some acknowledged royalty, which
then they will acknowledge! The King coming to them in the rugged
unformulistic state shall be no King.
For my own share, far be it from me to say or insinuate a word of
disparagement against such characters as Hampden, Elliot, Pym; whom I
believe to have been right worthy and useful men. I have read diligently
what books and documents about them I could come at;—with the honestest
wish to admire, to love and worship them like Heroes; but I am sorry to say,
if the real truth must be told, with very indifferent success! At bottom, I
found that it would not do. They are very noble men, these; step along in
their stately way, with their measured euphemisms, philosophies,
parliamentary eloquences, Ship-moneys, Monarchies of Man; a most
constitutional, unblamable, dignified set of men. But the heart remains cold
before them; the fancy alone endeavors to get up some worship of them.
What man's heart does, in reality, break forth into any fire of brotherly love
for these men? They are become dreadfully dull men! One breaks down
often enough in the constitutional eloquence of the admirable Pym, with his
"seventhly and lastly." You find that it may be the admirablest thing in the
world, but that it is heavy,—heavy as lead, barren as brick-clay; that, in a
word, for you there is little or nothing now surviving there! One leaves all
these Nobilities standing in their niches of honor: the rugged outcast
Cromwell, he is the man of them all in whom one still finds human stuff.
The great savage Baresark: he could write no euphemistic Monarchy of
Man; did not speak, did not work with glib regularity; had no straight story
to tell for himself anywhere. But he stood bare, not cased in euphemistic
coat-of-mail; he grappled like a giant, face to face, heart to heart, with the
naked truth of things! That, after all, is the sort of man for one. I plead
guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other sorts of men. Smooth-shaven

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

Hunger alone produced even the French Revolution; no, but the feeling of
the insupportable all-pervading Falsehood which had now embodied itself
in Hunger, in universal material Scarcity and Nonentity, and thereby
become indisputably false in the eyes of all! We will leave the Eighteenth
century with its "liberty to tax itself." We will not astonish ourselves that
the meaning of such men as the Puritans remained dim to it. To men who
believe in no reality at all, how shall a real human soul, the intensest of all
realities, as it were the Voice of this world's Maker still speaking to us,—be
intelligible? What it cannot reduce into constitutional doctrines relative to
"taxing," or other the like material interest, gross, palpable to the sense,
such a century will needs reject as an amorphous heap of rubbish.
Hampdens, Pyms and Ship-money will be the theme of much constitutional
eloquence, striving to be fervid;—which will glitter, if not as fire does, then
as ice does: and the irreducible Cromwell will remain a chaotic mass of
"madness," "hypocrisy," and much else.
From of old, I will confess, this theory of Cromwell's falsity has been
incredible to me. Nay I cannot believe the like, of any Great Man whatever.
Multitudes of Great Men figure in History as false selfish men; but if we
will consider it, they are but figures for us, unintelligible shadows; we do
not see into them as men that could have existed at all. A superficial
unbelieving generation only, with no eye but for the surfaces and
semblances of things, could form such notions of Great Men. Can a great
soul be possible without a conscience in it, the essence of all real souls,
great or small?—No, we cannot figure Cromwell as a Falsity and Fatuity;
the longer I study him and his career, I believe this the less. Why should
we? There is no evidence of it. Is it not strange that, after all the mountains
of calumny this man has been subject to, after being represented as the very
prince of liars, who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth, but always some
cunning counterfeit of truth, there should not yet have been one falsehood
brought clearly home to him? A prince of liars, and no lie spoken by him.
Not one that I could yet get sight of. It is like Pococke asking Grotius,
Where is your proof of Mahomet's Pigeon? No proof!—Let us leave all
these calumnious chimeras, as chimeras ought to be left. They are not
portraits of the man; they are distracted phantasms of him, the joint product
of hatred and darkness.
Looking at the man's life with our own eyes, it seems to me, a very
different hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of his earlier

obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it not all betoken an
earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? His nervous melancholic
temperament indicates rather a seriousness too deep for him. Of those
stories of "Spectres;" of the white Spectre in broad daylight, predicting that
he should be King of England, we are not bound to believe much;—
probably no more than of the other black Spectre, or Devil in person, to
whom the Officer saw him sell himself before Worcester Fight! But the
mournful, oversensitive, hypochondriac humor of Oliver, in his young
years, is otherwise indisputably known. The Huntingdon Physician told Sir
Philip Warwick himself, He had often been sent for at midnight; Mr.
Cromwell was full of hypochondria, thought himself near dying, and "had
fancies about the Town-cross." These things are significant. Such an
excitable deep-feeling nature, in that rugged stubborn strength of his, is not
the symptom of falsehood; it is the symptom and promise of quite other
than falsehood!
The young Oliver is sent to study Law; falls, or is said to have fallen, for
a little period, into some of the dissipations of youth; but if so, speedily
repents, abandons all this: not much above twenty, he is married, settled as
an altogether grave and quiet man. "He pays back what money he had won
at gambling," says the story;—he does not think any gain of that kind could
be really his. It is very interesting, very natural, this "conversion," as they
well name it; this awakening of a great true soul from the worldly slough, to
see into the awful truth of things;—to see that Time and its shows all rested
on Eternity, and this poor Earth of ours was the threshold either of Heaven
or of Hell! Oliver's life at St. Ives and Ely, as a sober industrious Farmer, is
it not altogether as that of a true and devout man? He has renounced the
world and its ways; its prizes are not the thing that can enrich him. He tills
the earth; he reads his Bible; daily assembles his servants round him to
worship God. He comforts persecuted ministers, is fond of preachers; nay
can himself preach,—exhorts his neighbors to be wise, to redeem the time.
In all this what "hypocrisy," "ambition," "cant," or other falsity? The man's
hopes, I do believe, were fixed on the other Higher World; his aim to get
well thither, by walking well through his humble course in this world. He
courts no notice: what could notice here do for him? "Ever in his great
Taskmaster's eye."
It is striking, too, how he comes out once into public view; he, since no
other is willing to come: in resistance to a public grievance. I mean, in that

matter of the Bedford Fens. No one else will go to law with Authority;
therefore he will. That matter once settled, he returns back into obscurity, to
his Bible and his Plough. "Gain influence"? His influence is the most
legitimate; derived from personal knowledge of him, as a just, religious,
reasonable and determined man. In this way he has lived till past forty; old
age is now in view of him, and the earnest portal of Death and Eternity; it
was at this point that he suddenly became "ambitious"! I do not interpret his
Parliamentary mission in that way!
His successes in Parliament, his successes through the war, are honest
successes of a brave man; who has more resolution in the heart of him,
more light in the head of him than other men. His prayers to God; his
spoken thanks to the God of Victory, who had preserved him safe, and
carried him forward so far, through the furious clash of a world all set in
conflict, through desperate-looking envelopments at Dunbar; through the
death-hail of so many battles; mercy after mercy; to the "crowning mercy"
of Worcester Fight: all this is good and genuine for a deep-hearted
Calvinistic Cromwell. Only to vain unbelieving Cavaliers, worshipping not
God but their own "love-locks," frivolities and formalities, living quite apart
from contemplations of God, living without God in the world, need it seem
hypocritical.
Nor will his participation in the King's death involve him in
condemnation with us. It is a stern business killing of a King! But if you
once go to war with him, it lies there; this and all else lies there. Once at
war, you have made wager of battle with him: it is he to die, or else you.
Reconciliation is problematic; may be possible, or, far more likely, is
impossible. It is now pretty generally admitted that the Parliament, having
vanquished Charles First, had no way of making any tenable arrangement
with him. The large Presbyterian party, apprehensive now of the
Independents, were most anxious to do so; anxious indeed as for their own
existence; but it could not be. The unhappy Charles, in those final
Hampton-Court negotiations, shows himself as a man fatally incapable of
being dealt with. A man who, once for all, could not and would not
understand:—whose thought did not in any measure represent to him the
real fact of the matter; nay worse, whose word did not at all represent his
thought. We may say this of him without cruelty, with deep pity rather: but
it is true and undeniable. Forsaken there of all but the name of Kingship, he
still, finding himself treated with outward respect as a King, fancied that he

