Skrymir now carried their portmanteau all day; Thor, however, had his

own suspicions, did not like the ways of Skrymir; determined at night

to put an end to him as he slept. Raising his hammer, he struck down

into the Giant's face a right thunderbolt blow, of force to rend

rocks. The Giant merely awoke; rubbed his cheek, and said, Did a leaf

fall? Again Thor struck, so soon as Skrymir again slept; a better blow

than before: but the Giant only murmured, Was that a grain of sand?

Thor's third stroke was with both his hands (the 'knuckles white' I

suppose), and seemed to dint deep into Skrymir's visage; but he merely

checked his snore, and remarked, There must be sparrows roosting in

this tree, I think; what is that they have dropt?--At the gate of

Utgard, a place so high that you had to 'strain your neck bending back

to see the top of it,' Skrymir went his ways. Thor and his companions

were admitted; invited to take share in the games going on. To Thor,

for his part, they handed a drinking-horn; it was a common feat, they

told him, to drink this dry at one draught. Long and fiercely, three

times over, Thor drank; but made hardly any impression. He was a weak

child, they told him; could he lift that Cat he saw there? Small as

the feat seemed, Thor with his whole godlike strength could not; he

bent-up the creature's back, could not raise its feet off the ground,

could at the utmost raise one foot. Why, you are no man, said the

Utgard people; there is an Old Woman that will wrestle you! Thor,

heartily ashamed, seized this haggard Old Woman; but could not throw

her.

And now, on their quitting Utgard, the Chief Jötun, escorting them

politely a little way, said to Thor: "You are beaten then:--yet be not

so much ashamed; there was deception of appearance in it. That Horn

you tried to drink was the _Sea_: you did make it ebb; but who could

drink that, the bottomless! The Cat you would have lifted,--why, that

is the _Midgard-snake_, the Great World-serpent, which, tail in mouth,

girds and keeps-up the whole created world; had you torn that up, the

world must have rushed to ruin! As for the Old Woman, she was _Time_,

Old Age, Duration; with her what can wrestle? No man nor no god with

her; gods or men, she prevails over all! And then those three strokes

you struck,--look at these _three valleys_; your three strokes made

these!" Thor looked at his attendant Jötun: it was Skrymir;--it was,

say Norse critics, the old chaotic rocky _Earth_ in person, and that

glove-_house_ was some Earth-cavern! But Skrymir had vanished; Utgard

with its skyhigh gates, when Thor grasped his hammer to smite them,

had gone to air; only the Giant's voice was heard mocking: "Better

come no more to Jötunheim!"--

This is of the allegoric period, as we see, and half play, not of the

prophetic and entirely devout: but as a mythus is there not real

antique Norse gold in it? More true metal, rough from the Mimerstithy,

than in many a famed Greek Mythus _shaped_ far better! A great broad

Brobdignag grin of true humour is in this Skrymir; mirth resting on

earnestness and sadness, as the rainbow on black tempest: only a right

valiant heart is capable of that. It is the grim humour of our own Ben

Jonson, rare old Ben; runs in the blood of us, I fancy; for one

catches tones of it, under a still other shape, out of the American

Backwoods.

That is also a very striking conception, that of the _Ragnarök_,

Consummation, or _Twilight of the Gods_. It is in the _Völuspa_ Song;

seemingly a very old, prophetic idea. The Gods and Jötuns, the divine

Powers and the chaotic brute ones, after long contest and partial

victory by the former, meet at last in universal world-embracing

wrestle and duel; World-serpent against Thor, strength against

strength; mutually extinctive; and ruin, 'twilight' sinking into

darkness, swallows the created Universe. The old Universe with its

Gods is sunk; but it is not final death: there is to be a new Heaven

and a new Earth; a higher supreme God, and Justice to reign among men.

Curious: this law of mutation, which also is a law written in man's

inmost thought, had been deciphered by these old earnest Thinkers in

their rude style; and how, though all dies, and even gods die, yet all

death is but a phoenix fire-death, and new-birth into the Greater and

the Better! It is the fundamental Law of Being for a creature made of

Time, living in this Place of Hope. All earnest men have seen into it;

may still see into it.

And now, connected with this, let us glance at the _last_ mythus of

the appearance of Thor; and end there. I fancy it to be the latest in

date of all these fables; a sorrowing protest against the advance of

Christianity,--set forth reproachfully by some Conservative Pagan.

King Olaf has been harshly blamed for his over-zeal in introducing

Christianity; surely I should have blamed him far more for an

under-zeal in that! He paid dear enough for it; he died by the revolt

of his Pagan people, in battle, in the year 1033, at Stickelstad, near

that Drontheim, where the chief Cathedral of the North has now stood

for many centuries, dedicated gratefully to his memory as _Saint_

Olaf. The mythus about Thor is to this effect. King Olaf, the

Christian Reform King, is sailing with fit escort along the shore of

Norway, from haven to haven; dispensing justice, or doing other royal

work: on leaving a certain haven, it is found that a stranger, of

grave eyes and aspect, red beard, of stately robust figure, has stept

in. The courtiers address him; his answers surprise by their

pertinency and depth: at length he is brought to the King. The

stranger's conversation here is not less remarkable, as they sail

along the beautiful shore; but after some time, he addresses King Olaf

thus: "Yes, King Olaf, it is all beautiful, with the sun shining on it

there; green, fruitful, a right fair home for you, and many a sore day

had Thor, many a wild fight with the rock Jötuns, before he could make

it so. And now you seem minded to put away Thor. King Olaf, have a

care!" said the stranger, drawing-down his brows;--and when they

looked again, he was nowhere to be found.--This is the last appearance

of Thor on the stage of this world!

Do we not see well enough how the Fable might arise, without

unveracity on the part of any one? It is the way most Gods have come

to appear among men: thus, if in Pindar's time 'Neptune was seen once

at the Nemean Games,' what was this Neptune too but a 'stranger of

noble grave aspect,' _fit_ to be 'seen'! There is something pathetic,

tragic for me in this last voice of Paganism. Thor is vanished, the

whole Norse world has vanished; and will not return ever again. In

like fashion to that pass away the highest things. All things that

have been in this world, all things that are or will be in it, have to

vanish, we have our sad farewell to give them.

That Norse Religion, a rude but earnest, sternly impressive

_Consecration of Valour_ (so we may define it), sufficed for these old

valiant Northmen. Consecration of Valour is not a _bad_ thing! We will

take it for good, so far as it goes. Neither is there no use in

_knowing_ something about this old Paganism of our Fathers.

Unconsciously, and combined with higher things, it is in _us_ yet,

that old Faith withal! To know it consciously, brings us into closer

and clearer relation with the Past--with our own possessions in the

Past. For the whole Past, as I keep repeating, is the possession of

the Present; the Past had always something _true_, and is a precious

possession. In a different time, in a different place, it is always

some other _side_ of our common Human Nature that has been developing

itself. The actual True is the _sum_ of all these; not any one of them

by itself, constitutes what of Human Nature is hitherto developed.

Better to know them all than misknow them. "To which of these Three

Religions do you specially adhere?" inquires Meister of his Teacher.

"To all the Three!" answers the other: "To all the Three: for they by

their union first constitute the True Religion."

LECTURE II

THE HERO AS PROPHET. MAHOMET: ISLAM

[_Friday, 8th May 1840_]

From the first rude times of Paganism among the Scandinavians in the

North, we advance to a very different epoch of religion, among a very

different people: Mahometanism among the Arabs. A great change; what a

change and progress is indicated here, in the universal condition and

thoughts of men!

The Hero is not now regarded as a God among his fellowmen; but as one

God-inspired, as a prophet. It is the second phasis of Hero-worship;

the first or oldest, we may say, has passed away without return; in

the history of the world there will not again be any man, never so

great, whom his fellowmen will take for a god. Nay we might rationally

ask, Did any set of human beings ever really think the man they _saw_

there standing beside them a god, the maker of this world? Perhaps

not: it was usually some man they remembered, or _had_ seen. But

neither can this any more be. The Great Man is not recognised

henceforth as a god any more.

It was a rude gross error, that of counting the Great Man a god. Yet

let us say that it is at all times difficult to know _what_ he is, or

how to account of him and receive him! The most significant feature in

the history of an epoch is the manner it has of welcoming a Great Man.

Ever, to the true instincts of men, there is something godlike in him.

Whether they shall take him to be a god, to be a prophet, or what they

shall take him to be? that is ever a grand question; by their way of

answering that, we shall see, as through a little window, into the

very heart of these men's spiritual condition. For at bottom the Great

Man, as he comes from the hand of nature, is ever the same kind of

thing: Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns; I hope to make it appear that

these are all originally of one stuff; that only by the world's

reception of them, and the shapes they assume, are they so

immeasurably diverse. The worship of Odin astonishes us--to fall

prostrate before the Great Man, into _deliquium_ of love and wonder

over him, and feel in their hearts that he was a denizen of the skies,

a god! This was imperfect enough: but to welcome, for example, a Burns

as we did, was that what we can call perfect? The most precious gift

that Heaven can give to the Earth; a man of 'genius' as we call it:

the Soul of a Man actually sent down from the skies with a

God's-message to us--this we waste away as an idle artificial

firework, sent to amuse us a little, and sink it into ashes, wreck and

ineffectuality: _such_ reception of a Great Man I do not call very

perfect either! Looking into the heart of the thing, one may perhaps

call that of Burns a still uglier phenomenon, betokening still sadder

imperfections in mankind's ways, than the Scandinavian method itself!

To fall into mere unreasoning _deliquium_ of love and admiration, was

not good; but such unreasoning, nay irrational supercilious no-love at

all is perhaps still worse!--It is a thing forever changing, this of

Hero-worship: different in each age, difficult to do well in any age.

Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the age, one may say, is to

do it well.

We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet, but as the one

we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets;

but I do esteem him a true one. Farther, as there is no danger of our

becoming, any of us, Mahometans, I mean to say all the good of him I

justly can. It is the way to get at his secret: let us try to

understand what _he_ meant with the world; what the world meant and

means with him, will then be a more answerable question. Our current

hypotheses about Mahomet, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood

incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity,

begins really to be now untenable to any one. The lies, which

well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to

ourselves only. When Pococke inquired of Grotius, Where the proof was

of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's ear,

and pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there

was no proof! It is really time to dismiss all that. The word this man

spoke has been the life-guidance now of a hundred-and-eighty millions

of men these twelve-hundred years. These hundred-and-eighty millions

were made by God as well as we. A greater number of God's creatures

believe in Mahomet's word at this hour than in any other word

whatever. Are we to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual

legerdemain, this which so many creatures of the Almighty have lived

by and died by? I, for my part, cannot form any such supposition. I

will believe most things sooner than that. One would be entirely at a

loss what to think of this world at all, if quackery so grew and were

sanctioned here.

Alas, such theories are very lamentable. If we would attain to

knowledge of anything in God's true Creation, let us disbelieve them

wholly! They are the product of an Age of Scepticism; they indicate

the saddest spiritual paralysis, and mere death-life of the souls of

men: more godless theory, I think, was never promulgated in this

Earth. A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a

brick house! If he do not know and follow _truly_ the properties of

mortar, burnt clay and what else he works in, it is no house that he

makes, but a rubbish-heap. It will not stand for twelve centuries, to

lodge a hundred-and-eighty millions; it will fall straightway. A man

must conform himself to Nature's laws, _be_ verily in communion with

Nature and the truth of things, or Nature will answer him, No, not at

all! Speciosities are specious--ah, me!--a Cagliostro, many

Cagliostros, prominent world-leaders, do prosper by their quackery,

for a day. It is like a forged bank-note; they get it passed out of

_their_ worthless hands: others, not they, have to smart for it.

