CHAPTER XII

FAREWELL

So have we endeavoured, from the enormous, amorphous Plum-pudding,

more like a Scottish Haggis, which Herr Teufelsdröckh had kneaded for

his fellow mortals, to pick-out the choicest Plums, and present them

separately on a cover of our own. A laborious, perhaps a thankless

enterprise; in which, however, something of hope has occasionally

cheered us, and of which we can now wash our hands not altogether

without satisfaction. If hereby, though in barbaric wise, some morsel

of spiritual nourishment have been added to the scanty ration of our

beloved British world, what nobler recompense could the Editor desire?

If it prove otherwise, why should he murmur? Was not this a Task which

Destiny, in any case, had appointed him; which having now done with,

he sees his general Day's-work so much the lighter, so much the

shorter?

Of Professor Teufelsdröckh it seems impossible to take leave without a

mingled feeling of astonishment, gratitude and disapproval. Who will

not regret that talents, which might have profited in the higher walks

of Philosophy, or in Art itself, have been so much devoted to a

rummaging among lumber-rooms; nay too often to a scraping in kennels,

where lost rings and diamond-necklaces are nowise the sole conquests?

Regret is unavoidable; yet censure were loss of time. To cure him of

his mad humours British Criticism would essay in vain: enough for her

if she can, by vigilance, prevent the spreading of such among

ourselves. What a result, should this piebald, entangled,

hyper-metaphorical style of writing, not to say of thinking, become

general among our Literary men! As it might so easily do. Thus has not

the Editor himself, working over Teufelsdröckh's German, lost much of

his own English purity? Even as the smaller whirlpool is sucked into

the larger, and made to whirl along with it, so has the lesser mind,

in this instance, been forced to become portion of the greater, and

like it, see all things figuratively: which habit time and assiduous

effort will be needed to eradicate.

Nevertheless, wayward as our Professor shows himself, is there any

reader that can part with him in declared enmity? Let us confess,

there is that in the wild, much-suffering, much-inflicting man, which

almost attaches us. His attitude, we will hope and believe, is that of

a man who had said to Cant, Begone; and to Dilettantism, Here thou

canst not be; and to Truth, Be thou in place of all to me: a man who

had manfully defied the 'Time-prince,' or Devil, to his face; nay

perhaps, Hannibal-like, was mysteriously consecrated from birth to

that warfare, and now stood minded to wage the same, by all weapons,

in all places, at all times. In such a cause, any soldier, were he but

a Polack Scythe-man, shall be welcome.

Still the question returns on us: How could a man occasionally of keen

insight, not without keen sense of propriety, who had real Thoughts to

communicate, resolve to emit them in a shape bordering so closely on

the absurd? Which question he were wiser than the present Editor who

should satisfactorily answer. Our conjecture has sometimes been, that

perhaps Necessity as well as Choice was concerned in it. Seems it not

conceivable that, in a Life like our Professor's, where so much

bountifully given by Nature had in Practice failed and misgone,

Literature also would never rightly prosper: that striving with his

characteristic vehemence to paint this and the other Picture, and ever

without success, he at last desperately dashes his sponge, full of all

colours, against the canvas, to try whether it will paint Foam? With

all his stillness, there were perhaps in Teufelsdröckh desperation

enough for this.

A second conjecture we hazard with even less warranty. It is, that

Teufelsdröckh is not without some touch of the universal feeling, a

wish to proselytise. How often already have we paused, uncertain

whether the basis of this so enigmatic nature were really Stoicism and

Despair, or Love and Hope only seared into the figure of these!

Remarkable, moreover, is this saying of his: 'How were Friendship

possible? In mutual devotedness to the Good and True: otherwise

impossible; except as Armed Neutrality, or hollow Commercial League. A

man, be the Heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were

ten men, united in Love, capable of being and of doing what ten

thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to

man.' And now in conjunction therewith consider this other: 'It is the

Night of the World, and still long till it be Day: we wander amid the

glimmer of smoking ruins, and the Sun and the Stars of Heaven are as

if blotted out for a season; and two immeasurable Phantoms, HYPOCRISY

and ATHEISM, with the Gowl, SENSUALITY, stalk abroad over the Earth,

and call it theirs: well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence

is a shallow Dream.'

But what of the awestruck Wakeful who find it a Reality? Should not

these unite; since even an authentic Spectre is not visible to

Two?--In which case were this enormous Clothes-Volume properly an

enormous Pitchpan, which our Teufelsdröckh in his lone watch-tower had

kindled, that it might flame far and wide through the Night, and many

a disconsolately wandering spirit be guided thither to a Brother's

bosom!--We say as before, with all his malign Indifference, who knows

what mad Hopes this man may harbour?