might play off party against party, and smuggle himself into his old power
by deceiving both. Alas, they both discovered that he was deceiving them.
A man whose word will not inform you at all what he means or will do, is
not a man you can bargain with. You must get out of that man's way, or put
him out of yours! The Presbyterians, in their despair, were still for believing
Charles, though found false, unbelievable again and again. Not so
Cromwell: "For all our fighting," says he, "we are to have a little bit of
paper?" No—!
In fact, everywhere we have to note the decisive practical eye of this
man; how he drives towards the practical and practicable; has a genuine
insight into what is fact. Such an intellect, I maintain, does not belong to a
false man: the false man sees false shows, plausibilities, expediences: the
true man is needed to discern even practical truth. Cromwell's advice about
the Parliament's Army, early in the contest, How they were to dismiss their
city-tapsters, flimsy riotous persons, and choose substantial yeomen, whose
heart was in the work, to be soldiers for them: this is advice by a man who
saw. Fact answers, if you see into Fact! Cromwell's Ironsides were the
embodiment of this insight of his; men fearing God; and without any other
fear. No more conclusively genuine set of fighters ever trod the soil of
England, or of any other land.
Neither will we blame greatly that word of Cromwell's to them; which
was so blamed: "If the King should meet me in battle, I would kill the
King." Why not? These words were spoken to men who stood as before a
Higher than Kings. They had set more than their own lives on the cast. The
Parliament may call it, in official language, a fighting "for the King;" but
we, for our share, cannot understand that. To us it is no dilettante work, no
sleek officiality; it is sheer rough death and earnest. They have brought it to
the calling-forth of War; horrid internecine fight, man grappling with man
in fire-eyed rage,—the infernal element in man called forth, to try it by that!
Do that therefore; since that is the thing to be done.—The successes of
Cromwell seem to me a very natural thing! Since he was not shot in battle,
they were an inevitable thing. That such a man, with the eye to see, with the
heart to dare, should advance, from post to post, from victory to victory, till
the Huntingdon Farmer became, by whatever name you might call him, the
acknowledged Strongest Man in England, virtually the King of England,
requires no magic to explain it—!

Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a man, to fall into Scepticism,
into dilettantism, insincerity; not to know Sincerity when they see it. For
this world, and for all worlds, what curse is so fatal? The heart lying dead,
the eye cannot see. What intellect remains is merely the vulpine intellect.
That a true King be sent them is of small use; they do not know him when
sent. They say scornfully, Is this your King? The Hero wastes his heroic
faculty in bootless contradiction from the unworthy; and can accomplish
little. For himself he does accomplish a heroic life, which is much, which is
all; but for the world he accomplishes comparatively nothing. The wild rude
Sincerity, direct from Nature, is not glib in answering from the witness-box:
in your small-debt pie-powder court, he is scouted as a counterfeit. The
vulpine intellect "detects" him. For being a man worth any thousand men,
the response your Knox, your Cromwell gets, is an argument for two
centuries whether he was a man at all. God's greatest gift to this Earth is
sneeringly flung away. The miraculous talisman is a paltry plated coin, not
fit to pass in the shops as a common guinea.
Lamentable this! I say, this must be remedied. Till this be remedied in
some measure, there is nothing remedied. "Detect quacks"? Yes do, for
Heaven's sake; but know withal the men that are to be trusted! Till we know
that, what is all our knowledge; how shall we even so much as "detect"? For
the vulpine sharpness, which considers itself to be knowledge, and "detects"
in that fashion, is far mistaken. Dupes indeed are many: but, of all dupes,
there is none so fatally situated as he who lives in undue terror of being
duped. The world does exist; the world has truth in it, or it would not exist!
First recognize what is true, we shall then discern what is false; and
properly never till then.
"Know the men that are to be trusted:" alas, this is yet, in these days, very
far from us. The sincere alone can recognize sincerity. Not a Hero only is
needed, but a world fit for him; a world not of Valets;—the Hero comes
almost in vain to it otherwise! Yes, it is far from us: but it must come; thank
God, it is visibly coming. Till it do come, what have we? Ballot-boxes,
suffrages, French Revolutions:—if we are as Valets, and do not know the
Hero when we see him, what good are all these? A heroic Cromwell comes;
and for a hundred and fifty years he cannot have a vote from us. Why, the
insincere, unbelieving world is the natural property of the Quack, and of
the Father of quacks and quackeries! Misery, confusion, unveracity are
alone possible there. By ballot-boxes we alter the figure of our Quack; but

the substance of him continues. The Valet-World has to be governed by the
Sham-Hero, by the King merely dressed in King-gear. It is his; he is its! In
brief, one of two things: We shall either learn to know a Hero, a true
Governor and Captain, somewhat better, when we see him; or else go on to
be forever governed by the Unheroic;—had we ballot-boxes clattering at
every street-corner, there were no remedy in these.
Poor Cromwell,—great Cromwell! The inarticulate Prophet; Prophet who
could not speak. Rude, confused, struggling to utter himself, with his
savage depth, with his wild sincerity; and he looked so strange, among the
elegant Euphemisms, dainty little Falklands, didactic Chillingworths,
diplomatic Clarendons! Consider him. An outer hull of chaotic confusion,
visions of the Devil, nervous dreams, almost semi-madness; and yet such a
clear determinate man's-energy working in the heart of that. A kind of
chaotic man. The ray as of pure starlight and fire, working in such an
element of boundless hypochondria, unformed black of darkness! And yet
withal this hypochondria, what was it but the very greatness of the man?
The depth and tenderness of his wild affections: the quantity of sympathy he
had with things,—the quantity of insight he would yet get into the heart of
things, the mastery he would yet get over things: this was his hypochondria.
The man's misery, as man's misery always does, came of his greatness.
Samuel Johnson too is that kind of man. Sorrow-stricken, half-distracted;
the wide element of mournful black enveloping him,—wide as the world. It
is the character of a prophetic man; a man with his whole soul seeing, and
struggling to see.
On this ground, too, I explain to myself Cromwell's reputed confusion of
speech. To himself the internal meaning was sun-clear; but the material with
which he was to clothe it in utterance was not there. He had lived silent; a
great unnamed sea of Thought round him all his days; and in his way of life
little call to attempt naming or uttering that. With his sharp power of vision,
resolute power of action, I doubt not he could have learned to write Books
withal, and speak fluently enough;—he did harder things than writing of
Books. This kind of man is precisely he who is fit for doing manfully all
things you will set him on doing. Intellect is not speaking and logicizing; it
is seeing and ascertaining. Virtue, Virtues, manhood, herohood, is not fair-
spoken immaculate regularity; it is first of all, what the Germans well name
it, Tugend (Taugend, dow-ing or Dough-tiness), Courage and the Faculty to
do. This basis of the matter Cromwell had in him.

