In this point of view, I consider that, for the last hundred years, by

far the notablest of all Literary Men is Fichte's countryman, Goethe.

To that man too, in a strange way, there was given what we may call a

life in the Divine Idea of the World; vision of the inward divine

mystery: and strangely, out of his Books, the world rises imaged once

more as godlike, the workmanship and temple of a God. Illuminated all,

not in fierce impure fire-splendour as of Mahomet, but in mild

celestial radiance;--really a Prophecy in these most unprophetic

times; to my mind, by far the greatest, though one of the quietest,

among all the great things that have come to pass in them. Our chosen

specimen of the Hero as Literary Man would be this Goethe. And it were

a very pleasant plan for me here to discourse of his heroism: for I

consider him to be a true Hero; heroic in what he said and did, and

perhaps still more in what he did not say and did not do; to me a

noble spectacle: a great heroic ancient man, speaking and keeping

silence as an ancient Hero, in the guise of a most modern, high-bred,

high-cultivated Man of Letters! We have had no such spectacle; no man

capable of affording such, for the last hundred-and-fifty years.

But at present, such is the general state of knowledge about Goethe,

it were worse than useless to attempt speaking of him in this case.

Speak as I might, Goethe, to the great majority of you would remain

problematic, vague; no impression but a false one could be realised.

Him we must leave to future times. Johnson, Burns, Rousseau, three

great figures from a prior time, from a far inferior state of

circumstances, will suit us better here. Three men of the Eighteenth

Century; the conditions of their life far more resemble what those of

ours still are in England, than what Goethe's in Germany were. Alas,

these men did not conquer like him; they fought bravely, and fell.

They were not heroic bringers of the light, but heroic seekers of it.

They lived under galling conditions; struggling as under mountains of

impediment, and could not unfold themselves into clearness, or

victorious interpretation of that 'Divine Idea.' It is rather the

_Tombs_ of three Literary Heroes that I have to show you. There are

the monumental heaps, under which three spiritual giants lie buried.

Very mournful, but also great and full of interest for us. We will

linger by them for a while.

Complaint is often made, in these times, of what we call the

disorganised condition of society: how ill many arranged forces of

society fulfil their work; how many powerful forces are seen working

in a wasteful, chaotic, altogether unarranged manner. It is too just a

complaint, as we all know. But perhaps if we look at this of Books and

the Writers of Books, we shall find here, as it were, the summary of

all other disorganisation;--a sort of _heart_, from which, and to

which, all other confusion circulates in the world! Considering what

Book-writers do in the world, and what the world does with

Book-writers, I should say, It is the most anomalous thing the world

at present has to show.--We should get into a sea far beyond sounding,

did we attempt to give account of this: but we must glance at it for

the sake of our subject. The worst element in the life of these three

Literary Heroes was, that they found their business and position such

a chaos. On the beaten road there is tolerable travelling; but it is

sore work, and many have to perish, fashioning a path through the

impassable!

Our pious Fathers, feeling well what importance lay in the speaking of

man to men, founded churches, made endowments, regulations; everywhere

in the civilised world there is a Pulpit, environed with all manner of

complex dignified appurtenances and furtherances, that therefrom a man

with the tongue may, to best advantage, address his fellow-men. They

felt that this was the most important thing; that without this there

was no good thing. It is a right pious work, that of theirs; beautiful

to behold! But now with the art of Writing, with the art of Printing,

a total change has come over that business. The Writer of a Book, is

not he a Preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or

that, but to all men in all times and places? Surely it is of the last

importance that _he_ do his work right, whoever do it wrong;--that the

_eye_ report not falsely, for then all the other members are astray!

Well; how he may do his work, whether he do it right or wrong, or do

it at all, is a point which no man in the world has taken the pains to

think of. To a certain shopkeeper, trying to get some money for his

books, if lucky, he is of some importance; to no other man of any.

Whence he came, whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived, by what

he might be furthered on his course, no one asks. He is an accident in

society. He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is

as the spiritual light, either the guidance or the misguidance!

Certainly the art of writing is the most miraculous of all things man

has devised. Odin's _Runes_ were the first form of the work of a Hero;

_Books_, written words, are still miraculous _Runes_, of the latest

form! In Books lies the _soul_ of the whole Past Time; the articulate

audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it

has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies,

harbours and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined,--they

are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many

Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some

ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of

Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives;

can be called-up again into life. No magic _Rune_ is stranger than a

Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying

as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen

possession of men.

Do not Books still accomplish _miracles_ as _Runes_ were fabled to do?

They persuade men. Not the wretchedest circulating-library novel,

which foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages but will help to

regulate the actual practical weddings and households of those foolish

girls. So 'Celia' felt, so 'Clifford' acted: the foolish Theorem of

Life, stamped into those young brains, comes out as a solid Practice

one day. Consider whether any _Rune_ in the wildest imagination of

Mythologist ever did such wonders as, on the actual firm Earth, some

Books have done! What built St Paul's Cathedral? Look at the heart of

the matter, it was that divine Hebrew BOOK,--the word partly of the

man Moses, an outlaw tending his Midianitish herds, four thousand

years ago, in the wildernesses of Sinai! It is the strangest of

things, yet nothing is truer. With the art of Writing, of which

Printing is a simple, an inevitable and comparatively insignificant

corollary, the true reign of miracles for mankind commenced. It

related, with a wondrous new contiguity and perpetual closeness, the

Past and Distant with the Present in time and place; all times and all

places with this our actual Here and Now. All things were altered for

men; all modes of important work of men: teaching, preaching,

governing, and all else.

To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a notable,

respectable product of the modern ages. Their existence too is

modified, to the very basis of it, by the existence of Books.

Universities arose while there were yet no Books procurable; while a

man, for a single Book, had to give an estate of land. That, in those

circumstances, when a man had some knowledge to communicate, he should

do it by gathering the learners round him, face to face, was a

necessity for him. If you wanted to know what Abelard knew, you must

go and listen to Abelard. Thousands, as many as thirty-thousand, went

to hear Abelard and that metaphysical theology of his. And now for any

other teacher who had something of his own to teach, there was a great

convenience opened: so many thousands eager to learn were already

assembled yonder; of all places the best place for him was that. For

any third teacher it was better still; and grew ever the better, the

more teachers there came. It only needed now that the King took notice

of this new phenomenon; combined or agglomerated the various schools

into one school; gave it edifices, privileges, encouragements, and

named it _Universitas_, or School of all Sciences: the University of

Paris, in its essential characters, was there. The model of all

subsequent Universities; which down even to these days, for six

centuries now, have gone on to found themselves. Such, I conceive, was

the origin of Universities.

It is clear, however, that with this simple circumstance, facility of

getting Books, the whole conditions of the business from top to bottom

were changed. Once invent Printing, you metamorphosed all

Universities, or superseded them! The Teacher needed not now to gather

men personally round him, that he might _speak_ to them what he knew:

print it in a Book, and all learners far and wide, for a trifle, had

it each at his own fireside, much more effectually to learn

it!--Doubtless there is still peculiar virtue in Speech; even writers

of Books may still, in some circumstances, find it convenient to speak

also,--witness our present meeting here! There _is_, one would say,

and must ever remain while man has a tongue, a distinct province for

Speech as well as for Writing and Printing. In regard to all things

this must remain; to Universities among others. But the limits of the

two have nowhere yet been pointed out, ascertained; much less put in

practice: the University which would completely take-in that great new

fact, of the existence of Printed Books, and stand on a clear footing

for the Nineteenth Century as the Paris one did for the Thirteenth,

has not yet come into existence. If we think of it, all that a

University, or final highest School can do for us, is still but what

the first School began doing,--teach us to _read_. We learn to _read_,

in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and

letters of all manner of Books. But the place where we go to get

knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves! It

depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done

their best for us. The true University of these days is a Collection

of Books.

But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, all is changed, in its

preaching, in its working, by the introduction of Books. The Church is

the working recognised Union of our Priests or Prophets, of those who

by wise teaching guide the souls of men. While there was no Writing,

even while there was no Easy-writing or _Printing_, the preaching of

the voice was the natural sole method of performing this. But now with

Books!--He that can write a true Book, to persuade England, is not he

the Bishop and Archbishop, the Primate of England and of All England?

I many a time say, the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books,

these _are_ the real working effective Church of a modern country. Nay

not only our preaching, but even our worship, is not it too

accomplished by means of Printed Books? The noble sentiment which a

gifted soul has clothed for us in melodious words, which brings melody

into our hearts,--is not this essentially, if we will understand it,

of the nature of worship? There are many, in all countries, who, in

this confused time, have no other method of worship. He who, in any

way, shows us better than we knew before that a lily of the fields is

beautiful, does he not show it us as an effluence of the Fountain of

all Beauty; as the _handwriting_, made visible there, of the great

Maker of the Universe? He has sung for us, made us sing with him, a

little verse of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How much more he who

sings, who says, or in any way brings home to our heart the noble

doings, feelings, darings and endurances of a brother man! He has

verily touched our hearts as with a live coal _from the altar_.

Perhaps there is no worship more authentic.

Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an 'apocalypse of Nature,'

a revealing of the 'open secret.' It may well enough be named, in

Fichte's style; a 'continuous revelation' of the Godlike in the

Terrestrial and Common. The Godlike does ever, in very truth, endure

there; is brought out, now in this dialect, now in that, with various

degrees of clearness: all true gifted Singers and Speakers are,

consciously or unconsciously, doing so. The dark stormful indignation

of a Byron, so wayward and perverse, may have touches of it; nay the

withered mockery of a French sceptic,--his mockery of the False, a

love and worship of the True. How much more the sphere-harmony of a

Shakspeare, of a Goethe; the cathedral-music of a Milton! They are

something too, those humble genuine lark-notes of a Burns,--skylark,

starting from the humble furrow, far overhead into the blue depths,

and singing to us so genuinely there! For all true singing is of the

nature of worship; as indeed all true _working_ may be said to

be,--whereof such _singing_ is but the record, and fit melodious

representation, to us. Fragments of a real 'Church Liturgy' and 'Body

of Homilies,' strangely disguised from the common eye, are to be found

weltering in that huge froth-ocean of Printed Speech we loosely call

Literature! Books are our Church too.

Or turning now to the Government of men. Witenagemote, old Parliament,

was a great thing. The affairs of the nation were there deliberated

and decided; what we were to _do_ as a nation. But does not, though

the name Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now,

everywhere and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, _out_ of

Parliament altogether? Burke said there were Three Estates in

Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a _Fourth

Estate_ more important far than they all. It is not a figure of

speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact,--very momentous to us

in these times. Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which

comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to

Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing brings

Printing; brings universal every-day extempore Printing, as we see at

present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes

a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in

law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has,

what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is, that he have a

tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is

requisite. The nation is governed by all that has tongue in the

nation: Democracy is virtually _there_. Add only, that whatsoever

power exists will have itself, by and by, organised; working secretly

under bandages, obscurations, obstructions, it will never rest till it

get to work free, unencumbered, visible to all. Democracy virtually

extant will insist on becoming palpably extant.--

On all sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of the things

which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous,

wonderful and worthy are the things we call Books! Those poor bits of

rag-paper with black ink on them;--from the Daily Newspaper to the

sacred Hebrew BOOK, what have they not done, what are they not

doing!--For indeed, whatever be the outward form of the thing (bits of

paper, as we say, and black ink), is it not verily, at bottom, the

highest act of man's faculty that produces a Book? It is the _Thought_

of man; the true thaumaturgic virtue; by which man works all things

whatsoever. All that he does, and brings to pass, is the vesture of a

Thought. This London City, with all its houses, palaces,

steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult,

what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One;--a

huge immeasurable Spirit of a THOUGHT, embodied in brick, in iron,

smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks,

and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to _think_

of the making of that brick.--The thing we called 'bits of paper with

traces of black ink,' is the _purest_ embodiment a Thought of man can

have. No wonder it is, in all ways, the activest and noblest.

All this, of the importance and supreme importance of the Man of

Letters in modern Society, and how the Press is to such a degree

superseding the Pulpit, the Senate, the _Senatus Academicus_ and much

else, has been admitted for a good while; and recognised often enough,

in late times, with a sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment. It

seems to me, the Sentimental by and by will have to give place to the

Practical. If Men of Letters _are_ so incalculably influential,

actually performing such work for us from age to age, and even from

day to day, then I think we may conclude that Men of Letters will not

always wander like unrecognised unregulated Ishmaelites among us!