Meanwhile there is one fact to be stated here, which harmonises ill

with such conjecture; and, indeed, were Teufelsdröckh made like other

men, might as good as altogether subvert it. Namely, that while the

Beacon-fire blazed its brightest, the Watchman had quitted it; that no

pilgrim could now ask him: Watchman, what of the Night? Professor

Teufelsdröckh, be it known is no longer visibly present at

Weissnichtwo, but again to all appearance lost in space! Some time

ago, the Hofrath Heuschrecke was pleased to favour us with another

copious Epistle; wherein much is said about the

'Population-Institute'; much repeated in praise of the Paper-bag

Documents, the hieroglyphic nature of which our Hofrath still seems

not to have surmised; and, lastly, the strangest occurrence

communicated, to us for the first time, in the following paragraph:

'_Ew. Wohlgeboren_ will have seen from the public Prints, with what

affectionate and hitherto fruitless solicitude Weissnichtwo regards

the disappearance of her Sage. Might but the united voice of Germany

prevail on him to return; nay, could we but so much as elucidate for

ourselves by what mystery he went away! But, alas, old Lieschen

experiences or affects the profoundest deafness, the profoundest

ignorance: in the Wahngasse all lies swept, silent, sealed up; the

Privy Council itself can hitherto elicit no answer.

'It had been remarked that while the agitating news of those Parisian

Three Days flew from mouth to mouth, and dinned every ear in

Weissnichtwo, Herr Teufelsdröckh was not known, at the _Gans_ or

elsewhere, to have spoken, for a whole week, any syllable except once

these three: _Es geht an_ (It is beginning). Shortly after, as _Ew.

Wohlgeboren_ knows, was the public tranquillity here, as in Berlin,

threatened by a Sedition of the Tailors. Nor did there want

Evil-wishers, or perhaps mere desperate Alarmists, who asserted that

the closing Chapter of the Clothes-Volume was to blame. In this

appalling crisis, the serenity of our Philosopher was indescribable;

nay, perhaps through one humble individual, something thereof might

pass into the _Rath_ (Council) itself, and so contribute to the

country's deliverance. The Tailors are now entirely pacificated.--

'To neither of these two incidents can I attribute our loss: yet still

comes there the shadow of a suspicion out of Paris and its Politics.

For example, when the _Saint-Simonian Society_ transmitted its

Propositions hither, and the whole _Gans_ was one vast cackle of

laughter, lamentation and astonishment, our Sage sat mute; and at the

end of the third evening said merely: "Here also are men who have

discovered, not without amazement, that Man is still Man; of which

high, long-forgotten Truth you already see them make a false

application." Since then, as has been ascertained by examination of

the Post-Director, there passed at least one Letter with its Answer

between the Messieurs Bazard-Enfantin and our Professor himself; of

what tenor can now only be conjectured. On the fifth night following,

he was seen for the last time!

'Has this invaluable man, so obnoxious to most of the hostile Sects

that convulse our Era, been spirited away by certain of their

emissaries; or did he go forth voluntarily to their head-quarters to

confer with them and confront them? Reason we have, at least of a

negative sort, to believe the Lost still living; our widowed heart

also whispers that ere long he will himself give a sign. Otherwise,

indeed, his archives must, one day, be opened by Authority; where

much, perhaps the _Palingenesie_ itself, is thought to be reposited.'

* * * * *

Thus far the Hofrath; who vanishes, as is his wont, too like an Ignis

Fatuus, leaving the dark still darker.

So that Teufelsdröckh's public History were not done, then, or reduced

to an even, unromantic tenor; nay, perhaps the better part thereof

were only beginning? We stand in a region of conjectures, where

substance has melted into shadow, and one cannot be distinguished from

the other. May Time, which solves or suppresses all problems, throw

glad light on this also! Our own private conjecture, now amounting

almost to certainty, is that, safe-moored in some stillest obscurity,

not to lie always still, Teufelsdröckh is actually in London!

Here, however, can the present Editor, with an ambrosial joy as of

over-weariness falling into sleep, lay down his pen. Well does he

know, if human testimony be worth aught, that to innumerable British

readers likewise, this is a satisfying consummation; that innumerable

British readers consider him, during these current months, but as an

uneasy interruption to their ways of thought and digestion; and

indicate so much, not without a certain irritancy and even spoken

invective. For which, as for other mercies, ought not he to thank the

Upper Powers? To one and all of you, O irritated readers, he, with

outstretched arms and open heart, will wave a kind farewell. Thou too,

miraculous Entity, who namest thyself YORKE and OLIVER, and with thy

vivacities and genialities, with thy all-too Irish mirth and madness,

and odour of palled punch, makest such strange work, farewell; long as

thou canst, fare-_well!_ Have we not, in the course of Eternity,

travelled some months of our Life-journey in partial sight of one

another; have we not existed together, though in a state of quarrel?

