"Unless above himself he can
Exalt himself, how poor a thing is man."
But, nevertheless, any man or woman who will, in any age and under any
circumstances, can live the heroic life and exercise heroic influences.
If any ask proof of this, I shall ask them, in return, to read two
novels; novels, indeed, but, in their method and their moral, partaking
of that heroic and ideal element, which will make them live, I trust,
long after thousands of mere novels have returned to their native dust. I
mean Miss Muloch's 'John Halifax, Gentleman,' and Mr. Thackeray's
'Esmond,' two books which no man or woman ought to read without being the
nobler for them.
'John Halifax, Gentleman,' is simply the history of a poor young clerk,
who rises to be a wealthy mill-owner in the manufacturing districts, in
the early part of this century. But he contrives to be an heroic and
ideal clerk, and an heroic and ideal mill-owner; and that without doing
anything which the world would call heroic or ideal, or in anywise
stepping out of his sphere, minding simply his own business, and doing
the duty which lies nearest him. And how? By getting into his head from
youth the strangest notion, that in whatever station or business he may
be, he can always be what he considers a gentleman; and that if he only
behaves like a gentleman, all must go right at last. A beautiful book.
As I said before, somewhat of an heroic and ideal book. A book which did
me good when first I read it; which ought to do any young man good who
will read it, and then try to be, like John Halifax, a gentleman, whether
in the shop, the counting-house, the bank, or the manufactory.
The other--an even more striking instance of the possibility, at least,
of heroism anywhere and everywhere--is Mr. Thackeray's 'Esmond.' On the
meaning of that book I can speak with authority. For my dear and
regretted friend told me himself that my interpretation of it was the
true one; that this was the lesson which he meant men to learn therefrom.
Esmond is a man of the first half of the eighteenth century; living in a
coarse, drunken, ignorant, profligate, and altogether unheroic age. He
is--and here the high art and the high morality of Mr. Thackeray's genius
is shown--altogether a man of his own age. He is not a sixteenth-century
or a nineteenth-century man born out of time. His information, his
politics, his religion, are no higher than of those round him. His
manners, his views of human life, his very prejudices and faults, are
those of his age. The temptations which he conquers are just those under
which the men around him fall. But how does he conquer them? By holding
fast throughout to honour, duty, virtue. Thus, and thus alone, he
becomes an ideal eighteenth-century gentleman, an eighteenth-century
hero. This was what Mr. Thackeray meant--for he told me so himself, I
say--that it was possible, even in England's lowest and foulest times, to
be a gentleman and a hero, if a man would but be true to the light within
him.
But I will go further. I will go from ideal fiction to actual, and yet
ideal, fact; and say that, as I read history, the most unheroic age which
the civilized world ever saw was also the most heroic; that the spirit of
man triumphed most utterly over his circumstances, at the very moment
when those circumstances were most against him.
How and why he did so is a question for philosophy in the highest sense
of that word. The fact of his having done so is matter of history. Shall
I solve my own riddle?
Then, have we not heard of the early Christian martyrs? Is there a doubt
that they, unlettered men, slaves, weak women, even children, did
exhibit, under an infinite sense of duty, issuing in infinite
self-sacrifice, a heroism such as the world had never seen before; did
raise the ideal of human nobleness a whole stage--rather say, a whole
heaven--higher than before; and that wherever the tale of their great
deeds spread, men accepted, even if they did not copy, those martyrs as
ideal specimens of the human race, till they were actually worshipped by
succeeding generations, wrongly, it may be, but pardonably, as a choir of
lesser deities?
But is there, on the other hand, a doubt that the age in which they were
heroic was the most unheroic of all ages; that they were bred, lived, and
died, under the most debasing of materialist tyrannies, with art,
literature, philosophy, family and national life dying or dead around
them, and in cities the corruption of which cannot be told for very
shame--cities, compared with which Paris is the abode of Arcadian
simplicity and innocence? When I read Petronius and Juvenal, and
recollect that they were the contemporaries of the Apostles; when--to
give an instance which scholars, and perhaps, happily, only scholars, can
appreciate--I glance once more at Trimalchio's feast, and remember that
within a mile of that feast St. Paul may have been preaching to a
Christian congregation, some of whom--for St. Paul makes no secret of
that strange fact--may have been, ere their conversion, partakers in just
such vulgar and bestial orgies as those which were going on in the rich
freedman's halls: after that, I say, I can put no limit to the
possibility of man's becoming heroic, even though he be surrounded by a
hell on earth; no limit to the capacities of any human being to form for
himself or herself a high and pure ideal of human character; and, without
"playing fantastic tricks before high heaven," to carry out that ideal in
every-day life; and in the most commonplace circumstances, and the most
menial occupations, to live worthy of--as I conceive--our heavenly
birthright, and to imitate the heroes, who were the kinsmen of the gods.