Whatsoever thing, as I said above, has virtual unnoticed power will

castoff its wrappages, bandages, and step-forth one day with palpably

articulated, universally visible power. That one man wear the clothes,

and take the wages, of a function which is done by quite another:

there can be no profit in this; this is not right, it is wrong. And

yet, alas, the _making_ of it right,--what a business, for long times

to come! Sure enough, this that we call Organisation of the Literary

Guild is still a great way off, encumbered with all manner of

complexities. If you asked me what were the best possible organisation

for the Men of Letters in modern society; the arrangement of

furtherance and regulation, grounded the most accurately on the actual

facts of their position and of the world's position,--I should beg to

say that the problem far exceeded my faculty! It is not one man's

faculty; it is that of many successive men turned earnestly upon it,

that will bring-out even an approximate solution. What the best

arrangement were, none of us could say. But if you ask, Which is the

worst? I answer: This which we now have, that Chaos should sit umpire

in it; this is the worst. To the best, or any good one, there is yet a

long way.

One remark I must not omit, That royal or parliamentary grants of

money are by no means the chief thing wanted! To give our Men of

Letters stipends, endowments and all furtherance of cash, will do

little towards the business. On the whole, one is weary of hearing

about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine

man, it is no evil to be poor; that there ought to be Literary Men

poor,--to show whether they are genuine or not! Mendicant Orders,

bodies of good men doomed to _beg_, were instituted in the Christian

Church; a most natural and even necessary development of the spirit of

Christianity. It was itself founded on Poverty, on Sorrow,

Contradiction, Crucifixion, every species of worldly Distress and

Degradation. We may say, that he who has not known those things, and

learned from them the priceless lessons they have to teach, has missed

a good opportunity of schooling. To beg, and go barefoot, in coarse

woollen cloak with a rope round your loins, and be despised of all the

world, was no beautiful business;--nor an honourable one in any eye,

till the nobleness of those who did so had made it honoured of some!

Begging is not in our course at the present time: but for the rest of

it, who will say that a Johnson is not perhaps the better for being

poor? It is needful for him, at all rates, to know that outward

profit, that success of any kind is _not_ the goal he has to aim at.

Pride, vanity, ill-conditioned egoism of all sorts, are bred in his

heart, as in every heart; need, above all, to be cast-out of his

heart,--to be, with whatever pangs, torn-out of it, cast-forth from

it, as a thing worthless. Byron, born rich and noble, made-out even

less than Burns, poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in that same 'best

possible organisation' as yet far off, Poverty may still enter as an

important element? What if our Men of Letters, Men setting-up to be

Spiritual Heroes, were still _then_, as they now are, a kind of

'involuntary monastic order;' bound still to this same ugly

Poverty,--till they had tried what was in it too, till they had

learned to make it too do for them! Money, in truth, can do much, but

it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it; and

even spurn it back, when it wishes to get farther.

Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season for them, the

fit assigner of them, all settled,--how is the Burns to be recognised

that merits these? He must pass through the ordeal, and prove himself.

_This_ ordeal; this wild welter of a chaos which is called Literary

Life; this too is a kind of ordeal! There is clear truth in the idea

that a struggle from the lower classes of society, towards the upper

regions and rewards of society, must ever continue. Strong men are

born there, who ought to stand elsewhere than there. The manifold,

inextricably complex, universal struggle of these constitutes, and

must constitute, what is called the progress of society. For Men of

Letters, as for all other sorts of men. How to regulate that struggle?

There is the whole question. To leave it as it is, at the mercy of

blind Chance; a whirl of distracted atoms, one cancelling the other;

one of the thousand arriving saved, nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine lost

by the way; your royal Johnson languishing inactive in garrets, or

harnessed to the yoke of Printer Cave; your Burns dying broken-hearted

as a Gauger; your Rousseau driven into mad exasperation, kindling

French Revolutions by his paradoxes: this, as we said, is clearly

enough the _worst_ regulation. The _best_, alas, is far from us!

And yet there can be no doubt but it is coming; advancing on us, as

yet hidden in the bosom of centuries: this is a prophecy one can risk.

For so soon as men get to discern the importance of a thing, they do

infallibly set about arranging it, facilitating, forwarding it; and

rest not till, in some approximate degree, they have accomplished

that. I say, of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes at

present extant in the world, there is no class comparable for

importance to that Priesthood of the Writers of Books. This is a fact

which he who runs may read,--and draw inferences from. "Literature

will take care of itself," answered Mr Pitt, when applied-to for some

help for Burns. "Yes," adds Mr Southey, "it will take care of itself;

_and of you too_, if you do not look to it!"

The result to individual Men of Letters is not the momentous one; they

are but individuals, an infinitesimal fraction of the great body; they

can struggle on, and live or else die, as they have been wont. But it

deeply concerns the whole society, whether it will set its _light_ on

high places, to walk thereby; or trample it under foot, and scatter it

in all ways of wild waste (not without conflagration), as heretofore!

Light is the one thing wanted for the world. Put wisdom in the head of

the world, the world will fight its battle victoriously, and be the

best world man can make it. I call this anomaly of a disorganic

Literary Class the heart of all other anomalies, at once product and

parent; some good arrangement for that would be as the _punctum

saliens_ of a new vitality and just arrangement for all. Already, in

some European countries, in France, in Prussia, one traces some

beginnings of an arrangement for the Literary Class; indicating the

gradual possibility of such. I believe that it is possible; that it

will have to be possible.

By far the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese is one on

which we cannot arrive at clearness, but which excites endless

curiosity even in the dim state: this namely, that they do attempt to

make their Men of Letters their Governors! It would be rash to say,

one understood how this was done, or with what degree of success it

was done. All such things must be very unsuccessful; yet a small

degree of success is precious; the very attempt how precious! There

does seem to be, all over China, a more or less active search

everywhere to discover the men of talent that grow up in the young

generation. Schools there are for every one: a foolish sort of

training, yet still a sort. The youths who distinguish themselves in

the lower school are promoted into favourable stations in the higher,

that they may still more distinguish themselves,--forward and forward:

it appears to be out of these that the Official Persons, and incipient

Governors, are taken. These are they whom they _try_ first, whether

they can govern or not. And surely with the best hope: for they are

the men that have already shown intellect. Try them: they have not

governed or administered as yet; perhaps they cannot; but there is no

doubt they _have_ some Understanding, without which no man can!

Neither is Understanding a _tool_, as we are too apt to figure; 'it is

a _hand_ which can handle any tool.' Try these men: they are of all

others the best worth trying.--Surely there is no kind of government,

constitution, revolution, social apparatus or arrangement, that I know

of in this world, so promising to one's scientific curiosity as this.

The man of intellect at the top of affairs: this is the aim of all

constitutions and revolutions, if they have any aim. For the man of

true intellect, as I assert and believe always, is the noblehearted

man withal, the true, just, humane and valiant man. Get _him_ for

governor, all is got; fail to get him, though you had Constitutions

plentiful as blackberries, and a Parliament in every village, there is

nothing yet got!--

These things look strange, truly; and are not such as we commonly

speculate upon. But we are fallen into strange times; these things

will require to be speculated upon; to be rendered practicable, to be

in some way put in practice. These and many others. On all hands of

us, there is the announcement, audible enough, that the old Empire of

Routine has ended; that to say a thing has long been, is no reason for

its continuing to be. The things which have been are fallen into

decay, are fallen into incompetence; large masses of mankind, in every

society of our Europe, are no longer capable of living at all by the

things which have been. When millions of men can no longer by their

utmost exertion gain food for themselves, and 'the third man for

thirty-six weeks each year is short of third-rate potatoes,' the

things which have been must decidedly prepare to alter themselves!--I

will now quit this of the organisation of Men of Letters.

* * * * *

Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest on those Literary Heroes of ours

was not the want of organisation for Men of Letters, but a far deeper

one; out of which, indeed, this and so many other evils for the

Literary Man, and for all men, had, as from their fountain, taken

rise. That our Hero as Man of Letters had to travel without highway,

companionless, through an inorganic chaos,--and to leave his own life

and faculty lying there, as a partial contribution towards _pushing_

some highway through it: this, had not his faculty itself been so

perverted and paralysed, he might have put up with, might have

considered to be but the common lot of Heroes. His fatal misery was

the _spiritual paralysis_, so we may name it, of the Age in which his

life lay; whereby his life too, do what he might, was half-paralysed!

The Eighteenth was a _Sceptical_ Century; in which little word there

is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries. Scepticism means not

intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of _in_fidelity,

insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, in few centuries that one

could specify since the world began, was a life of Heroism more

difficult for a man. That was not an age of Faith,--an age of Heroes!

The very possibility of Heroism had been, as it were, formally

abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever; Triviality,

Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. The 'age of miracles' had

been, or perhaps had not been; but it was not any longer. An effete

world; wherein Wonder, Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell;--in one

word, a godless world!

How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time,--compared

not with the Christian Shakspeares and Miltons, but with the old Pagan

Skalds, with any species of believing men! The living TREE Igdrasil,

with the melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs,

deep-rooted as Hela, has died-out into the clanking of a

World-MACHINE. 'Tree' and 'Machine': contrast these two things. I, for

my share, declare the world to be no machine! I say that it does not

go by wheel-and-pinion 'motives,' self-interests, checks, balances;

that there is something far other in it than the clank of

spinning-jennies, and parliamentary majorities; and, on the whole,

that it is not a machine at all!--The old Norse Heathen had a truer

notion of God's-world than these poor Machine-Sceptics: the old

Heathen Norse were _sincere_ men. But for these poor Sceptics there

was no sincerity, no truth. Half-truth and hearsay was called truth.

Truth, for most men, meant plausibility; to be measured by the number

of votes you could get. They had lost any notion that sincerity was

possible, or of what sincerity was. How many Plausibilities asking,

with unaffected surprise and the air of offended virtue, What! am not

I sincere? Spiritual Paralysis, I say, nothing left but a Mechanical

life, was the characteristic of that century. For the common man,

unless happily he stood _below_ his century and belonged to another

prior one, it was impossible to be a Believer, a Hero; he lay buried,

unconscious, under these baleful influences. To the strongest man,

only with infinite struggle and confusion was it possible to work

himself half-loose; and lead as it were, in an enchanted, most

tragical way, a spiritual death-in-life, and be a Half-Hero!

Scepticism is the name we give to all this; as the chief symptom, as

the chief origin of all this. Concerning which so much were to be

said! It would take many Discourses, not a small fraction of one

Discourse, to state what one feels about that Eighteenth Century and

its ways. As indeed this, and the like of this, which we now call

Scepticism, is precisely the black malady and life-foe, against which

all teaching and discoursing since man's life began has directed

itself: the battle of Belief against Unbelief is the never-ending

battle! Neither is it in the way of crimination that one would wish to

speak. Scepticism, for that century, we must consider as the decay of

old ways of believing, the preparation afar off for new better and

wider ways,--an inevitable thing. We will not blame men for it; we

will lament their hard fate. We will understand that destruction of

old _forms_ is not destruction of everlasting _substances_; that

Scepticism, as sorrowful and hateful as we see it, is not an end but a

beginning.

The other day speaking, without prior purpose that way, of Bentham's

theory of man and man's life, I chanced to call it a more beggarly one

than Mahomet's. I am bound to say, now when it is once uttered, that

such is my deliberate opinion. Not that one would mean offence against

the man Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe him. Bentham

himself, and even the creed of Bentham, seems to me comparatively

worthy of praise. It is a determinate _being_ what all the world, in a

cowardly, half-and-half manner, was tending to be. Let us have the

crisis; we shall either have death or the cure. I call this gross,

steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith. It was a

laying down of cant; a saying to oneself: "Well then, this world is a

dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation and selfish Hunger; let

us see what, by checking and balancing, and good adjustment of tooth

and pinion, can be made of it!" Benthamism has something complete,

manful, in such fearless committal of itself to what it finds true;

you may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its _eyes_ put out! It

is the culminating point, and fearless ultimatum, of what lay in the

half-and-half state, pervading man's whole existence in that

Eighteenth Century. It seems to me, all deniers of Godhood, and all

lip-believers of it, are bound to be Benthamites, if they have courage

and honesty. Benthamism is an _eyeless_ Heroism: the Human Species,

like a hapless blinded Samson grinding in the Philistine Mill, clasps

convulsively the pillars of its Mill; brings huge ruin down, but

ultimately deliverance withal. Of Bentham I meant to say no harm.