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

premeditation of the words he was to use. The Reporters, too, in those days
seem to have been singularly candid; and to have given the Printer precisely
what they found on their own note-paper. And withal, what a strange proof
is it of Cromwell's being the premeditative ever-calculating hypocrite,
acting a play before the world, That to the last he took no more charge of
his Speeches! How came he not to study his words a little, before flinging
them out to the public? If the words were true words, they could be left to
shift for themselves.
But with regard to Cromwell's "lying," we will make one remark. This, I
suppose, or something like this, to have been the nature of it. All parties
found themselves deceived in him; each party understood him to be
meaning this, heard him even say so, and behold he turns out to have been
meaning that! He was, cry they, the chief of liars. But now, intrinsically, is
not all this the inevitable fortune, not of a false man in such times, but
simply of a superior man? Such a man must have reticences in him. If he
walk wearing his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at, his journey will
not extend far! There is no use for any man's taking up his abode in a house
built of glass. A man always is to be himself the judge how much of his
mind he will show to other men; even to those he would have work along
with him. There are impertinent inquiries made: your rule is, to leave the
inquirer uninformed on that matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed, but
precisely as dark as he was! This, could one hit the right phrase of response,
is what the wise and faithful man would aim to answer in such a case.
Cromwell, no doubt of it, spoke often in the dialect of small subaltern
parties; uttered to them a part of his mind. Each little party thought him all
its own. Hence their rage, one and all, to find him not of their party, but of
his own party. Was it his blame? At all seasons of his history he must have
felt, among such people, how, if he explained to them the deeper insight he
had, they must either have shuddered aghast at it, or believing it, their own
little compact hypothesis must have gone wholly to wreck. They could not
have worked in his province any more; nay perhaps they could not now
have worked in their own province. It is the inevitable position of a great
man among small men. Small men, most active, useful, are to be seen
everywhere, whose whole activity depends on some conviction which to
you is palpably a limited one; imperfect, what we call an error. But would it
be a kindness always, is it a duty always or often, to disturb them in that?
Many a man, doing loud work in the world, stands only on some thin

traditionality, conventionality; to him indubitable, to you incredible: break
that beneath him, he sinks to endless depths! "I might have my hand full of
truth," said Fontenelle, "and open only my little finger."
And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how much more in all
departments of practice! He that cannot withal keep his mind to himself
cannot practice any considerable thing whatever. And we call it
"dissimulation," all this? What would you think of calling the general of an
army a dissembler because he did not tell every corporal and private soldier,
who pleased to put the question, what his thoughts were about everything?
—Cromwell, I should rather say, managed all this in a manner we must
admire for its perfection. An endless vortex of such questioning "corporals"
rolled confusedly round him through his whole course; whom he did
answer. It must have been as a great true-seeing man that he managed this
too. Not one proved falsehood, as I said; not one! Of what man that ever
wound himself through such a coil of things will you say so much?—
But in fact there are two errors, widely prevalent, which pervert to the
very basis our judgments formed about such men as Cromwell; about their
"ambition," "falsity," and such like. The first is what I might call
substituting the goal of their career for the course and starting-point of it.
The vulgar Historian of a Cromwell fancies that he had determined on
being Protector of England, at the time when he was ploughing the marsh
lands of Cambridgeshire. His career lay all mapped out: a program of the
whole drama; which he then step by step dramatically unfolded, with all
manner of cunning, deceptive dramaturgy, as he went on,—the hollow,
scheming [Gr.] Upokrites, or Play-actor, that he was! This is a radical
perversion; all but universal in such cases. And think for an instant how
different the fact is! How much does one of us foresee of his own life?
Short way ahead of us it is all dim; an unwound skein of possibilities, of
apprehensions, attemptabilities, vague-looming hopes. This Cromwell had
not his life lying all in that fashion of Program, which he needed then, with
that unfathomable cunning of his, only to enact dramatically, scene after
scene! Not so. We see it so; but to him it was in no measure so. What
absurdities would fall away of themselves, were this one undeniable fact
kept honestly in view by History! Historians indeed will tell you that they
do keep it in view;—but look whether such is practically the fact! Vulgar
History, as in this Cromwell's case, omits it altogether; even the best kinds
of History only remember it now and then. To remember it duly with

rigorous perfection, as in the fact it stood, requires indeed a rare faculty;
rare, nay impossible. A very Shakspeare for faculty; or more than
Shakspeare; who could enact a brother man's biography, see with the
brother man's eyes at all points of his course what things he saw; in short,
know his course and him, as few "Historians" are like to do. Half or more of
all the thick-plied perversions which distort our image of Cromwell, will
disappear, if we honestly so much as try to represent them so; in sequence,
as they were; not in the lump, as they are thrown down before us.
But a second error, which I think the generality commit, refers to this
same "ambition" itself. We exaggerate the ambition of Great Men; we
mistake what the nature of it is. Great Men are not ambitious in that sense;
he is a small poor man that is ambitious so. Examine the man who lives in
misery because he does not shine above other men; who goes about
producing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims; struggling
to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for God's sake, to
acknowledge him a great man, and set him over the heads of men! Such a
creature is among the wretchedest sights seen under this sun. A great man?
A poor morbid prurient empty man; fitter for the ward of a hospital, than for
a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk
on quiet paths; unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs
about him, he cannot live. It is the emptiness of the man, not his greatness.
Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would
find something in him. In good truth, I believe no great man, not so much as
a genuine man who had health and real substance in him of whatever
magnitude, was ever much tormented in this way.
Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be "noticed" by noisy
crowds of people? God his Maker already noticed him. He, Cromwell, was
already there; no notice would make him other than he already was. Till his
hair was grown gray; and Life from the down-hill slope was all seen to be
limited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurable matter how it went,—he
had been content to plough the ground, and read his Bible. He in his old
days could not support it any longer, without selling himself to Falsehood,
that he might ride in gilt carriages to Whitehall, and have clerks with
bundles of papers haunting him, "Decide this, decide that," which in utmost
sorrow of heart no man can perfectly decide! What could gilt carriages do
for this man? From of old, was there not in his life a weight of meaning, a
terror and a splendor as of Heaven itself? His existence there as man set