APPENDIX

TESTIMONIES OF AUTHORS

This questionable little Book was undoubtedly written among

the mountain solitudes, in 1831; but, owing to impediments

natural and accidental, could not, for seven years more,

appear as a Volume in England;--and had at last to clip itself

in pieces, and be content to struggle out, bit by bit, in some

courageous _Magazine_ that offered. Whereby now, to certain

idly curious readers, and even to myself till I make study,

the insignificant but at last irritating question, What its

real history and chronology are, is, if not insoluble,

considerably involved in haze.

To the first English Edition, 1838, which an American, or two

American had now opened the way for, there was slightingly

prefixed, under the title '_Testimonies of Authors_,' some

straggle of real documents, which, now that I find it again,

sets the matter into clear light and sequence;--and shall

here, for removal of idle stumbling-blocks and nugatory

guessings from the path of every reader, be reprinted as it

stood. (_Author's Note of 1868._)

TESTIMONIES OF AUTHORS

I. HIGHEST CLASS, BOOKSELLER'S TASTER

_Taster to Bookseller._--"The Author of _Teufelsdröckh_ is a person of

talent; his work displays here and there some felicity of thought and

expression, considerable fancy and knowledge: but whether or not it

would take with the public seems doubtful. For a _jeu d'esprit_ of

that kind it is too long; it would have suited better as an essay or

article than as a volume. The Author has no great tact; his wit is

frequently heavy; and reminds one of the German Baron who took to

leaping on tables, and answered that he was learning to be lively.

_Is_ the work a translation?"

_Bookseller to Editor._--"Allow me to say that such a writer requires

only a little more tact to produce a popular as well as an able work.

Directly on receiving your permission, I sent your _MS._ to a

gentleman in the highest class of men of letters, and an accomplished

German scholar: I now inclose you his opinion, which, you may rely

upon it, is a just one; and I have too high an opinion of your good

sense to" &c. &c.--_MS._ (_penes nos_), _London, 17th September 1831_.

II. CRITIC OF THE SUN

"_Fraser's Magazine_ exhibits the usual brilliancy, and also the" &c.

"_Sartor Resartus_ is what old Dennis used to call 'a heap of clotted

nonsense,' mixed however, here and there, with passages marked by

thought and striking poetic vigour. But what does the writer mean by

'Baphometic fire-baptism'? Why cannot he lay aside his pedantry, and

write so as to make himself generally intelligible? We quote by way of

curiosity a sentence from the _Sartor Resartus_; which may be read

either backwards or forwards, for it is equally intelligible either

way. Indeed, by beginning at the tail, and so working up to the head,

we think the reader will stand the fairest chance of getting at its

meaning: 'The fire-baptised soul, long so scathed and thunder-riven,

here feels its own freedom; which feeling is its Baphometic baptism:

the citadel of its whole kingdom it has thus gained by assault, and

will keep inexpugnable; outwards from which the remaining dominions,

not indeed without hard battering, will doubtless by degrees be

conquered and pacificated.' Here is a"--....--_Sun Newspaper_, _1st

April 1834_.

III. NORTH-AMERICAN REVIEWER

... "After a careful survey of the whole ground, our belief is that no

such persons as Professor Teufelsdröckh or Counsellor Heuschrecke ever

existed; that the six Paper-bags, with their China-ink inscriptions

and multifarious contents, are a mere figment of the brain; that the

'present Editor' is the only person who has ever written upon the

Philosophy of Clothes; and that the _Sartor Resartus_ is the only

treatise that has yet appeared upon that subject;--in short, that the

whole account of the origin of the work before us, which the supposed

Editor relates with so much gravity, and of which we have given a

brief abstract, is, in plain English, a _hum_.

"Without troubling our readers at any great length with our reasons

for entertaining these suspicions, we may remark, that the absence of

all other information on the subject, except what is contained in the

work, is itself a fact of a most significant character. The whole

German press, as well as the particular one where the work purports to

have been printed, seems to be under the control of _Stillschweigen

and Co._,--Silence and Company. If the Clothes-Philosophy and its

author are making so great a sensation throughout Germany as is

pretended, how happens it that the only notice we have of the fact is

contained in a few numbers of a monthly Magazine published at London?

How happens it that no intelligence about the matter has come out

directly to this country? We pique ourselves here in New England upon

knowing at least as much of what is going on in the literary way in

the old Dutch Mother-land as our brethren of the fast-anchored Isle;

but thus far we have no tidings whatever of the 'extensive

close-printed close-meditated volume,' which forms the subject of this

pretended commentary. Again, we would respectfully inquire of the

'present Editor' upon what part of the map of Germany we are to look

for the city of _Weissnichtwo_,--'Know-not-where,'--at which place the

work is supposed to have been printed, and the Author to have resided.

