peoples, an Odin palpable to the sense, a real hero of flesh and blood.
Tradition calls him inventor of the Runes, or Scandinavian alphabet,
and again of poetry. To the wild Norse souls this noble-hearted man was
hero, prophet, god. That the man Odin, speaking with a hero's voice and
heart, as with an impressiveness out of Heaven, told his people the
infinite importance of valour, how man thereby became a god; and that
his people believed this message of his, and thought it a message out
of Heaven, and believed him a divinity for telling it to them--this
seems to me the primary seed-grain of the Norse religion. For that
religion was a sternly impressive consecration of valour.
_II.--The Hero as Prophet_
We turn now to Mohammedanism among the Arabs for the second phase of
hero-worship, wherein the hero is not now regarded as a god, but as
one God-inspired, a prophet. Mohammed is not the most eminent prophet,
but is the one of whom we are freest to speak. Nor is he the truest of
prophets but I do esteem him a true one. Let us try to understand what
he meant with the world; what the world meant and means with him will
then be more answerable.
Certainly he was no scheming impostor, no falsehood incarnate; theories
of that kind are the product of an age of scepticism, and indicate the
saddest spiritual paralysis. A false man found a religion? Why, a false
man cannot build a brick house! No Mirabeau, Napoleon, Burns, Cromwell,
no man adequate to do anything, but is first of all in right earnest
about it. Sincerity is the great characteristic of all men in any way
heroic.
The Arabs are a notable people; their country itself is notable.
Consider that wide, waste horizon of sand, empty, silent like a sea;
you are all alone there, left alone with the universe; by day a fierce
sun blazing down with intolerable radiance; by night the great deep
heaven, with its stars--a fit country for a swift-handed, deep-hearted
race of men. The Arab character is agile, active, yet most meditative,
enthusiastic. Hospitable, taciturn, earnest, truthful, deeply
religious, the Arabs were a people of great qualities, waiting for the
day when they should become notable to all the world.
Here, in the year 570 of our era, the man Mohammed was born, and grew
up in the bosom of the wilderness, alone with Nature and his own
thoughts. From an early age he had been remarked as a thoughtful man,
and his companions named him "The Faithful." He was forty before he
talked of any mission from Heaven. All this time living a peaceful
life, he was looking through the shows of things into things themselves.
Then, having withdrawn to a cavern near Mecca for a month of prayer and
meditation, he told his wife Kadijah that, by the unspeakable favour of
Heaven, he was in doubt and darkness no longer, but saw it all. That
all these idols and formulas were nothing; that there was one God in
and over all; that God is great and is the reality. _Allah akbar_,
"God is great"; and then _Islam_, "we must submit to Him."
This is yet the only true morality known. A man is right and
invincible, while he joins himself to the great deep law of the
world, in spite of all superficial laws, temporary appearances,
profit-and-loss calculations. This is the soul of Islam, and is
properly also the soul of Christianity. We are to receive whatever
befalls us as sent from God above. Islam means in its way the denial
of self, annihilation of self. This is yet the highest wisdom that
Heaven has revealed to our earth. In Mohammed, and in his Koran, I
find first of all sincerity, the total freedom from cant. For these
twelve centuries his religion has been the guidance of a fifth part of
mankind, and, above all, it has been a religion heartily believed.
The Arab nation was a poor shepherd people; a hero-prophet was sent
down to them; within one century afterwards Arabia is at Grenada on
this hand, at Delhi on that!
_III.--The Hero as Poet_
The hero as divinity and as prophet are productions of old ages, not
to be repeated in the new. We are now to see our hero in the less
ambitious, but also less questionable, character of poet. For the hero
can be poet, prophet, king, priest, or what you will, according to the
kind of world he finds himself born into. I have no notion of a truly
great man that could not be all sorts of men.
Indeed, the poet and prophet, participators in the open secret of the
universe, are one; though the prophet has seized the sacred mystery
rather on its moral side, and the poet on the æsthetic side. Poetry is
essentially a song; its thoughts are musical not in word only, but in
heart and in substance.