him beyond the need of gilding. Death, Judgment and Eternity: these
already lay as the background of whatsoever he thought or did. All his life
lay begirt as in a sea of nameless Thoughts, which no speech of a mortal
could name. God's Word, as the Puritan prophets of that time had read it:
this was great, and all else was little to him. To call such a man "ambitious,"
to figure him as the prurient wind-bag described above, seems to me the
poorest solecism. Such a man will say: "Keep your gilt carriages and
huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tape clerks, your influentialities, your
important businesses. Leave me alone, leave me alone; there is too much of
life in me already!" Old Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in England in his
day, was not ambitious. "Corsica Boswell" flaunted at public shows with
printed ribbons round his hat; but the great old Samuel stayed at home. The
world-wide soul wrapt up in its thoughts, in its sorrows;—what could
paradings, and ribbons in the hat, do for it?
Ah yes, I will say again: The great silent men! Looking round on the
noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with little
worth, one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence. The noble silent
men, scattered here and there, each in his department; silently thinking,
silently working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention of! They
are the salt of the Earth. A country that has none or few of these is in a bad
way. Like a forest which had no roots; which had all turned into leaves and
boughs;—which must soon wither and be no forest. Woe for us if we had
nothing but what we can show, or speak. Silence, the great Empire of
Silence: higher than the stars; deeper than the Kingdoms of Death! It alone
is great; all else is small.—I hope we English will long maintain our grand
talent pour le silence. Let others that cannot do without standing on barrel-
heads, to spout, and be seen of all the market-place, cultivate speech
exclusively,—become a most green forest without roots! Solomon says,
There is a time to speak; but also a time to keep silence. Of some great
silent Samuel, not urged to writing, as old Samuel Johnson says he was, by
want of money, and nothing other, one might ask, "Why do not you too get
up and speak; promulgate your system, found your sect?" "Truly," he will
answer, "I am continent of my thought hitherto; happily I have yet had the
ability to keep it in me, no compulsion strong enough to speak it. My
'system' is not for promulgation first of all; it is for serving myself to live
by. That is the great purpose of it to me. And then the 'honor'? Alas, yes;—

but as Cato said of the statue: So many statues in that Forum of yours, may
it not be better if they ask, Where is Cato's statue?"—
But now, by way of counterpoise to this of Silence, let me say that there
are two kinds of ambition; one wholly blamable, the other laudable and
inevitable. Nature has provided that the great silent Samuel shall not be
silent too long. The selfish wish to shine over others, let it be accounted
altogether poor and miserable. "Seekest thou great things, seek them not:"
this is most true. And yet, I say, there is an irrepressible tendency in every
man to develop himself according to the magnitude which Nature has made
him of; to speak out, to act out, what nature has laid in him. This is proper,
fit, inevitable; nay it is a duty, and even the summary of duties for a man.
The meaning of life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this: To
unfold your self, to work what thing you have the faculty for. It is a
necessity for the human being, the first law of our existence. Coleridge
beautifully remarks that the infant learns to speak by this necessity it feels.
—We will say therefore: To decide about ambition, whether it is bad or not,
you have two things to take into view. Not the coveting of the place alone,
but the fitness of the man for the place withal: that is the question. Perhaps
the place was his; perhaps he had a natural right, and even obligation, to
seek the place! Mirabeau's ambition to be Prime Minister, how shall we
blame it, if he were "the only man in France that could have done any good
there"? Hopefuler perhaps had he not so clearly felt how much good he
could do! But a poor Necker, who could do no good, and had even felt that
he could do none, yet sitting broken-hearted because they had flung him
out, and he was now quit of it, well might Gibbon mourn over him.—
Nature, I say, has provided amply that the silent great man shall strive to
speak withal; too amply, rather!
Fancy, for example, you had revealed to the brave old Samuel Johnson,
in his shrouded-up existence, that it was possible for him to do priceless
divine work for his country and the whole world. That the perfect Heavenly
Law might be made Law on this Earth; that the prayer he prayed daily, "Thy
kingdom come," was at length to be fulfilled! If you had convinced his
judgment of this; that it was possible, practicable; that he the mournful
silent Samuel was called to take a part in it! Would not the whole soul of the
man have flamed up into a divine clearness, into noble utterance and
determination to act; casting all sorrows and misgivings under his feet,
counting all affliction and contradiction small,—the whole dark element of

his existence blazing into articulate radiance of light and lightning? It were
a true ambition this! And think now how it actually was with Cromwell.
From of old, the sufferings of God's Church, true zealous Preachers of the
truth flung into dungeons, whips, set on pillories, their ears crops off, God's
Gospel-cause trodden under foot of the unworthy: all this had lain heavy on
his soul. Long years he had looked upon it, in silence, in prayer; seeing no
remedy on Earth; trusting well that a remedy in Heaven's goodness would
come,—that such a course was false, unjust, and could not last forever. And
now behold the dawn of it; after twelve years silent waiting, all England
stirs itself; there is to be once more a Parliament, the Right will get a voice
for itself: inexpressible well-grounded hope has come again into the Earth.
Was not such a Parliament worth being a member of? Cromwell threw
down his ploughs, and hastened thither.
He spoke there,—rugged bursts of earnestness, of a self-seen truth, where
we get a glimpse of them. He worked there; he fought and strove, like a
strong true giant of a man, through cannon-tumult and all else,—on and on,
till the Cause triumphed, its once so formidable enemies all swept from
before it, and the dawn of hope had become clear light of victory and
certainty. That he stood there as the strongest soul of England, the
undisputed Hero of all England,—what of this? It was possible that the Law
of Christ's Gospel could now establish itself in the world! The Theocracy
which John Knox in his pulpit might dream of as a "devout imagination,"
this practical man, experienced in the whole chaos of most rough practice,
dared to consider as capable of being realized. Those that were highest in
Christ's Church, the devoutest wisest men, were to rule the land: in some
considerable degree, it might be so and should be so. Was it not true, God's
truth? And if true, was it not then the very thing to do? The strongest
practical intellect in England dared to answer, Yes! This I call a noble true
purpose; is it not, in its own dialect, the noblest that could enter into the
heart of Statesman or man? For a Knox to take it up was something; but for
a Cromwell, with his great sound sense and experience of what our world
was,—History, I think, shows it only this once in such a degree. I account it
the culminating point of Protestantism; the most heroic phasis that "Faith in
the Bible" was appointed to exhibit here below. Fancy it: that it were made
manifest to one of us, how we could make the Right supremely victorious
over Wrong, and all that we had longed and prayed for, as the highest good
to England and all lands, an attainable fact!

