HEROISM.

IT is an open question whether the policeman is not demoralising us; and

that in proportion as he does his duty well; whether the perfection of

justice and safety, the complete “preservation of body and goods,” may

not reduce the educated and comfortable classes into that lap-dog

condition in which not conscience, but comfort, doth make cowards of us

all. Our forefathers had, on the whole, to take care of themselves; we

find it more convenient to hire people to take care of us. So much the

better for us, in some respects; but, it may be, so much the worse in

others. So much the better; because, as usually results from the

division of labour, these people, having little or nothing to do save to

take care of us, do so far better than we could; and so prevent a vast

amount of violence and wrong, and therefore of misery, especially to the

weak; for which last reason we will acquiesce in the existence of

policemen and lawyers, as we do in the results of arbitration, as the

lesser of two evils. The odds in war are in favour of the bigger bully,

in arbitration in favour of the bigger rogue; and it is a question

whether the lion or the fox be the safer guardian of human interests.

But arbitration prevents war; and that, in three cases out of four, is

full reason for employing it.

On the other hand, the lap-dog condition, whether in dogs or in men, is

certainly unfavourable to the growth of the higher virtues. Safety and

comfort are good, indeed, for the good; for the brave, the

self-originating, the earnest. They give to such a clear stage and no

favour, wherein to work unhindered for their fellow-men. But for the

majority, who are neither brave, self-originating, nor earnest, but the

mere puppets of circumstance, safety and comfort may, and actually do,

merely make their lives mean and petty, effeminate and dull. Therefore

their hearts must be awakened, as often as possible, to take exercise

enough for health; and they must be reminded, perpetually and

importunately, of what a certain great philosopher called, “whatsoever

things are true, honourable, just, pure, lovely, and of good report;” “if

there be any manhood, and any just praise, to think of such things.”

This pettiness and dulness of our modern life is just what keeps alive

our stage, to which people go to see something a little less petty, a

little less dull, than what they see at home. It is, too, the cause of—I

had almost said the excuse for—the modern rage for sensational novels.

Those who read them so greedily are conscious, poor souls, of capacities

in themselves of passion and action for good and evil, for which their

frivolous humdrum daily life gives no room, no vent. They know too well

that human nature can be more fertile, whether in weeds and poisons, or

in flowers and fruits, than it is usually in the streets and houses of a

well-ordered and tolerably sober city. And because the study of human

nature is, after all, that which is nearest to everyone and most

interesting to everyone, therefore they go to fiction, since they cannot

go to fact, to see what they themselves might be had they the chance; to

see what fantastic tricks before high heaven men and women like

themselves can play, and how they play them.

Well, it is not for me to judge, for me to blame. I will only say that

there are those who cannot read sensational novels, or, indeed, any

novels at all, just because they see so many sensational novels being

enacted round them in painful facts of sinful flesh and blood. There are

those, too, who have looked in the mirror too often to wish to see their

own disfigured visage in it any more; who are too tired of themselves and

ashamed of themselves to want to hear of people like themselves; who want

to hear of people utterly unlike themselves, more noble, and able, and

just, and sweet, and pure; who long to hear of heroism and to converse

with heroes; and who, if by chance they meet with an heroic act, bathe

their spirits in that, as in May-dew, and feel themselves thereby, if but

for an hour, more fair.

If any such shall chance to see these words, let me ask them to consider

with me that one word Hero, and what it means.

Hero; Heroic; Heroism. These words point to a phase of human nature, the

capacity for which we all have in ourselves, which is as startling and as

interesting in its manifestations as any, and which is always beautiful,

always ennobling, and therefore always attractive to those whose hearts

are not yet seared by the world or brutalised by self-indulgence.

But let us first be sure what the words mean. There is no use talking

about a word till we have got at its meaning. We may use it as a cant

phrase, as a party cry on platforms; we may even hate and persecute our

fellow-men for the sake of it: but till we have clearly settled in our

own minds what a word means, it will do for fighting with, but not for

working with. Socrates of old used to tell the young Athenians that the

ground of all sound knowledge was—to understand the true meaning of the

words which were in their mouths all day long; and Socrates was a wiser

man than we shall ever see. So, instead of beginning an oration in

praise of heroism, I shall ask my readers to think with me what heroism

is.

