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

by Thomas Carlyle · English · Gutenberg #1091 · 521,285 chars · public domain (US)

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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: July 26, 2008

Language: English



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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.

  I.   THE HERO AS DIVINITY.  ODIN.  PAGANISM:  SCANDINAVIAN MYTHOLOGY.
  II.  THE HERO AS PROPHET.  MAHOMET:  ISLAM.
  III. THE HERO AS POET.  DANTE:  SHAKSPEARE.
  IV.  THE HERO AS PRIEST.  LUTHER; REFORMATION:  KNOX; PURITANISM.
  V.   THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS.  JOHNSON, ROUSSEAU, BURNS.
  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 _Hero_archy (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. Sin

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