It has been our fortune to visit several portions of the German

territory, and to examine pretty carefully, at different times and for

various purposes, maps of the whole; but we have no recollection of

any such place. We suspect that the city of _Know-not-where_ might be

called, with at least as much propriety, _Nobody-knows-where_, and is

to be found in the kingdom of _Nowhere_. Again, the village of

_Entepfuhl_--'Duck-pond,' where the supposed Author of the work is

said to have passed his youth, and that of _Hinterschlag_, where he

had his education, are equally foreign to our geography. Duck-ponds

enough there undoubtedly are in almost every village in Germany, as

the traveller in that country knows too well to his cost, but any

particular village denominated Duck-pond is to us altogether _terra

incognita_. The names of the personages are not less singular than

those of the places. Who can refrain from a smile at the yoking

together of such a pair of appellatives as Diogenes Teufelsdröckh? The

supposed bearer of this strange title is represented as admitting, in his

pretended autobiography, that 'he had searched to no purpose through all

the Heralds' books in and without the German empire, and through all

manner of Subscribers'-lists, Militia-rolls, and other Name-catalogues,'

but had nowhere been able to find the 'name Teufelsdröckh, except as

appended to his own person.' We can readily believe this, and we doubt

very much whether any Christian parent would think of condemning a son to

carry through life the burden of so unpleasant a title. That of Counsellor

Heuschrecke--'Grasshopper,' though not offensive, looks much more like a

piece of fancy work than a 'fair business transaction.' The same may be

said of _Blumine_--'Flower-Goddess'--the heroine of the fable; and so

of the rest.

"In short, our private opinion is, as we have remarked, that the whole

story of a correspondence with Germany, a university of

Nobody-knows-where, a Professor of Things in General, a Counsellor

Grasshopper, a Flower-Goddess Blumine, and so forth, has about as much

foundation in truth as the late entertaining account of Sir John

Herschel's discoveries in the moon. Fictions of this kind are,

however, not uncommon, and ought not, perhaps, to be condemned with

too much severity; but we are not sure that we can exercise the same

indulgence in regard to the attempt, which seems to be made to mislead

the public as to the substance of the work before us, and its

pretended German original. Both purport, as we have seen, to be upon

the subject of Clothes, or dress. _Clothes, their Origin and

Influence_, is the title of the supposed German treatise of Professor

Teufelsdröckh, and the rather odd name of _Sartor Resartus_--the

Tailor Patched,--which the present Editor has affixed to his pretended

commentary, seems to look the same way. But though there is a good

deal of remark throughout the work in a half-serious, half-comic style

upon dress, it seems to be in reality a treatise upon the great

science of Things in General, which Teufelsdröckh is supposed to have

professed at the university of Nobody-knows-where. Now, without

intending to adopt a too rigid standard of morals, we own that we

doubt a little the propriety of offering to the public a treatise on

Things in General, under the name and in the form of an Essay on

Dress. For ourselves, advanced as we unfortunately are in the journey

of life, far beyond the period when dress is practically a matter of

interest, we have no hesitation in saying, that the real subject of

the work is to us more attractive than the ostensible one. But this is

probably not the case with the mass of readers. To the younger portion

of the community, which constitutes everywhere the very great

majority, the subject of dress is one of intense and paramount

importance. An author who treats it appeals, like the poet, to the

young men and maidens--_virginibus puerisque_,--and calls upon them,

by all the motives which habitually operate most strongly upon their

feelings, to buy his book. When, after opening their purses for this

purpose, they have carried home the work in triumph, expecting to find

in it some particular instruction in regard to the tying of their

neckcloths, or the cut of their corsets, and meet with nothing better

than a dissertation on Things in General, they will,--to use the

mildest term--not be in very good humour. If the last improvements in

legislation, which we have made in this country, should have found

their way to England, the author, we think, would stand some chance of

being _Lynched_. Whether his object in this piece of _supercherie_ be

merely pecuniary profit, or whether he takes a malicious pleasure in

quizzing the Dandies, we shall not undertake to say. In the latter

part of the work, he devotes a separate chapter to this class of

persons, from the tenour of which we should be disposed to conclude,

that he would consider any mode of divesting them of their property

very much in the nature of a spoiling of the Egyptians.

"The only thing about the work, tending to prove that it is what it

purports to be, a commentary on a real German treatise, is the style,

which is a sort of Babylonish dialect, not destitute, it is true, of

richness, vigour, and at times a sort of singular felicity of expression,

but very strongly tinged throughout with the peculiar idiom of the German

language. This quality in the style, however, may be a mere result of

a great familiarity with German literature, and we cannot, therefore,

look upon it as in itself decisive, still less as outweighing so much

evidence of an opposite character."--_North-American Review_, _No. 89_,

_October 1835_.

