was to this man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is, preternatural. The green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;5 that great deep sea of azure that swims over head; 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 w of insight. It is by not thinking that we eess to wonder at it. Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage d 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; be: 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 a Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on an eye to discern wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth; because of his free insight, his lively talent-above all, of his love and open-mindedness. His sneaking sycophancies, his greediness and forwardness, whatever was bestial and earthy in him, are so many blemishes in his book, which still disturb us in its clearness; wholly hindrances, not helps. Towards Johnson, however, his feeling was not sycophancy, which is the lowest, but reverence, 10 which is the highest of human feelings. None but a reverent man (which so unspeakably few are) could have found his way from Boswell's environment to Johnson's: if such worship for real God-made superiors, showed itself also as 15 worship for apparent tailor-made superiors, even as hollow interested mouth-worship for such—the case, in this composite human nature of ours, was not miraculous, the more was the pity! But for ourselves, let every one of us 20 cling to this last article of faith, and know it as the beginning of all knowledge worthy the name: That neither James Boswell's good book, nor any other good thing, in any time or in any place, was, is, or can be performed by 25 which all science swims as a mere superany man in virtue of his badness, but always and solely in spite thereof. THE HERO (From Heroes and Hero Worship, 1841) ficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it. 30 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 mewhat could the wild man know of it; what can we yet know? That it is a Force, and thousandfold Complexity of forces; a Force which is not we. That is all; it is not we, it is altogether different from us. Force, Force. everywhere Force; we ourselves a mysterious You remember that fancy of Plato's,1 of a man who had grown to maturity in some dark 35 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 40 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 45 Force in the centre of that. "There is not a first Pagan Thinker among rude men, the leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it: first man that began to think, was precisely how else could it rot?" Nay, surely, to the this child-man of Plato's. Simple, open as a Atheistic Thinker, if such a one were possible. child, yet with the depth and strength of a it must be a miracle too, this huge illimitable Nature had as yet no name to him; he 50 whirlwind of Force, which envelopes us here; 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 dis man. 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, miss it from us. To the wild deep-hearted 55 with scientific nomenclatures, experiments man all was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas; it stood naked, flashing-in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature 1 See Plato's Republic, Bk. VII. 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, pro claims 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. 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, 5 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: 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, 10 "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 body, these faculties, this life of ours, is it not all as a vesture for that Unnamed? "There is but one Temple in the Universe," says the devout Novalis," "and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than that high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body." This sounds much like a mere flourish of rhet 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 15 Highest Being reveals himself in man. This 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 20 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 25 oric; but it is not so. If well meditated, it 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 splendour to him. Cannot we understand how these men worshipped Canopus; became 30 God. We cannot understand it, we know not 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; 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 how to speak of it; but we may feel and know it, if we like, that it is verily so. Well, these truths were once more readily felt than now. The young generations of the that is worship. To these primeval men, all 35 world, who had in them the freshness of 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, 40 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 45 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 50 Genius, gifted, loveable. 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 Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825), one of the most widely known of the German humorists and satirists. A very brilliant star of the Southern hemisphere, in the constellation of the ship Argo. According to Plutarch, it was named from Canopus, the pilot of Menelaus. A people of Southern Arabia, formerly supposed to be worshippers of the stars. 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 St. John Chrysostom ("mouth of gold," so named, because of his eloquence) was one of the greatest of the early Fathers of the Church, especially famous for his Homilies. 6 A term in Jewish and early Christian theology, expressing the divine presence either in heaven or upon the earth, among the people of Israel or in the sanctuary. 7 A name assumed by Friederich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), a German romantic writer. 