Shakespeare and Dante are our two canonised poets; they dwell
apart, none equal, none second to them. Dante's book was written, in
banishment, with his heart's blood. His great soul, homeless on earth,
made its home more and more in that awful other world. The three
kingdoms--_Inferno_, _Purgatorio_, _Paradiso_--are like compartments of
a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern, solemn,
awful; Dante's world of souls. It is the sincerest of all poems.
Sincerity here, too, we find to be the measure of worth. Intensity is
the prevailing character of his genius; his greatness lies in fiery
emphasis and depth; it is seen even in the graphic vividness of his
painting. Dante burns as a pure star, fixed in the firmament, at which
the great and high of all ages kindle themselves.
As Dante embodies musically the inner life of the Middle Ages, so
Shakespeare embodies for us its outer life, its chivalries, courtesies,
humours, ambitions. Dante gave us the soul of Europe; Shakespeare gave
us its body. Of this Shakespeare of ours, the best judgment of Europe
is slowly pointing to the conclusion that he is the chief of all poets,
the greatest intellect who has left record of himself in the way of
literature.
It is in portrait-painting, the delineation of men, that the greatness
of Shakespeare comes out most decisively. His calm, creative
perspicacity is unexampled. The word that will describe the thing
follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. He takes
in all kinds of men--a Falstaff, Othello, Juliet, Coriolanus; sets them
all forth to us in their rounded completeness, loving, just, the equal
brother of all.
The degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of
the man, and Shakespeare's is the greatest of intellects. Novalis
beautifully remarks of him that those dramas of his are products of
nature, too, deep as nature herself. Shakespeare's art is not artifice;
the noblest worth of it is not there by plan or pre-contrivance. The
latest generations of men will find new meanings in Shakespeare, new
elucidations of their own human being.
Shakespeare, too, was a prophet, in his way, of an insight analogous to
the prophetic, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to
this man also divine, unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as heaven. "We
are such stuff as dreams are made of." There rises a kind of universal
psalm out of Shakespeare, not unfit to make itself heard among the
still more sacred psalms.
England, before long, this island of ours, will hold but a small
fraction of the English; east and west to the antipodes there will be a
Saxondom covering great spaces of the globe. What is it that can keep
all these together into virtually one nation, so that they do not fall
out and fight, but live at peace? Here, I say, is an English king whom
no time or chance can dethrone! King Shakespeare shines over us all, as
the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs; we can fancy
him as radiant aloft over all the nations of Englishmen, a thousand
years hence. Truly it is a great thing for a nation that it gets an
articulate voice.
_IV.--The Hero as Priest_
The priest, too, is a kind of prophet. In him, also, there is required
to be a light of inspiration. He presides over the worship of the
people, and is the uniter of them with the unseen Holy. He is their
spiritual captain, as the prophet is their spiritual king with many
captains.
Luther and Knox were by express vocation priests, yet it will suit us
better here to consider them chiefly in their historical character as
reformers. The battling reformer is from time to time a needful and
inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are never wanting; the very things
that were once indispensable furtherances become obstructions, and
need to be shaken off and left behind us--a business often of enormous
difficulty.
We are to consider Luther as an idol-breaker, a bringer back of men to
reality, for that is the function of great men and teachers. Thus it
was that Luther said to the Pope, "This thing of yours that you call a
pardon of sins, is a bit of rag-paper with ink. It, and so much like
it, is nothing else. God alone can pardon sins. God's Church is not a
semblance, Heaven and Hell are not semblances. Standing on this, I, a
poor German monk, am stronger than you all."
The most interesting phase which the Reformation anywhere assumes
is that of Puritanism, which even got itself established as a
Presbyterianism and National Church among the Scotch, and has produced
in the world very notable fruit. Knox was the chief priest and founder
of that faith which became the faith of Scotland, of New England, of
Oliver Cromwell; and that which Knox did for his nation we may really
call a resurrection as from death. The people began to live. Scotch
literature and thought, Scotch industry, James Watt, David Hume, Walter
Scott, Robert Burns--I find Knox and the Reformation acting in the
heart's core of every one of these persons and phenomena; I find that
without the Reformation they would not have been.