Nature bursts-up in fire-flame, French Revolutions and suchlike,

proclaiming with terrible veracity that forged notes are forged.

But of a Great Man especially, of him I will venture to assert that it

is incredible he should have been other than true. It seems to me the

primary foundation of him, and of all that can lie in him, this. No

Mirabeau, Napoleon, Burns, Cromwell, no man adequate to do anything,

but is first of all in right earnest about it; what I call a sincere

man. I should say _sincerity_, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is

the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic. Not the

sincerity that calls itself sincere; ah, no, that is a very poor

matter indeed;--a shallow braggart conscious sincerity; oftenest

self-conceit mainly. The Great Man's sincerity is of the kind he

cannot speak of, is not conscious of: nay, I suppose, he is conscious

rather of _in_sincerity; for what man can walk accurately by the law

of truth for one day? No, the Great Man does not boast himself

sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself if he is so: I

would say rather, his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot

help being sincere! The great Fact of Existence is great to him. Fly

as he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of this Reality.

His mind is so made; he is great by that, first of all. Fearful and

wonderful, real as Life, real as death, is this Universe to him.

Though all men should forget its truth, and walk in a vain show, he

cannot. At all moments the Flame-image glares-in upon him; undeniable,

there, there!--I wish you to take this as my primary definition of a

Great Man. A little man may have this, it is competent to all men that

God has made: but a Great Man cannot be without it.

Such a man is what we call an _original_ man: he comes to us at

first-hand. A messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with

tidings to us. We may call him Poet, Prophet, God;--in one way or

other, we all feel that the words he utters are as no other man's

words. Direct from the Inner Fact of things;--he lives, and has to

live, in daily communion with that. Hearsays cannot hide it from him;

he is blind, homeless, miserable, following hearsays; _it_ glares-in

upon him. Really his utterances, are they not a kind of

'revelation;'--what we must call such for want of some other name? It

is from the heart of the world that he comes; he is portion of the

primal reality of things. God has made many revelations: but this man

too, has not God made him, the latest and newest of all? The

'inspiration of the Almighty giveth _him_ understanding:' we must

listen before all to him.

This Mahomet, then, we will in no wise consider as an Inanity and

Theatricality, a poor conscious ambitious schemer; we cannot conceive

him so. The rude message he delivered was a real one withal; an

earnest confused voice from the unknown Deep. The man's words were not

false, nor his workings here below; no Inanity and Simulacrum; a fiery

mass of Life cast-up from the great bosom of Nature herself. To

_kindle_ the world; the world's Maker had ordered it so. Neither can

the faults, imperfections, insincerities even, of Mahomet, if such

were never so well proved against him, shake this primary fact about

him.

On the whole, we make too much of faults; the details of the business

hide the real centre of it. Faults? The greatest of faults, I should

say, is to be conscious of none. Readers of the Bible above all, one

would think, might know better. Who is called there 'the man according

to God's own heart'? David, the Hebrew King, had fallen into sins

enough; blackest crimes; there was no want of sins. And thereupon the

unbelievers sneer and ask, Is this your man according to God's own

heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a shallow one. What are

faults, what are the outward details of a life; if the inner secret of

it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended

struggle of it, be forgotten? 'It is not in man that walketh to direct

his steps.' Of all acts, is not, for a man, _repentance_ the most

divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious

consciousness of no sin;--that is death; the heart so conscious is

divorced from sincerity, humility and fact; is dead: it is 'pure' as

dead dry sand is pure. David's life and history, as written for us in

those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of

a man's moral progress and warfare here below. All earnest souls will

ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an earnest human soul

towards what is good and best. Struggle often baffled, sore baffled,

down as into entire wreck; yet a struggle never ended; ever, with

tears, repentance, true unconquerable purpose, begun anew. Poor human

nature! Is not a man's walking, in truth, always that: 'a succession

of falls'? Man can do no other. In this wild element of a Life, he has

to struggle onwards; now fallen, deep-abased; and ever, with tears,

repentance, with bleeding heart, he has to rise again, struggle again

still onwards. That his struggle _be_ a faithful unconquerable one:

that is the question of questions. We will put-up with many sad

details, if the soul of it were true. Details by themselves will never

teach us what it is. I believe we misestimate Mahomet's faults even as

faults: but the secret of him will never be got by dwelling there. We

will leave all this behind us; and assuring ourselves that he did mean

some true thing, ask candidly what it was or might be.

* * * * *

These Arabs Mahomet was born among are certainly a notable people.

Their country itself is notable; the fit habitation for such a race.

Savage inaccessible rock-mountains, great grim deserts, alternating

with beautiful strips of verdure: wherever water is, there is

greenness, beauty; odoriferous balm-shrubs, date-trees,

frankincense-trees. Consider that wide waste horizon of sand, empty,

silent, like a sand-sea, dividing habitable place from habitable. You

are all alone there, left alone with the Universe; by day a fierce sun

blazing down on it with intolerable radiance; by night the great deep

Heaven with its stars. Such a country is fit for a swift-handed,

deep-hearted race of men. There is something most agile, active, and

yet most meditative, enthusiastic in the Arab character. The Persians

are called the French of the East, we will call the Arabs Oriental

Italians. A gifted noble people; a people of wild strong feelings, and

of iron restraint over these: the characteristic of noblemindedness,

of genius. The wild Bedouin welcomes the stranger to his tent, as one

having right to all that is there; were it his worst enemy, he will

slay his foal to treat him, will serve him with sacred hospitality for

three days, will set him fairly on his way;--and then, by another law

as sacred, kill him if he can. In words too, as in action. They are

not a loquacious people, taciturn rather; but eloquent, gifted when

they do speak. An earnest truthful kind of men. They are, as we know,

of Jewish kindred: but with that deadly terrible earnestness of the

Jews they seem to combine something graceful, brilliant, which is not

Jewish. They had 'Poetic contests' among them before the time of

Mahomet. Sale says, at Ocadh, in the South of Arabia, there were

yearly fairs, and there, when the merchandising was done, Poets sang

for prizes:--the wild people gathered to hear that.

One Jewish quality these Arabs manifest; the outcome of many or of all

high qualities; what we may call religiosity. From of old they had

been zealous workers, according to their light. They worshipped the

stars, as Sabeans; worshipped many natural objects,--recognised them

as symbols, immediate manifestations, of the Maker of Nature. It was

wrong; and yet not wholly wrong. All God's works are still in a sense

symbols of God. Do we not, as I urged, still account it a merit to

recognise a certain inexhaustible significance, 'poetic beauty' as we

name it, in all natural objects whatsoever? A man is a poet, and

honoured, for doing that, and speaking or singing it,--a kind of

diluted worship. They had many Prophets, these Arabs; Teachers each to

his tribe, each according to the light he had. But indeed, have we not

from of old the noblest of proofs, still palpable to every one of us,

of what devoutness and noblemindedness had dwelt in these rustic

thoughtful peoples? Biblical critics seem agreed that our own _Book of

Job_ was written in that region of the world. I call that, apart from

all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with

pen. One feels, indeed, as if it were not Hebrew; such a noble

universality, different from noble patriotism or sectarianism, reigns

in it. A noble Book; all men's Book! It is our first, oldest statement

of the never-ending Problem,--man's destiny, and God's ways with him

here in this earth. And all in such free flowing outlines; grand in

its sincerity, in its simplicity; in its epic melody, and repose of

reconcilement. There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding

heart. So _true_ everywhere; true eyesight and vision for all things;

material things no less than spiritual; the Horse,--'hast thou clothed

his neck with _thunder_?'--he '_laughs_ at the shaking of the spear!'

Such living likenesses were never since drawn. Sublime sorrow, sublime

reconciliation: oldest choral melody as of the heart of mankind;--so

soft, and great; as the summer midnight, as the world with its seas

and stars! There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of

it, of equal literary merit.--

To the idolatrous Arabs one of the most ancient universal objects of

worship was that Black Stone, still kept in the building called Caabah

at Mecca. Diodorus Siculus mentions this Caabah in a way not to be

mistaken, as the oldest, most honoured temple in his time; that is,

some half-century before our Era. Silvestre de Sacy says there is some

likelihood that the Black Stone is an aerolite. In that case, some one

might _see_ it fall out of Heaven! It stands now beside the Well

Zemzem; the Caabah is built over both. A Well is in all places a

beautiful affecting object, gushing out like life from the hard

earth;--still more so in these hot dry countries, where it is the

first condition of being. The Well Zemzem has its name from the

bubbling sound of the waters, _zem-zem_; they think it is the Well

which Hagar found with her little Ishmael in the wilderness: the

aerolite and it have been sacred now, and had a Caabah over them, for

thousands of years. A curious object, that Caabah! There it stands at

this hour, in the black cloth-covering the Sultan sends it yearly;

'twenty-seven cubits high;' with circuit, with double circuit of

pillars, with festoon-rows of lamps and quaint ornaments: the lamps

will be lighted again _this_ night,--to glitter again under the stars.

An authentic fragment of the oldest Past. It is the _Keblah_ of all

Moslem: from Delhi all onwards to Morocco, the eyes of innumerable

praying men are turned towards _it_, five times, this day and all

days: one of the notablest centres in the Habitation of Men.

It had been from the sacredness attached to this Caabah Stone and

Hagar's Well, from the pilgrimings of all tribes of Arabs thither,

that Mecca took its rise as a Town. A great town once, though much

decayed now. It has no natural advantage for a town; stands in a sandy

hollow amid bare barren hills, at a distance from the sea; its

provisions, its very bread, have to be imported. But so many pilgrims

needed lodgings: and then all places of pilgrimage do, from the first,

become places of trade. The first day pilgrims meet, merchants have

also met: where men see themselves assembled for one object, they find

that they can accomplish other objects which depend on meeting

together. Mecca became the Fair of all Arabia. And thereby indeed the

chief staple and warehouse of whatever Commerce there was between the

Indian and Western countries, Syria, Egypt, even Italy. It had at one

time a population of 100,000; buyers, forwarders of those Eastern and

Western products; importers for their own behoof of provisions and

corn. The government was a kind of irregular aristocratic republic,

not without a touch of theocracy. Ten Men of a chief tribe, chosen in

some rough way, were Governors of Mecca, and Keepers of the Caabah.

The Koreish were the chief tribe in Mahomet's time; his own family was

of that tribe. The rest of the Nation, fractioned and cut-asunder by

deserts, lived under similar rude patriarchal governments by one or

several: herdsmen, carriers, traders, generally robbers too; being

oftenest at war one with another, or with all: held together by no

open bond, if it were not this meeting at the Caabah, where all forms

of Arab Idolatry assembled in common adoration;--held mainly by the

_inward_ indissoluble bond of a common blood and language. In this way

had the Arabs lived for long ages, unnoticed by the world: a people of

great qualities, unconsciously waiting for the day when they should

become notable to all the world. Their Idolatries appear to have been

in a tottering state; much was getting into confusion and fermentation

among them. Obscure tidings of the most important Event ever

transacted in this world, the Life and Death of the Divine Man in

Judea, at once the symptom and cause of immeasurable change to all

people in the world, had in the course of centuries reached into

Arabia too; and could not but, of itself, have produced fermentation

there.

* * * * *

It was among this Arab people, so circumstanced, in the year 570 of

our Era, that the man Mahomet was born. He was of the family of

Hashem, of the Koreish tribe as we said; though poor, connected with

the chief persons of his country.