IV. NEW ENGLAND EDITORS

"The Editors have been induced, by the express desire of many persons,

to collect the following sheets out of the ephemeral pamphlets[4] in

which they first appeared, under the conviction that they contain in

themselves the assurance of a longer date.

[4] _Fraser's_ (London) _Magazine_, 1833-4.

"The Editors have no expectation that this little Work will have a

sudden and general popularity. They will not undertake, as there is no

need, to justify the gay costume in which the Author delights to dress

his thoughts, or the German idioms with which he has sportively

sprinkled his pages. It is his humour to advance the gravest

speculations upon the gravest topics in a quaint and burlesque style.

If his masquerade offend any of his audience, to that degree that they

will not hear what he has to say, it may chance to draw others to

listen to his wisdom; and what work of imagination can hope to please

all? But we will venture to remark that the distaste excited by these

peculiarities in some readers is greatest at first, and is soon

forgotten; and that the foreign dress and aspect of the Work are quite

superficial, and cover a genuine Saxon heart. We believe, no book has

been published for many years, written in a more sincere style of

idiomatic English, or which discovers an equal mastery over all the

riches of the language. The Author makes ample amends for the

occasional eccentricity of his genius, not only by frequent bursts of

pure splendour, but by the wit and sense which never fail him.

"But what will chiefly commend the Book to the discerning reader is

the manifest design of the work, which is, a Criticism upon the Spirit

of the Age,--we had almost said, of the hour,--in which we live;

exhibiting in the most just and novel light the present aspects of

Religion, Politics, Literature, Arts, and Social Life. Under all his

gaiety the Writer has an earnest meaning, and discovers an insight

into the manifold wants and tendencies of human nature, which is very

rare among our popular authors. The philanthropy and the purity of

moral sentiment, which inspire the work, will find their way to the

heart of every lover of virtue."--_Preface to Sartor Resartus_:

_Boston_, 1836, 1837.

SUNT, FUERUNT VEL FUERE.

LONDON, _30th June 1838_.

SUMMARY

BOOK I

CHAP. I. _Preliminary_

No Philosophy of Clothes yet, notwithstanding all our Science.

Strangely forgotten that Man is by nature a _naked_ animal.

The English mind all-too practically absorbed for any such

inquiry. Not so, deep-thinking Germany. Advantage of

Speculation having free course. Editor receives from Professor

Teufelsdröckh his new Work on Clothes (p. 1).

CHAP. II. _Editorial Difficulties_

How to make known Teufelsdröckh and his Book to English

readers; especially _such_ a book? Editor receives from the

Hofrath Heuschrecke a letter promising Biographic Documents.

Negotiations with Oliver Yorke. _Sartor Resartus_ conceived.

Editor's assurances and advice to his British reader (p. 5).

CHAP. III. _Reminiscences_

Teufelsdröckh at Weissnichtwo. Professor of Things in General

at the University there: Outward aspect and character;

memorable coffee-house utterances; domicile and watch-tower:

Sights thence of City-life by day and by night; with

reflections thereon. Old 'Liza and her ways. Character of

Hofrath Heuschrecke, and his relation to Teufelsdröckh (p. 9).

CHAP. IV. _Characteristics_

Teufelsdröckh and his Work on Clothes: Strange freedom of

speech: transcendentalism; force of insight and expression;

multifarious learning: Style poetic, uncouth:

Comprehensiveness of his humour and moral feeling. How the

Editor once saw him laugh. Different kinds of Laughter and

their significance (p. 20).

CHAP. V. _The World in Clothes_

Futile cause-and-effect Philosophies. Teufelsdröckh's Orbis

Vestitus. Clothes first invented for the sake of Ornament.

Picture of our progenitor, the Aboriginal Savage. Wonders of

growth and progress in mankind's history. Man defined as a

Tool-using Animal (p. 25).

CHAP. VI. _Aprons_

Divers Aprons in the world with divers uses. The Military and

Police Establishment Society's working Apron. The Episcopal

Apron with its corner tucked in. The Laystall. Journalists now

our only Kings and Clergy (p. 31).

CHAP. VII. _Miscellaneous-Historical_

How Men and Fashions come and go. German Costume in the

fifteenth century. By what strange chances do we live in

History! The costume of Bolivar's Cavalry (p. 34).

CHAP. VIII. _The World out of Clothes_

Teufelsdröckh's Theorem, "Society founded upon Cloth"; his

Method, Intuition quickened by Experience.--The mysterious

question, Who am I? Philosophic systems, all at fault: A

deeper meditation has always taught, here and there an

individual, that all visible things are appearances only; but

also emblems and revelations of God. Teufelsdröckh first

comes upon the question of Clothes: Baseness to which Clothing

may bring us (p. 37).

CHAP. IX. _Adamatism_

The universal utility of Clothes, and their higher mystic

virtue, illustrated. Conception of Mankind stripped naked; and

immediate consequent dissolution of civilised Society (p. 43).