But this I do say, and would wish all men to know and lay to heart,

that he who discerns nothing but Mechanism in the Universe has in the

fatalest way missed the secret of the Universe altogether. That all

Godhood should vanish out of men's conception of this Universe seems

to me precisely the most brutal error,--I will not disparage

Heathenism by calling it a Heathen error,--that men could fall into.

It is not true; it is false at the very heart of it. A man who thinks

so will think _wrong_ about all things in the world; this original sin

will vitiate all other conclusions he can form. One might call it the

most lamentable of delusions,--not forgetting Witchcraft itself!

Witchcraft worshipped at least a living Devil: but this worships a

dead iron Devil; no God, not even a Devil!--Whatsoever is noble,

divine, inspired, drops thereby out of life. There remains everywhere

in life a despicable _caput-mortuum_; the mechanical hull, all soul

fled out of it. How can a man act heroically? The 'Doctrine of

Motives' will teach him that it is, under more or less disguise,

nothing but a wretched love of Pleasure, fear of Pain; that Hunger, of

applause, of cash, of whatsoever victual it may be, is the ultimate

fact of man's life. Atheism, in brief;--which does indeed frightfully

punish itself. The man, I say, is become spiritually a paralytic man;

this god-like Universe a dead mechanical steam-engine, all working by

motives, checks, balances, and I know not what; wherein, as in the

detestable belly of some Phalaris'-Bull of his own contriving, he the

poor Phalaris sits miserably dying!

Belief I define to be the healthy act of a man's mind. It is a mysterious

indescribable process, that of getting to believe;--indescribable, as

all vital acts are. We have our mind given us, not that it may cavil

and argue, but that it may see into something, give us clear belief

and understanding about something, whereon we are then to proceed to

act. Doubt, truly, is not itself a crime. Certainly we do not rush

out, clutch-up the first thing we find, and straightway believe that!

All manner of doubt, inquiry, [Greek: skepsis] as it is named, about

all manner of objects, dwells in every reasonable mind. It is the

mystic working of the mind, on the object it is _getting_ to know and

believe. Belief comes out of all this, above ground, like the tree

from its hidden _roots_. But now if, even on common things, we require

that a man keep his doubts _silent_, and not babble of them till they

in some measure become affirmations or denials; how much more in

regard to the highest things, impossible to speak of in words at all!

That a man parade his doubt, and get to imagine that debating and

logic (which means at best only the manner of _telling_ us your

thought, your belief or disbelief, about a thing) is the triumph and

true work of what intellect he has: alas, this is as if you should

_overturn_ the tree, and instead of green boughs, leaves, and fruits,

show us ugly taloned roots turned-up into the air,--and no growth,

only death and misery going on!

For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; It is moral

also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by

believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A

sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something

he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and

digest! Lower than that he will not get. We call those ages in which

he gets so low the mournfulest, sickest, and meanest of all ages. The

world's heart is palsied, sick: how can any limb of it be whole?

Genuine Acting ceases in all departments of the world's work; dextrous

Similitude of Acting begins. The world's wages are pocketed, the

world's work is not done. Heroes have gone out; quacks have come in.

Accordingly, what Century, since the end of the Roman world, which

also was a time of scepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, so

abounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth! Consider them, with their

tumid sentimental vapouring about virtue, benevolence,--the wretched

Quack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head of them! Few men were without

quackery; they had got to consider it a necessary ingredient and

amalgam for truth. Chatham, our brave Chatham himself, comes down to

the House, all wrapt and bandaged; he 'has crawled out in great bodily

suffering,' and so on;--_forgets_, says Walpole, that he is acting the

sick man; in the fire of debate, snatches his arm from the sling, and

oratorically swings and brandishes it! Chatham himself lives the

strangest mimetic life, half hero, half quack, all along. For indeed

the world is full of dupes; and you have to gain the _world's_

suffrage! How the duties of the world will be done in that case, what

quantities of error, which means failure, which means sorrow and

misery, to some and to many, will gradually accumulate in all

provinces of the world's business, we need not compute.

It seems to me, you lay your finger here on the heart of the world's

maladies, when you call it a Sceptical World. An insincere world; a

godless untruth of a world! It is out of this, as I consider, that the

whole tribe of social pestilences, French Revolutions, Chartisms, and

what not, have derived their being, their chief necessity to be. This

must alter. Till this alter, nothing can beneficially alter. My one

hope of the world, my inexpugnable consolation in looking at the

miseries of the world, is that this is altering. Here and there one

does now find a man who knows, as of old, that this world is a Truth,

and no Plausibility and Falsity; that he himself is alive, not dead or

paralytic; and that the world is alive, instinct with Godhood,

beautiful and awful, even as in the beginning of days! One man once

knowing this, many men, all men, must by and by come to know it. It

lies there clear, for whosoever will take the _spectacles_ off his

eyes and honestly look, to know! For such a man, the Unbelieving

Century, with its unblessed Products, is already past: a new century

is already come. The old unblessed Products and Performances, as solid

as they look, are Phantasms, preparing speedily to vanish. To this and

the other noisy, very great-looking Simulacrum with the whole world

huzzahing at its heels, he can say, composedly stepping aside: Thou

art not _true_; thou art not extant, only semblant; go thy way!--Yes,

hollow Formulism, gross Benthamism, and other unheroic atheistic

Insincerity is visibly and even rapidly declining. An unbelieving

Eighteenth Century is but an exception,--such as now and then occurs.

I prophesy that the world will once more become _sincere_; a believing

world: with _many_ Heroes in it, a heroic world! It will then be a

victorious world; never till then!

Or indeed what of the world and its victories? Men speak too much

about the world. Each one of us here, let the world go how it will,

and be victorious or not victorious, has he not a Life of his own to

lead? One Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no

second chance to us forevermore! It were well for _us_ to live not as

fools and simulacra, but as wise and realities. The world's being

saved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. We

should look to ourselves: there is great merit here in the 'duty of

staying at home'! And, on the whole, to say truth, I never heard of

'worlds' being 'saved' in any other way. That mania of saving worlds

is itself a piece of the Eighteenth Century with its windy

sentimentalism. Let us not follow it too far. For the saving of the

_world_ I will trust confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a

little to my own saving, which I am more competent to!--In brief, for

the world's sake, and for our own, we will rejoice greatly that

Scepticism, Insincerity, Mechanical Atheism, with all their

poison-dews, are going, and as good as gone.--

Now it was under such conditions, in those times of Johnson, that our

Men of Letters had to live. Times in which there was properly no truth

in life. Old truths had fallen nigh dumb; the new lay yet hidden, not

trying to speak. That Man's Life here below was a Sincerity and Fact,

and would forever continue such, no new intimation, in that dusk of

the world, had yet dawned. No intimation; not even any French

Revolution,--which we define to be a Truth once more, though a Truth

clad in hellfire! How different was the Luther's Pilgrimage, with its

assured goal, from the Johnson's, girt with mere traditions,

suppositions, grown now incredible, unintelligible! Mahomet's Formulas

were of 'wood waxed and oiled,' and could be _burnt_ out of one's way:

poor Johnson's were far more difficult to burn.--The strong man will

ever find _work_, which means difficulty, pain, to the full measure of

his strength. But to make-out a victory, in those circumstances of our

poor Hero as Man of Letters, was perhaps more difficult than in any.

Not obstruction, disorganisation, Bookseller Osborne and

Fourpence-halfpenny a day; not this alone; but the light of his own

soul was taken from him. No landmark on the Earth; and, alas, what is

that to having no loadstar in the Heaven! We need not wonder that none

of those Three men rose to victory. That they fought truly is the

highest praise. With a mournful sympathy we will contemplate, if not

three living victorious Heroes, as I said, the Tombs of three fallen

Heroes! They fell for us too; making a way for us. There are the

mountains which they hurled abroad in their confused War of the

Giants; under which, their strength and life spent, they now lie

buried.

* * * * *

I have already written of these three Literary Heroes, expressly or

incidentally; what I suppose is known to most of you; what need not be

spoken or written a second time. They concern us here as the singular

_Prophets_ of that singular age; for such they virtually were; and the

aspect they and their world exhibit, under this point of view, might

lead us into reflections enough! I call them, all three, Genuine Men

more or less; faithfully, for most part unconsciously, struggling to

be genuine, and plant themselves on the everlasting truth of things.

This to a degree that eminently distinguishes them from the poor

artificial mass of their contemporaries; and renders them worthy to be

considered as Speakers, in some measure, of the everlasting truth, as

Prophets in that age of theirs. By Nature herself, a noble necessity

was laid on them to be so. They were men of such magnitude that they

could not live on unrealities,--clouds, froth and all inanity gave-way

under them: there was no footing for them but on firm earth; no rest

or regular motion for them, if they got not footing there. To a

certain extent, they were Sons of Nature once more in an age of

Artifice; once more, Original Men.

As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by nature, one of

our great English souls. A strong and noble man; so much left

undeveloped in him to the last: in a kindlier element what might he

not have been,--Poet, Priest, sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a man

must not complain of his 'element,' of his 'time,' or the like; it is

thriftless work doing so. His time is bad: well then, he is there to

make it better!--Johnson's youth was poor, isolated, hopeless, very

miserable. Indeed, it does not seem possible that, in any the

favourablest outward circumstances, Johnson's life could have been

other than a painful one. The world might have had more of profitable

_work_ out of him, or less; but his _effort_ against the world's work

could never have been a light one. Nature, in return for his

nobleness, had said to him, Live in an element of diseased sorrow.

Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the nobleness were intimately and even

inseparably connected with each other. At all events, poor Johnson had

to go about girt with continual hypochondria, physical and spiritual

pain. Like a Hercules with the burning Nessus'-shirt on him, which

shoots-in on him dull incurable misery: the Nessus'-shirt not to be

stript-off, which is his own natural skin! In this manner _he_ had to

live. Figure him there, with his scrofulous diseases, with his great

greedy heart, and unspeakable chaos of thoughts; stalking mournful as

a stranger in this Earth; eagerly devouring what spiritual thing he

could come at: school-languages and other merely grammatical stuff, if

there were nothing better! The largest soul that was in all England;

and provision made for it of 'fourpence-halfpenny a day.' Yet a giant

invincible soul; a true man's. One remembers always that story of the

shoes at Oxford: the rough, seamy-faced, rawboned College Servitor

stalking about, in winter-season, with his shoes worn-out; how the

charitable Gentleman Commoner secretly places a new pair at his door;

and the rawboned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with

his dim eyes, with what thoughts,--pitches them out of window! Wet

feet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will; but not beggary: we cannot

stand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help here; a whole world of squalor,

rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of nobleness and manfulness

withal. It is a type of the man's life, this pitching-away of the

shoes. An original man;--not a secondhand, borrowing or begging man.

Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such shoes as we

ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on

that;--on the reality and substance which Nature gives _us_, not on

the semblance, on the thing she has given another than us!--

And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help was there

ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was

really higher than he? Great souls are always loyally submissive,

reverent to what is over them; only small mean souls are otherwise. I

could not find a better proof of what I said the other day, That the

sincere man was by nature the obedient man; that only in a World of

Heroes was there loyal Obedience to the Heroic. The essence of

_originality_ is not that it be _new_: Johnson believed altogether in

the old; he found the old opinions credible for him, fit for him; and

in a right heroic manner lived under them. He is well worth study in

regard to that. For we are to say that Johnson was far other than a

mere man of words and formulas; he was a man of truths and facts. He

stood by the old formulas; the happier was it for him that he could so

stand: but in all formulas that _he_ could stand by, there needed to

be a most genuine substance. Very curious how, in that poor Paper-age,

so barren, artificial, thick-quilted with Pedantries, Hearsays, the

great Fact of this Universe glared in, forever wonderful, indubitable,

unspeakable, divine-infernal, upon this man too! How he harmonised his

Formulas with it, how he managed at all under such circumstances: that

is a thing worth seeing. A thing 'to be looked at with reverence, with

pity, with awe.' That Church of St. Clement Danes, where Johnson still

_worshipped_ in the era of Voltaire, is to me a venerable place.