Now, we shall always get most surely at the meaning of a word by getting

at its etymology—that is, at what it meant at first. And if heroism

means behaving like a hero, we must find out, it seems to me, not merely

what a hero may happen to mean just now, but what it meant in the

earliest human speech in which we find it.

A hero or a heroine, then, among the old Homeric Greeks, meant a man or

woman who was like the gods; and who, from that likeness, stood superior

to his or her fellow-creatures. Gods, heroes, and men, is a threefold

division of rational beings, with which we meet more than once or twice.

Those grand old Greeks felt deeply the truth of the poet’s saying—

Unless above himself he can

Exalt himself, how poor a thing is man.

But more: the Greeks supposed these heroes to be, in some way or other,

partakers of a divine nature; akin to the gods; usually, either they, or

some ancestor of theirs, descended from a god or goddess. Those who have

read Mr. Gladstone’s “Juventus Mundi” will remember the section (cap. ix.

§ 6) on the modes of the approximation between the divine and the human

natures; and whether or not they agree with the author altogether, all

will agree, I think, that the first idea of a hero or a heroine was a

godlike man or godlike woman.

A godlike man. What varied, what infinite forms of nobleness that word

might include, ever increasing, as men’s notions of the gods became purer

and loftier, or, alas! decreasing, as their notions became degraded. The

old Greeks, with that intense admiration of beauty which made them, in

after ages, the master-sculptors and draughtsmen of their own, and,

indeed, of any age, would, of course, require in their hero, their

god-like man, beauty and strength, manners too, and eloquence, and all

outward perfections of humanity, and neglect his moral qualities.

Neglect, I say, but not ignore. The hero, by virtue of his kindred with

the gods, was always expected to be a better man than common men, as

virtue was then understood. And how better? Let us see.

The hero was at least expected to be more reverent than other men to

those divine beings of whose nature he partook, whose society he might

enjoy even here on earth. He might be unfaithful to his own high

lineage; he might misuse his gifts by selfishness and self-will; he

might, like Ajax, rage with mere jealousy and wounded pride till his rage

ended in shameful madness and suicide. He might rebel against the very

gods, and all laws of right and wrong, till he perished his ἀτασθαλίη—

Smitten down, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to mortals.

But he ought to have, he must have, to be true to his name of Hero,

justice, self-restraint, and αἰδώς—that highest form of modesty, for

which we have, alas! no name in the English tongue; that perfect respect

for the feelings of others which springs out of perfect self-respect.

And he must have too—if he were to be a hero of the highest type—the

instinct of helpfulness; the instinct that, if he were a kinsman of the

gods, he must fight on their side, through toil and danger, against all

that was unlike them, and therefore hateful to them. Who loves not the

old legends, unsurpassed for beauty in the literature of any race, in

which the hero stands out as the deliverer, the destroyer of evil?

Theseus ridding the land of robbers, and delivering it from the yearly

tribute of boys and maidens to be devoured by the Minotaur; Perseus

slaying the Gorgon, and rescuing Andromeda from the sea-beast; Heracles

with his twelve famous labours against giants and monsters; and all the

rest—

Who dared, in the god-given might of their manhood,

Greatly to do and to suffer, and far in the fens and the forests

Smite the devourers of men, heaven-hated brood of the giants;

Transformed, strange, without like, who obey not the golden-haired

rulers.