CHAP. X. _Pure Reason_

A Naked World possible, nay actually exists, under the clothed

one. Man, in the eye of Pure Reason, a visible God's Presence.

The beginning of all wisdom, to look fixedly on Clothes till

they become transparent. Wonder, the basis of Worship:

Perennial in man. Modern Sciolists who cannot wonder:

Teufelsdröckh's contempt for, and advice to them (p. 47).

CHAP. XI. _Prospective_

Nature not an Aggregate, but a Whole. All visible things are

emblems, Clothes; and exist for a time only. The grand scope

of the Philosophy of Clothes.--Biographic Documents arrive.

Letter from Heuschrecke on the importance of Biography.

Heterogeneous character of the documents: Editor sorely

perplexed; but desperately grapples with his work (p. 52).

BOOK II

CHAP. I. _Genesis_

Old Andreas Futteral and Gretchen his wife: their quiet home.

Advent of a mysterious stranger, who deposits with them a

young infant, the future Herr Diogenes Teufelsdröckh.

After-yearnings of the youth for his unknown Father. Sovereign

power of Names and Naming. Diogenes a flourishing Infant (p.

61).

CHAP. II. _Idyllic_

Happy Childhood! Entepfuhl: Sights, hearings and experiences

of the boy Teufelsdröckh; their manifold teaching. Education;

what it can do, what cannot. Obedience our universal duty and

destiny. Gneschen sees the good Gretchen pray (p. 68).

CHAP. III. _Pedagogy_

Teufelsdröckh's School. His Education. How the ever-flowing

Kuhbach speaks of Time and Eternity. The Hinterschlag

Gymnasium; rude Boys; and pedant Professors. The need of true

Teachers, and their due recognition. Father Andreas dies: and

Teufelsdröckh learns the secret of his birth: His reflections

thereon. The Nameless University. Statistics of Imposture much

wanted. Bitter fruits of Rationalism: Teufelsdröckh's

religious difficulties. The young Englishman Herr Towgood.

Modern Friendship (p. 76).

CHAP. IV. _Getting under Way_

The grand thaumaturgic Art of Thought. Difficulty in fitting

Capability to Opportunity, or of getting underway. The

advantage of Hunger and Bread-Studies. Teufelsdröckh has to

enact the stern mono-drama of _No object and no rest_.

Sufferings as Auscultator. Given up as a man of genius,

Zähdarm House. Intolerable presumption of young men. Irony

and its consequences. Teufelsdröckh's Epitaph on Count

Zähdarm (p. 90).

CHAP. V. _Romance_

Teufelsdröckh gives up his Profession. The heavenly mystery

of Love. Teufelsdröckh's feeling of worship towards women.

First and only love. Blumine. Happy hearts and free tongues.

The infinite nature of Fantasy. Love's joyful progress; sudden

dissolution; and final catastrophe (p. 101).

CHAP. VI. _Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh_

Teufelsdröckh's demeanour thereupon. Turns pilgrim. A last

wistful look on native Entepfuhl: Sunset amongst primitive

Mountains. Basilisk-glance of the Barouche-and-four. Thoughts

on View-hunting. Wanderings and Sorrowings (p. 112).

CHAP. VII. _The Everlasting No_

Loss of Hope, and of Belief. Profit-and-Loss Philosophy,

Teufelsdröckh in his darkness and despair still clings to

Truth and follows Duty. Inexpressible pains and fears of

Unbelief. Fever-crisis: Protest against the Everlasting No:

Baphometic Fire-baptism (p. 121).

CHAP. VIII. _Centre of Indifference_

Teufelsdröckh turns now outwardly to the _Not-me_; and finds

wholesomer food. Ancient Cities: Mystery of their origin and

growth: Invisible inheritances and possessions. Power and

virtue of a true Book. Wagram Battlefield: War. Great Scenes

beheld by the Pilgrim: Great Events, and Great Men. Napoleon,

a divine missionary, preaching _La carrière ouverte aux

talens_. Teufelsdröckh at the North Cape: Modern means of

self-defence. Gunpowder and duelling. The Pilgrim, despising

his miseries, reaches the Centre of Indifference (p. 128).

CHAP. IX. _The Everlasting Yea_

Temptations in the Wilderness: Victory over the Tempter.

Annihilation of Self. Belief in God, and love to Man. The

origin of Evil, a problem ever requiring to be solved anew:

Teufelsdröckh's solution. Love of Happiness a vain whim: A

Higher in man than Love of Happiness. The Everlasting Yea.

Worship of Sorrow. Voltaire: his task now finished. Conviction

worthless, impossible, without Conduct. The true Ideal, the

Actual: Up and work! (p. 138).

CHAP. X. _Pause_

Conversion; a spiritual attainment peculiar to the modern Era.