It was in virtue of his _sincerity_, of his speaking still in some

sort from the heart of Nature, though in the current artificial

dialect, that Johnson was a Prophet. Are not all dialects

'artificial'? Artificial things are not all false;--nay every true

Product of Nature will infallibly _shape_ itself; we may say all

artificial things are, at the starting of them, _true_. What we call

'Formulas' are not in their origin bad; they are indispensably good.

Formula is _method_, habitude; found wherever man is found. Formulas

fashion themselves as Paths do, as beaten Highways, leading towards

some sacred or high object, whither many men are bent. Consider it.

One man, full of heartfelt earnest impulse, finds-out a way of doing

somewhat,--were it of uttering his soul's reverence for the Highest,

were it but of fitly saluting his fellow-man. An inventor was needed

to do that, a _poet_; he has articulated the dim-struggling thought

that dwelt in his own and many hearts. This is his way of doing that;

these are his footsteps, the beginning of a 'Path.' And now see: the

second man travels naturally in the footsteps of his foregoer, it is

the _easiest_ method. In the footsteps of his foregoer; yet with

improvements, with changes where such seem good; at all events with

enlargements, the Path ever _widening_ itself as more travel it;--till

at last there is a broad Highway whereon the whole world may travel

and drive. While there remains a City or Shrine, or any Reality to

drive to, at the farther end, the Highway shall be right welcome! When

the City is gone, we will forsake the Highway. In this manner all

Institutions, Practices, Regulated Things in the world have come into

existence, and gone out of existence. Formulas all begin by being

_full_ of substance; you may call them the _skin_, the articulation

into shape, into limbs and skin, of a substance that is already there:

_they_ had not been there otherwise. Idols, as we said, are not

idolatrous till they become doubtful, empty for the worshipper's

heart. Much as we talk against Formulas, I hope no one of us is

ignorant withal of the high significance of _true_ Formulas; that they

were, and will ever be, the indispensablest furniture of our

habitation in this world.----

Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his 'sincerity.' He has no

suspicion of his being particularly sincere,--of his being

particularly anything! A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or

'scholar' as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honest

livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live--without stealing!

A noble unconsciousness is in him. He does not 'engrave _Truth_ on his

watch-seal;' no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and lives

by it. Thus it ever is. Think of it once more. The man whom Nature has

appointed to do great things is, first of all, furnished with that

openness to Nature which renders him incapable of being _in_sincere!

To his large, open, deep-feeling heart Nature is a Fact: all hearsay

is hearsay; the unspeakable greatness of this Mystery of Life, let him

acknowledge it or not, nay even though he seem to forget it or deny

it, is ever present to _him_,--fearful and wonderful, on this hand and

on that. He has a basis of sincerity; unrecognised, because never

questioned or capable of question. Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell,

Napoleon: all the Great Men I ever heard-of have this as the primary

material of them. Innumerable commonplace men are debating, are

talking everywhere their commonplace doctrines, which they have

learned by logic, by rote, at secondhand: to that kind of man all this

is still nothing. He must have truth; truth which _he_ feels to be

true. How shall he stand otherwise? His whole soul, at all moments, in

all ways, tells him that there is no standing. He is under the noble

necessity of being true. Johnson's way of thinking about this world is

not mine, any more than Mahomet's was: but I recognise the everlasting

element of heart-_sincerity_ in both; and see with pleasure how

neither of them remains ineffectual. Neither of them is as _chaff_

sown; in both of them is something which the seed-field will _grow_.

Johnson was a Prophet to his people; preached a Gospel to them,--as

all like him always do. The highest Gospel he preached we may describe

as a kind of Moral Prudence: 'in a world where much is to be done, and

little is to be known,' see how you will _do_ it! A thing well worth

preaching. 'A world where much is to be done, and little is to be

known:' do not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of

Doubt, of wretched god-forgetting Unbelief;--you were miserable then,

powerless, mad: how could you _do_ or work at all? Such Gospel Johnson

preached and taught;--coupled, theoretically and practically, with

this other great Gospel, 'Clear your mind of Cant!' Have no trade with

Cant: stand on the cold mud in the frosty weather, but let it be in

your own _real_ torn shoes: 'that will be better for you,' as Mahomet

says! I call this, I call these two things _joined together_, a great

Gospel, the greatest perhaps that was possible at that time.

Johnson's Writings, which once had such currency and celebrity, are

now, as it were, disowned by the young generation. It is not

wonderful; Johnson's opinions are fast becoming obsolete: but his

style of thinking and of living, we may hope, will never become

obsolete. I find in Johnson's Books the indisputablest traces of a

great intellect and great heart:--ever welcome, under what

obstructions and perversions soever. They are _sincere_ words, those

of his; he means things by them. A wondrous buckram style,--the best

he could get to then; a measured grandiloquence, stepping or rather

stalking along in a very solemn way, grown obsolete now; sometimes a

tumid _size_ of phraseology not in proportion to the contents of it:

all this you will put-up with. For the phraseology, tumid or not, has

always _something within it_. So many beautiful styles and books, with

_nothing_ in them;--a man is a _male_factor to the world who writes

such! _They_ are the avoidable kind!--Had Johnson left nothing but his

_Dictionary_, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine

man. Looking to its clearness of definition, its general solidity,

honesty, insight, and successful method, it may be called the best of

all Dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it

stands there like a great solid square-built edifice, finished,

symmetrically complete: you judge that a true Builder did it.

One word, in spite of our haste, must be granted to poor Bozzy. He

passes for a mean, inflated, gluttonous creature; and was so in many

senses. Yet the fact of his reverence for Johnson will ever remain

noteworthy. The foolish conceited Scotch Laird, the most conceited man

of his time, approaching in such awestruck attitude the great dusty

irascible Pedagogue in his mean garret there: it is a genuine reverence

for Excellence; a _worship_ for Heroes, at a time when neither Heroes

nor worship were surmised to exist. Heroes, it would seem exist always,

and a certain worship of them! We will also take the liberty to deny

altogether that of the witty Frenchman, that no man is a Hero to his

valet-de-chambre. Or if so, it is not the Hero's blame, but the

Valet's: that his soul, namely, is a mean _valet_-soul! He expects his

Hero to advance in royal stage-trappings, with measured step, trains

borne behind him, trumpets sounding before him. It should stand rather,

No man can be a _Grand-Monarque_ to his valet-de-chambre. Strip your

Louis Quatorze of his king-gear, and there _is_ left nothing but a poor

forked radish with a head fantastically carved;--admirable to no valet.

The Valet does not know a Hero when he sees him! Alas, no: it requires

a kind of _Hero_ to do that;--and one of the world's wants, in _this_

as in other senses, is for the most part want of such.

On the whole, shall we not say, that Boswell's admiration was well

bestowed; that he could have found no soul in all England so worthy of

bending down before? Shall we not say, of this great mournful Johnson

too, that he guided his difficult confused existence wisely; led it

_well_, like a right-valiant man? That waste chaos of Authorship by

trade; that waste chaos of Scepticism in religion and politics, in

life-theory and life-practice; in his poverty, in his dust and

dimness, with the sick body and the rusty coat: he made it do for him,

like a brave man. Not wholly without a loadstar in the Eternal; he had

still a loadstar, as the brave all need to have: with his eye set on

that, he would change his course for nothing in these confused

vortices of the lower sea of Time. 'To the Spirit of Lies, bearing

death and hunger, he would in no wise strike his flag.' Brave old

Samuel: _ultimus Romanorum_!

* * * * *

Of Rousseau and his Heroism I cannot say so much. He is not what I

call a strong man. A morbid, excitable, spasmodic man; at best,

intense rather than strong. He had not 'the talent of Silence,' an

invaluable talent; which few Frenchmen, or indeed men of any sort in

these times, excel in! The suffering man ought really 'to consume his

own smoke;' there is no good in emitting _smoke_ till you have made it

into _fire_,--which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is

capable of becoming! Rousseau has not depth or width, not calm force

for difficulty; the first characteristic of true greatness. A

fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is

not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him

then. He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering,

he is the strong man. We need forever, especially in these

loud-shrieking days, to remind ourselves of that. A man who cannot

_hold his peace_, till the time come for speaking and acting, is no

right man.

Poor Rousseau's face is to me expressive of him. A high but narrow

contracted intensity in it: bony brows; deep, straight-set eyes, in

which there is something bewildered-looking,--bewildered, peering with

lynx-eagerness. A face full of misery, even ignoble misery, and also

of the antagonism against that; something mean, plebeian there,

redeemed only by _intensity_: the face of what is called a Fanatic,--a

sadly _contracted_ Hero! We name him here because, with all his

drawbacks, and they are many, he has the first and chief

characteristic of a Hero: he is heartily _in earnest_. In earnest, if

ever man was; as none of these French Philosophes were. Nay, one would

say, of an earnestness too great for his otherwise sensitive, rather

feeble nature; and which indeed in the end drove him into the

strangest incoherences, almost delirations. There had come, at last,

to be a kind of madness in him: his Ideas _possessed_ him like demons;

hurried him so about, drove him over steep places!--

The fault and misery of Rousseau was what we easily name by a single

word _Egoism_; which is indeed the source and summary of all faults

and miseries whatsoever. He had not perfected himself into victory

over mere Desire; a mean hunger, in many sorts, was still the motive

principle of him. I am afraid he was a very vain man; hungry for the

praises of men. You remember Genlis's experience of him. She took Jean

Jacques to the Theatre; he bargaining for a strict incognito,--"_He_

would not be seen there for the world!" The curtain did happen

nevertheless to be drawn aside: the Pit recognised Jean Jacques, but

took no great notice of him! He expressed the bitterest indignation;

gloomed all evening, spake no other than surly words. The glib

Countess remained entirely convinced that his anger was not at being

seen, but at not being applauded when seen. How the whole nature of

the man is poisoned; nothing but suspicion, self-isolation, fierce

moody ways! He could not live with anybody. A man of some rank from

the country, who visited him often, and used to sit with him,

expressing all reverence and affection for him, comes one day, finds

Jean Jacques full of the sourest unintelligible humour. "Monsieur,"

said Jean Jacques, with flaming eyes, "I know why you come here. You

come to see what a poor life I lead; how little is in my poor pot that

is boiling there. Well, look into the pot! There is half a pound of

meat, one carrot and three onions; that is all: go and tell the whole

world that, if you like, Monsieur!"--A man of this sort was far gone.

The whole world got itself supplied with anecdotes for light laughter,

for a certain theatrical interest, from these perversions and

contortions of poor Jean Jacques. Alas, to him they were not laughing

or theatrical; too real to him! The contortions of a dying gladiator:

the crowded amphitheatre looks-on with entertainment; but the

gladiator is in agonies and dying.

And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passionate appeals to

Mothers, with his _Contrat-social_, with his celebrations of Nature,

even of savage life in Nature, did once more touch upon Reality,

struggle towards Reality; was doing the function of a Prophet to his

Time. As _he_ could, and as the Time could! Strangely through all that

defacement, degradation and almost madness, there is in the inmost

heart of poor Rousseau a spark of real heavenly fire. Once more, out

of the element of that withered mocking Philosophism, Scepticism and

Persiflage, there has arisen in that man the ineradicable feeling and

knowledge that this Life of ours is _true_; not a Scepticism, Theorem,

or Persiflage, but a Fact, an awful Reality. Nature had made that

revelation to him; had ordered him to speak it out. He got it spoken

out; if not well and clearly, then ill and dimly,--as clearly as he

could. Nay what are all errors and perversities of his, even those

stealings of ribbons aimless confused miseries and vagabondisms, if we

will interpret them kindly, but the blinkard dazzlements and

staggerings to and fro of a man sent on an errand he is too weak for,

by a path he cannot yet find? Men are led by strange ways. One should

have tolerance for a man, hope of him; leave him to try yet what he

will do. While life lasts, hope lasts for every man.

Of Rousseau's literary talents, greatly celebrated still among his

countrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like himself, are what I

call unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. There is a sensuality in

Rousseau. Combined with such an intellectual gift as his, it makes

pictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness: but they are not

genuinely poetical. Not white sunlight: something _operatic_; a kind

of rosepink, artificial bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it is

universal, among the French since his time. Madame de Staël has

something of it; St. Pierre; and down onwards to the present

astonishing convulsionary 'Literature of Desperation,' it is

everywhere abundant. That same _rosepink_ is not the right hue. Look

at a Shakspeare, at a Goethe, even at a Walter Scott! He who has once

seen into this, has seen the difference of the True from the

Sham-True, and will discriminate them ever afterwards.