Well, I must say, the vulpine intellect, with its knowingness, its alertness
and expertness in "detecting hypocrites," seems to me a rather sorry
business. We have had but one such Statesman in England; one man, that I
can get sight of, who ever had in the heart of him any such purpose at all.
One man, in the course of fifteen hundred years; and this was his welcome.
He had adherents by the hundred or the ten; opponents by the million. Had
England rallied all round him,—why, then, England might have been a
Christian land! As it is, vulpine knowingness sits yet at its hopeless
problem, "Given a world of Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their united
action;"—how cumbrous a problem, you may see in Chancery Law-Courts,
and some other places! Till at length, by Heaven's just anger, but also by
Heaven's great grace, the matter begins to stagnate; and this problem is
becoming to all men a palpably hopeless one.—
But with regard to Cromwell and his purposes: Hume, and a multitude
following him, come upon me here with an admission that Cromwell was
sincere at first; a sincere "Fanatic" at first, but gradually became a
"Hypocrite" as things opened round him. This of the Fanatic-Hypocrite is
Hume's theory of it; extensively applied since,—to Mahomet and many
others. Think of it seriously, you will find something in it; not much, not all,
very far from all. Sincere hero hearts do not sink in this miserable manner.
The Sun flings forth impurities, gets balefully incrusted with spots; but it
does not quench itself, and become no Sun at all, but a mass of Darkness! I
will venture to say that such never befell a great deep Cromwell; I think,
never. Nature's own lionhearted Son; Antaeus-like, his strength is got by
touching the Earth, his Mother; lift him up from the Earth, lift him up into
Hypocrisy, Inanity, his strength is gone. We will not assert that Cromwell
was an immaculate man; that he fell into no faults, no insincerities among
the rest. He was no dilettante professor of "perfections," "immaculate
conducts." He was a rugged Orson, rending his rough way through actual
true work,—doubtless with many a fall therein. Insincerities, faults, very
many faults daily and hourly: it was too well known to him; known to God
and him! The Sun was dimmed many a time; but the Sun had not himself
grown a Dimness. Cromwell's last words, as he lay waiting for death, are
those of a Christian heroic man. Broken prayers to God, that He would
judge him and this Cause, He since man could not, in justice yet in pity.
They are most touching words. He breathed out his wild great soul, its toils
and sins all ended now, into the presence of his Maker, in this manner.

I, for one, will not call the man a Hypocrite! Hypocrite, mummer, the life
of him a mere theatricality; empty barren quack, hungry for the shouts of
mobs? The man had made obscurity do very well for him till his head was
gray; and now he was, there as he stood recognized unblamed, the virtual
King of England. Cannot a man do without King's Coaches and Cloaks? Is
it such a blessedness to have clerks forever pestering you with bundles of
papers in red tape? A simple Diocletian prefers planting of cabbages; a
George Washington, no very immeasurable man, does the like. One would
say, it is what any genuine man could do; and would do. The instant his real
work were out in the matter of Kingship,—away with it!
Let us remark, meanwhile, how indispensable everywhere a King is, in
all movements of men. It is strikingly shown, in this very War, what
becomes of men when they cannot find a Chief Man, and their enemies can.
The Scotch Nation was all but unanimous in Puritanism; zealous and of one
mind about it, as in this English end of the Island was always far from being
the case. But there was no great Cromwell among them; poor tremulous,
hesitating, diplomatic Argyles and such like: none of them had a heart true
enough for the truth, or durst commit himself to the truth. They had no
leader; and the scattered Cavalier party in that country had one: Montrose,
the noblest of all the Cavaliers; an accomplished, gallant-hearted, splendid
man; what one may call the Hero-Cavalier. Well, look at it; on the one hand
subjects without a King; on the other a King without subjects! The subjects
without King can do nothing; the subjectless King can do something. This
Montrose, with a handful of Irish or Highland savages, few of them so
much as guns in their hands, dashes at the drilled Puritan armies like a wild
whirlwind; sweeps them, time after time, some five times over, from the
field before him. He was at one period, for a short while, master of all
Scotland. One man; but he was a man; a million zealous men, but without
the one; they against him were powerless! Perhaps of all the persons in that
Puritan struggle, from first to last, the single indispensable one was verily
Cromwell. To see and dare, and decide; to be a fixed pillar in the welter of
uncertainty;—a King among them, whether they called him so or not.
Precisely here, however, lies the rub for Cromwell. His other proceedings
have all found advocates, and stand generally justified; but this dismissal of
the Rump Parliament and assumption of the Protectorship, is what no one
can pardon him. He had fairly grown to be King in England; Chief Man of
the victorious party in England: but it seems he could not do without the

King's Cloak, and sold himself to perdition in order to get it. Let us see a
little how this was.
England, Scotland, Ireland, all lying now subdued at the feet of the
Puritan Parliament, the practical question arose, What was to be done with
it? How will you govern these Nations, which Providence in a wondrous
way has given up to your disposal? Clearly those hundred surviving
members of the Long Parliament, who sit there as supreme authority, cannot
continue forever to sit. What is to be done?—It was a question which
theoretical constitution-builders may find easy to answer; but to Cromwell,
looking there into the real practical facts of it, there could be none more
complicated. He asked of the Parliament, What it was they would decide
upon? It was for the Parliament to say. Yet the Soldiers too, however
contrary to Formula, they who had purchased this victory with their blood,
it seemed to them that they also should have something to say in it! We will
not "for all our fighting have nothing but a little piece of paper." We
understand that the Law of God's Gospel, to which He through us has given
the victory, shall establish itself, or try to establish itself, in this land!
For three years, Cromwell says, this question had been sounded in the
ears of the Parliament. They could make no answer; nothing but talk, talk.
Perhaps it lies in the nature of parliamentary bodies; perhaps no Parliament
could in such case make any answer but even that of talk, talk! Nevertheless
the question must and shall be answered. You sixty men there, becoming
fast odious, even despicable, to the whole nation, whom the nation already
calls Rump Parliament, you cannot continue to sit there: who or what then
is to follow? "Free Parliament," right of Election, Constitutional Formulas
of one sort or the other,—the thing is a hungry Fact coming on us, which
we must answer or be devoured by it! And who are you that prate of
Constitutional Formulas, rights of Parliament? You have had to kill your
King, to make Pride's Purges, to expel and banish by the law of the stronger
whosoever would not let your Cause prosper: there are but fifty or
threescore of you left there, debating in these days. Tell us what we shall
do; not in the way of Formula, but of practicable Fact!
How they did finally answer, remains obscure to this day. The diligent
Godwin himself admits that he cannot make it out. The likeliest is, that this
poor Parliament still would not, and indeed could not dissolve and disperse;
that when it came to the point of actually dispersing, they again, for the

tenth or twentieth time, adjourned it,—and Cromwell's patience failed him.
But we will take the favorablest hypothesis ever started for the Parliament;
the favorablest, though I believe it is not the true one, but too favorable.
According to this version: At the uttermost crisis, when Cromwell and his
Officers were met on the one hand, and the fifty or sixty Rump Members on
the other, it was suddenly told Cromwell that the Rump in its despair was
answering in a very singular way; that in their splenetic envious despair, to
keep out the Army at least, these men were hurrying through the House a
kind of Reform Bill,—Parliament to be chosen by the whole of England;
equable electoral division into districts; free suffrage, and the rest of it! A
very questionable, or indeed for them an unquestionable thing. Reform Bill,
free suffrage of Englishmen? Why, the Royalists themselves, silenced
indeed but not exterminated, perhaps outnumber us; the great numerical
majority of England was always indifferent to our Cause, merely looked at
it and submitted to it. It is in weight and force, not by counting of heads,
that we are the majority! And now with your Formulas and Reform Bills,
the whole matter, sorely won by our swords, shall again launch itself to sea;
become a mere hope, and likelihood, small even as a likelihood? And it is
not a likelihood; it is a certainty, which we have won, by God's strength and
our own right hands, and do now hold here. Cromwell walked down to
these refractory Members; interrupted them in that rapid speed of their
Reform Bill;—ordered them to begone, and talk there no more.—Can we
not forgive him? Can we not understand him? John Milton, who looked on
it all near at hand, could applaud him. The Reality had swept the Formulas
away before it. I fancy, most men who were realities in England might see
into the necessity of that.
The strong daring man, therefore, has set all manner of Formulas and
logical superficialities against him; has dared appeal to the genuine Fact of
this England, Whether it will support him or not? It is curious to see how he
struggles to govern in some constitutional way; find some Parliament to
support him; but cannot. His first Parliament, the one they call Barebones's
Parliament, is, so to speak, a Convocation of the Notables. From all quarters
of England the leading Ministers and chief Puritan Officials nominate the
men most distinguished by religious reputation, influence and attachment to
the true Cause: these are assembled to shape out a plan. They sanctioned
what was past; shaped as they could what was to come. They were
scornfully called Barebones's Parliament: the man's name, it seems, was