Teufelsdröckh accepts Authorship as his divine calling. The

scope of the command _Thou shalt not steal_.--Editor begins to

suspect the authenticity of the Biographical documents; and

abandons them for the great Clothes volume. Result of the

preceding ten Chapters: Insight into the character of

Teufelsdröckh: His fundamental beliefs, and how he was forced

to seek and find them (p. 149).

BOOK III

CHAP. I. _Incident in Modern History_

Story of George Fox the Quaker; and his perennial suit of

Leather. A man God-possessed, witnessing for spiritual freedom

and manhood (p. 156).

CHAP. II. _Church-Clothes_

Church-Clothes defined; the Forms under which the Religious

principle is temporarily embodied. Outward Religion originates

by Society: Society becomes possible by Religion. The

condition of Church-Clothes in our time (p. 161).

CHAP. III. _Symbols_

The benignant efficacies of Silence and Secrecy. Symbols;

revelations of the Infinite in the Finite: Man everywhere

encompassed by them; lives and works by them. Theory of

Motive-millwrights, a false account of human nature. Symbols

of an extrinsic value; as Banners, Standards: Of intrinsic

value; as Works of Art, Lives and Deaths of Heroic men.

Religious Symbols; Christianity. Symbols hallowed by Time; but

finally defaced and desecrated. Many superannuated Symbols in

our time, needing removal (p. 163).

CHAP. IV. _Helotage_

Heuschrecke's Malthusian Tract, and Teufelsdröckh's marginal

notes thereon. The true workman, for daily bread, or spiritual

bread, to be honoured; and no other. The real privation of the

Poor not poverty or toil, but ignorance. Over-population: With

a world like ours and wide as ours, can there be too many men?

Emigration (p. 170).

CHAP. V. _The Phoenix_

Teufelsdröckh considers Society as _dead_; its soul

(Religion) gone, its body (existing Institutions) going.

Utilitarianism, needing little farther preaching, is now in

full activity of Destruction.--Teufelsdröckh would yield to

the Inevitable, accounting that the best: Assurance of a

fairer Living Society, arising, Phoenix-like, out of the ruins

of the old dead one. Before that Phoenix death-birth is

accomplished, long time, struggle, and suffering must

intervene (p. 174).

CHAP. VI. _Old Clothes_

Courtesy due from all men to all men: The Body of Man a

Revelation in the Flesh. Teufelsdröckh's respect for Old

Clothes, as the 'Ghosts of Life.' Walk in Monmouth Street, and

meditations there (p. 179).

CHAP. VII. _Organic Filaments_

Destruction and Creation ever proceed together; and organic

filaments of the Future are even now spinning. Wonderful

connection of each man with all men; and of each generation

with all generations, before and after: Mankind is One.

Sequence and progress of all human work, whether of creation

or destruction, from age to age.--Titles, hitherto derived

from Fighting, must give way to others. Kings will remain and

their title. Political Freedom, not to be attained by any

mechanical contrivance. Hero-worship, perennial amongst men;

the cornerstone of polities in the Future. Organic filaments

of the New Religion: Newspapers and Literature. Let the

faithful soul take courage! (p. 183).

CHAP. VIII. _Natural Supernaturalism_

Deep significance of Miracles. Littleness of human Science:

Divine incomprehensibility of Nature. Custom blinds us to the

miraculousness of daily-recurring miracles; so do Names. Space

and Time, appearances only; forms of human Thought: A glimpse

of Immortality. How Space hides from us the wondrousness of

our commonest powers; and Time, the divinely miraculous course

of human history (p. 191).

CHAP. IX. _Circumspective_

Recapitulation. Editor congratulates the few British readers

who have accompanied Teufelsdröckh through all his

speculations. The true use of the _Sartor Resartus_, to

exhibit the Wonder of daily life and common things; and to

show that all Forms are but Clothes, and temporary. Practical

inferences enough will follow (p. 201).

CHAP. X. _The Dandiacal Body_

The Dandy defined. The Dandiacal Sect a new modification of

the primeval superstition Self-worship: How to be

distinguished. Their Sacred Books (Fashionable Novels)

unreadable. Dandyism's Articles of Faith.--Brotherhood of

Poor-Slaves: vowed to perpetual Poverty; worshippers of Earth;

distinguished by peculiar costume and diet. Picture of a

Poor-Slave Household; and of a Dandiacal. Teufelsdröckh fears

these two Sects may spread, till they part all England between

them, and then frightfully collide (p. 204).

CHAP. XI. _Tailors_

Injustice done to Tailors, actual and metaphorical. Their rights

and great services will one day be duly recognised (p. 216).

CHAP. XII. _Farewell_

Teufelsdröckh's strange manner of speech, but resolute,

truthful character: His purpose seemingly to proselytise, to

unite the wakeful earnest in these dark times. Letter from

Hofrath Heuschrecke announcing that Teufelsdröckh has

disappeared from Weissnichtwo. Editor guesses he will appear

again, Friendly Farewell (p. 219).