We had to observe in Johnson how much good a Prophet, under all

disadvantages and disorganisations, can accomplish for the world. In

Rousseau we are called to look rather at the fearful amount of evil

which, under such disorganisation, may accompany the good.

Historically it is a most pregnant spectacle, that of Rousseau.

Banished into Paris garrets, in the gloomy company of his own Thoughts

and Necessities there; driven from post to pillar; fretted,

exasperated till the heart of him went mad, he had grown to feel

deeply that the world was not his friend nor the world's law. It was

expedient, if anyway possible, that such a man should _not_ have been

set in flat hostility with the world. He could be cooped into garrets,

laughed at as a maniac, left to starve like a wild beast in his

cage;--but he could not be hindered from setting the world on fire.

The French Revolution found its Evangelist in Rousseau. His

semi-delirious speculations on the miseries of civilised life, the

preferability of the savage to the civilised, and suchlike, helped

well to produce a whole delirium in France generally. True, you may

well ask, What could the world, the governors of the world, do with

such a man? Difficult to say what the governors of the world could do

with him! What he could do with them is unhappily clear

enough,--_guillotine_ a great many of them! Enough now of Rousseau.

* * * * *

It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbelieving, secondhand

Eighteenth Century, that of a Hero starting up, among the artificial

pasteboard figures and productions, in the guise of a Robert Burns.

Like a little well in the rocky desert places,--like a sudden

splendour of Heaven in the artificial Vauxhall! People knew not what

to make of it. They took it for a piece of the Vauxhall fire-work;

alas, it _let_ itself be so taken, though struggling half-blindly, as

in bitterness of death, against that! Perhaps no man had such a false

reception from his fellow-men. Once more a very wasteful life-drama

was enacted under the sun.

The tragedy of Burns's life is known to all of you. Surely we may say,

if discrepancy between place held and place merited constitute

perverseness of lot for a man, no lot could be more perverse than

Burns's. Among those secondhand acting-figures, _mimes_ for most part,

of the Eighteenth Century, once more a giant Original man; one of

those men who reach down to the perennial Deeps, who take rank with

the Heroic among men: and he was born in a poor Ayrshire hut. The

largest soul of all the British lands came among us in the shape of a

hard-handed Scottish Peasant.

His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things; did not succeed

in any; was involved in continual difficulties. The Steward, Factor as

the Scotch call him, used to send letters and threatenings, Burns says,

'which threw us all into tears.' The brave, hard-toiling,

hard-suffering Father, his brave heroine of a wife; and those children,

of whom Robert was one! In this Earth, so wide otherwise, no shelter

for _them_. The letters 'threw us all into tears:' figure it. The brave

Father, I say always;--a _silent_ Hero and Poet; without whom the son

had never been a speaking one! Burns's Schoolmaster came afterwards to

London, learnt what good society was; but declares that in no meeting

of men did he ever enjoy better discourse than at the hearth of this

peasant. And his poor 'seven acres of nursery-ground,'--not that, nor

the miserable patch of clay-farm, nor anything he tried to get a living

by, would prosper with him; he had a sore unequal battle all his days.

But he stood to it valiantly; a wise, faithful, unconquerable

man;--swallowing-down how many sore sufferings daily into silence;

fighting like an unseen Hero,--nobody publishing newspaper paragraphs

about his nobleness; voting pieces of plate to him! However, he was not

lost: nothing is lost. Robert is there; the outcome of him,--and indeed

of many generations of such as him.

This Burns appears under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor, born

only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that, in a

rustic special dialect, known only to a small province of the country

he lived in. Had he written, even what he did write, in the general

language of England, I doubt not he had already become universally

recognised as being, or capable to be, one of our greatest men. That

he should have tempted so many to penetrate through the rough husk of

that dialect of his, is proof that there lay something far from common

within it. He has gained a certain recognition, and is continuing to

do so over all quarters of our wide Saxon world: wheresoever a Saxon

dialect is spoken, it begins to be understood, by personal inspection

of this and the other, that one of the most considerable Saxon men of

the Eighteenth century was an Ayrshire Peasant named Robert Burns.

Yes, I will say, here too was a piece of the right Saxon stuff: strong

as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world;--rock, yet with

wells of living softness in it! A wild impetuous whirlwind of passion

and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly _melody_ dwelling in

the heart of it. A noble rough genuineness; homely, rustic, honest;

true simplicity of strength: with its lightning-fire, with its soft

dewy pity;--like the old Norse Thor, the Peasant-god!--

Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and worth, has told me

that Robert, in his young days, in spite of their hardship, was

usually the gayest of speech; a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter,

sense and heart; far pleasanter to hear there, stript cutting peats in

the bog, or suchlike, than he ever afterwards knew him. I can well

believe it. This basis of mirth ('_fond gaillard_,' as old Marquis

Mirabeau calls it), a primal-element of sunshine and joyfulness,

coupled with his other deep and earnest qualities, is one of the most

attractive characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope dwells in

him; spite of his tragical history, he is not a mourning man. He

shakes his sorrows gallantly aside; bounds forth victorious over them.

It is as the lion shaking 'dew-drops from his mane;' as the

swift-bounding horse, that _laughs_ at the shaking of the spear.--But

indeed, Hope, Mirth, of the sort like Burns's, are they not the

outcome properly of warm generous affection,--such as is the beginning

of all to every man?

You would think it strange if I called Burns the most gifted British

soul we had in all that century of his: and yet I believe the day is

coming when there will be little danger in saying so. His writings,

all that he _did_ under such obstructions, are only a poor fragment of

him. Professor Stewart remarked very justly, what indeed is true of

all Poets good for much, that his poetry was not any particular

faculty; but the general result of a naturally vigorous original mind

expressing itself in that way. Burns's gifts, expressed in

conversation, are the theme of all that ever heard him. All kinds of

gifts: from the gracefulest utterances of courtesy, to the highest

fire of passionate speech; loud floods of mirth, soft wailings of

affection, laconic emphasis, clear piercing insight; all was in him.

Witty duchesses celebrate him as a man whose speech 'led them off

their feet.' This is beautiful: but still more beautiful that which

Mr. Lockhart has recorded, which I have more than once alluded to, How

the waiters and ostlers at inns would get out of bed, and come

crowding to hear this man speak! Waiters and ostlers:--they too were

men, and here was a man! I have heard much about his speech; but one

of the best things I ever heard of it was, last year, from a venerable

gentleman long familiar with him. That it was speech distinguished by

always _having something in it_. "He spoke rather little than much,"

this old man told me; "sat rather silent in those early days, as in

the company of persons above him; and always when he did speak, it was

to throw new light on the matter." I know not why any one should ever

speak otherwise!--But if we look at his general force of soul, his

healthy _robustness_ everyway, the rugged down-rightness, penetration,

generous valour and manfulness that was in him,--where shall we

readily find a better-gifted man?

Among the great men of the Eighteenth Century, I sometimes feel as if

Burns might be found to resemble Mirabeau more than any other. They

differ widely in vesture; yet look at them intrinsically. There is the

same burly thick-necked strength of body as of soul;--built, in both

cases, on what the old Marquis calls a _fond gaillard_. By nature, by

course of breeding, indeed by nation, Mirabeau has much more of

bluster; a noisy, forward, unresting man. But the characteristic of

Mirabeau too is veracity and sense, power of true _insight_,

superiority of vision. The thing that he says is worth remembering. It

is a flash of insight into some object or other: so do both these men

speak. The same raging passions; capable too in both of manifesting

themselves as the tenderest noble affections. Wit, wild laughter,

energy, directness, sincerity: these were in both. The types of the

two men are not dissimilar. Burns too could have governed, debated in

National Assemblies; politicised, as few could. Alas, the courage

which had to exhibit itself in capture of smuggling schooners in the

Solway Frith; in keeping _silence_ over so much, where no good speech,

but only inarticulate rage was possible: this might have bellowed

forth Ushers de Brézé and the like; and made itself visible to all

men, in managing of kingdoms, in ruling of great ever-memorable

epochs! But they said to him reprovingly, his Official Superiors said,

and wrote: 'You are to work, not think.' Of your _thinking_-faculty,

the greatest in this land, we have no need; you are to gauge beer

there; for that only are _you_ wanted. Very notable;--and worth

mentioning, though we know what is to be said and answered! As if

Thought, Power of Thinking, were not, at all times, in all places and

situations of the world, precisely the thing that _was_ wanted. The

fatal man, is he not always the _un_thinking man, the man who cannot

think and _see_; but only grope, and hallucinate, and _mis_see the

nature of the thing he works with? He missees it, mis_takes_ it as we

say; takes it for one thing, and it _is_ another thing,--and leaves

him standing like a Futility there! He is the fatal man; unutterably

fatal, put in the high places of men.--"Why complain of this?" say

some: "Strength is mournfully denied its arena; that was true from of

old." Doubtless; and the worse for the _arena_, answer I!

_Complaining_ profits little; stating of the truth may profit. That a

Europe, with its French Revolution just breaking out, finds no need of

a Burns except for gauging beer,--is a thing I, for one, cannot

_rejoice_ at!--

Once more we have to say here, that the chief quality of Burns is the

_sincerity_ of him. So in his Poetry, so in his Life. The Song he

sings is not of fantasticalities; it is of a thing felt, really there;

the prime merit of this, as of all in him, and of his Life generally,

is truth. The Life of Burns is what we may call a great tragic

sincerity. A sort of savage sincerity,--not cruel, far from that; but

wild, wrestling naked with the truth of things. In that sense, there

is something of the savage in all great men.

Hero-worship,--Odin, Burns? Well; these Men of Letters too were not

without a kind of Hero-worship: but what a strange condition has that

got into now! The waiters and ostlers of Scotch inns, prying about the

door, eager to catch any word that fell from Burns, were doing

unconscious reverence to the Heroic. Johnson had his Boswell for

worshipper. Rousseau had worshippers enough; princes calling on him in

his mean garret; the great, the beautiful doing reverence to the poor

moonstruck man. For himself a most portentous contradiction; the two

ends of his life not to be brought into harmony. He sits at the tables

of grandees; and has to copy music for his own living. He cannot even

get his music copied. "By dint of dining out," says he, "I run the

risk of dying by starvation at home." For his worshippers too a most

questionable thing! If doing Hero-worship well or badly be the test of

vital wellbeing or illbeing to a generation, can we say that _these_

generations are very first-rate?--And yet our heroic Men of Letters do

teach, govern, are kings, priests, or what you like to call them;

intrinsically there is no preventing it by any means whatever. The

world _has_ to obey him who thinks and sees in the world. The world

can alter the manner of that; can either have it as blessed continuous

summer sunshine, or as unblessed black thunder and tornado,--with

unspeakable difference of profit for the world! The manner of it is

very alterable; the matter and fact of it is not alterable by any

power under the sky. Light; or, failing that, lightning: the world can

take its choice. Not whether we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, or

what we call him; but whether we believe the word he tells us: there

it all lies. If it be a true word, we shall have to believe it;

believing it, we shall have to do it. What _name_ or welcome we give

him or it, is a point that concerns ourselves mainly. _It_, the new

Truth, new deeper revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verily

of the nature of a message from on high; and must and will have itself

obeyed.--

My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns's history,--his

visit to Edinburgh. Often it seems to me as if his demeanour there

were the highest proof he gave of what a fund of worth and genuine

manhood was in him. If we think of it, few heavier burdens could be

laid on the strength of a man. So sudden; all common _Lionism_, which

ruins innumerable men, was as nothing to this. It is as if Napoleon

had been made a King of, not gradually, but at once from the Artillery

Lieutenancy in the Regiment La Fère. Burns, still only in his

twenty-seventh year, is no longer even a ploughman; he is flying to

the West Indies to escape disgrace and a jail. This month he is a

ruined peasant, his wages seven pounds a year, and these gone from

him: next month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing down

jewelled Duchesses to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes! Adversity is

sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity,

there are a hundred that will stand adversity. I admire much the way

in which Burns met all this. Perhaps no man one could point out, was

ever so sorely tried, and so little forgot himself. Tranquil,

unastonished; not abashed, not inflated, neither awkwardness nor

affectation: he feels that _he_ there is the man Robert Burns; that

the 'rank is but the guinea-stamp;' that the celebrity is but the

candle-light, which will show _what_ man, not in the least make him a

better or other man! Alas, it may readily, unless he look to it, make

him a _worse_ man; a wretched inflated wind-bag,--inflated till he

_burst_ and become a _dead_ lion; for whom, as some one has said,

'there is no resurrection of the body;' worse than a living

dog!--Burns is admirable here.