Almost at his birth he lost his Father; at the age of six years his

Mother too, a woman noted for her beauty, her worth and sense: he fell

to the charge of his Grandfather, an old man, a hundred years old. A

good old man: Mahomet's Father, Abdallah, had been his youngest

favourite son. He saw in Mahomet, with his old life-worn eyes, a

century old, the lost Abdallah come back again, all that was left of

Abdallah. He loved the little orphan Boy greatly; used to say, They

must take care of that beautiful little Boy, nothing in their kindred

was more precious than he. At his death, while the boy was still but

two years old, he left him in charge to Abu Thaleb the eldest of the

Uncles, as to him that now was head of the house. By this Uncle, a

just and rational man as everything betokens, Mahomet was brought-up

in the best Arab way.

Mahomet, as he grew up, accompanied his Uncle on trading journeys and

suchlike; in his eighteenth year one finds him a fighter following his

Uncle in war. But perhaps the most significant of all his journeys is

one we find noted as of some years' earlier date: a journey to the

Fairs of Syria. The young man here first came in contact with a quite

foreign world,--with one foreign element of endless moment to him: the

Christian Religion. I know not what to make of that 'Sergius, the

Nestorian Monk,' whom Abu Thaleb and he are said to have lodged with;

or how much any monk could have taught one still so young. Probably

enough it is greatly exaggerated, this of the Nestorian Monk. Mahomet

was only fourteen; had no language but his own: much in Syria must

have been a strange unintelligible whirlpool to him. But the eyes of

the lad were open; glimpses of many things would doubtless be

taken-in, and lie very enigmatic as yet, which were to ripen in a

strange way into views, into beliefs and insights one day. These

journeys to Syria were probably the beginning of much to Mahomet.

One other circumstance we must not forget: that he had no

school-learning; of the thing we call school-learning none at all. The

art of writing was but just introduced into Arabia; it seems to be the

true opinion that Mahomet never could write! Life in the Desert, with

its experiences, was all his education. What of this infinite Universe

he, from his dim place, with his own eyes and thoughts, could take in,

so much and no more of it was he to know. Curious, if we will reflect

on it, this of having no books. Except by what he could see for

himself, or hear of by uncertain rumour of speech in the obscure

Arabian Desert, he could know nothing. The wisdom that had been before

him or at a distance from him in the world, was in a manner as good as

not there for him. Of the great brother souls, flame-beacons through

so many lands and times, no one directly communicates with this great

soul. He is alone there, deep down in the bosom of the Wilderness; has

to grow up so,--alone with Nature and his own Thoughts.

But, from an early age, he had been remarked as a thoughtful man. His

companions named him '_Al Amin_, The Faithful.' A man of truth and

fidelity; true in what he did, in what he spake and thought. They

noted that _he_ always meant something. A man rather taciturn in

speech; silent when there was nothing to be said; but pertinent, wise,

sincere, when he did speak; always throwing light on the matter. This

is the only sort of speech _worth_ speaking! Through life we find him

to have been regarded as an altogether solid, brotherly, genuine man.

A serious, sincere character; yet amiable, cordial, companionable,

jocose even;--a good laugh in him withal: there are men whose laugh is

as untrue as anything about them; who cannot laugh. One hears of

Mahomet's beauty: his fine sagacious honest face, brown florid

complexion, beaming black eyes;--I somehow like too that vein on the

brow, which swelled-up black when he was in anger: like the

'_horse-shoe_ vein' in Scott's _Redgauntlet_. It was a kind of feature

in the Hashem family, this black swelling vein in the brow; Mahomet

had it prominent, as would appear. A spontaneous, passionate, yet

just, true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light: of wild

worth, all uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of the

Desert there.

How he was placed with Kadijah, a rich Widow, as her Steward, and

travelled in her business, again to the Fairs of Syria; how he managed

all, as one can well understand, with fidelity, adroitness; how her

gratitude, her regard for him grew: the story of their marriage is

altogether a graceful intelligible one, as told us by the Arab

authors. He was twenty-five; she forty, though still beautiful. He

seems to have lived in a most affectionate, peaceable, wholesome way

with this wedded benefactress; loving her truly, and her alone. It

goes greatly against the impostor theory, the fact that he lived in

this entirely unexceptionable, entirely quiet and commonplace way,

till the heat of his years was done. He was forty before he talked of

any mission from Heaven. All his irregularities, real and supposed,

date from after his fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died. All his

'ambition,' seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an honest life; his

'fame,' the mere good opinion of neighbours that knew him, had been

sufficient hitherto. Not till he was already getting old, the prurient

heat of his life all burnt out, and _peace_ growing to be the chief

thing this world could give him, did he start on the 'career of

ambition;' and, belying all his past character and existence, set-up

as a wretched empty charlatan to acquire what he could now no longer

enjoy! For my share, I have no faith whatever in that.

Ah no: this deep-hearted Son of the Wilderness, with his beaming black

eyes and open social deep soul, had other thoughts in him than

ambition. A silent great soul; he was one of those who cannot _but_ be

in earnest; whom Nature herself has appointed to be sincere. While

others walk in formulas and hearsays, contented enough to dwell there,

this man could not screen himself in formulas; he was alone with his

own soul and the reality of things. The great Mystery of Existence, as

I said, glared-in upon him, with its terrors, with its splendours; no

hearsays could hide that unspeakable fact, "Here am I!" Such

_sincerity_, as we named it, has in very truth something of divine.

The word of such a man is a Voice direct from Nature's own Heart. Men

do and must listen to that as to nothing else;--all else is wind in

comparison. From of old, a thousand thoughts, in his pilgrimings and

wanderings, had been in this man: What am I? What _is_ this

unfathomable Thing I live in, which men name Universe? What is Life;

what is Death? What am I to believe? What am I to do? The grim rocks

of Mount Hara, of Mount Sinai, the stern sandy solitudes answered not.

The great Heaven rolling silent overhead, with its blue-glancing

stars, answered not. There was no answer. The man's own soul, and what

of God's inspiration dwelt there, had to answer!

It is the thing which all men have to ask themselves; which we too have

to ask, and answer. This wild man felt it to be of _infinite_ moment;

all other things of no moment whatever in comparison. The jargon of

argumentative Greek Sects, vague traditions of Jews, the stupid routine

of Arab Idolatry, there was no answer in these. A Hero, as I repeat,

has this first distinction, which indeed we may call first and last,

the Alpha and Omega of his whole Heroism, That he looks through the

shows of things into _things_. Use and wont, respectable hearsay,

respectable formula: all these are good, or are not good. There is

something behind and beyond all these, which all these must correspond

with, be the image of, or they are--_Idolatries_: 'bits of black wood

pretending to be God;' to the earnest soul a mockery and abomination.

Idolatries never so gilded, waited on by heads of the Koreish, will do

nothing for this man. Though all men walk by them, what good is it? The

great Reality stands glaring there upon _him_. He there has to answer

it, or perish miserably. Now, even now, or else through all Eternity

never! Answer it; _thou_ must find an answer.--Ambition? What could all

Arabia do for this man; with the crown of Greek Heraclius, of Persian

Chosroes, and all crowns in the Earth;--what could they all do for him?

It was not of the Earth he wanted to hear tell; it was of the Heaven

above and of the Hell beneath. All crowns and sovereignties whatsoever,

where would _they_ in a few brief years be? To be Sheik of Mecca or

Arabia, and have a bit of gilt wood put into your hand,--will that be

one's salvation? I decidedly think, not. We will leave it altogether,

this impostor hypothesis, as not credible; not very tolerable even,

worthy chiefly of dismissal by us.

Mahomet had been wont to retire yearly, during the month Ramadhan,

into solitude and silence; as indeed was the Arab custom; a

praiseworthy custom, which such a man, above all, would find natural

and useful. Communing with his own heart, in the silence of the

mountains; himself silent; open to the 'small still voices:' it was a

right natural custom! Mahomet was in his fortieth year, when having

withdrawn to a cavern in Mount Hara, near Mecca, during this Ramadhan,

to pass the month in prayer, and meditation on those great questions,

he one day told his wife Kadijah, who with his household was with him

or near him this year, That by the unspeakable special favour of

Heaven he had now found it all out; was in doubt and darkness no

longer, but saw it all. That all these Idols and Formulas were

nothing, miserable bits of wood; that there was One God in and over

all; and we must leave all Idols, and look to Him. That God is great;

and that there is nothing else great! He is the Reality. Wooden Idols

are not real; He is real. He made us at first, sustains us yet; we and

all things are but the shadow of Him; a transitory garment veiling the

Eternal Splendour. '_Allah akbar_, God is great;'--and then also

'_Islam_,' That we must _submit_ to God. That our whole strength lies

in resigned submission to Him, whatsoever He do to us. For this world,

and for the other! The thing He sends to us, were it death and worse

than death, shall be good, shall be best; we resign ourselves to

God.--'If this be _Islam_,' says Goethe, 'do we not all live in

_Islam_?' Yes, all of us that have any moral life; we all live so. It

has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submit

to Necessity,--Necessity will make him submit,--but to know and

believe well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the

wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic

pretension of scanning this great God's-World in his small fraction of

a brain; to know that it _had_ verily, though deep beyond his

soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;--that his part in

it was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence

follow that; not questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable.

I say, this is yet the only true morality known. A man is right and

invincible, virtuous and on the road towards sure conquest, precisely

while he joins himself to the great deep Law of the World, in spite of

all superficial laws, temporary appearances, profit-and-loss

calculations; he is victorious while he coöperates with that great

central Law, not victorious otherwise:--and surely his first chance of

coöperating with it, or getting into the course of it, is to know with

his whole soul that it _is_; that it is good, and alone good! This is

the soul of Islam; it is properly the soul of Christianity;--for Islam

is definable as a confused form of Christianity; had Christianity not

been, neither had it been. Christianity also commands us, before all,

to be resigned to God. We are to take no counsel with flesh-and-blood;

give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes: to know that we

know nothing; that the worst and cruelest to our eyes is not what it

seems; that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God

above, and say, It is good and wise, God is great! "Though He slay me,

yet will I trust in Him." Islam means in its way Denial of Self,

Annihilation of Self. This is yet the highest Wisdom that Heaven has

revealed to our Earth.

Such light had come, as it could, to illuminate the darkness of this

wild Arab soul. A confused dazzling, splendour as of life and Heaven,

in the great darkness which threatened to be death: he called it

revelation and the angel Gabriel;--who of us yet can know what to call

it? It is the 'inspiration of the Almighty that giveth us

understanding.' To _know_; to get into the truth of anything, is ever

a mystic act,--of which the best Logics can but babble on the surface.

'Is not Belief the true god-announcing Miracle?' says Novalis.--That

Mahomet's whole soul, set in flame with this grand Truth vouchsafed

him, should feel as if it were important and the only important thing,

was very natural. That Providence had unspeakably honoured _him_ by

revealing it, saving him from death and darkness; that he therefore

was bound to make known the same to all creatures: this is what was

meant by 'Mahomet is the Prophet of God;' this too is not without its

true meaning.--

The good Kadijah, we can fancy, listened to him with wonder, with

doubt: at length she answered: Yes, it was _true_ this that he said.