Knox could not live but by fact. He is an instance to us how a
man, by sincerity itself, becomes heroic. We find in Knox a good,
honest, intellectual talent, no transcendent one; he was a narrow,
inconsiderable man as compared with Luther; but in heartfelt,
instinctive adherence to truth, in real sincerity, he has no superior.
His heart is of the true prophet cast. "He lies there," said the Earl
of Morton, at his grave, "who never feared the face of man."
_V.--The Hero as Man of Letters_
The hero as man of letters is a new and singular phenomenon. Living
in his squalid garret and rusty coat; ruling from his grave after
death whole nations and generations; he must be regarded as our most
important modern person. Such as he may be, he is the soul of all.
Intrinsically it is the same function which the old generations named a
prophet, priest, or divinity for doing.
The three great prophets of the eighteenth century, that singular
age of scepticism, were Johnson, Rousseau, and Burns; they were not,
indeed, heroic bringers of the light, but heroic seekers of it,
struggling under mountains of impediment.
As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by nature, one of
our great English souls. 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. The highest
gospel he preached was a kind of moral prudence, coupled with this
other great gospel, "Clear your mind of cant!" These two things, joined
together, were, perhaps, the greatest gospel that was possible at that
time.
Of Rousseau and his heroism I cannot say so much. He was not a strong
man; but a morbid, excitable, spasmodic man; at best, intense rather
than strong. Yet, at least he was heartily in earnest, if ever man was;
his ideas possessed him like demons.
The fault and misery of Rousseau was egoism, which is the source and
summary of all faults and miseries whatsoever. He had not perfected
himself into victory over mere desire; a mean hunger was still his
motive principle. He was a very vain man, hungry for the praises of
men. The whole nature of the man was poisoned; there was nothing but
suspicion, self-isolation, and fierce, moody ways.
And yet this Rousseau, with his celebrations of nature, even of savage
life in nature, did once more touch upon reality and struggle towards
reality. Strangely through all that defacement, degradation, and almost
madness, there is in the inmost heart of poor Rousseau a spark of
real heavenly fire. Out of all that withered, mocking philosophism,
scepticism, and persiflage of his day there has arisen in this man the
ineradicable feeling and knowledge that this life of ours is true, not
a theorem, but a fact.
The French Revolution found its evangelist in Rousseau. His
semi-delirious speculations on the miseries of civilised life, and such
like, helped to produce a delirium in France generally. It is difficult
to say what the governors of the world could do with such a man. What
he could do with them is clear enough--guillotine a great many of them.
The tragedy of Burns's life is known to all. The largest soul of all
the British lands appeared under every disadvantage; uninstructed,
poor, born only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that,
in a rustic special dialect, known only to a small province of the
country he lived in.
We find in Burns a noble, rough genuineness, the true simplicity of
strength, and a deep and earnest element of sunshine and joyfulness;
yet the chief quality, both of his poetry and of his life, is
sincerity--a wild wrestling with the truth of things.
_VI.--The Hero as King_
The commander over men, 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 called
_Rex_, "Regulator"; our own name is still better--king, which means
"can-ning," "able-man."
In rebellious ages, when kingship itself seems dead and abolished,
Cromwell and Napoleon step forth again as kings. 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.
The war of the Puritans was a section of that 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. And among
these Puritans Cromwell stood supreme, grappling like a giant, face
to face, heart to heart, with the naked truth of things. Yet Cromwell
alone finds no hearty apologist anywhere. Selfish ambition, dishonesty,
duplicity; a fierce, coarse, hypocritical Tartuffe; 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 him.
From of old, this theory of Cromwell's falsity has been incredible to
me. All that we know of him betokens an earnest, hearty sincerity.
Everywhere we have to note his decisive, practical eye, how he drives
towards the practicable, and has a genuine insight into what is fact.
Such an intellect 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.