These are figures whose divine moral beauty has sunk into the hearts, not

merely of poets or of artists, but of men and women who suffered and who

feared; the memory of them, fables though they may have been, ennobled

the old Greek heart; they ennobled the heart of Europe in the fifteenth

century, at the re-discovery of Greek literature. So far from

contradicting the Christian ideal, they harmonised with—I had almost said

they supplemented—that more tender and saintly ideal of heroism which had

sprung up during the earlier Middle Ages. They justified, and actually

gave a new life to, the old noblenesses of chivalry, which had grown up

in the later Middle Ages as a necessary supplement of active and manly

virtue to the passive and feminine virtue of the cloister. They

inspired, mingling with these two other elements, a literature both in

England, France, and Italy, in which the three elements, the saintly, the

chivalrous, and the Greek heroic, have become one and undistinguishable,

because all three are human, and all three divine; a literature which

developed itself in Ariosto, in Tasso, in the Hypnerotomachia, the

Arcadia, the Euphues, and other forms, sometimes fantastic, sometimes

questionable, but which reached its perfection in our own Spenser’s

“Fairy Queen”—perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever been penned

by mortal man.

And why? What has made these old Greek myths live, myths though they be,

and fables, and fair dreams? What—though they have no body, and,

perhaps, never had—has given them an immortal soul, which can speak to

the immortal souls of all generations to come?

What but this, that in them—dim it may be and undeveloped, but still

there—lies the divine idea of self-sacrifice as the perfection of

heroism, of self-sacrifice, as the highest duty and the highest joy of

him who claims a kindred with the gods?

Let us say, then, that true heroism must involve self-sacrifice. Those

stories certainly involve it, whether ancient or modern, which the

hearts, not of philosophers merely, or poets, but of the poorest and the

most ignorant, have accepted instinctively as the highest form of moral

beauty—the highest form, and yet one possible to all.

Grace Darling rowing out into the storm towards the wreck. The “drunken

private of the Buffs,” who, prisoner among the Chinese, and commanded to

prostrate himself and kotoo, refused in the name of his country’s honour:

“He would not bow to any China-man on earth:” and so was knocked on the

head, and died surely a hero’s death. Those soldiers of the Birkenhead,

keeping their ranks to let the women and children escape, while they

watched the sharks who in a few minutes would be tearing them limb from

limb. Or, to go across the Atlantic—for there are heroes in the Far

West—Mr. Bret Harte’s “Flynn of Virginia,” on the Central Pacific

Railway—the place is shown to travellers—who sacrificed his life for his

married comrade:

There, in the drift,

Back to the wall,

He held the timbers

Ready to fall.

Then in the darkness

I heard him call:

“Run for your life, Jake!

Run for your wife’s sake!

Don’t wait for me.”

And that was all

Heard in the din—

Heard of Tom Flynn—

Flynn of Virginia.

Or the engineer, again, on the Mississippi, who, when the steamer caught

fire, held, as he had sworn he would, her bow against the bank, till

every soul save he got safe on shore:

Through the hot black breath of the burning boat

Jim Bludso’s voice was heard;

And they all had trust in his cussedness,

And knew he would keep his word.

And sure’s you’re born, they all got off

Afore the smokestacks fell;

And Bludso’s ghost went up alone

In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.

He weren’t no saint—but at the judgment

I’d run my chance with Jim

’Longside of some pious gentlemen

That wouldn’t shake hands with him.

He’d seen his duty—a dead sure thing—

And went for it there and then;

And Christ is not going to be too hard

On a man that died for men.

To which gallant poem of Colonel John Hay’s—and he has written many

gallant and beautiful poems—I have but one demurrer: Jim Bludso did not

merely do his duty but more than his duty. He did a voluntary deed, to

which he was bound by no code or contract, civil or moral; just as he who

introduced me to that poem won his Victoria Cross—as many a cross,

Victoria and other, has been won—by volunteering for a deed to which he,

too, was bound by no code or contract, military or moral. And it is of

the essence of self-sacrifice, and therefore of heroism, that it should

be voluntary; a work of supererogation, at least towards society and man;

an act to which the hero or heroine is not bound by duty, but which is

above though not against duty.

Nay, on the strength of that same element of self-sacrifice, I will not

grudge the epithet “heroic,” which my revered friend Mr. Darwin justly

applies to the poor little monkey, who once in his life did that which

was above his duty; who lived in continual terror of the great baboon,

and yet, when the brute had sprung upon his friend the keeper, and was

tearing out his throat, conquered his fear by love, and, at the risk of

instant death, sprang in turn upon his dreaded enemy, and bit and

shrieked till help arrived.