not Barebones, but Barbone,—a good enough man. Nor was it a jest, their
work; it was a most serious reality,—a trial on the part of these Puritan
Notables how far the Law of Christ could become the Law of this England.
There were men of sense among them, men of some quality; men of deep
piety I suppose the most of them were. They failed, it seems, and broke
down, endeavoring to reform the Court of Chancery! They dissolved
themselves, as incompetent; delivered up their power again into the hands
of the Lord General Cromwell, to do with it what he liked and could.
What will he do with it? The Lord General Cromwell, "Commander-in-
chief of all the Forces raised and to be raised;" he hereby sees himself, at
this unexampled juncture, as it were the one available Authority left in
England, nothing between England and utter Anarchy but him alone. Such
is the undeniable Fact of his position and England's, there and then. What
will he do with it? After deliberation, he decides that he will accept it; will
formally, with public solemnity, say and vow before God and men, "Yes,
the Fact is so, and I will do the best I can with it!" Protectorship, Instrument
of Government,—these are the external forms of the thing; worked out and
sanctioned as they could in the circumstances be, by the Judges, by the
leading Official people, "Council of Officers and Persons of interest in the
Nation:" and as for the thing itself, undeniably enough, at the pass matters
had now come to, there was no alternative but Anarchy or that. Puritan
England might accept it or not; but Puritan England was, in real truth, saved
from suicide thereby!—I believe the Puritan People did, in an inarticulate,
grumbling, yet on the whole grateful and real way, accept this anomalous
act of Oliver's; at least, he and they together made it good, and always
better to the last. But in their Parliamentary articulate way, they had their
difficulties, and never knew fully what to say to it—!
Oliver's second Parliament, properly his first regular Parliament, chosen
by the rule laid down in the Instrument of Government, did assemble, and
worked;—but got, before long, into bottomless questions as to the
Protector's right, as to "usurpation," and so forth; and had at the earliest
legal day to be dismissed. Cromwell's concluding Speech to these men is a
remarkable one. So likewise to his third Parliament, in similar rebuke for
their pedantries and obstinacies. Most rude, chaotic, all these Speeches are;
but most earnest-looking. You would say, it was a sincere helpless man; not
used to speak the great inorganic thought of him, but to act it rather! A
helplessness of utterance, in such bursting fulness of meaning. He talks

much about "births of Providence:" All these changes, so many victories
and events, were not forethoughts, and theatrical contrivances of men, of
me or of men; it is blind blasphemers that will persist in calling them so! He
insists with a heavy sulphurous wrathful emphasis on this. As he well
might. As if a Cromwell in that dark huge game he had been playing, the
world wholly thrown into chaos round him, had foreseen it all, and played it
all off like a precontrived puppet-show by wood and wire! These things
were foreseen by no man, he says; no man could tell what a day would
bring forth: they were "births of Providence," God's finger guided us on,
and we came at last to clear height of victory, God's Cause triumphant in
these Nations; and you as a Parliament could assemble together, and say in
what manner all this could be organized, reduced into rational feasibility
among the affairs of men. You were to help with your wise counsel in doing
that. "You have had such an opportunity as no Parliament in England ever
had." Christ's Law, the Right and True, was to be in some measure made the
Law of this land. In place of that, you have got into your idle pedantries,
constitutionalities, bottomless cavillings and questionings about written
laws for my coming here;—and would send the whole matter into Chaos
again, because I have no Notary's parchment, but only God's voice from the
battle-whirlwind, for being President among you! That opportunity is gone;
and we know not when it will return. You have had your constitutional
Logic; and Mammon's Law, not Christ's Law, rules yet in this land. "God be
judge between you and me!" These are his final words to them: Take you
your constitution-formulas in your hand; and I my informal struggles,
purposes, realities and acts; and "God be judge between you and me!"—
We said above what shapeless, involved chaotic things the printed
Speeches of Cromwell are. Wilfully ambiguous, unintelligible, say the most:
a hypocrite shrouding himself in confused Jesuitic jargon! To me they do
not seem so. I will say rather, they afforded the first glimpses I could ever
get into the reality of this Cromwell, nay into the possibility of him. Try to
believe that he means something, search lovingly what that may be: you
will find a real speech lying imprisoned in these broken rude tortuous
utterances; a meaning in the great heart of this inarticulate man! You will,
for thc first time, begin to see that he was a man; not an enigmatic chimera,
unintelligible to you, incredible to you. The Histories and Biographies
written of this Cromwell, written in shallow sceptical generations that could
not know or conceive of a deep believing man, are far more obscure than

Cromwell's Speeches. You look through them only into the infinite vague of
Black and the Inane. "Heats and jealousies," says Lord Clarendon himself:
"heats and jealousies," mere crabbed whims, theories and crotchets; these
induced slow sober quiet Englishmen to lay down their ploughs and work;
and fly into red fury of confused war against the best-conditioned of Kings!
Try if you can find that true. Scepticism writing about Belief may have
great gifts; but it is really ultra vires there. It is Blindness laying down the
Laws of Optics.—
Cromwell's third Parliament split on the same rock as his second. Ever
the constitutional Formula: How came you there? Show us some Notary
parchment! Blind pedants:—"Why, surely the same power which makes
you a Parliament, that, and something more, made me a Protector!" If my
Protectorship is nothing, what in the name of wonder is your
Parliamenteership, a reflex and creation of that?—
Parliaments having failed, there remained nothing but the way of
Despotism. Military Dictators, each with his district, to coerce the Royalist
and other gainsayers, to govern them, if not by act of Parliament, then by
the sword. Formula shall not carry it, while the Reality is here! I will go on,
protecting oppressed Protestants abroad, appointing just judges, wise
managers, at home, cherishing true Gospel ministers; doing the best I can to
make England a Christian England, greater than old Rome, the Queen of
Protestant Christianity; I, since you will not help me; I while God leaves me
life!—Why did he not give it up; retire into obscurity again, since the Law
would not acknowledge him? cry several. That is where they mistake. For
him there was no giving of it up! Prime ministers have governed countries,
Pitt, Pombal, Choiseul; and their word was a law while it held: but this
Prime Minister was one that could not get resigned. Let him once resign,
Charles Stuart and the Cavaliers waited to kill him; to kill the Cause and
him. Once embarked, there is no retreat, no return. This Prime Minister
could retire no-whither except into his tomb.
One is sorry for Cromwell in his old days. His complaint is incessant of
the heavy burden Providence has laid on him. Heavy; which he must bear
till death. Old Colonel Hutchinson, as his wife relates it, Hutchinson, his
old battle-mate, coming to see him on some indispensable business, much
against his will,—Cromwell "follows him to the door," in a most fraternal,
domestic, conciliatory style; begs that he would be reconciled to him, his