One can fancy too the boundless gratitude of Mahomet; and how of all

the kindnesses she had done him, this of believing the earnest

struggling word he now spoke was the greatest. 'It is certain,' says

Novalis, 'my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will

believe in it.' It is a boundless favour.--He never forgot this good

Kadijah. Long afterwards, Ayesha his young favourite wife, a woman who

indeed distinguished herself among the Moslem, by all manner of

qualities, through her whole long life; this young brilliant Ayesha

was, one day, questioning him: "Now am not I better than Kadijah? She

was a widow; old, and had lost her looks: you love me better than you

did her?"--"No, by Allah!" answered Mahomet: "No, by Allah! She

believed in me when none else would believe. In the whole world I had

but one friend, and she was that!"--Seid, his Slave, also believed in

him; these with his young Cousin Ali, Abu Thaleb's son, were his first

converts.

He spoke of his Doctrine to this man and that; but the most treated it

with ridicule, with indifference; in three years, I think, he had

gained but thirteen followers. His progress was slow enough. His

encouragement to go on, was altogether the usual encouragement that

such a man in such a case meets. After some three years of small

success, he invited forty of his chief kindred to an entertainment;

and there stood-up and told them what his pretension was: that he had

this thing to promulgate abroad to all men; that it was the highest

thing, the one thing: which of them would second him in that? Amid the

doubt and silence of all, young Ali, as yet a lad of sixteen,

impatient of the silence, started-up, and exclaimed in passionate

fierce language, That he would! The assembly, among whom was Abu

Thaleb, Ali's Father, could not be unfriendly to Mahomet; yet the

sight there, of one unlettered elderly man, with a lad of sixteen,

deciding on such an enterprise against all mankind, appeared

ridiculous to them; the assembly broke-up in laughter. Nevertheless it

proved not a laughable thing; it was a very serious thing! As for this

young Ali, one cannot but like him. A noble-minded creature, as he

shows himself, now and always afterwards; full of affection, of fiery

daring. Something chivalrous in him; brave as a lion; yet with a

grace, a truth and affection worthy of Christian knighthood. He died

by assassination in the Mosque at Bagdad; a death occasioned by his

own generous fairness, confidence in the fairness of others: he said,

If the wound proved not unto death, they must pardon the Assassin; but

if it did, then they must slay him straightway, that so they two in

the same hour might appear before God, and see which side of that

quarrel was the just one!

Mahomet naturally gave offence to the Koreish, Keepers of the Caabah,

superintendents of the Idols. One or two men of influence had joined

him: the thing spread slowly, but it was spreading. Naturally, he gave

offence to everybody: Who is this that pretends to be wiser than we

all; that rebukes us all, as mere fools and worshippers of wood! Abu

Thaleb the good Uncle spoke with him: Could he not be silent about all

that; believe it all for himself, and not trouble others, anger the

chief men, endanger himself and them all, talking of it? Mahomet

answered: If the Sun stood on his right hand and the Moon on his left,

ordering him to hold his peace, he could not obey! No: there was

something in this Truth he had got which was of Nature herself; equal

in rank to Sun, or Moon, or whatsoever thing Nature had made. It would

speak itself there, so long as the Almighty allowed it, in spite of

Sun and Moon, and all Koreish and all men and things. It must do that,

and could do no other. Mahomet answered so; and, they say, 'burst into

tears.' Burst into tears: he felt that Abu Thaleb was good to him;

that the task he had got was no soft, but a stern and great one.

He went on speaking to who would listen to him; publishing his

Doctrine among the pilgrims as they came to Mecca; gaining adherents

in this place and that. Continual contradiction, hatred, open or

secret danger attended him. His powerful relations protected Mahomet

himself; but by and by, on his own advice, all his adherents had to

quit Mecca, and seek refuge in Abyssinia over the sea. The Koreish

grew ever angrier; laid plots, and swore oaths among them, to put

Mahomet to death with their own hands. Abu Thaleb was dead, the good

Kadijah was dead. Mahomet is not solicitous of sympathy from us; but

his outlook at this time was one of the dismalest. He had to hide in

caverns, escape in disguise; fly hither and thither; homeless, in

continual peril of his life. More than once it seemed all-over with

him; more than once it turned on a straw, some rider's horse taking

fright or the like, whether Mahomet and his Doctrine had not ended

there, and not been heard of at all. But it was not to end so.

In the thirteenth year of his mission, finding his enemies all banded

against him, forty sworn men, one out of every tribe, waiting to take

his life, and no continuance possible at Mecca for him any longer,

Mahomet fled to the place then called Yathreb, where he had gained

some adherents; the place they now call Medina, or '_Medinat al Nabi_,

the City of the Prophet,' from that circumstance. It lay some 200

miles off, through rocks and deserts; not without great difficulty, in

such mood as we may fancy, he escaped thither, and found welcome. The

whole East dates its era from this Flight, _Hegira_ as they name it:

the Year 1 of this Hegira is 622 of our Era, the fifty-third of

Mahomet's life. He was now becoming an old man; his friends sinking

round him one by one: his path desolate, encompassed with danger:

unless he could find hope in his own heart, the outward face of things

was but hopeless for him. It is so with all men in the like case.

Hitherto Mahomet had professed to publish his Religion by the way of

preaching and persuasion alone. But now, driven foully out of his

native country, since unjust men had not only given no ear to his

earnest Heaven's-message, the deep cry of his heart, but would not

even let him live if he kept speaking it,--the wild Son of the Desert

resolved to defend himself, like a man and Arab. If the Koreish will

have it so, they shall have it. Tidings, felt to be of infinite moment

to them and all men, they would not listen to these; would trample

them down by sheer violence, steel and murder: well, let steel try it

then! Ten years more this Mahomet had: all of fighting, of breathless

impetuous toil and struggle; with what result we know.

Much has been said of Mahomet's propagating his Religion by the sword.

It is no doubt far nobler what we have to boast of the Christian

Religion, that it propagated itself peaceably in the way of preaching

and conviction. Yet withal, if we take this for an argument of the

truth or falsehood of a religion, there is a radical mistake in it.

The sword indeed: but where will you get your sword! Every new

opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a _minority of one_. In one

man's head alone, there it dwells as yet. One man alone of the whole

world believes it; there is one man against all men. That _he_ take a

sword, and try to propagate with that, will do little for him. You

must first get your sword! On the whole, a thing will propagate itself

as it can. We do not find, of the Christian Religion either, that it

always disdained the sword, when once it had got one. Charlemagne's

conversion of the Saxons was not by preaching. I care little about the

sword: I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with

any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. We will

let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost bestir

itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that it

will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to be

conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but only

what is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can

do no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what we call

_truest_, that thing and not the other will be found growing at last.

Here however, in reference to much that there is in Mahomet and his

success, we are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a

greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take

wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom: your wheat may be mixed with

chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish;

no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the

wheat,--the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds _it_ in, says

nothing of the rubbish. The yellow wheat is growing there; the good

Earth is silent about all the rest,--has silently turned all the rest

to some benefit too, and makes no complaint about it! So everywhere in

Nature! She is true and not a lie; and yet so great, and just, and

motherly in her truth. She requires of a thing only that it _be_

genuine of heart; she will protect it if so; will not, if not so.

There is a soul of truth in all the things she ever gave harbour to.

Alas, is not this the history of all highest Truth that comes or ever

came into the world? The _body_ of them all is imperfection, an

element of light _in_ darkness: to us they have to come embodied in

mere Logic, in some merely _scientific_ Theorem of the Universe; which

_cannot_ be complete; which cannot but be found, one day, incomplete,

erroneous, and so die and disappear. The body of all Truth dies; and

yet in all, I say, there is a soul which never dies; which in new and

ever-nobler embodiment lives immortal as man himself! It is the way

with Nature. The genuine essence of Truth never dies. That it be

genuine, a voice from the great Deep of Nature, there is the point at

Nature's judgment-seat. What _we_ call pure or impure, is not with her

the final question. Not how much chaff is in you; but whether you have

any wheat. Pure? I might say to many a man: Yes, you are pure; pure

enough; but you are chaff,--insincere hypothesis, hearsay, formality;

you never were in contact with the great heart of the Universe at all;

you are properly neither pure nor impure; you _are_ nothing, Nature

has no business with you.

Mahomet's Creed we called a kind of Christianity; and really, if we

look at the wild rapt earnestness with which it was believed and laid

to heart, I should say a better kind than that of those miserable

Syrian Sects, with their vain janglings about _Homoiousion_ and

_Homoousion_, the head full of worthless noise, the heart empty and

dead! The truth of it is embedded in portentous error and falsehood;

but the truth of it makes it be believed, not the falsehood: it

succeeded by its truth. A bastard kind of Christianity, but a living

kind; with a heart-life in it: not dead, chopping barren logic merely!

Out of all that rubbish of Arab idolatries, argumentative theologies,

traditions, subtleties, rumours and hypotheses of Greeks and Jews,

with their idle wire-drawings, this wild man of the Desert, with his

wild sincere heart, earnest as death and life, with his great flashing

natural eyesight, had seen into the kernel of the matter. Idolatry is

nothing: these Wooden Idols of yours, 'ye rub them with oil and wax,

and the flies stick on them,'--these are wood, I tell you! They can do

nothing for you; they are an impotent blasphemous pretence; a horror

and abomination, if ye knew them. God alone is; God alone has power;

He made us, He can kill us and keep us alive: '_Allah akbar_, God is

great.' Understand that His will is the best for you; that howsoever

sore to flesh-and-blood, you will find it the wisest, best: you are

bound to take it so; in this world and in the next, you have no other

thing that you can do!

And now if the wild idolatrous men did believe this, and with their

fiery hearts laid hold of it to do it, in what form soever it came to

them, I say it was well worthy of being believed. In one form or the

other, I say it is still the one thing worthy of being believed by all

men. Man does hereby become the high-priest of this Temple of a World.

He is in harmony with the Decrees of the Author of this World;

coöperating with them, not vainly withstanding them: I know, to this

day, no better definition of Duty than that same. All that is _right_

includes itself in this of coöperating with the real Tendency of the

World; you succeed by this (the World's Tendency will succeed), you

are good, and in the right course there. _Homoiousion_, _Homoousion_,

vain logical jangle, then or before or at any time, may jangle itself

out, and go whither and how it likes: this is the _thing_ it all

struggles to mean, if it would mean anything. If it do not succeed in

meaning this, it means nothing. Not that Abstractions, logical

Propositions, be correctly worded or incorrectly; but that living

concrete Sons of Adam do lay this to heart: that is the important

point. Islam devoured all these vain jangling Sects; and I think had

right to do so. It was a Reality, direct from the great Heart of

Nature once more. Arab idolatries, Syrian formulas, whatsoever was not

equally real, had to go up in flame,--mere dead _fuel_, in various

senses, for this which was _fire_.

* * * * *

It was during these wild warfarings and strugglings, especially after

the Flight to Mecca, that Mahomet dictated at intervals his Sacred

Book, which they name _Koran_, or _Reading_, 'Thing to be read.' This

is the Work he and his disciples made so much of, asking all the

world, Is not that a miracle? The Mahometans regard their Koran with a

reverence which few Christians pay even to their Bible. It is admitted

everywhere as the standard of all law and all practice; the thing to

be gone-upon in speculation and life: the message sent direct out of

Heaven, which this Earth has to conform to, and walk by; the thing to

be read. Their Judges decide by it; all Moslem are bound to study it,

seek in it for the light of their life. They have mosques where it is

all read daily; thirty relays of priests take it up in succession, get

through the whole each day. There, for twelve-hundred years, has the

voice of this Book, at all moments, kept sounding through the ears and

the hearts of so many men. We hear of Mahometan Doctors that had read

it seventy-thousand times!