Some would nowadays use that story merely to prove that the monkey’s

nature and the man’s nature are, after all, one and the same. Well: I,

at least, have never denied that there is a monkey-nature in man, as

there is a peacock-nature, and a swine-nature, and a wolf-nature—of all

which four I see every day too much. The sharp and stern distinction

between men and animals, as far as their natures are concerned, is of a

more modern origin than people fancy. Of old the Assyrian took the

eagle, the ox, and the lion—and not unwisely—as the three highest types

of human capacity. The horses of Homer might be immortal, and weep for

their master’s death. The animals and monsters of Greek myth—like the

Ananzi spider of Negro fable—glide insensibly into speech and reason.

Birds—the most wonderful of all animals in the eyes of a man of science

or a poet—are sometimes looked on as wiser, and nearer to the gods, than

man. The Norseman—the noblest and ablest human being, save the Greek, of

whom history can tell us—was not ashamed to say of the bear of his native

forests that he had “ten men’s strength and eleven men’s wisdom.” How

could Reinecke Fuchs have gained immortality, in the Middle Ages and

since, save by the truth of its too solid and humiliating theorem—that

the actions of the world of men were, on the whole, guided by passions

but too exactly like those of the lower animals? I have said, and say

again, with good old Vaughan:

Unless above himself he can

Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man.

But I cannot forget that many an old Greek poet or sage, and many a

sixteenth and seventeenth century one, would have interpreted the

monkey’s heroism from quite a different point of view; and would have

said that the poor little creature had been visited suddenly by some

“divine afflatus”—an expression quite as philosophical and quite as

intelligible as most philosophic formulas which I read nowadays—and had

been thus raised for the moment above his abject selfish monkey-nature,

just as man requires to be raised above his. But that theory belongs to

a philosophy which is out of date and out of fashion, and which will have

to wait a century or two before it comes into fashion again.

And now, if self-sacrifice and heroism be, as I believe, identical, I

must protest against the use of the word “sacrifice” which is growing too

common in newspaper-columns, in which we are told of an “enormous

sacrifice of life;” an expression which means merely that a great many

poor wretches have been killed, quite against their own will, and for no

purpose whatsoever; no sacrifice at all, unless it be one to the demons

of ignorance, cupidity, or mismanagement.

The stout Whig undergraduate understood better the meaning of such words,

who, when asked, “In what sense might Charles the First be said to be a

martyr?” answered, “In the same sense that a man might be said to be a

martyr to the gout.”

And I must protest, in like wise, against a misuse of the words “hero.”

“heroism,” “heroic,” which is becoming too common, namely, applying them

to mere courage. We have borrowed the misuse, I believe, as we have more

than one beside, from the French press. I trust that we shall neither

accept it, nor the temper which inspires it. It may be convenient for

those who flatter their nation, and especially the military part of it,

into a ruinous self-conceit, to frame some such syllogism as this:

“Courage is heroism: every Frenchman is naturally courageous: therefore

every Frenchman is a hero.” But we, who have been trained at once in a

sounder school of morals, and in a greater respect for facts, and for

language as the expression of facts, shall be careful, I hope, not to

trifle thus with that potent and awful engine—human speech. We shall

eschew likewise, I hope, a like abuse of the word “moral,” which has

crept from the French press now and then, not only into our own press,

but into the writings of some of our military men, who, as Englishmen,

should have known better. We were told again and again, during the late

war, that the moral effect of such a success had been great; that the

_morale_ of the troops was excellent; or again, that the _morale_ of the

troops had suffered, or even that they were somewhat demoralised. But

when one came to test what was really meant by these fine words, one

discovered that morals had nothing to do with the facts which they

expressed; that the troops were in the one case actuated simply by the

animal passion of hope, in the other simply by the animal passion of

fear. This abuse of the word “moral” has crossed, I am sorry to say, the

Atlantic; and a witty American, whom we must excuse, though we must not

imitate, when some one had been blazing away at him with a revolver, he

being unarmed, is said to have described his very natural emotions on the

occasion, by saying that he felt dreadfully demoralised. We, I hope,

shall confine the word “demoralisation,” as our generals of the last

century would have done, when applied to soldiers, to crime, including,

of course, the neglect of duty or of discipline; and we shall mean by the

word “heroism,” in like manner, whether applied to a soldier or to any

human being, not mere courage, not the mere doing of duty, but the doing

of something beyond duty; something which is not in the bond; some

spontaneous and unexpected act of self-devotion.

I am glad, but not surprised, to see that Miss Yonge has held to this

sound distinction in her golden little book of “Golden Deeds,” and said,

“Obedience, at all costs and risks, is the very essence of a soldier’s

life. It has the solid material, but it has hardly the exceptional

brightness, of a golden deed.”

I know that it is very difficult to draw the line between mere obedience

to duty and express heroism. I know also that it would be both invidious

and impertinent in an utterly unheroic personage like me, to try to draw

that line; and to sit at home at ease, analysing and criticising deeds

which I could not do myself; but—to give an instance or two of what I

mean:

To defend a post as long as it is tenable is not heroic. It is simple

duty. To defend it after it has become untenable, and even to die in so

doing, is not heroic, but a noble madness, unless an advantage is to be

gained thereby for one’s own side. Then, indeed, it rises towards, if

not into, the heroism of self-sacrifice.

Who, for example, will not endorse the verdict of all ages on the conduct

of those Spartans at Thermopylæ, when they sat “combing their yellow hair

for death” on the sea-shore? They devoted themselves to hopeless

destruction; but why? They felt—I must believe that, for they behaved as

if they felt—that on them the destinies of the Western World might hang;

that they were in the forefront of the battle between civilisation and

barbarism, between freedom and despotism; and that they must teach that

vast mob of Persian slaves, whom the officers of the Great King were

driving with whips up to their lance-points, that the spirit of the old

heroes was not dead; and that the Greek, even in defeat and death, was a

mightier and a nobler man than they. And they did their work. They

produced, if you will, a “moral” effect, which has lasted even to this

very day. They struck terror into the heart, not only of the Persian

host, but of the whole Persian empire. They made the event of that war

certain, and the victories of Salamis and Platæa comparatively easy.

They made Alexander’s conquest of the East, one hundred and fifty years

afterwards, not only possible at all, but permanent when it came; and

thus helped to determine the future civilisation of the whole world.

They did not, of course, foresee all this. No great or inspired man can

foresee all the consequences of his deeds; but these men were, as I hold

inspired to see somewhat at least of the mighty stake for which they

played; and to count their lives worthless, if Sparta had sent them

thither to help in that great game.

Or shall we refuse the name of heroic to those three German cavalry

regiments who, in the battle of Mars-la-Tour, were bidden to hurl

themselves upon the chassepots and mitrailleuses of the unbroken French

infantry, and went to almost certain death, over the corpses of their

comrades, on and in and through, reeling man over horse, horse over man,

and clung like bull-dogs to their work, and would hardly leave, even at

the bugle-call, till in one regiment thirteen officers out of nineteen

were killed or wounded? And why?

Because the French army must be stopped, if it were but for a quarter of

an hour. A respite must be gained for the exhausted Third Corps. And

how much might be done, even in a quarter of an hour, by men who knew

when, and where, and why to die! Who will refuse the name of heroes to

these men? And yet they, probably, would have utterly declined the

honour. They had but done that which was in the bond. They were but

obeying orders after all. As Miss Yonge well says of all heroic persons:

“‘I have but done that which it was my duty to do,’ is the natural answer

of those capable of such actions. They have been constrained to them by

duty or pity; have never deemed it possible to act otherwise; and did not

once think of themselves in the matter at all.”