old brother in arms; says how much it grieves him to be misunderstood,
deserted by true fellow-soldiers, dear to him from of old: the rigorous
Hutchinson, cased in his Republican formula, sullenly goes his way.—And
the man's head now white; his strong arm growing weary with its long
work! I think always too of his poor Mother, now very old, living in that
Palace of his; a right brave woman; as indeed they lived all an honest God-
fearing Household there: if she heard a shot go off, she thought it was her
son killed. He had to come to her at least once a day, that she might see with
her own eyes that he was yet living. The poor old Mother!—What had this
man gained; what had he gained? He had a life of sore strife and toil, to his
last day. Fame, ambition, place in History? His dead body was hung in
chains, his "place in History,"—place in History forsooth!—has been a
place of ignominy, accusation, blackness and disgrace; and here, this day,
who knows if it is not rash in me to be among the first that ever ventured to
pronounce him not a knave and liar, but a genuinely honest man! Peace to
him. Did he not, in spite of all, accomplish much for us? We walk smoothly
over his great rough heroic life; step over his body sunk in the ditch there.
We need not spurn it, as we step on it!—Let the Hero rest. It was not to
men's judgment that he appealed; nor have men judged him very well.
Precisely a century and a year after this of Puritanism had got itself
hushed up into decent composure, and its results made smooth, in 1688,
there broke out a far deeper explosion, much more difficult to hush up,
known to all mortals, and like to be long known, by the name of French
Revolution. It is properly the third and final act of Protestantism; the
explosive confused return of mankind to Reality and Fact, now that they
were perishing of Semblance and Sham. We call our English Puritanism the
second act: "Well then, the Bible is true; let us go by the Bible!" "In
Church," said Luther; "In Church and State," said Cromwell, "let us go by
what actually is God's Truth." Men have to return to reality; they cannot live
on semblance. The French Revolution, or third act, we may well call the
final one; for lower than that savage Sansculottism men cannot go. They
stand there on the nakedest haggard Fact, undeniable in all seasons and
circumstances; and may and must begin again confidently to build up from
that. The French explosion, like the English one, got its King,—who had no
Notary parchment to show for himself. We have still to glance for a moment
at Napoleon, our second modern King.

Napoleon does by no means seem to me so great a man as Cromwell. His
enormous victories which reached over all Europe, while Cromwell abode
mainly in our little England, are but as the high stilts on which the man is
seen standing; the stature of the man is not altered thereby. I find in him no
such sincerity as in Cromwell; only a far inferior sort. No silent walking,
through long years, with the Awful Unnamable of this Universe; "walking
with God," as he called it; and faith and strength in that alone: latent
thought and valor, content to lie latent, then burst out as in blaze of
Heaven's lightning! Napoleon lived in an age when God was no longer
believed; the meaning of all Silence, Latency, was thought to be Nonentity:
he had to begin not out of the Puritan Bible, but out of poor Sceptical
Encyclopedies. This was the length the man carried it. Meritorious to get so
far. His compact, prompt, every way articulate character is in itself perhaps
small, compared with our great chaotic inarticulate Cromwell's. Instead of
"dumb Prophet struggling to speak," we have a portentous mixture of the
Quack withal! Hume's notion of the Fanatic-Hypocrite, with such truth as it
has, will apply much better to Napoleon than it did to Cromwell, to
Mahomet or the like,—where indeed taken strictly it has hardly any truth at
all. An element of blamable ambition shows itself, from the first, in this
man; gets the victory over him at last, and involves him and his work in
ruin.
"False as a bulletin" became a proverb in Napoleon's time. He makes
what excuse he could for it: that it was necessary to mislead the enemy, to
keep up his own men's courage, and so forth. On the whole, there are no
excuses. A man in no case has liberty to tell lies. It had been, in the long-
run, better for Napoleon too if he had not told any. In fact, if a man have
any purpose reaching beyond the hour and day, meant to be found extant
next day, what good can it ever be to promulgate lies? The lies are found
out; ruinous penalty is exacted for them. No man will believe the liar next
time even when he speaks truth, when it is of the last importance that he be
believed. The old cry of wolf!—A Lie is no-thing; you cannot of nothing
make something; you make nothing at last, and lose your labor into the
bargain.
Yet Napoleon had a sincerity: we are to distinguish between what is
superficial and what is fundamental in insincerity. Across these outer
manoeuverings and quackeries of his, which were many and most blamable,
let us discern withal that the man had a certain instinctive ineradicable

feeling for reality; and did base himself upon fact, so long as he had any
basis. He has an instinct of Nature better than his culture was. His savans,
Bourrienne tells us, in that voyage to Egypt were one evening busily
occupied arguing that there could be no God. They had proved it, to their
satisfaction, by all manner of logic. Napoleon looking up into the stars,
answers, "Very ingenious, Messieurs: but who made all that?" The Atheistic
logic runs off from him like water; the great Fact stares him in the face:
"Who made all that?" So too in Practice: he, as every man that can be great,
or have victory in this world, sees, through all entanglements, the practical
heart of the matter; drives straight towards that. When the steward of his
Tuileries Palace was exhibiting the new upholstery, with praises, and
demonstration how glorious it was, and how cheap withal, Napoleon,
making little answer, asked for a pair of scissors, clips one of the gold
tassels from a window-curtain, put it in his pocket, and walked on. Some
days afterwards, he produced it at the right moment, to the horror of his
upholstery functionary; it was not gold but tinsel! In St. Helena, it is notable
how he still, to his last days, insists on the practical, the real. "Why talk and
complain; above all, why quarrel with one another? There is no result in it;
it comes to nothing that one can do. Say nothing, if one can do nothing!" He
speaks often so, to his poor discontented followers; he is like a piece of
silent strength in the middle of their morbid querulousness there.
And accordingly was there not what we can call a faith in him, genuine
so far as it went? That this new enormous Democracy asserting itself here
in the French Revolution is an unsuppressible Fact, which the whole world,
with its old forces and institutions, cannot put down; this was a true insight
of his, and took his conscience and enthusiasm along with it,—a faith. And
did he not interpret the dim purport of it well? "La carriere ouverte aux
talens, The implements to him who can handle them:" this actually is the
truth, and even the whole truth; it includes whatever the French Revolution
or any Revolution, could mean. Napoleon, in his first period, was a true
Democrat. And yet by the nature of him, fostered too by his military trade,
he knew that Democracy, if it were a true thing at all, could not be an
anarchy: the man had a heart-hatred for anarchy. On that Twentieth of June
(1792), Bourrienne and he sat in a coffee-house, as the mob rolled by:
Napoleon expresses the deepest contempt for persons in authority that they
do not restrain this rabble. On the Tenth of August he wonders why there is
no man to command these poor Swiss; they would conquer if there were.