Very curious: if one sought for 'discrepancies of national taste,'

here surely were the most eminent instance of that! We also can read

the Koran; our Translation of it, by Sale, is known to be a very fair

one. I must say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A

wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations,

long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite;--insupportable

stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any

European through the Koran. We read in it, as we might in the

State-Paper Office, unreadable masses of lumber, that perhaps we may

get some glimpses of a remarkable man. It is true we have it under

disadvantages: the Arabs see more method in it than we. Mahomet's

followers found the Koran lying all in fractions, as it had been

written-down at first promulgation; much of it, they say, on

shoulder-blades of mutton, flung pellmell into a chest: and they

published it, without any discoverable order as to time or

otherwise;--merely trying, as would seem, and this not very strictly,

to put the longest chapters first. The real beginning of it, in that

way, lies almost at the end: for the earliest portions were the

shortest. Read in its historical sequence it perhaps would not be so

bad. Much of it, too, they say, is rhythmic; a kind of wild chanting

song, in the original. This may be a great point; much perhaps has

been lost in the Translation here. Yet with every allowance, one feels

it difficult to see how any mortal ever could consider this Koran as a

Book written in Heaven, too good for the Earth; as a well-written

book, or indeed as a _book_ at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody;

_written_, so far as writing goes, as badly as almost any book ever

was. So much for national discrepancies, and the standard of taste.

Yet I should say, it was not unintelligible how the Arabs might so

love it. When once you get this confused coil of a Koran fairly off

your hands, and have it behind you at a distance, the essential type

of it begins to disclose itself; and in this there is a merit quite

other than the literary one. If a book come from the heart, it will

contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small

amount to that. One would say the primary character of the Koran is

that of its _genuineness_, of its being a _bonâ-fide_ book. Prideaux,

I know, and others have represented it as a mere bundle of juggleries;

chapter after chapter got-up to excuse and varnish the author's

successive sins, forward his ambitions and quackeries: but really it

is time to dismiss all that. I do not assert Mahomet's continual

sincerity: who is continually sincere? But I confess I can make

nothing of the critic, in these times, who would accuse him of deceit

_prepense_; of conscious deceit generally, or perhaps at all;--still

more, of living in a mere element of conscious deceit, and writing

this Koran as a forger and juggler would have done! Every candid eye,

I think, will read the Koran far otherwise than so. It is the confused

ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even

read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in

words. With a kind of breathless intensity he strives to utter

himself; the thoughts crowd on him pellmell: for very multitude of

things to say, he can get nothing said. The meaning that is in him

shapes itself into no form of composition, is stated in no sequence,

method, or coherence;--they are not _shaped_ at all, these thoughts of

his; flung-out unshaped, as they struggle and tumble there, in their

chaotic inarticulate state. We said 'stupid:' yet natural stupidity is

by no means the character of Mahomet's Book; it is natural

uncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking; in the haste

and pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himself

into fit speech. The panting breathless haste and vehemence of a man

struggling in the thick of battle for life and salvation; this is the

mood he is in! A headlong haste; for very magnitude of meaning, he

cannot get himself articulated into words. The successive utterances

of a soul in that mood, coloured by the various vicissitudes of

three-and-twenty years; now well uttered, now worse: this is the

Koran.

For we are to consider Mahomet, through these three-and-twenty years,

as the centre of a world wholly in conflict. Battles with the Koreish

and Heathen, quarrels among his own people, backslidings of his own

wild heart; all this kept him in a perpetual whirl, his soul knowing

rest no more. In wakeful nights, as one may fancy, the wild soul of

the man, tossing amid these vortices, would hail any light of a

decision for them as a veritable light from Heaven; _any_ making-up of

his mind, so blessed, indispensable for him there, would seem the

inspiration of a Gabriel. Forger and juggler? No, no! This great fiery

heart, seething, simmering like a great furnace of thoughts, was not a

juggler's. His life was a Fact to him; this God's Universe an awful

Fact and Reality. He has faults enough. The man was an uncultured

semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to

him: we must take him for that. But for a wretched Simulacrum, a

hungry Impostor without eyes or heart, practising for a mess of

pottage such blasphemous swindlery, forgery of celestial documents,

continual high-treason against his Maker and Self, we will not and

cannot take him.

Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what had

rendered it precious to the wild Arab men. It is, after all, the first

and last merit in a book; gives rise to merits of all kinds,--nay, at

bottom, it alone can give rise to merit of any kind. Curiously,

through these incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint,

ejaculation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we

might almost call poetry, is found straggling. The body of the Book is

made-up of mere tradition, and as it were vehement enthusiastic

extempore preaching. He returns forever to the old stories of the

Prophets as they went current in the Arab memory: how Prophet after

Prophet, the Prophet Abraham, the Prophet Hud, the Prophet Moses,

Christian and other real and fabulous Prophets, had come to this Tribe

and to that, warning men of their sin; and been received by them even

as he Mahomet was,--which is a great solace to him. These things he

repeats ten, perhaps twenty times; again and ever again with wearisome

iteration; has never done repeating them. A brave Samuel Johnson, in

his forlorn garret, might con-over the Biographies of Authors in that

way! This is the great staple of the Koran. But curiously, through all

this, comes ever and anon some glance as of the real thinker and seer.

He has actually an eye for the world, this Mahomet: with a certain

directness and rugged vigour, he brings home still, to our heart, the

thing his own heart has been opened to. I make but little of his

praises of Allah, which many praise; they are borrowed I suppose

mainly from the Hebrew, at least they are far surpassed there. But the

eye that flashes direct into the heart of things, and _sees_ the truth

of them; this is to me a highly interesting object. Great Nature's own

gift; which she bestows on all; but which only one in the thousand

does not cast sorrowfully away: it is what I call sincerity of vision;

the test of a sincere heart.

Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can work

no miracles. I? 'I am a Public Preacher;' appointed to preach this

doctrine to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really

from of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world,

says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly 'a sign to

you,' if your eyes were open! This Earth, God made it for you:

'appointed paths in it;' you can live in it, go to and fro on it.--The

clouds in the dry country of Arabia, to Mahomet they are very

wonderful: Great clouds, he says, born in the deep bosom of the Upper

Immensity, where do they come from! They hang there, the great black

monsters; pour-down their rain deluges 'to revive a dead earth,' and

grass springs, and tall leafy palm-trees with their date-clusters

hanging round. Is not that a sign?' Your cattle too,--Allah made them;

serviceable dumb creatures; they change the grass into milk; you have

your clothing from them, very strange creatures; they come ranking

home at evening-time, 'and,' adds he, 'and are a credit to you!' Ships

also,--he talks often about ships: Huge moving mountains, they

spread-out their cloth wings, go bounding through the water there,

Heaven's wind driving them; anon they lie motionless, God has

withdrawn the wind, they lie dead, and cannot stir! Miracles? cries

he; what miracle would you have? Are not you yourselves there? God

made _you_, 'shaped you out of a little clay.' Ye were small once; a

few years ago ye were not at all. Ye have beauty, strength, thoughts,

'ye have compassion on one another.' Old age comes-on you, and gray

hairs; your strength fades into feebleness; ye sink down, and again

are not. 'Ye have compassion on one another:' this struck me much:

Allah might have made you having no compassion on one another,--how

had it been then! This is a great direct thought, a glance at

first-hand into the very fact of things. Rude vestiges of poetic

genius, of whatsoever is best and truest, are visible in this man. A

strong untutored intellect: eyesight, heart; a strong wild man,--might

have shaped himself into Poet, King, Priest, any kind of Hero.

To his eyes it is forever clear that this world wholly is miraculous.

He sees what, as we said once before, all great thinkers, the rude

Scandinavians themselves, in one way or other, have contrived to see:

That this so solid-looking material world is, at bottom, in very deed,

Nothing; is a visual and tactual Manifestation of God's power and

presence,--a shadow hung-out by Him on the bosom of the void Infinite;

nothing more. The Mountains, he says, these great rock-mountains, they

shall dissipate themselves 'like clouds;' melt into the Blue as clouds

do, and not be! He figures the Earth, in the Arab fashion, Sale tells

us, as an immense Plain or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are set

on that to _steady_ it. At the Last Day they shall disappear 'like

clouds;' the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl itself off into

wreck, and as dust and vapour vanish in the Inane. Allah withdraws his

hand from it, and it ceases to be. The universal empire of Allah,

presence everywhere of an unspeakable Power, a Splendour, and a Terror

not to be named, as the true force, essence and reality, in all things

whatsoever, was continually clear to this man. What a modern talks-of

by the name, Forces of Nature, Laws of Nature; and does not figure as

a divine thing; not even as one thing at all, but as a set of things,

undivine enough,--saleable, curious, good for propelling steamships!

With our Sciences and Cyclopædias, we are apt to forget the

_divineness_, in these laboratories of ours. We ought not to forget

it! That once well forgotten, I know not what else were worth

remembering. Most sciences, I think, were then a very dead thing;

withered, contentious, empty;--a thistle in late autumn. The best

science, without this, is but as the dead _timber_; it is not the

growing tree and forest,--which gives ever-new timber, among other

things! Man cannot _know_ either, unless he can _worship_ in some way.

His knowledge is a pedantry, and dead thistle, otherwise.

Much has been said and written about the sensuality of Mahomet's

Religion; more than was just. The indulgences, criminal to us, which

he permitted, were not of his appointment; he found them practised,

unquestioned from immemorial time in Arabia; what he did was to

curtail them, restrict them, not on one but on many sides. His

Religion is not an easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict

complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine,

it did not 'succeed by being an easy religion.' As if indeed any

religion, or cause holding of religion, could succeed by that! It is a

calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease,

hope of pleasure, recompense,--sugar-plums of any kind, in this world

or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler. The

poor swearing soldier, hired to be shot, has his 'honour of a

soldier,' different from drill-regulations and the shilling a day. It

is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and

vindicate himself under God's Heaven as a god-made Man, that the

poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the

dullest daydrudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say

he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death

are the _allurements_ that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner

genial life of him, you have a flame that burns-up all lower

considerations. Not happiness, but something higher: one sees this

even in the frivolous classes, with their 'point of honour' and the

like. Not by flattering our appetites; no, by awakening the Heroic

that slumbers in every heart, can any Religion gain followers.

Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a

sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common

voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments,--nay on enjoyments of

any kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common diet

barley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once

lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend

his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided

man; careless of what vulgar men toil for. Not a bad man, I should

say; something better in him than _hunger_ of any sort,--or these wild

Arab men, fighting and jostling three-and-twenty years at his hand, in

close contact with him always, would not have reverenced him so! They

were wild men, bursting ever and anon into quarrel, into all kinds of

fierce sincerity; without right worth and manhood, no man could have

commanded them. They called him Prophet, you say? Why, he stood there

face to face with them; bare, not enshrined in any mystery; visibly

clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes; fighting, counselling,

ordering in the midst of them: they must have seen what kind of a man

he _was_, let him be _called_ what you like! No emperor with his

tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting. During

three-and-twenty years of rough actual trial. I find something of a

veritable Hero necessary for that, of itself.

His last words are a prayer; broken ejaculations of a heart

struggling-up, in trembling hope, towards its Maker. We cannot say

that his religion made him _worse_; it made him better; good, not bad.