These last true words bring us to another element in heroism: its

simplicity. Whatsoever is not simple; whatsoever is affected, boastful,

wilful, covetous, tarnishes, even destroys, the heroic character of a

deed; because all these faults spring out of self. On the other hand,

wherever you find a perfectly simple, frank, unconscious character, there

you have the possibility, at least, of heroic action. For it is nobler

far to do the most commonplace duty in the household, or behind the

counter, with a single eye to duty, simply because it must be done—nobler

far, I say, than to go out of your way to attempt a brilliant deed, with

a double mind, and saying to yourself not only—“This will be a brilliant

deed,” but also—“and it will pay me, or raise me, or set me off, into the

bargain.” Heroism knows no “into the bargain.” And therefore, again, I

must protest against applying the word “heroic” to any deeds, however

charitable, however toilsome, however dangerous, performed for the sake

of what certain French ladies, I am told, call “faire son salut”—saving

one’s soul in the world to come. I do not mean to judge. Other and

quite unselfish motives may be, and doubtless often are, mixed up with

that selfish one: womanly pity and tenderness; love for, and desire to

imitate, a certain Incarnate ideal of self-sacrifice, who is at once

human and divine. But that motive of saving the soul, which is too often

openly proposed and proffered, is utterly unheroic. The desire to escape

pains and penalties hereafter by pains and penalties here; the balance of

present loss against future gain—what is this but selfishness extended

out of this world into eternity? “Not worldliness,” indeed, as a

satirist once said with bitter truth, “but other-worldliness.”

Moreover—and the young and the enthusiastic should also bear this in

mind—though heroism means the going beyond the limits of strict duty, it

never means the going out of the path of strict duty. If it is your duty

to go to London, go thither: you may go as much farther as you choose

after that. But you must go to London first. Do your duty first; it

will be time after that to talk of being heroic.

And therefore one must seriously warn the young, lest they mistake for

heroism and self-sacrifice what is merely pride and self-will, discontent

with the relations by which God has bound them, and the circumstances

which God has appointed for them. I have known girls think they were

doing a fine thing by leaving uncongenial parents or disagreeable

sisters, and cutting out for themselves, as they fancied, a more useful

and elevated line of life than that of mere home duties; while, after

all, poor things, they were only saying, with the Pharisees of old,

“Corban, it is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me;”

and in the name of God, neglecting the command of God to honour their

father and mother.

There are men, too, who will neglect their households and leave their

children unprovided for, and even uneducated, while they are spending

their money on philanthropic or religious hobbies of their own. It is

ill to take the children’s bread and cast it to the dogs; or even to the

angels. It is ill, I say, trying to make presents to God, before we have

tried to pay our debts to God. The first duty of every man is to the

wife whom he has married, and to the children whom she has brought into

the world; and to neglect them is not heroism, but self-conceit; the

conceit that a man is so necessary to Almighty God, that God will

actually allow him to do wrong, if He can only thereby secure the man’s

invaluable services. Be sure that every motive which comes not from the

single eye, every motive which springs from self, is by its very essence

unheroic, let it look as gaudy or as beneficent as it may.

But I cannot go so far as to say the same of the love of approbation—the

desire for the love and respect of our fellow-men. That must not be

excluded from the list of heroic motives. I know that it is, or may be

proved to be, by victorious analysis, an emotion common to us and the

lower animals. And yet no man excludes it less than that true hero, St.

Paul.

If those brave Spartans, if those brave Germans, of whom I spoke just

now, knew that their memories would be wept over and worshipped by brave

men and fair women, and that their names would become watchwords to

children in their fatherland, what is that to us, save that it should

make us rejoice, if we be truly human, that they had that thought with

them in their last moments to make self-devotion more easy, and death

more sweet?