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

LECTURE I

THE HERO AS DIVINITY. ODIN. PAGANISM: SCANDINAVIAN MYTHOLOGY

[_Tuesday, 5th May 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 realisation 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 neighbourhood 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 recognised element therein

Physical Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not as

real only, but as the only reality; Time, through every meanest moment

of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a

nobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it 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, or 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 _in_version, 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 symbolises! 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 cloudfield 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 cloudfield

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 rumour 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, _preter_natural. 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 thundercloud '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 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 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 may 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 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 recognise 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 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 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 _un_speakable 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 _Kön-ning_, _Kan-ning_, Man that _knows_ or _cans_.

Society everywhere is some representation, not _in_supportably

inaccurate, of a graduated Worship of Heroes;--reverence and obedience

done to men really great and wise. Not _in_supportably 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, valour 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 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.

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 for ever 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

realised 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 Maître de Poste, with a broad oath, orders his Postillion, "_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 summer-time; 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

seaboard of this wild land is a rim of grassy country, where cattle

can subsist, and men by means of them and of what the sea yields; and

it seems they were poetic men these, men who had deep thoughts in

them, and uttered musically their thoughts. Much would be lost, had

Iceland not been burst-up from the sea, not been discovered by the

Northmen! The old Norse Poets were many of them natives of Iceland.

Sæmund, 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 Sæmund'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 sympathise 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 '_Jötuns_,'

Giants, huge shaggy beings of a demonic character. Frost, Fire,

Sea-tempest; these are Jötuns. 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;

Jötunheim, a distant dark chaotic land, is the home of the Jötuns.

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 Jötuns. 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 Jötun, 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 Jötun or Devil; the monstrous Jötun _Rime_ drove home his

Horses at night, sat 'combing their manes,'--which Horses were

_Hail-Clouds_, or fleet _Frost-Winds_. His Cows--No, not his, but a

kinsman's, the Giant Hymir's Cows are _Icebergs_: this Hymir 'looks at

the rocks' with his devil-eye, and they _split_ in the glance of it.

Thunder was not then mere Electricity, vitreous or resinous; it was

the God Donner (Thunder) or Thor,--God also of beneficent Summer-heat.

The thunder was his wrath; the gathering of the black clouds is the

drawing down of Thor's angry brows; the fire-bolt bursting out of

Heaven is the all-rending Hammer flung from the hand of Thor: he urges

his loud chariot over the mountain-tops,--that is the peal: wrathful

he 'blows in his red beard,'--that is the rustling storm-blast before

the thunder begin. Balder again, the White God, the beautiful, the

just and benignant (whom the early Christian Missionaries found to

resemble Christ), is the Sun--beautifulest 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 _Wünsch_, or Wish. The God

_Wish_; who could give us all that we _wished_! Is not this the

sincerest 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 Jötuns I will mention only for etymology's sake,

that Sea-tempest is the Jötun _Aegir_, a very dangerous Jötun;--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

back-water, 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-Jötun;

sending out Thor to get the caldron for them in the Jötun 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, characterises 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 giant-like, 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 stormtost, the stormwind 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 honour 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 _im_measurable; 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 the 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

Trebisond, 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. Wheresoever 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. "_Wednes_day," 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. Torfæus, 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 suchlike,--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 dogmatise 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 ardours 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 once seen him, being

all dead. And in three-hundred years, and three-thousand years--!--To

attempt _theorising_ 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-obscura 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

thousandfold expansion spread itself, in forms and colours, depends

not on _it_, so much as on the National Mind recipient of it. The

colours 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 Phantasy of Himself; this world is the multiplex

'Image of his own Dream.' Who knows to what unnameable 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 rumour 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

æsthetic 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-obscura 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 recognising the divineness of

Nature, the divineness of Man; most rude, yet heartfelt, robust,

giantlike; betokening what a giant of a man this child would 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 than 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 were

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 favour 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. _Valour_ is

still _value_. The first duty of 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 valour 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 valour; yet

valour 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 valour, different enough from ferocity, is the basis of all. A

more legitimate kind of valour 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 valour 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 Valour, 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 suchlike, 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 _Völuspa_ 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

symbolising, 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 humour 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 Valour is the fountain of Pity too;--of Truth, and all that

is great and good in man. The robust homely vigour 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 Labour_. 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 Jötuns, harrying those chaotic

Frost-monsters, subduing them, at least straitening and damaging them.

There is a great broad humour in some of these things.

Thor, as we saw above, goes to Jötun-land, to seek Hymir's Caldron,

that the Gods may brew beer. Hymir the huge Giant enters, his grey

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 _Jötun_. 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 Jötun-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!