Generous things are recorded of him: when he lost his Daughter, the

thing he answers is, in his own dialect, everyway sincere, and yet

equivalent to that of Christians, 'The Lord giveth, and the Lord

taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.' He answered in like

manner of Seid, his emancipated well-beloved Slave, the second of the

believers. Seid had fallen in the War of Tabûc, the first of Mahomet's

fightings with the Greeks. Mahomet said, It was well; Seid had done

his Master's work, Seid had now gone to his Master: it was all well

with Seid. Yet Seid's daughter found him weeping over the body;--the

old gray-haired man melting in tears! "What do I see?" said she.--"You

see a friend weeping over his friend."--He went out for the last time

into the mosque, two days before his death; asked, If he had injured

any man? Let his own back bear the stripes. If he owed any man? A

voice answered, "Yes, me three drachms," borrowed on such an occasion.

Mahomet ordered them to be paid: "Better be in shame now," said he,

"than at the Day of Judgment."--You remember Kadijah, and the "No, by

Allah!" Traits of that kind show us the genuine man, the brother of us

all, brought visible through twelve centuries,--the veritable Son of

our common Mother.

Withal I like Mahomet for his total freedom from cant. He is a rough

self-helping son of the wilderness; does not pretend to be what he is

not. There is no ostentatious pride in him; but neither does he go

much upon humility: he is there as he can be, in cloak and shoes of

his own clouting; speaks plainly to all manner of Persian Kings, Greek

Emperors, what it is they are bound to do; knows well enough, about

himself, 'the respect due unto thee.' In a life-and-death war with

Bedouins, cruel things could not fail; but neither are acts of mercy,

of noble natural pity and generosity wanting. Mahomet makes no apology

for the one, no boast of the other. They were each the free dictate of

his heart; each called-for, there and then. Not a mealy-mouthed man! A

candid ferocity, if the case call for it, is in him; he does not mince

matters! The War of Tabûc is a thing he often speaks of: his men

refused, many of them, to march on that occasion: pleaded the heat of

the weather, the harvest, and so forth; he can never forget that. Your

harvest? It lasts for a day. What will become of your harvest through

all Eternity? Hot weather? Yes, it was hot; 'but Hell will be hotter!'

Sometimes a rough sarcasm turns-up: He says to the unbelievers, Ye

shall have the just measure of your deeds at that Great Day. They will

be weighed-out to you; ye shall not have short weight!--Everywhere he

fixes the matter in his eye; he _sees_ it: his heart, now and then, is

as if struck dumb by the greatness of it. 'Assuredly,' he says: that

word, in the Koran, is written-down sometimes as a sentence by itself:

'Assuredly.'

No _Dilettantism_ in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and

Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest

about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of

amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is

the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in

the heart and soul of the man never having been _open_ to

Truth;--'living in a vain show.' Such a man not only utters and

produces falsehoods, but _is_ himself a falsehood. The rational moral

principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet

paralysis of life-death. The very falsehoods of Mahomet are truer than

the truths of such a man. He is the insincere man: smooth-polished,

respectable in some times and places: inoffensive, says nothing harsh

to anybody; most _cleanly_,--just as carbonic acid is, which is death

and poison.

We will not praise Mahomet's moral precepts as always of the

superfinest sort; yet it can be said that there is always a tendency

to good in them; that they are the true dictates of a heart aiming

towards what is just and true. The sublime forgiveness of

Christianity, turning of the other cheek when the one has been

smitten, is not here: you _are_ to revenge yourself, but it is to be

in measure, not overmuch, or beyond justice. On the other hand, Islam,

like any great Faith, and insight into the essence of man, is a

perfect equaliser of men: the soul of one believer outweighs all

earthly kingships; all men, according to Islam too, are equal. Mahomet

insists not on the propriety of giving alms, but on the necessity of

it; he marks-down by law how much you are to give, and it is at your

peril if you neglect. The tenth part of a man's annual income,

whatever that may be, is the _property_ of the poor, of those that are

afflicted and need help. Good all this: the natural voice of humanity,

of pity and equity dwelling in the heart of this wild Son of Nature

speaks _so_.

Mahomet's Paradise is sensual, his Hell sensual: true; in the one and

the other there is enough that shocks all spiritual feeling in us. But

we are to recollect that the Arabs already had it so; that Mahomet, in

whatever he changed of it, softened and diminished all this. The worst

sensualities, too, are the work of doctors, followers of his, not his

work. In the Koran there is really very little said about the joys of

Paradise; they are intimated rather than insisted on. Nor is it

forgotten that the highest joys even there shall be spiritual; the

pure Presence of the Highest, this shall infinitely transcend all

other joys. He says, 'Your salutation shall be, Peace.' _Salam_, Have

Peace!--the thing that all rational souls long for, and seek, vainly

here below, as the one blessing. 'Ye shall sit on seats, facing one

another: all grudges shall be taken away out of your hearts.' All

grudges! Ye shall love one another freely; for each of you, in the

eyes of his brothers, there will be Heaven enough!

In reference to this of the sensual Paradise and Mahomet's sensuality,

the sorest chapter of all for us, there were many things to be said;

which it is not convenient to enter upon here. Two remarks only I

shall make, and therewith leave it to your candour. The first is

furnished me by Goethe; it is a casual hint of his which seems well

worth taking note of. In one of his Delineations, in _Meister's

Travels_ it is, the hero comes-upon a Society of men with very strange

ways, one of which was this: "We require," says the Master, "that each

of our people shall restrict himself in one direction," shall go right

against his desire in one matter, and _make_ himself do the thing he

does not wish, "should we allow him the greater latitude on all other

sides." There seems to me a great justness in this. Enjoying things

which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our

moral self to slavery by them that is. Let a man assert withal that he

is king over his habitudes; that he could and would shake them off, on

cause shown: this is an excellent law. The Month Ramadhan for the

Moslem, much in Mahomet's Religion, much in his own Life, bears in

that direction; if not by forethought, or clear purpose of moral

improvement on his part, then by a certain healthy manful instinct,

which is as good.

But there is another thing to be said about the Mahometan Heaven and

Hell. This namely, that, however gross and material they may be, they

are an emblem of an everlasting truth, not always so well remembered

elsewhere. That gross sensual Paradise of his; that horrible flaming

Hell; the great enormous Day of Judgment he perpetually insists on:

what is all this but a rude shadow, in the rude Bedouin imagination,

of that grand spiritual Fact, and Beginning of Facts, which it is ill

for us too if we do not all know and feel: the Infinite Nature of

Duty? That man's actions here are of _infinite_ moment to him, and

never die or end at all; that man, with his little life, reaches

upwards high as Heaven, downwards low as Hell, and in his threescore

years of Time holds an Eternity fearfully and wonderfully hidden: all

this had burnt itself, as in flame-characters, into the wild Arab

soul. As in flame and lightning, it stands written there; awful,

unspeakable, ever present to him. With bursting earnestness, with a

fierce savage sincerity, halt, articulating, not able to articulate,

he strives to speak it, bodies it forth in that Heaven and that Hell.

Bodied forth in what way you will, it is the first of all truths. It

is venerable under all embodiments. What is the chief end of man here

below? Mahomet has answered this question, in a way that might put

some of _us_ to shame! He does not, like a Bentham, a Paley, take

Right and Wrong, and calculate the profit and loss, ultimate pleasure

of the one and of the other; and summing all up by addition and

subtraction into a net result, ask you, Whether on the whole the Right

does not preponderate considerably? No, it is not _better_ to do the

one than the other; the one is to the other as life is to death,--as

Heaven is to Hell. The one must in nowise be done, the other in nowise

left undone. You shall not measure them; they are incommensurable: the

one is death eternal to a man, the other is life eternal. Benthamee

Utility, virtue by Profit and Loss; reducing this God's-world to a

dead brute Steam-engine, the infinite celestial Soul of Man to a kind

of Hay-balance for weighing hay and thistles on, pleasures and pains

on:--If you ask me which gives, Mahomet or they, the beggarlier and

falser view of Man and his Destinies in this Universe, I will answer,

It is not Mahomet!----

On the whole, we will repeat that this Religion of Mahomet's is a kind

of Christianity; has a genuine element of what is spiritually highest

looking through it, not to be hidden by all its imperfections. The

Scandinavian God _Wish_, the god of all rude men,--this has been

enlarged into a Heaven by Mahomet; but a Heaven symbolical of sacred

Duty, and to be earned by faith and welldoing, by valiant action, and

a divine patience which is still more valiant. It is Scandinavian

Paganism, and a truly celestial element superadded to that. Call it

not false; look not at the falsehood of it, look at the truth of it.

For these twelve centuries, it has been the religion and life-guidance

of the fifth part of the whole kindred of Mankind. Above all things,

it has been a religion heartily _believed_. These Arabs believe their

religion, and try to live by it! No Christians, since the early ages,

or only perhaps the English Puritans in modern times, have ever stood

by their Faith as the Moslem do by theirs,--believing it wholly,

fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it. This night the watchman

on the streets of Cairo when he cries "Who goes?" will hear from the

passenger, along with his answer, "There is no God but God." _Allah

akbar, Islam_, sounds through the souls, and whole daily existence, of

these dusky millions. Zealous missionaries preach it abroad among

Malays, black Papuans, brutal Idolaters;--displacing what is worse,

nothing that is better or good.

To the Arab Nation it was as a birth from darkness into light; Arabia

first became alive by means of it. A poor shepherd people, roaming

unnoticed in its deserts since the creation of the world: a

Hero-Prophet was sent down to them with a word they could believe:

see, the unnoticed becomes world-notable, the small has grown

world-great; within one century afterwards, Arabia is at Grenada on

this hand, at Delhi on that;--glancing in valour and splendour and the

light of genius, Arabia shines through long ages over a great section

of the world. Belief is great, life-giving. The history of a Nation

becomes fruitful, soul-elevating, great, so soon as it believes. These

Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century,--is it not as if a spark

had fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed black unnoticeable

sand; but lo, the sand proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high

from Delhi to Grenada! I said, the Great Man was always as lightning

out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they

too would flame.

LECTURE III

THE HERO AS POET. DANTE; SHAKSPEARE.

[_Tuesday, 12th May 1840_]

The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old

ages; not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain

rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientific

knowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a world

vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms, if men in their loving

wonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a god or one speaking with

the voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past. We are now to see

our Hero in the less ambitious, but also less questionable, character

of Poet; a character which does not pass. The Poet is a heroic figure

belonging to all ages; whom all ages possess, when once he is

produced, whom the newest age as the oldest may produce;--and will

produce, always when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul; in

no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a Poet.

Hero, Prophet, Poet,--many different names, in different times and

places, do we give to Great Men; according to varieties we note in

them, according to the sphere in which they have displayed themselves!

We might give many more names, on this same principle. I will remark

again, however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood, that the

different _sphere_ constitutes the grand origin of such distinction;

that the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will,

according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess,

I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be _all_ sorts of

men. The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas,

would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic

warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. I fancy

there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator,

Philosopher;--in one or the other degree, he could have been, he is

all these. So too I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that great

glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears

that were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems,

touched all hearts in that way, had his course of life and education

led him thitherward. The grand fundamental character is that of Great

Man; that the man be great. Napoleon has words in him which are like

Austerlitz Battles. Louis Fourteenth's Marshals are a kind of poetical

men withal; the things Turenne says are full of sagacity and

geniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. The great heart, the clear

deep-seeing eye: there it lies; no man whatever, in what province

soever, can prosper at all without these. Petrarch and Boccaccio did

diplomatic messages, it seems, quite well: one can easily believe it;

they had done things a little harder than these! Burns, a gifted

song-writer, might have made a still better Mirabeau. Shakspeare,--one

knows not what _he_ could not have made, in the supreme degree.