And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these Lion-hunters were

the ruin and death of Burns. It was they that rendered it impossible

for him to live! They gathered round him in his Farm; hindered his

industry; no place was remote enough from them. He could not get his

Lionism forgotten, honestly as he was disposed to do so. He falls into

discontents, into miseries, faults; the world getting ever more

desolate for him; health, character, peace of mind all gone;--solitary

enough now. It is tragical to think of! These men came but to _see_

him; it was out of no sympathy with him, nor no hatred to him. They

came to get a little amusement: they got their amusement;--and the

Hero's life went for it!

Richter says, in the Island of Sumatra, there is a kind of

'Light-chafers,' large Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits, and

illuminate the ways with at night. Persons of condition can thus

travel with a pleasant radiance, which they much admire. Great honour

to the Fire-flies! But--!--

LECTURE VI

THE HERO AS KING. CROMWELL, NAPOLEON: MODERN REVOLUTIONISM.

[_Friday, 22nd May 1840_]

We come now to the last form of Heroism; that which we call Kingship.

The Commander over men; he to whose will our wills are to be

subordinated, and loyally surrender themselves, and find their welfare

in doing so, may be reckoned the most important of Great Men. He is

practically the summary for us of _all_ the various figures of

Heroism; Priest, Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of spiritual

dignity we can fancy to reside in a man, embodies itself here, to

_command_ over us, to furnish us with constant practical teaching, to

tell us for the day and hour what we are to _do_. He is called _Rex_,

Regulator, _Roi_: our own name is still better; King, _Könning_, which

means _Can_-ning, Ableman.

Numerous considerations, pointing towards deep, questionable, and

indeed unfathomable regions, present themselves here: on the most of

which we must resolutely for the present forbear to speak at all. As

Burke said that perhaps fair _Trial by Jury_ was the Soul of

Government, and that all legislation, administration, parliamentary

debating, and the rest of it, went on, in 'order to bring twelve

impartial men into a jury-box;'--so, by much stronger reason, may I

say here, that the finding of your _Ableman_ and getting him invested

with the _symbols of ability_, with dignity, worship (_worth_-ship),

royalty, kinghood, or whatever we call it, so that _he_ may actually

have room to guide according to his faculty of doing it,--is the

business, well or ill accomplished, of all social procedure whatsoever

in this world! Hustings-speeches, Parliamentary motions, Reform Bills,

French Revolutions, all mean at heart this; or else nothing. Find in

any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise _him_ to the

supreme place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect

government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence,

voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can

improve it a whit. It is in the perfect state: an ideal country. The

Ablest Man; he means also the truest-hearted, justest, the Noblest

Man: what he _tells us to do_ must be precisely the wisest, fittest,

that we could anywhere or anyhow learn;--the thing which it will in

all ways behove us, with right loyal thankfulness, and nothing

doubting, to do! Our _doing_ and life were then, so far as government

could regulate it, well regulated; that were the ideal of

constitutions.

Alas, we know very well that Ideals can never be completely embodied

in practice. Ideals must ever lie a very great way off; and we will

right thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable

approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously

'measure by a scale of perfection the meagre product of reality' in

this poor world of ours. We will esteem him no wise man; we will

esteem him a sickly, discontented, foolish man. And yet, on the other

hand, it is never to be forgotten that Ideals do exist; that if they

be not approximated to at all, the whole matter goes to wreck!

Infallibly. No bricklayer builds a wall _perfectly_ perpendicular,

mathematically this is not possible; a certain degree of

perpendicularity suffices him; and he, like a good bricklayer, who

must have done with his job, leaves it so. And yet if he sway _too

much_ from the perpendicular; above all, if he throw plummet and level

quite away from him, and pile brick on brick heedless, just as it

comes to hand--! Such bricklayer, I think, is in a bad way. _He_ has

forgotten himself: but the Law of Gravitation does not forget to act

on him; he and his wall rush-down into confused welter of ruin!--

This is the history of all rebellions, French Revolutions, social

explosions in ancient or modern times. You have put the too _Un_able

man at the head of affairs! The too ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man.

You have forgotten that there is any rule, or natural necessity

whatever, of putting the Able Man there. Brick must lie on brick as it

may and can. Unable Simulacrum of Ability, _quack_, in a word, must

adjust himself with quack, in all manner of administration of human

things;--which accordingly lie unadministered, fermenting into

unmeasured masses of failure, of indigent misery: in the outward, and

in the inward or spiritual, miserable millions stretch-out the hand

for their due supply, and it is not there. The 'law of gravitation'

acts; Nature's laws do none of them forget to act. The miserable

millions burst-forth into Sansculottism, or some other sort of

madness; bricks and bricklayers lie as a fatal chaos!--

Much sorry stuff, written some hundred years ago or more, about the

'Divine right of Kings,' moulders unread now in the Public Libraries

of this country. Far be it from us to disturb the calm process by

which it is disappearing harmlessly from the earth, in those

repositories! At the same time, not to let the immense rubbish go

without leaving us, as it ought, some soul of it behind--I will say

that it did mean something; something true, which it is important for

us and all men to keep in mind. To assert that in whatever man you

chose to lay hold of (by this or the other plan of clutching at him);

and clapt a round piece of metal on the head of, and called

King,--there straightway came to reside a divine virtue, so that _he_

became a kind of God, and a Divinity inspired him with faculty and

right to rule over you to all lengths: this,--what can we do with this

but leave it to rot silently in the Public Libraries? But I will say

withal, and that is what these Divine-right men meant, That in Kings,

and in all human Authorities, and relations that men god-created can

form among each other, there is verily either a Divine Right or else a

Diabolic Wrong; one or the other of these two! For it is false

altogether, what the last Sceptical Century taught us, that this world

is a steam-engine. There is a God in this world; and a God's-sanction,

or else the violation of such, does look-out from all ruling and

obedience, from all moral acts of men. There is no act more moral

between men than that of rule and obedience. Woe to him that claims

obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is!

God's law is in that, I say, however the Parchment-laws may run: there

is a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong at the heart of every claim

that one man makes upon another.

It can do none of us harm to reflect on this: in all the relations of

life it will concern us; in Loyalty and Royalty, the highest of these.

I esteem the modern error, That all goes by self-interest and the

checking and balancing of greedy knaveries, and that, in short, there

is nothing divine whatever in the association of men, a still more

despicable error, natural as it is to an unbelieving century, than

that of a 'divine right' in people _called_ Kings. I say, Find me the

true _Könning_, King, or Able-man, and he _has_ a divine right over

me. That we knew in some tolerable measure how to find him, and that

all men were ready to acknowledge his divine right when found: this is

precisely the healing which a sick world is everywhere, in these ages,

seeking after! The true King, as guide of the practical, has ever

something of the Pontiff in him,--guide of the spiritual, from which

all practice has its rise. This too is a true saying, That the _King_

is head of the _Church_.--But we will leave the Polemic stuff of a

dead century to lie quiet on its bookshelves.

* * * * *

Certainly it is a fearful business, that of having your Ableman to

_seek_, and not knowing in what manner to proceed about it! That is

the world's sad predicament in these times of ours. They are times of

Revolution, and have long been. The bricklayer with his bricks, no

longer heedful of plummet or the law of gravitation, have toppled,

tumbled, and it all welters as we see! But the beginning of it was not

the French Revolution; that is rather the _end_, we can hope. It were

truer to say, the _beginning_ was three centuries farther back: in the

Reformation of Luther. That the thing which still called itself

Christian Church had become a Falsehood, and brazenly went about

pretending to pardon men's sins for metallic coined money, and to do

much else which in the everlasting truth of Nature it did _not_ now

do: here lay the vital malady. The inward being wrong, all outward

went ever more and more wrong. Belief died away; all was Doubt,

Disbelief. The builder _cast away_ his plummet; said to himself, "What

is gravitation? Brick lies on brick there!" Alas, does it not still

sound strange to many of us, the assertion that there is a God's truth

in the business of god-created men; that all is not a kind of grimace,

an 'expediency,' diplomacy, one knows not what!--

From that first necessary assertion of Luther's, "You, self-styled

_Papa_, you are no Father in God at all; you are--a Chimera, whom I

know not how to name in polite language!"--from that onwards to the

shout which rose round Camille Desmoulins in the Palais-Royal, "_Aux

armes!_" when the people had burst-up against _all_ manner of

Chimeras,--I find a natural historical sequence. That shout too, so

frightful, half-infernal, was a great matter. Once more the voice of

awakened nations; starting confusedly, as out of nightmare, as out of

death-sleep, into some dim feeling that Life was real; that

God's-world was not an expediency and diplomacy! Infernal;--yes, since

they would not have it otherwise. Infernal, since not celestial or

terrestrial!--Hollowness, insincerity _has_ to cease;--sincerity of

some sort has to begin. Cost what it may, reigns of terror, horrors of

French Revolution or what else, we have to return to truth. Here is a

Truth, as I said: a Truth clad in hell-fire, since they would not but

have it so!--

A common theory among considerable parties of men in England and

elsewhere used to be, that the French Nation had, in those days, as it

were gone _mad_; that the French Revolution was a general act of

insanity, a temporary conversion of France and large sections of the

world into a kind of Bedlam. The Event had risen and raged; but was a

madness and nonentity,--gone now happily into the region of Dreams and

the Picturesque!--To such comfortable philosophers, the Three Days of

July 1830 must have been a surprising phenomenon. Here is the French

Nation risen again, in musketry and death-struggle, out shooting and

being shot, to make that same mad French Revolution good! The sons and

grandsons of those men, it would seem, persist in the enterprise: they

do not disown it; they will have it made good; will have themselves

shot, if it be not made good! To philosophers who had made-up their

life-system on that 'madness' quietus, no phenomenon could be more

alarming. Poor Niebuhr, they say, the Prussian Professor and

Historian, fell broken-hearted in consequence; sickened, if we can

believe it, and died of the Three Days! It was surely not a very

heroic death;--little better than Racine's, dying because Louis

Fourteenth looked sternly on him once. The world had stood some

considerable shocks, in its time; might have been expected to survive

the Three Days too, and be found turning on its axis after even them!

The Three Days told all mortals that the old French Revolution, mad as

it might look, was not a transitory ebullition of Bedlam, but a

genuine product of this Earth where we all live; that it was verily a

Fact, and that the world in general would do well everywhere to regard

it as such.

Truly, without the French Revolution, one would not know what to make

of an age like this at all. We will hail the French Revolution, as

shipwrecked mariners might the sternest rock, in a world otherwise all

of baseless sea and waves. A true Apocalypse, though a terrible one,

to this false withered artificial time; testifying once more that

Nature is _preter_natural; if not divine, then diabolic; that

Semblance is not reality; that it has to become reality, or the world

will take-fire under it,--burn _it_ into what it is, namely Nothing!

Plausibility has ended; empty Routine has ended; much has ended. This,

as with a Trump of Doom, has been proclaimed to all men. They are the

wisest who will learn it soonest. Long confused generations before it

be learned; peace impossible till it be! The earnest man, surrounded,

as ever, with a world of inconsistencies, can await patiently,

patiently strive to do _his_ work, in the midst of that. Sentence of

Death is written down in Heaven against all that; sentence of Death is

now proclaimed on the Earth against it: this he with his eyes may see.

And surely, I should say, considering the other side of the matter,

what enormous difficulties lie there, and how fast, fearfully fast, in

all countries, the inexorable demand for solution of them is pressing

on,--he may easily find other work to do than labouring in the

Sansculottic province at this time of day!

To me, in these circumstances, that of 'Hero-worship' becomes a fact

inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world

at present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management of

the world. Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that

men ever instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of

Heroes being sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence Heroes

when sent: it shines like a polestar through smoke-clouds,

dust-clouds, and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration.