And yet—and yet—is not the highest heroism that which is free even from

the approbation of our fellowmen, even from the approbation of the best

and wisest? The heroism which is known only to our Father who seeth in

secret? The Godlike deeds alone in the lonely chamber? The Godlike

lives lived in obscurity?—a heroism rare among us men, who live perforce

in the glare and noise of the outer world: more common among women; women

of whom the world never hears; who, if the world discovered them, would

only draw the veil more closely over their faces and their hearts, and

entreat to be left alone with God. True, they cannot always hide. They

must not always hide; or their fellow-creatures would lose the golden

lesson. But, nevertheless, it is of the essence of the perfect and

womanly heroism, in which, as in all spiritual forces the woman

transcends the man, that it would hide if it could.

And it was a pleasant thought to me, when I glanced lately at the golden

deeds of women in Miss Yonge’s book—it was a pleasant thought to me, that

I could say to myself—Ah! yes. These heroines are known, and their fame

flies through the mouths of men. But if so, how many thousands of

heroines there must have been, how many thousands there may be now, of

whom we shall never know. But still they are there. They sow in secret

the seed of which we pluck the flower and eat the fruit, and know not

that we pass the sower daily in the street; perhaps some humble,

ill-dressed woman, earning painfully her own small sustenance. She who

nurses a bedridden mother, instead of sending her to the workhouse. She

who spends her heart and her money on a drunken father, a reckless

brother, on the orphans of a kinsman or a friend. She who—But why go on

with the long list of great little heroisms, with which a clergyman at

least comes in contact daily—and it is one of the most ennobling

privileges of a clergyman’s high calling that he does come in contact

with them—why go on, I say, save to commemorate one more form of great

little heroism—the commonest, and yet the least remembered of all—namely,

the heroism of an average mother? Ah, when I think of that last broad

fact, I gather hope again for poor humanity; and this dark world looks

bright, this diseased world looks wholesome to me once more—because,

whatever else it is or is not full of, it is at least full of mothers.

While the satirist only sneers, as at a stock butt for his ridicule, at

the managing mother trying to get her daughters married off her hands by

chicaneries and meannesses, which every novelist knows too well how to

draw—would to heaven he, or rather, alas! she would find some more

chivalrous employment for his or her pen—for were they not, too, born of

woman?—I only say to myself—having had always a secret fondness for poor

Rebecca, though I love Esau more than Jacob—Let the poor thing alone.

With pain she brought these girls into the world. With pain she educated

them according to her light. With pain she is trying to obtain for them

the highest earthly blessing of which she can conceive, namely, to be

well married; and if in doing that last, she manœuvres a little, commits

a few basenesses, even tells a few untruths, what does all that come to,

save this—that in the confused intensity of her motherly self-sacrifice,

she will sacrifice for her daughters even her own conscience and her own

credit? We may sneer, if we will, at such a poor hard-driven soul when

we meet her in society; our duty, both as Christians and ladies and

gentlemen, seems to me to be—to do for her something very different

indeed.

But to return. Looking at the amount of great little heroisms, which are

being, as I assert, enacted around us every day, no one has a right to

say, what we are all tempted to say at times: “How can I be heroic? This

is no heroic age, setting me heroic examples. We are growing more and

more comfortable, frivolous, pleasure-seeking, money-making; more and

more utilitarian; more and more mercenary in our politics, in our morals,

in our religion; thinking less and less of honour and duty, and more and

more of loss and gain. I am born into an unheroic time. You must not

ask me to become heroic in it.”

I do not deny that it is more difficult to be heroic, while circumstances

are unheroic round us. We are all too apt to be the puppets of

circumstances; all too apt to follow the fashion; all too apt, like so

many minnows, to take our colour from the ground on which we lie, in

hopes, like them, of comfortable concealment, lest the new tyrant deity,

called Public Opinion, should spy us out, and, like Nebuchadnezzar of

old, cast us into a burning fiery furnace—which public opinion can make

very hot—for daring to worship any god or man save the will of the

temporary majority.

Yes, it is difficult to be anything but poor, mean, insufficient,

imperfect people, as like each other as so many sheep; and, like so many

sheep, having no will or character of our own, but rushing altogether

blindly over the same gap, in foolish fear of the same dog, who, after

all, dare not bite us; and so it always was and always will be.

For the third time I say,

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 farther. 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 civilised 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.