True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not make all

great men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. Varieties

of aptitude doubtless; but infinitely more of circumstance; and far

oftenest it is the _latter_ only that are looked to. But it is as with

common men in the learning of trades. You take any man, as yet a vague

capability of a man, who could be any kind of craftsman; and make him

into a smith, a carpenter, a mason: he is then and thenceforth that

and nothing else. And if, as Addison complains, you sometimes see a

street-porter staggering under his load on spindle-shanks, and near at

hand a tailor with the frame of a Samson handling a bit of cloth and

small Whitechapel needle,--it cannot be considered that aptitude of

Nature alone has been consulted here either!--The Great Man also, to

what shall he be bound apprentice? Given your Hero, is he to become

Conqueror, King, Philosopher, Poet? It is an inexplicably complex

controversial-calculation between the world and him! He will read the

world and its laws; the world with its laws will be there to be read.

What the world, on _this_ matter, shall permit and bid is, as we said,

the most important fact about the world.--

* * * * *

Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them.

In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; _Vates_ means

both Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well

understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they

are still the same; in this most important respect especially, That

they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the

Universe; what Goethe calls 'the open secret.' "Which is the great

secret?" asks one.--"The _open_ secret,"--open to all, seen by almost

none! That divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, 'the

Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the bottom of

Appearance,' as Fichte styles it; of which all Appearance, from the

starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially the Appearance of

Man and his work, is but the _vesture_, the embodiment that renders it

visible. This divine mystery _is_ in all times and in all places;

veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly overlooked; and

the Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect, as the

realised Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace

matter,--as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some

upholsterer had put together! It could do no good at present, to

_speak_ much about this; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do

not know it, live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful

pity;--a failure to live at all, if we live otherwise!

But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the _Vates_,

whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hither

to make it more impressively known to us. That always is his message;

he is to reveal that to us,--that sacred mystery which he more than

others lives ever present with. While others forget it, he knows

it;--I might say, he has been driven to know it; without consent asked

of _him_, he finds himself living in it, bound to live in it. Once

more, here is no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and Belief; this man

too could not help being a sincere man! Whosoever may live in the

shows of things, it is for him a necessity of nature to live in the

very fact of things. A man once more, in earnest with the Universe,

though all others were but toying with it. He is a _Vates_, first of

all, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and Prophet,

participators in the 'open secret,' are one.

With respect to their distinction again: The _Vates_ Prophet, we might

say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Good

and Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the _Vates_ Poet on what the Germans

call the æsthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we may

call a revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are to

love. But indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannot

be disjoined. The Prophet too has his eye on what we are to love: how

else shall he know what it is we are to do? The highest Voice ever

heard on this earth said withal, "Consider the lilies of the field;

they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was

not arrayed like one of these." A glance, that, into the deepest deep

of Beauty. 'The lilies of the field,'--dressed finer than earthly

princes, springing-up there in the humble furrow-field; a beautiful

_eye_ looking-out on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty! How

could the rude Earth make these, if her Essence, rugged as she looks

and is, were not inwardly Beauty? In this point of view, too, a saying

of Goethe's, which has staggered several, may have meaning: 'The

Beautiful,' he intimates, 'is higher than the Good: the Beautiful

includes in it the Good.' The _true_ Beautiful; which however, I have

said somewhere, 'differs from the _false_ as Heaven does from

Vauxhall!' So much for the distinction and identity of Poet and

Prophet.--

In ancient and also in modern periods we find a few Poets who are

accounted perfect; whom it were a kind of treason to find fault with.

This is noteworthy; this is right: yet in strictness it is only an

illusion. At bottom, clearly enough, there is no perfect Poet! A vein

of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether

of Poetry. We are all poets when we _read_ a poem well. The

'imagination that shudders at the Hell of Dante,' is not that the same

faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own? No one but Shakspeare can

embody, out of _Saxo Grammaticus_, the story of _Hamlet_ as Shakspeare

did: but every one models some kind of story out of it; every one

embodies it better or worse. We need not spend time in defining. Where

there is no specific difference, as between round and square, all

definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has _so_ much

more of the poetic element developed in him as to have become

noticeable, will be called Poet by his neighbours. World-Poets too,

those whom we are to take for perfect Poets, are settled by critics in

the same way. One who rises _so_ far above the general level of Poets

will, to such and such critics, seem a Universal Poet; as he ought to

do. And yet it is, and must be, an arbitrary distinction. All Poets,

all men, have some touches of the Universal; no man is wholly made of

that. Most Poets are very soon forgotten: but not the noblest

Shakspeare or Homer of them can be remembered _forever_;--a day comes

when he too is not!

Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a difference between true

Poetry and true Speech not poetical: what is the difference? On this

point many things have been written, especially by late German

Critics, some of which are not very intelligible at first. They say,

for example, that the Poet has an _infinitude_ in him; communicates an

_Unendlichkeit_, a certain character of 'infinitude,' to whatsoever he

delineates. This, though not very precise, yet on so vague a matter is

worth remembering: if well meditated, some meaning will gradually be

found in it. For my own part, I find considerable meaning in the old

vulgar distinction of Poetry being _metrical_, having music in it,

being a Song. Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one might say

this as soon as anything else: If your delineation be authentically

_musical_, musical, not in word only, but in heart and substance, in

all the thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it,

then it will be poetical; if not, not.--Musical: how much lies in

that! A _musical_ thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated

into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it,

namely the _melody_ that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of

coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be,

here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious;

naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who

is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on

us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the

edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!

Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has something of song in

it: not a parish in the world but has its parish-accent;--the rhythm

or _tune_ to which the people there _sing_ what they have to say!

Accent is a kind of chanting; all men have accent of their

own,--though they only _notice_ that of others. Observe too how all

passionate language does of itself become musical,--with a finer music

than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger

becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. It seems somehow

the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but

wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all

things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies; it was the feeling they

had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices

and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call

_musical Thought_. The Poet is he who _thinks_ in that manner. At

bottom, it turns still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity

and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you

see musically; the heart of Nature _being_ everywhere music, if you

can only reach it.

The _Vates_ Poet, with his melodious Apocalypse of Nature, seems to

hold a poor rank among us, in comparison with the _Vates_ Prophet; his

function, and our esteem of him for his function, alike slight. The

Hero taken as Divinity; the Hero taken as Prophet; then next the Hero

taken only as Poet: does it not look as if our estimate of the Great

Man, epoch after epoch, were continually diminishing? We take him

first for a god, then for one god-inspired; and now in the next stage

of it, his most miraculous word gains from us only the recognition

that he is a Poet, beautiful verse-maker, man of genius, or

suchlike!--It looks so; but I persuade myself that intrinsically it is

not so. If we consider well, it will perhaps appear that in man still

there is the _same_ altogether peculiar admiration for the Heroic

Gift, by what name soever called, that there at any time was.

I should say, if we do not now reckon a Great Man literally divine, it

is that our notions of God, of the supreme unattainable Fountain of

Splendour, Wisdom and Heroism, are ever rising _higher_; not

altogether that our reverence for these qualities, as manifested in

our like, is getting lower. This is worth taking thought of. Sceptical

Dilettantism, the curse of these ages, a curse which will not last

forever, does indeed in this the highest province of human things, as

in all provinces, make sad work; and our reverence for great men, all

crippled, blinded, paralytic as it is, comes out in poor plight,

hardly recognisable. Men worship the shows of great men; the most

disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship. The

dreariest, fatalest faith; believing which, one would literally

despair of human things. Nevertheless look, for example, at Napoleon!

A Corsican lieutenant of artillery; that is the show of _him_: yet is

he not obeyed, _worshipped_ after his sort, as all the Tiaraed and

Diademed of the world put together could not be? High Duchesses, and

ostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish rustic, Burns;--a strange

feeling dwelling in each that they had never heard a man like this;

that, on the whole, this is the man! In the secret heart of these

people it still dimly reveals itself, though there is no accredited

way of uttering it at present, that this rustic, with his black brows

and flashing sun-eyes, and strange words moving laughter and tears, is

of a dignity far beyond all others, incommensurable with all others.

Do not we feel it so? But now, were Dilettantism, Scepticism,

Triviality, and all that sorrowful brood, cast-out of us,--as, by

God's blessing, they shall one day be; were faith in the shows of

things entirely swept-out, replaced by clear faith in the _things_, so

that a man acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the other

non-extant; what a new livelier feeling towards this Burns were it!

Nay here in these pages, such as they are, have we not two mere Poets,

if not deified, yet we may say beatified? Shakspeare and Dante are

Saints of Poetry; really, if we will think of it, _canonised_, so that

it is impiety to meddle with them. The unguided instinct of the world,

working across all these perverse impediments, has arrived at such

result. Dante and Shakspeare are a peculiar Two. They dwell apart, in

a kind of royal solitude; none equal, none second to them: in the

general feeling of the world, a certain transcendentalism, a glory as

of complete perfection, invests these two. They _are_ canonised,

though no Pope or Cardinals took hand in doing it! Such, in spite of

every perverting influence, in the most unheroic times, is still our

indestructible reverence for heroism.--We will look a little at these

Two, the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakspeare: what little it is

permitted us to say here of the Hero as Poet will most fitly arrange

itself in that fashion.

* * * * *

Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and his

Book; yet, on the whole, with no great result. His Biography is, as it

were, irrecoverably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering,

sorrowstricken man, not much note was taken of him while he lived; and

the most of that has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes.

It is five centuries since he ceased writing and living here. After

all commentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we know of him. The

Book;--and one might add that Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto,

which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine,

whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all faces

that I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, with

the simple laurel wound round it; the deathless sorrow and pain, the

known victory which is also deathless;--significant of the whole

history of Dante! I think it is the mournfulest face that ever was

painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face.

There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle

affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed into sharp

contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain. A soft

ethereal soul looking-out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as

from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain too,

a silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of godlike disdain

of the thing that is eating-out his heart,--as if it were withal a

mean insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and

strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and

life-long unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection all

converted into indignation: an implacable indignation; slow, equable,

silent, like that of a god! The eye too, it looks-out as in a kind of

_surprise_, a kind of inquiry, Why the world was of such a sort? This

is Dante: so he looks, this 'voice of ten silent centuries,' and sings

us 'his mystic unfathomable song.'

The little that we know of Dante's Life corresponds well enough with

this Portrait and this Book. He was born at Florence, in the upper

class of society, in the year 1265. His education was the best then

going; much school-divinity, Aristotelean logic, some Latin

classics,--no inconsiderable insight into certain provinces of things:

and Dante, with his earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt,

learned better than most all that was learnable. He has a clear

cultivated understanding, and of great subtlety; the best fruit of

education he had contrived to realise from these scholastics. He knows

accurately and well what lies close to him; but, in such a time,

without printed books or free intercourse, he could not know well what

was distant: the small clear light, most luminous for what is near,

breaks itself into singular _chiaroscuro_ striking on what is far off.

This was Dante's learning from the schools. In life, he had gone

through the usual destinies; been twice out campaigning as a soldier

for the Florentine State, been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifth

year, by natural gradation of talent and service, become one of the

Chief Magistrates of Florence. He had met in boyhood a certain

Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful little girl of his own age and rank,

and grown-up thenceforth in partial sight of her, in some distant

intercourse with her. All readers know his graceful affecting account

of this; and then of their being parted; of her being wedded to

another, and of her death soon after. She makes a great figure in

Dante's Poem; seems to have made a great figure in his life. Of all

beings it might seem as if she, held apart from him, far apart at last

in the dim Eternity, were the only one he had ever with his whole

strength of affection loved. She died: Dante himself was wedded; but

it seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy, the rigorous earnest

man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make

happy.