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. it was always and everywhere, and cannot cease till man himself ceases. I am well aware that in these days Her worship, the thing I call Hero-worship, pro5 fesses to have gone out, and finally ceased This, for reasons which it will be worth whi sometime to inquire into, is an age that as it were denies the existence of great men; denies the desirableness of great men. Show or 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 10 critics a great man, a Luther for example, 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. Religions I find stand upon it; not paganism only, but far higher and 15 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? they begin to what they call "account" for him; not to worship him, but take the dimen sions of him,-and bring him out to be s 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 cal The greatest of all 20 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. 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 history on earth. 25 For if we 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 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 30 the salvation of any Time. But I liken common society, but an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive admiration for the truly great? Society is founded on Hero-worship. dignities of rank, on which human association rests, are what we may call a Heroarchy (Gov- 35 ernment 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 All languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, inpotently 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 is some representation, not insupportably 40 wise healing word which all can believe in. 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 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 dignitaries, all representing gold;—and several 45 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 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 50 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 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 depair that there is no gold, that there never was any! "Gold," Hero-worship, is nevertheless, as 55 the Great Man to have been the indispensable From the Greek hieros, sacred, and archo, I rule. Here used as "government by the holy or sacred ones." This derivation of king from can is a mistaken etymology. King comes from O. E. cyning, and is related to English kin. saviour 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. BURNS (From the same) 5 It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbelieving, secondhand Eighteenth Century, that of a hero starting up, among the artificial pasteboard figures and productions, in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like a little well in the rocky desert places,—like a sudden splendour of Heaven in the artificial Vauxhall!1 10 People knew not what to make of it. They took it for a piece of the Vauxhall firework; alas, it let itself be so taken, though struggling half-blindly, as in bitterness of death, against his nobleness; voting pieces of plate to him! However, he was not lost; nothing is lost. Robert is there; the outcome of him,-and indeed of many generations of such as him. This Burns appeared under every disadvantage; uninstructed, poor, born only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that, in a rustic special dialect, known only to a small province of the country he lived in. Had he written, even what he did write, in the general language of England, I doubt not he had already become universally recognized as being, or capable to be, one of our greatest men. That he should have tempted so many that! Perhaps no man had such a false recep- 15 to penetrate through the rough husk of that tion from his fellowmen. Once more a very wasteful life-drama was enacted under the sun. The tragedy of Burns' life is known to all of you. Surely we may say if discrepancy between place held and place merited constitute 20 perverseness of lot for a man, no lot could be more perverse than Burns's. Among those secondhand acting-figures, mimes for most part, of the Eighteenth Century, once more a giant Original Man; one of those men who reach 25 down to the perennial Deeps, who take rank with the Heroic among men: and he was born in a poor Ayrshire hut. The largest soul of all the British lands came among us in the shape of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant. dialect of his, is proof that there lay something far from common within it. He has gained a certain recognition, and is continuing to do so over all quarters of our wide Saxon world: wheresoever a Saxon dialect is spoken, it begins to be understood, by personal inspection of this and the other, that one of the most considerable Saxon men of the Eighteenth Century was an Ayrshire Peasant named Robert Burns. Yes, I will say, here too was a piece of the right Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world; -rock, yet with wells of living softness in it! A wild impetuous whirlwind of passion and 30 faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly melody dwelling in the heart of it. A noble rough genuineness; homely, rustic, honest; true simplicity of strength; with its lightningfire, with its soft dewy pity;-like the old 3 His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things; did not succeed in any; was involved in continual difficulties. The Steward, Factor as the Scotch call him, used to send letters and threatenings, Burns says, "which threw us 35 Norse Thor, the Peasant-god! all into tears." The brave, hard-toiling, hardsuffering Father, his brave heroine of a wife; and those children, of whom Robert was one! In this Earth, so wide otherwise, no shelter for them. The letters "threw us all into tears:" 40 figure it. The brave Father, I say always;-a silent Hero and Poet; without whom the son had never been a speaking one! Burns's schoolmaster2 came afterwards to London, learnt what good society was; but declares that in 45 Mirabeau calls it), a primal-element of sun Burns's brother Gilbert, a man of much sease and worth, has told me that Robert, in his young days, in spite of their hardship, was usually the gayest of speech; a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter, sense and heart; far pleasanter to hear there, stript, cutting peats in the bog, or suchlike, than he ever afterwards knew him. I