Such a faith in Democracy, yet hatred of anarchy, it is that carries Napoleon
through all his great work. Through his brilliant Italian Campaigns, onwards
to the Peace of Leoben, one would say, his inspiration is: "Triumph to the
French Revolution; assertion of it against these Austrian Simulacra that
pretend to call it a Simulacrum!" Withal, however, he feels, and has a right
to feel, how necessary a strong Authority is; how the Revolution cannot
prosper or last without such. To bridle in that great devouring, self-
devouring French Revolution; to tame it, so that its intrinsic purpose can be
made good, that it may become organic, and be able to live among other
organisms and formed things, not as a wasting destruction alone: is not this
still what he partly aimed at, as the true purport of his life; nay what he
actually managed to do? Through Wagrams, Austerlitzes; triumph after
triumph,—he triumphed so far. There was an eye to see in this man, a soul
to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he was
such. The common soldiers used to say on the march: "These babbling
Avocats, up at Paris; all talk and no work! What wonder it runs all wrong?
We shall have to go and put our Petit Caporal there!" They went, and put
him there; they and France at large. Chief-consulship, Emperorship, victory
over Europe;—till the poor Lieutenant of La Fere, not unnaturally, might
seem to himself the greatest of all men that had been in the world for some
ages.
But at this point, I think, the fatal charlatan-element got the upper hand.
He apostatized from his old faith in Facts, took to believing in Semblances;
strove to connect himself with Austrian Dynasties, Popedoms, with the old
false Feudalities which he once saw clearly to be false;—considered that he
would found "his Dynasty" and so forth; that the enormous French
Revolution meant only that! The man was "given up to strong delusion, that
he should believe a lie;" a fearful but most sure thing. He did not know true
from false now when he looked at them,—the fearfulest penalty a man pays
for yielding to untruth of heart. Self and false ambition had now become his
god: self-deception once yielded to, all other deceptions follow naturally
more and more. What a paltry patchwork of theatrical paper-mantles, tinsel
and mummery, had this man wrapt his own great reality in, thinking to
make it more real thereby! His hollow Pope's-Concordat, pretending to be a
re-establishment of Catholicism, felt by himself to be the method of
extirpating it, "la vaccine de la religion:" his ceremonial Coronations,
consecrations by the old Italian Chimera in Notre-Dame,—"wanting

nothing to complete the pomp of it," as Augereau said, "nothing but the
half-million of men who had died to put an end to all that"! Cromwell's
Inauguration was by the Sword and Bible; what we must call a genuinely
true one. Sword and Bible were borne before him, without any chimera:
were not these the real emblems of Puritanism; its true decoration and
insignia? It had used them both in a very real manner, and pretended to
stand by them now! But this poor Napoleon mistook: he believed too much
in the Dupability of men; saw no fact deeper in man than Hunger and this!
He was mistaken. Like a man that should build upon cloud; his house and
he fall down in confused wreck, and depart out of the world.
Alas, in all of us this charlatan-element exists; and might be developed,
were the temptation strong enough. "Lead us not into temptation"! But it is
fatal, I say, that it be developed. The thing into which it enters as a
cognizable ingredient is doomed to be altogether transitory; and, however
huge it may look, is in itself small. Napoleon's working, accordingly, what
was it with all the noise it made? A flash as of gunpowder wide-spread; a
blazing-up as of dry heath. For an hour the whole Universe seems wrapt in
smoke and flame; but only for an hour. It goes out: the Universe with its old
mountains and streams, its stars above and kind soil beneath, is still there.
The Duke of Weimar told his friends always, To be of courage; this
Napoleonism was unjust, a falsehood, and could not last. It is true doctrine.
The heavier this Napoleon trampled on the world, holding it tyrannously
down, the fiercer would the world's recoil against him be, one day. Injustice
pays itself with frightful compound-interest. I am not sure but he had better
have lost his best park of artillery, or had his best regiment drowned in the
sea, than shot that poor German Bookseller, Palm! It was a palpable
tyrannous murderous injustice, which no man, let him paint an inch thick,
could make out to be other. It burnt deep into the hearts of men, it and the
like of it; suppressed fire flashed in the eyes of men, as they thought of it,—
waiting their day! Which day came: Germany rose round him.—What
Napoleon did will in the long-run amount to what he did justly; what Nature
with her laws will sanction. To what of reality was in him; to that and
nothing more. The rest was all smoke and waste. La carriere ouverte aux
talens: that great true Message, which has yet to articulate and fulfil itself
everywhere, he left in a most inarticulate state. He was a great ebauche, a
rude-draught never completed; as indeed what great man is other? Left in
too rude a state, alas!

His notions of the world, as he expresses them there at St. Helena, are
almost tragical to consider. He seems to feel the most unaffected surprise
that it has all gone so; that he is flung out on the rock here, and the World is
still moving on its axis. France is great, and all-great: and at bottom, he is
France. England itself, he says, is by Nature only an appendage of France;
"another Isle of Oleron to France." So it was by Nature, by Napoleon-
Nature; and yet look how in fact—HERE AM I! He cannot understand it:
inconceivable that the reality has not corresponded to his program of it; that
France was not all-great, that he was not France. "Strong delusion," that he
should believe the thing to be which is not! The compact, clear-seeing,
decisive Italian nature of him, strong, genuine, which he once had, has
enveloped itself, half-dissolved itself, in a turbid atmosphere of French
fanfaronade. The world was not disposed to be trodden down underfoot; to
be bound into masses, and built together, as he liked, for a pedestal to
France and him: the world had quite other purposes in view! Napoleon's
astonishment is extreme. But alas, what help now? He had gone that way of
his; and Nature also had gone her way. Having once parted with Reality, he
tumbles helpless in Vacuity; no rescue for him. He had to sink there,
mournfully as man seldom did; and break his great heart, and die,—this
poor Napoleon: a great implement too soon wasted, till it was useless: our
last Great Man!
Our last, in a double sense. For here finally these wide roamings of ours
through so many times and places, in search and study of Heroes, are to
terminate. I am sorry for it: there was pleasure for me in this business, if
also much pain. It is a great subject, and a most grave and wide one, this
which, not to be too grave about it, I have named Hero-worship. It enters
deeply, as I think, into the secret of Mankind's ways and vitalest interests in
this world, and is well worth explaining at present. With six months, instead
of six days, we might have done better. I promised to break ground on it; I
know not whether I have even managed to do that. I have had to tear it up in
the rudest manner in order to get into it at all. Often enough, with these
abrupt utterances thrown out isolated, unexplained, has your tolerance been
put to the trial. Tolerance, patient candor, all-hoping favor and kindness,
which I will not speak of at present. The accomplished and distinguished,
the beautiful, the wise, something of what is best in England, have listened
patiently to my rude words. With many feelings, I heartily thank you all;
and say, Good be with you all!

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