Hero-worship would have sounded very strange to those workers and

fighters in the French Revolution. Not reverence for Great Men; not

any hope or belief, or even wish, that Great Men could again appear in

the world! Nature, turned into a 'Machine,' was as if effete now;

could not any longer produce Great Men:--I can tell her, she may

give-up the trade altogether, then; we cannot do without Great

Men!--But neither have I any quarrel with that of 'Liberty and

Equality;' with the faith that, wise great men being impossible, a

level immensity of foolish small men would suffice. It was a natural

faith then and there. "Liberty and Equality; no Authority needed any

longer. Hero-worship, reverence for _such_ Authorities, has proved

false, is itself a falsehood; no more of it! We have had such

_forgeries_, we will now trust nothing. So many base plated coins

passing in the market, the belief has now become common that no gold

any longer exists,--and even that we can do very well without gold!" I

find this, among other things, in that universal cry of Liberty and

Equality; and find it very natural, as matters then stood.

And yet surely it is but the _transition_ from false to true.

Considered as the whole truth, it is false altogether;--the product of

entire sceptical blindness, as yet only _struggling_ to see.

Hero-worship exists forever, and everywhere: not Loyalty alone; it

extends from divine adoration down to the lowest practical regions of

life. 'Bending before men,' if it is not to be a mere empty grimace,

better dispensed with than practised, is Hero-worship,--a recognition

that there does dwell in that presence of our brother something

divine; that every created man, as Novalis said, is a 'revelation in

the Flesh.' They were Poets too, that devised all those graceful

courtesies which make life noble! Courtesy is not a falsehood or

grimace; it need not be such. And Loyalty, religious Worship itself,

are still possible; nay still inevitable.

May we not say, moreover, while so many of our late Heroes have worked

rather as revolutionary men, that nevertheless every Great Man, every

genuine man, is by the nature of him a son of Order, not of Disorder?

It is a tragical position for a true man to work in revolutions. He

seems an anarchist; and indeed a painful element of anarchy does

encumber him at every step,--him to whose whole soul anarchy is

hostile, hateful. His mission is Order; every man's is. He is here to

make what was disorderly, chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He is

the missionary of Order. Is not all work of man in this world a

_making of Order_? The carpenter finds rough trees: shapes them,

constrains them into square fitness, into purpose and use. We are all

born enemies of Disorder: it is tragical for us all to be concerned in

image-breaking and down-pulling; for the Great Man, _more_ a man than

we, it is doubly tragical.

Thus too all human things, maddest French Sansculottisms, do and must

work towards Order. I say, there is not a _man_ in them, raging in the

thickest of the madness, but is impelled withal, at all moments,

towards Order. His very life means that; Disorder is dissolution,

death. No chaos but it seeks a _centre_ to revolve round. While man is

man, some Cromwell or Napoleon is the necessary finish of a

Sansculottism.--Curious: in those days when Hero-worship was the most

incredible thing to every one, how it does come-out nevertheless, and

assert itself practically, in a way which all have to credit. Divine

_right_, take it on the great scale, is found to mean divine _might_

withal! While old false Formulas are getting trampled everywhere into

destruction, new genuine Substances unexpectedly unfold themselves

indestructible. In rebellious ages, when Kingship itself seems dead

and abolished, Cromwell, Napoleon step-forth again as Kings. The

history of these men is what we have now to look at, as our last

phasis of Heroism. The old ages are brought back to us; the manner in

which Kings were made, and Kingship itself first took rise, is again

exhibited in the history of these Two.

* * * * *

We have had many civil-wars in England; wars of Red and White Roses,

wars of Simon de Montfort; wars enough, which are not very memorable.

But that war of the Puritans has a significance which belongs to no

one of the others. Trusting to your candour, which will suggest on the

other side what I have not room to say, I will call it a section once

more of that great universal war which alone makes-up the true History

of the World,--the war of Belief against Unbelief! The struggle of men

intent on the real essence of things, against men intent on the

semblances and forms of things. The Puritans, to many, seem mere

savage Iconoclasts, fierce destroyers of Forms; but it were more just

to call them haters of _untrue_ Forms. I hope we know how to respect

Laud and his King as well as them. Poor Laud seems to me to have been

weak and ill-starred, not dishonest; an unfortunate Pedant rather than

anything worse. His 'Dreams' and superstitions, at which they laugh

so, have an affectionate, lovable kind of character. He is like a

College-Tutor, whose whole world is forms, College-rules; whose notion

is that these are the life and safety of the world. He is placed

suddenly, with that unalterable luckless notion of his, at the head

not of a College but of a Nation, to regulate the most complex

deep-reaching interests of men. He thinks they ought to go by the old

decent regulations; nay that their salvation will lie in extending and

improving these. Like a weak man, he drives with spasmodic vehemence

towards his purpose; cramps himself to it, heeding no voice of

prudence, no cry of pity: He will have his College-rules obeyed by his

Collegians; that first; and till that, nothing. He is an ill-starred

Pedant, as I said. He would have it the world was a College of that

kind, and the world _was not_ that. Alas, was not his doom stern

enough? Whatever wrongs he did, were they not all frightfully avenged

on him?

It is meritorious to insist on forms; Religion and all else naturally

clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the _formed_ world is the only

habitable one. The naked formlessness of Puritanism is not the thing I

praise in the Puritans; it is the thing I pity,--praising only the

spirit which had rendered that inevitable! All substances clothe

themselves in forms: but there are suitable true forms, and then there

are untrue unsuitable. As the briefest definition, one might say,

Forms which _grow_ round a substance, if we rightly understand that,

will correspond to the real nature and purport of it, will be true,

good; forms which are consciously _put_ round a substance, bad. I

invite you to reflect on this. It distinguishes true from false in

Ceremonial Form, earnest solemnity from empty pageant, in all human

things.

There must be a veracity, a natural spontaneity in forms. In the

commonest meeting of men, a person making, what we call, 'set

speeches,' is not he an offence? In the mere drawing-room, whatsoever

courtesies you see to be grimaces, prompted by no spontaneous reality

within, are a thing you wish to get away from. But suppose now it were

some matter of vital concernment, some transcendent matter (as Divine

Worship is), about which your whole soul, struck dumb with its excess

of feeling, knew not how to _form_ itself into utterance at all, and

preferred formless silence to any utterance there possible,--what

should we say of a man coming forward to represent or utter it for you

in the way of upholsterer-mummery? Such a man,--let him depart

swiftly, if he love himself! You have lost your only son; are mute,

struck down, without even tears: an importunate man importunately

offers to celebrate Funeral Games for him in the manner of the Greeks!

Such mummery is not only not to be accepted,--it is hateful,

unendurable. It is what the old Prophets called 'Idolatry,'

worshipping of hollow _shows_; what all earnest men do and will

reject. We can partly understand what those poor Puritans meant. Laud

dedicating that St. Catherine Creed's Church, in the manner we have it

described; with his multiplied ceremonial bowings, gesticulations,

exclamations: surely it is rather the rigorous formal _Pedant_, intent

on his 'College-rules,' than the earnest Prophet, intent on the

essence of the matter!

Puritanism found _such_ forms insupportable; trampled on such

forms;--we have to excuse it for saying, No form at all rather than

such! It stood preaching in its bare pulpit, with nothing but the

Bible in its hand. Nay, a man preaching from his earnest _soul_ into

the earnest _souls_ of men: is not this virtually the essence of all

Churches whatsoever? The nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is

preferable to any semblance, however dignified. Besides, it will

clothe itself with _due_ semblance by and by, if it be real. No fear

of that; actually no fear at all. Given the living _man_, there will

be found _clothes_ for him; he will find himself clothes. But the

suit-of-clothes pretending that _it_ is both clothes and man--!--We

cannot 'fight the French' by three-hundred-thousand red uniforms;

there must be _men_ in the inside of them! Semblance, I assert, must

actually _not_ divorce itself from Reality. If Semblance do,--why then

there must be men found to rebel against Semblance, for it has become

a lie! These two Antagonisms at war here, in the case of Laud and the

Puritans, are as old nearly as the world. They went to fierce battle

over England in that age; and fought-out their confused controversy to

a certain length, with many results for all of us.

* * * * *

In the age which directly followed that of the Puritans, their cause

or themselves were little likely to have justice done them. Charles

Second and his Rochesters were not the kind of men you would set to

judge what the worth or meaning of such men might have been. That

there could be any faith or truth in the life of a man, was what these

poor Rochesters, and the age they ushered-in, had forgotten.

Puritanism was hung on gibbets,--like the bones of the leading

Puritans. Its work nevertheless went on accomplishing itself. All true

work of a man, hang the author of it on what gibbet you like, must and

will accomplish itself. We have our _Habeas-Corpus_, our free

Representation of the People; acknowledgment, wide as the world, that

all men are, or else must, shall, and will become, what we call _free_

men;--men with their life grounded on reality and justice, not on

tradition, which has become unjust and a chimera! This in part and

much besides this, was the work of the Puritans.

And indeed, as these things became gradually manifest, the character

of the Puritans began to clear itself. Their memories were, one after

another, taken _down_ from the gibbet; nay a certain portion of them

are now, in these days, as good as canonised. Eliot, Hampden, Pym, nay

Ludlow, Hutchinson, Vane himself, are admitted to be a kind of Heroes;

political Conscript Fathers, to whom in no small degree we owe what

makes us a free England: it would not be safe for anybody to designate

these men as wicked now. Few Puritans of note but find their

apologists somewhere, and have a certain reverence paid them by

earnest men. One Puritan, I think, and almost he alone, our poor

Cromwell, seems to hang yet on the gibbet, and find no hearty

apologist anywhere. Him neither saint nor sinner will acquit of great

wickedness. A man of ability, infinite talent, courage, and so forth:

but he betrayed the Cause. Selfish ambition, dishonesty, duplicity; a

fierce, coarse, hypocritical _Tartufe_; turning all that noble

Struggle for constitutional Liberty into a sorry farce played for his

own benefit: this and worse is the character they give of Cromwell.

And then there come contrasts with Washington and others; above all,

with these noble Pyms and Hampdens, whose noble work he stole for

himself, and ruined into a futility and deformity.

This view of Cromwell seems to me the not unnatural product of a

century like the Eighteenth. As we said of the Valet, so of the

Sceptic: He does not know a Hero when he sees him! The Valet expected

purple mantles, gilt sceptres, body-guards and flourishes of trumpets:

the Sceptic of the Eighteenth century looks for regulated respectable

Formulas, 'Principles,' or what else he may call them; a style of

speech and conduct which has got to seem 'respectable,' which can

plead for itself in a handsome articulate manner, and gain the

suffrages of an enlightened sceptical Eighteenth century! It is, at

bottom, the same thing that both the Valet and he expect: the

garnitures of some _acknowledged_ royalty, which _then_ they will

acknowledge! The King coming to them in the rugged _un_formulistic

state shall be no King.

For my own share, far be it from me to say or insinuate a word of

disparagement against such characters as Hampden, Eliot, Pym; whom I

believe to have been right worthy and useful men. I have read

diligently what books and documents about them I could come at;--with

the honestest wish to admire, to love and worship them like Heroes;

but I am sorry to say, if the real truth must be told, with very

indifferent success! At bottom, I found that it would not do. They are

very noble men, these; step along in their stately way, with their

measured euphemisms, philosophies, parliamentary eloquences,

Ship-moneys, _Monarchies of Man_; a most constitutional, unblamable,

dignified set of men. But the heart remains cold before them; the

fancy alone endeavours to get-up some worship of them. What man's

heart does, in reality, break-forth into any fire of brotherly love

for these men? They are become dreadfully dull men! One breaks-down

often enough in the constitutional eloquence of the admirable Pym,

with his 'seventhly and lastly.' You find that it may be the

admirablest thing in the world, but that it is heavy,--heavy as lead,

barren as brick-clay; that, in a word, for you there is little or

nothing now surviving there! One leaves all these Nobilities standing

in their niches of honour: the rugged out-cast Cromwell, he is the man

of them all in whom one still finds human stuff. The great savage

_Baresark_: he could write no euphemistic _Monarchy of Man_; did not

speak, did not work with glib regularity; had no straight story to

tell for himself anywhere. But he stood bare, not cased in euphemistic

coat-of-mail; he grappled like a giant, face to face, heart to heart,

with the naked truth of things! That, after all, is the sort of man

for one. I plead guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other sorts

of men. Smooth-shaven Respectabilities not a few one finds, that are

not good for much. Small thanks to a man for keeping his hands clean,

who would not touch the work but with gloves on!