can well believe it. The basis of mirth ("fond gaillard," as old Marquis shine and joyfulness, coupled with his other deep and earnest qualities, is one of the most attractive characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope dwells in him; spite of his tragical history, he is not a mourning man. He shakes his sorrows gallantly aside; bounds forth victorious over them. It is as the lion shaking "dew-drops from his mane;" as the swiftbounding horse, that laughs at the shaking of 55 the spear. But indeed, Hope, Mirth, of the sort like Burns's, are they not the outcome no meeting of men did he ever enjoy better John Murdoch, who was instrumental in guiding Rocky mountains in Germany, the highest peak the properly of warm generous affection, such as is the beginning of all to every man? unresting man. But the characteristic of Mirabeau too is veracity and sense, power of true insight, superiority of vision. The thing that he says is worth remembering. It is s 5 flash of insight into some object or other: se do both these men speak. The same raging passions; capable too in both of manifesting themselves as the tenderest noble affections. Wit, wild laughter, energy, directness, The types of the two men are not dissimilar. Burns too could have governed, debated in National Assenblies; policised, as few could. Alas, the cour age which had to exhibit itself in capture of smuggling schooners in the Solway Frith;* in keeping silence over so much, where no good speech, but only inarticulate rage was possible: this might have bellowed forth Ushers de Brézé and the like; and made itself visible to all You would think it strange if I called Burns the most gifted British soul we had in all that century of his: and yet I believe the day is coming when there will be little danger in saying so. His writings, all that he did under such obstructions are only a poor fragment of him. Professor Stewart remarked very justly, what indeed is true of all Poets good for much, that 10 cerity: these were in both. his poetry was not any particular faculty; but the general result of a naturally vigorous original mind expressing itself in that way. Burns's gifts, expressed in conversation, are the theme of all that ever heard him. All kinds 15 of gifts: from the gracefulest utterances of courtesy, to the highest fire of passionate speech; loud floods of mirth, soft wailings of affection, laconic emphasis, clear piercing insight; all was in him. Witty duchesses cele- 20 men, in managing of kingdoms, in ruling of great, ever-memorable epochs! But they said to him reprovingly, his Official Superiors said, and wrote: "You are to work, not to think." Of your thinking-faculty, the greatest in this land, we have no need; you are to gauge beer there; for that only are you wanted. Very notable; and worth mentioning, though we know what is to be said and answered! As if thought, Power of Thinking, were not at al times, in all places and situations of the world, precisely the thing that was wanted. The fatal man, is he not always the unthinking man, the man who cannot think and see; but only grope, and hallucinate; and missee the brate him as a man whose speech "led them off their feet." This is beautiful: but still more beautiful that which Mr. Lockhart has recorded, which I have more than once alluded to, How the waiters and ostlers at inns would 25 get out of bed, and come crowding to hear this man speak! Waiters and ostlers:-they too were men, and here was a man! I have heard much about his speech; but one of the best things I ever heard of it was, last year, 30 from a venerable gentleman long familiar with him. That it was speech distinguished by always having something in it. "He spoke rather little than much," this old man told me; "sat rather silent in those early days, as 35 nature of the thing he works with? He misses in the company of persons above him; and always when he did speak, it was to throw new light on the matter." I know not why any one should ever speak otherwise!-But it, mistakes it as we say; takes it for one thing, and it is another thing,—and leaves him standing like a Futility there! He is the fatal man; unutterably fatal, put in the high places of if we look at his general force of soul, his healthy 40 men.-"Why complain of this?" say some: robustness every way, the rugged downrightness, penetration, generous valour and manfulness that was in him,-where shall we readily find a better-gifted man? "Strength is mournfully denied its arena; that was true from of old." Doubtless; and the worse for the arena, answer I! Complaining profits little; stating of the truth may profit. just breaking out, finds no need of a Burns except for gauging beer,—is a thing I, for one, cannot rejoice at. Once more we have to say here, that the Among the great men of the Eighteenth 45 That a Europe, with its French Revolution Century, I sometimes feel as if Burns might be found to resemble Mirabeau more than any other. They differ widely in vesture; yet look at them intrinsically. There is the same burly thick-necked strength of body as of 50 chief quality of Burns is the sincerity of him. soul;-built, in both cases, on what the old Marquis calls a fond gaillard. By nature, by course of breeding, indeed by nation, Mirabeau has much more of bluster; a noisy, forward, Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. John Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law and biographer of Scott, wrote also a Life of Burns, 1828. 7 A famous French writer, orator, and statesman (174991). The "old Marquis," mentioned later, is his father. So in his Poetry, so in his life. The Song he An allusion to Burns' occupation as excise officer and gauger of ale at Dumfries, where it sometimes became his duty to board and seize a smuggling brig, as was the case on Feb. 27, 1792. The Marquis de Brézé was Chief Usher to the Court at the time of the French Revolution. On one occasion. June 22, 1789, when de Brézé attempted to dismiss the National Deputies by the King's orders, Mirabeau debied him in the name of the will of the people, and thus beld the deputies in session. V. Carlyle's French Revolution, Vol. I., Bk. V., chap. II. |