Napoleon by no means seems to me so great a man as Cromwell. His
enormous victories which reached over all Europe, while Cromwell abode
mainly in our little England, are but as the high stilts on which the
man is seen standing; the stature of the man is not altered thereby. I
find in him no such sincerity as in Cromwell; only a far inferior sort.
"False as a bulletin," became a proverb in Napoleon's time. Yet he had
a sincerity, a certain instinctive, ineradicable feeling for reality;
and did base himself upon fact, so long as he had any basis. He had an
instinct of Nature better than his culture was. His companions, we are
told, were one evening busily occupied arguing that there could be no
God; they had proved it by all manner of logic. Napoleon, looking up
into the stars, answers, "Very ingenious, Messieurs; but who made all
that?" The atheistic logic runs off from him like water; the great fact
stares him in the face. So, too, in practice; he, as every man that can
be great, sees, through all entanglements, the practical heart of the
matter, and drives straight towards that.
Accordingly, there was a faith in him, genuine so far as it went. That
this new, enormous democracy is an insuppressible fact, which the
whole world cannot put down--this was a true insight of his, and took
his conscience and enthusiasm along with it. And did he not interpret
the dim purport of it well? _La carrière ouverte aux talents_--"the
implements to him who can handle them"--this actually is the truth, and
even the whole truth; it includes whatever the French Revolution or any
revolution could mean. It is a great, true message from our last great
man.
Sartor Resartus
"Sartor Resartus," first published in "Frazer's Magazine" in
1833-34, is Thomas Carlyle's most popular work, and is largely
autobiographical.
I.--_The Philosophy of Clothes_
Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the torch
of science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or
less effect, for five thousand years and upwards, it is surprising
that hitherto little or nothing of a fundamental character, whether
in the way of philosophy or history, has been written on the subject
of clothes. Every other tissue has been dissected, but the vestural
tissue of woollen or other cloth, which man's soul wears as its outmost
wrappage, has been quite overlooked. All speculation has tacitly
figured man as a clothed animal, whereas he is by nature a naked
animal, and only in certain circumstances, by purpose and device, masks
himself in clothes.
But here, as in so many other cases, learned, indefatigable,
deep-thinking Germany comes to our aid. The editor of these sheets
has lately received a new book from Professor Teufelsdröckh, of
Weissnichtwo, treating expressly of "Clothes, their Origin and
Influence" (1831). This extensive volume, a very sea of thought,
discloses to us not only a new branch of philosophy, but also
the strange personal character of Professor Teufelsdröckh, which
is scarcely less interesting. We were just considering how the
extraordinary doctrines of this book might best be imparted to our
own English nation, when we received a letter from Herr Hofrath
Heuschrecke, our professor's chief associate, offering us the requisite
documents for a biography of Teufelsdröckh. This was the origin of our
"Sartor Resartus," now presented in the vehicle of "Frazer's Magazine."
Professor Teufelsdröckh, when we knew him at Weissnichtwo, lived a
still and self-contained life, devoted to the higher philosophies and
to a certain speculative radicalism. The last words that he spoke in
our hearing were to propose a toast in the coffee-house--"The cause of
the poor, in heaven's name and the devil's." But we looked for nothing
moral from him, still less anything didactico-religious.
Brave Teufelsdröckh, who could tell what lurked in thee? In thine eyes,
deep under thy shaggy brows, and looking out so still and dreamy,
have we not noticed gleams of an ethereal or else a diabolic fire?
Our friend's title was that of Professor of Things in General, but he
never delivered any course. We used to sit with him in his attic,
overlooking the town; he would contemplate that wasp-nest or bee-hive
spread out below him, and utter the strangest thoughts. "That living
flood, pouring through these streets, is coming from eternity, going
onward to eternity. These are apparitions. What else?" Thus he lived
and meditated with Heuschrecke as Boswell for his Johnson.
"As Montesquieu wrote a 'Spirit of Laws,'" observes our professor, "so
could I write a 'Spirit of Clothes,' for neither in tailoring nor in
legislating does man proceed by mere accident, but the hand is ever
guided by the mysterious operations of the mind." And so he deals with
Paradise and fig-leaves, and proceeds to view the costumes of all
mankind, in all countries, in all times.