Neither, on the whole, does this constitutional tolerance of the

Eighteenth century for the other happier Puritans seem to be a very

great matter. One might say, it is but a piece of Formulism and

Scepticism, like the rest. They tell us, It was a sorrowful thing to

consider that the foundation of our English Liberties should have been

laid by 'Superstition.' These Puritans came forward with Calvinistic

incredible Creeds, Anti-Laudisms, Westminster Confessions; demanding,

chiefly of all, that they should have liberty to _worship_ in their

own way. Liberty to _tax_ themselves: that was the thing they should

have demanded! It was Superstition, Fanaticism, disgraceful Ignorance

of Constitutional Philosophy to insist on the other thing!--Liberty to

_tax_ oneself? Not to pay-out money from your pocket except on reason

shown? No century, I think, but a rather barren one would have fixed

on that as the first right of man! I should say, on the contrary, A

just man will generally have better cause than _money_ in what shape

soever, before deciding to revolt against his Government. Ours is a

most confused world; in which a good man will be thankful to see any

kind of Government maintain itself in a not insupportable manner; and

here in England, to this hour, if he is not ready to pay a great many

taxes which _he_ can see very small reason in, it will not go well

with him, I think! He must try some other climate than this.

Taxgatherer? Money? He will say: "Take my money, since you _can_, and

it is so desirable to you; take it,--and take yourself away with it;

and leave me alone to my work here. _I_ am still here; can still work,

after all the money you have taken from me!" But if they come to him,

and say, "Acknowledge a Lie; pretend to say you are worshipping God,

when you are not doing it: believe not the thing that _you_ find true,

but the thing that I find, or pretend to find true!" He will answer:

"No; by God's help, no! You may take my purse; but I cannot have my

moral Self annihilated. The purse is any Highwayman's who might meet

me with a loaded pistol: but the Self is mine and God my Maker's; it

is not yours; and I will resist you to the death, and revolt against

you, and, on the whole, front all manner of extremities, accusations

and confusions, in defence of that!"--

Really, it seems to me the one reason which could justify revolting,

this of the Puritans. It has been the soul of all just revolts among

men. Not _Hunger_ alone produced even the French Revolution: no, but

the feeling of the insupportable all-pervading _Falsehood_ which had

now embodied itself in Hunger, in universal material Scarcity and

Nonentity, and thereby become _indisputably_ false in the eyes of all!

We will leave the Eighteenth century with its 'liberty to tax itself.'

We will not astonish ourselves that the meaning of such men as the

Puritans remained dim to it. To men who believe in no reality at all,

how shall a _real_ human soul, the intensest of all realities, as it

were the Voice of this world's Maker still speaking to _us_,--be

intelligible? What it cannot reduce into constitutional doctrines

relative to 'taxing,' or other the like material interest, gross,

palpable to the sense, such a century will needs reject as an

amorphous heap of rubbish. Hampdens, Pyms, and Ship-money will be the

theme of much constitutional eloquence, striving to be fervid;--which

will glitter, if not as fire does, then as _ice_ does: and the

irreducible Cromwell will remain a chaotic mass of 'madness,'

'hypocrisy,' and much else.

* * * * *

From of old, I will confess, this theory of Cromwell's falsity has

been incredible to me. Nay I cannot believe the like, of any Great Man

whatever. Multitudes of Great Men figure in History as false selfish

men; but if we will consider it, they are but _figures_ for us,

unintelligible shadows; we do not see into them as men that could have

existed at all. A superficial unbelieving generation only, with no eye

but for the surfaces and semblances of things, could form such notions

of Great Men. Can a great soul be possible without a _conscience_ in

it, the essence of all _real_ souls, great or small?--No, we cannot

figure Cromwell as a Falsity and Fatuity; the longer I study him and

his career, I believe this the less. Why should we? There is no

evidence of it. Is it not strange that, after all the mountains of

calumny this man has been subject to, after being represented as the

very prince of liars, who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth, but

always some cunning counterfeit of truth, there should not yet have

been one falsehood brought clearly home to him? A prince of liars, and

no lie spoken by him. Not one that I could yet get sight of. It is

like Pococke asking Grotius, Where is your _proof_ of Mahomet's

Pigeon? No proof!--Let us leave all these calumnious chimeras, as

chimeras ought to be left. They are not portraits of the man; they are

distracted phantasms of him, the joint product of hatred and darkness.

Looking at the man's life with our own eyes, it seems to me, a very

different hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of his

earlier obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it

not all betoken an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? His

nervous melancholic temperament indicates rather a seriousness too

deep for him. Of those stories of 'Spectres;' of the white Spectre in

broad daylight, predicting that he should be King of England, we are

not bound to believe much;--probably no more than of the other black

Spectre, or Devil in person, to whom the Officer _saw_ him sell

himself before Worcester Fight! But the mournful, over-sensitive,

hypochondriac humour of Oliver, in his young years, is otherwise

indisputably known. The Huntingdon Physician told Sir Philip Warwick

himself, He had often been sent for at midnight; Mr. Cromwell was full

of hypochondria, thought himself near dying, and "had fancies about

the Town-cross." These things are significant. Such an excitable

deep-feeling nature, in that rugged stubborn strength of his, is not

the symptom of falsehood; it is the symptom and promise of quite other

than falsehood!

The young Oliver is sent to study Law; falls, or is said to have

fallen, for a little period, into some of the dissipations of youth;

but if so, speedily repents, abandons all this: not much above twenty,

he is married, settled as an altogether grave and quiet man. 'He

pays-back what money he had won at gambling,' says the story;--he does

not think any gain of that kind could be really _his_. It is very

interesting, very natural, this 'conversion,' as they well name it;

this awakening of a great true soul from the worldly slough, to see

into the awful _truth_ of things;--to see that time and its shows all

rested on Eternity, and this poor Earth of ours was the threshold

either of Heaven or of Hell! Oliver's life at St Ives or Ely, as a

sober industrious Farmer, is it not altogether as that of a true and

devout man? He has renounced the world and its ways; _its_ prizes are

not the thing that can enrich him. He tills the earth; he reads his

Bible; daily assembles his servants round him to worship God. He

comforts persecuted ministers, is fond of preachers; nay can himself

preach,--exhorts his neighbours to be wise, to redeem the time. In all

this what 'hypocrisy,' 'ambition,' 'cant,' or other falsity? The man's

hopes, I do believe, were fixed on the other Higher World; his aim to

get well _thither_, by walking well through his humble course in

_this_ world. He courts no notice: what could notice here do for him?

'Ever in his great Taskmaster's eye.'

It is striking, too, how he comes-out once into public view; he, since

no other is willing to come: in resistance to a public grievance. I

mean, in that matter of the Bedford Fens. No one else will go to law

with Authority; therefore he will. That matter once settled, he

returns back into obscurity, to his Bible and his Plough. 'Gain

influence'? His influence is the most legitimate; derived from

personal knowledge of him, as a just, religious, reasonable and

determined man. In this way he has lived till past forty; old age is

now in view of him, and the earnest portal of Death and Eternity; it

was at this point that he suddenly became 'ambitious'! I do not

interpret his Parliamentary mission in that way!

His successes in Parliament, his successes through the war, are honest

successes of a brave man; who has more resolution in the heart of him,

more light in the head of him than other men. His prayers to God; his

spoken thanks to the God of Victory, who had preserved him safe, and

carried him forward so far, through the furious clash of a world all

set in conflict, through desperate-looking envelopments at Dunbar;

through the death-hail of so many battles; mercy after mercy; to the

'crowning mercy' of Worcester Fight: all this is good and genuine for

a deep-hearted Calvinistic Cromwell. Only to vain unbelieving

Cavaliers, worshipping not God but their own 'lovelocks,' frivolities

and formalities, living quite apart from contemplations of God, living

_without_ God in the world, need it seem hypocritical.

Nor will his participation in the King's death involve him in

condemnation with us. It is a stern business killing of a King! But if

you once go to war with him, it lies _there_; this and all else lies

there. Once at war, you have made wager of battle with him: it is he

to die, or else you. Reconciliation is problematic; may be possible,

or, far more likely, is impossible. It is now pretty generally

admitted that the Parliament, having vanquished Charles First, had no

way of making any tenable arrangement with him. The large Presbyterian

party, apprehensive now of the Independents, were most anxious to do

so; anxious indeed as for their own existence; but it could not be.

The unhappy Charles, in those final Hampton-Court negotiations, shows

himself as a man fatally incapable of being dealt with. A man who,

once for all, could not and would not _understand_:--whose thought did

not in any measure represent to him the real fact of the matter; nay

worse, whose _word_ did not at all represent his thought. We may say

this of him without cruelty, with deep pity rather: but it is true and

undeniable. Forsaken there of all but the _name_ of Kingship, he

still, finding himself treated with outward respect as a King, fancied

that he might play-off party against party, and smuggle himself into

his old power by deceiving both. Alas, they both _discovered_ that he

was deceiving them. A man whose _word_ will not inform you at all what

he means or will do, is not a man you can bargain with. You must get

out of that man's way, or put him out of yours! The Presbyterians, in

their despair, were still for believing Charles, though found false,

unbelievable again and again. Not so Cromwell: "For all our fighting,"

says he, "we are to have a little bit of paper?" No!--

In fact, everywhere we have to note the decisive practical _eye_ of

this man; how he drives towards the practical and practicable; has a

genuine insight into what _is_ fact. Such an intellect, I maintain,

does not belong to a false man: the false man sees false shows,

plausibilities, expediences: the true man is needed to discern even

practical truth. Cromwell's advice about the Parliament's Army, early

in the contest, How they were to dismiss their city-tapsters, flimsy

riotous persons, and choose substantial yeomen, whose heart was in the

work, to be soldiers for them: this is advice by a man who _saw_. Fact

answers, if you see into Fact. Cromwell's _Ironsides_ were the

embodiment of this insight of his; men fearing God; and without any

other fear. No more conclusively genuine set of fighters ever trod the

soil of England, or of any other land.

Neither will we blame greatly that word of Cromwell's to them; which

was so blamed: "If the King should meet me in battle, I would kill the

King." Why not? These words were spoken to men who stood as before a

Higher than Kings. They had set more than their own lives on the cast.

The Parliament may call it, in official language, a fighting '_for_

the King;' but we, for our share, cannot understand that. To us it is

no dilettante work, no sleek officiality; it is sheer rough death and

earnest. They have brought it to the calling-forth of _War_; horrid

internecine fight, man grappling with man in fire-eyed rage,--the

_infernal_ element in man called forth, to try it by that! _Do_ that

therefore; since that is the thing to be done.--The successes of

Cromwell seem to me a very natural thing! Since he was not shot in

battle, they were an inevitable thing. That such a man, with the eye

to see, with the heart to dare, should advance, from post to post,

from victory to victory, till the Huntingdon Farmer became, by

whatever name you might call him, the acknowledged Strongest Man in

England, virtually the King of England, requires no magic to explain

it!--

Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a man, to fall into

Scepticism, into dilettantism, insincerity; not to know a Sincerity

when they see it. For this world, and for all worlds, what curse is so

fatal? The heart lying dead, the eye cannot see. What intellect

remains is merely the _vulpine_ intellect. That a true _King_ be sent

them is of small use; they do not know him when sent. They say

scornfully, Is this your King? The Hero wastes his heroic faculty in

bootless contradiction from the unworthy; and can accomplish little.

For himself he does accomplish a heroic life, which is much, which is

all; but for the world he accomplishes comparatively nothing. The wild

rude Sincerity, direct from Nature, is not glib in answering from the

witness-box; in your small-debt _pie-powder_ court, he is scouted as a

counterfeit. The vulpine intellect 'detects' him. For being a man

worth any thousand men, the response, your Knox, your Cromwell gets,

is an argument for two centuries, whether he was a man at all. God's

greatest gift to this Earth is sneeringly flung away. The miraculous

talisman is a paltry plated coin, not fit to pass in the shops as a

common guinea.

Lamentable this! I say, this must be remedied. Till this be remedied

in some measure, there is nothing remedied. 'Detect quacks'? Yes do,

for Heaven's sake; but know withal the men that are to be trusted!

Till we know that, what is all our knowledge; how shall we even so

much as 'detect'? For the vulpine sharpness, which considers itself to

be knowledge, and 'detects' in that fashion, is far mistaken. Dupes

indeed are many: but, of all _dupes_, there is none so fatally

situated as he who lives in undue terror of being duped. The world

does exist; the world has truth in it or it would not exist! First

recognise what is true, we shall _then_ discern what is false; and

properly never till then.