We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with him

as he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podestà, or whatsoever they

call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbours,--and the world

had wanted one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence

would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb

centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries

(for there will be ten of them and more) had no _Divina Commedia_ to

hear! We will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for

this Dante; and he, struggling like a man led towards death and

crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give _him_ the choice of

his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what was really happy,

what was really miserable.

In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or some

other confused disturbance rose to such a height, that Dante, whose

party had seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast unexpectedly

forth into banishment; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe and

wandering. His property was all confiscated and more; he had the

fiercest feeling that it was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight

of God and man. He tried what was in him to get reinstated; tried even

by warlike surprisal, with arms in his hand: but it would not do; bad

only had become worse. There is a record, I believe, still extant in

the Florence Archives, dooming this Dante, wheresoever caught, to be

burnt alive. Burnt alive; so it stands, they say: a very curious civic

document. Another curious document, some considerable number of years

later, is a Letter of Dante's to the Florentine Magistrates, written

in answer to a milder proposal of theirs, that he should return on

condition of apologising and paying a fine. He answers, with fixed

stern pride: "If I cannot return without calling myself guilty, I will

never return, _nunquam revertar_."

For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wandered from patron

to patron, from place to place; proving in his own bitter words, 'How

hard is the path, _Come è duro calle_.' The wretched are not cheerful

company. Dante, poor and banished, with his proud earnest nature, with

his moody humours, was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch reports

of him that being at Can della Scala's court, and blamed one day for

his gloom and taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like way. Della

Scala stood among his courtiers, with mimes and buffoons (_nebulones

ac histriones_) making him heartily merry; when turning to Dante, he

said: "Is it not strange, now, that this poor fool should make himself

so entertaining; while you, a wise man, sit there day after day, and

have nothing to amuse us with at all?" Dante answered bitterly: "No,

not strange; your Highness is to recollect the Proverb, _Like to

Like_;"--given the amuser, the amusee must also be given! Such a man,

with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, was not

made to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be evident to him

that he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of benefit, in this

earth. The earthly world had cast him forth, to wander, wander; no

living heart to love him now; for his sore miseries there was no

solace here.

The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself on him;

that awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, with its

Florences and banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence

thou shalt never see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt

surely see! What is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life

altogether? ETERNITY: thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, art thou

and all things bound! The great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made

its home more and more in that awful other world. Naturally his

thoughts brooded on that, as on the one fact important for him. Bodied

or bodiless, it is the one fact important for all men:--but to Dante,

in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape; he

no more doubted of that _Malebolge_ Pool, that it all lay there with

its gloomy circles, with its _alti guai_, and that he himself should

see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went

thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in

speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into 'mystic

unfathomable song;' and this his _Divine Comedy_, the most remarkable

of all modern Books, is the result.

It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see,

a proud thought for him at times, That he, here in exile, could do

this work; that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him from

doing it, or even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that

it was great; the greatest a man could do. 'If thou follow thy star,

_Se tu segui tua stella_,'--so could the Hero, in his forsakenness, in

his extreme need, still say to himself: "Follow thou thy star, thou

shalt not fail of a glorious haven!" The labour of writing, we find,

and indeed could know otherwise, was great and painful for him; he

says, This Book, 'which has made me lean for many years.' Ah yes, it

was won, all of it, with pain and sore toil,--not in sport, but in

grim earnest. His Book, as indeed most good Books are, has been

written, in many senses, with his heart's blood. It is his whole

history, this Book. He died after finishing it; not yet very old, at

the age of fifty-six;--broken-hearted rather, as is said. He lies

buried in his death-city Ravenna: _Hic claudor Dantes patriis extorris

ab oris._ The Florentines begged back his body, in a century after;

the Ravenna people would not give it. "Here am I Dante laid, shut-out

from my native shores."

I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls it 'a mystic

unfathomable Song;' and such is literally the character of it.

Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a

sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words,

there is something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and

soul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song:

we said before, it was the Heroic of Speech! All _old_ Poems, Homer's

and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness,

that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not _sung_ is properly no

Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,--to the great

injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most

part! What we want to get at is the _thought_ the man had, if he had

any: why should he twist it into jingle, if he _could_ speak it out

plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of

melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark,

become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his thoughts, that

we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet, and

listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,--whose speech _is_ Song.

Pretenders to this are many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is

for most part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business,

that of reading rhyme! Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be

rhymed;--it ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle, what it

was aiming at. I would advise all men who _can_ speak their thought,

not to sing it; to understand that, in a serious time, among serious

men, there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely as we love

the true song, and are charmed by it as by something divine, so shall

we hate the false song, and account it a mere wooden noise, a thing

hollow, superfluous, altogether an insincere and offensive thing.

I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his _Divine Comedy_ that

it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there

is a _canto fermo_; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his

simple _terza rima_, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along

naturally with a sort of _lilt_. But I add, that it could not be

otherwise; for the essence and material of the work are themselves

rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, makes its

musical;--go _deep_ enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward

symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it,

proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of the

character of music. The three kingdoms, _Inferno_, _Purgatorio_,

_Paradiso_, look-out on one another like compartments of a great

edifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled-up there, stern,

solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the

_sincerest_ of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be the

measure of worth. It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts;

and it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people

of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, "_Eccovi l'

uom ch' è stato all' Inferno_, See, there is the man that was in

Hell!" Ah, yes, he had been in Hell;--in Hell enough, in long severe

sorrow and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been.

Commedias that come-out _divine_ are not accomplished otherwise.

Thought, true labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the

daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind;--true _effort_,

in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought.

In all ways we are 'to become perfect through _suffering_.'--But, as I

say, no work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has

all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made

him 'lean' for many years. Not the general whole only; every

compartment of it is worked-out, with intense earnestness, into truth,

into clear visuality. Each answers to the other; each fits in its

place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is the

soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the middle ages, rendered

forever rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intense

one: but a task which is _done_.

Perhaps one would say, _intensity_, with the much that depends on it,

is the prevailing character of Dante's genius. Dante does not come

before us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow and even

sectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and position, but

partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses,

concentered itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great

not because he is world-wide, but because he is world-deep. Through

all objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I know

nothing so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to begin with the

outermost development of his intensity, consider how he paints. He has

a great power of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents

that and nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of the

Hall of Dite: _red_ pinnacle, redhot cone of iron glowing through the

dim immensity of gloom;--so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and

forever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of Dante. There is a

brevity, an abrupt precision in him: Tacitus is not briefer, more

condensed; and then in Dante it seems a natural condensation,

spontaneous to the man. One smiting word; and then there is silence,

nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent than words. It is

strange with what a sharp decisive grace he snatches the true likeness

of a matter: cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the

blustering giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke; it is 'as the sails

sink, the mast being suddenly broken.' Or that poor Brunetto Latini,

with the _cotto aspetto_, 'face _baked_,' parched brown and lean; and

the 'fiery snow,' that falls on them there, a 'fiery snow without

wind,' slow, deliberate, never-ending! Or the lids of those Tombs;

square sarcophaguses, in that silent dim-burning Hall, each with its

Soul in torment; the lids laid open there; they are to be shut at the

Day of Judgment, through Eternity. And how Farinata rises; and how

Cavalcante falls--at hearing of his Son, and the past tense '_fue_'!

The very movements in Dante have something brief; swift, decisive,

almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his genius this sort

of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent,

passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its silent 'pale rages,'

speaks itself in these things.

For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a

man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is

physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a

likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of

doing it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could

not have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it,

unless he had, what we may call, _sympathised_ with it,--had sympathy

in him to bestow on objects. He must have been _sincere_ about it too;

sincere and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the

likeness of any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and

trivial hearsay, about all objects. And indeed may we not say that

intellect altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning what

an object is? Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may have will come

out here. Is it even of business, a matter to be done? The gifted man

is he who _sees_ the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside as

surplusage: it is his faculty too, the man of business's faculty, that

he discern the true _likeness_, not the false superficial one, of the

thing he has got to work in. And how much of _morality_ is in the kind

of insight we get of anything; 'the eye seeing in all things what it

brought with it the faculty of seeing'! To the mean eye all things are

trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael,

the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No

most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the

commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take-away with

him.

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness

as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is everyway

noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what

qualities in that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of

eternal black. A small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into

our very heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too; _della bella

persona, che mi fu tolta_; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a

solace that _he_ will never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these

_alti guai_. And the racking winds, in that _aer bruno_, whirl them

away again, to wail forever!--Strange to think: Dante was the friend

of this poor Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat upon

the Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet

also infinite rigour of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante

discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his

_Divine Comedy's_ being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial libel;

putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged-upon on earth! I

suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's, was in the heart of any

man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigour cannot pity

either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic,--sentimentality, or

little better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that of

Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like

the wail of Æolean harps, soft, soft; like a child's young heart;--and

then that stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of his towards

his Beatrice; their meeting together in the _Paradiso_; his gazing in

her pure transfigured eyes, her that had been purified by death so

long, separated from him so far:--one likens it to the song of angels;

it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the very

purest, that ever came out of a human soul.

For the _intense_ Dante is intense in all things; he has got into the

essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion too

as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity.

Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of

all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;--as indeed,

what are they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love? '_A Dio

spiacenti ed a' nemici sui_, Hateful to God and to the enemies of

God:' lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion; '_Non

ragionam di lor_, We will not speak of _them_, look only and pass.' Or

think of this; 'They have not the _hope_ to die, _Non han speranza di

morte_.' One day, it had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of

Dante, that he, wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full

surely _die_; 'that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die.'

Such words are in this man. For rigour, earnestness and depth, he is

not to be paralleled in the modern world; to seek his parallel we must

go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique Prophets there.

I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the

_Inferno_ to the two other parts of the Divine _Commedia_. Such

preference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and

is like to be a transient feeling. The _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_,

especially the former, one would almost say, is even more excellent

than it. It is a noble thing that _Purgatorio_, 'Mountain of

Purification'; an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If Sin

is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in

Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act.

It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The _tremolar dell' onde_ that

'trembling' of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of morning,

dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an altered mood.

Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company still with heavy

sorrow. The obscure sojourn of dæmons and reprobate is underfoot; a

soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher, to the Throne of

Mercy itself. "Pray for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain all

say to him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me," my daughter Giovanna;

"I think her mother loves me no more!" They toil painfully up by that

winding steep, 'bent-down like corbels of a building,' some of

them,--crushed-together so 'for the sin of pride'; yet nevertheless in

years, in ages and æons, they shall have reached the top, which is

Heaven's gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too

of all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy,

and a psalm of praise rises, when one soul has perfected repentance

and got its sin and misery left behind! I call all this a noble

embodiment of a true noble thought.

But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, are

indispensable to one another. The _Paradiso_, a kind of inarticulate

music to me, is the redeeming side of the _Inferno_; the _Inferno_

without it were untrue. All three make-up the true Unseen World, as

figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing forever

memorable, forever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was

perhaps delineated in no human soul with such depth of veracity as in

this of Dante's; a man _sent_ to sing it, to keep it long memorable.

Very notable with what brief simplicity he passes out of the every-day

reality, into the Invisible one; and in the second or third stanza, we

find ourselves in the World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among

things palpable, indubitable! To Dante they _were_ so; the real world,

as it is called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely

higher Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as _preter_-natural as

the other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a spirit, but

is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believes

it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say

again, is the saving merit, now as always.