The first purpose of clothes, he imagines, was not warmth or decency,
but ornament. "Yet what have they not become? Increased security
and pleasurable heat soon followed; divine shame or modesty, as yet
a stranger to the anthropophagous bosom, arose there mysteriously
under clothes, a mystic shrine for the holy in man. Clothes gave us
individuality, distinctions, social polity; clothes have made men of
us; they are threatening to make clothes-screens of us."
Teufelsdröckh dwells chiefly on the seams, tatters, and unsightly
wrong-side of clothes, but he has also a superlative transcendentalism.
To him, man is a soul, a spirit, and divine apparition, whose flesh
and senses are but a garment. He deals much in the feeling of wonder,
insisting that wonder is the only reasonable temper for the denizen
of our planet. "Wonder," he says, "is the basis of worship," and
that progress of science, which is to destroy wonder and substitute
mensuration and numeration, finds small favour with him. "Clothes,
despicable as we think them, are unspeakably significant."
_II.--Biography of Teufelsdröckh_
So far as we can gather from the disordered papers which have been
placed in our hands, the genesis of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh is obscure.
We see nothing but an exodus out of invisibility into visibility.
In the village of Entepfuhl we find a childless couple, verging on
old age. Andreas Futteral, who has been a grenadier sergeant under
Frederick the Great, is now cultivating a little orchard. To him and
Gretchen his wife there entered one evening a stranger of reverend
aspect, who deposited a silk-covered basket, saying, "Good people, here
is an invaluable loan; take all heed thereof; with high recompense, or
else with heavy penalty, will it one day be required back." Therein
they found, as soon as he had departed, a little infant in the softest
sleep. Our philosopher tells us that this story, told him in his
twelfth year, produced a quite indelible impression. Who was his
unknown father, whom he was never able to meet?
We receive glimpses of his childhood, schooldays, and university life,
and then meet with him in that difficulty, common to young men, of
"getting under way." "Not what I have," he says, "but what I do, is my
kingdom; and we should grope throughout our lives from one expectation
and disappointment to another were we not saved by one thing--our
hunger." He had thrown up his legal profession, and found himself
without landmark of outward guidance; whereby his previous want of
decided belief, or inward guidance, is frightfully aggravated. So he
sets out over an unknown sea; but a certain Calypso Island at the very
outset falsifies his whole reckoning.
"Nowhere," he says, "does Heaven so immediately reveal itself to the
young man as in the young maiden. The feeling of our young forlorn
towards the queens of this earth was, and indeed is, altogether
unspeakable. A visible divinity dwelt in them; to our young friend all
women were holy, were heavenly. And if, on a soul so circumstanced,
some actual air-maiden should cast kind eyes, saying thereby, 'Thou
too mayest love and be loved,' and so kindle him--good Heaven, what an
all-consuming fire were probably kindled!"
Such a fire of romance did actually burst forth in Herr Diogenes.
We know not who "Blumine" was, nor how they met. She was young,
hazel-eyed, beautiful, high-born, and of high spirit, but unhappily
dependent and insolvent, living perhaps on the bounty of moneyed
relatives. "To our friend the hours seemed moments; holy was he and
happy; the words from those sweetest lips came over him like dew on
thirsty grass. At parting, the Blumine's hand was in his; in the balmy
twilight, with the kind stars above them, he spoke something of meeting
again, which was not contradicted; he pressed gently those soft,
small fingers, and it seemed as if they were not hastily, not angrily
withdrawn."
Poor Teufelsdröckh, it is clear to demonstration thou art smit!
Flame-clad, thou art scaling the upper Heaven, and verging towards
insanity, for prize of a high-souled brunette, as if the earth held but
one and not several of these! "One morning, he found his morning-star
all dimmed and dusky-red; doomsday had dawned; they were to meet no
more!" Their lips were joined for the first time and the last, and
Teufelsdröckh was made immortal by a kiss. And then--"thick curtains
of night rushed over his soul, and he fell, through the ruins as of a
shivered universe, towards the abyss."