Heroes and Hero Worship

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Our primary characteristic of a Hero, that he is sincere, applies
emphatically to Knox. It is not denied anywhere that this, whatever might
be his other qualities or faults, is among the truest of men. With a
singular instinct he holds to the truth and fact; the truth alone is there
for him, the rest a mere shadow and deceptive nonentity. However feeble,
forlorn the reality may seem, on that and that only _can_ he take his
stand. In the Galleys of the River Loire, whither Knox and the others,
after their Castle of St. Andrew's was taken, had been sent as
Galley-slaves,--some officer or priest, one day, presented them an Image of
the Virgin Mother, requiring that they, the blasphemous heretics, should do
it reverence. Mother? Mother of God? said Knox, when the turn came to
him: This is no Mother of God: this is "_a pented bredd_,"--_a_ piece of
wood, I tell you, with paint on it! She is fitter for swimming, I think,
than for being worshipped, added Knox; and flung the thing into the river.
It was not very cheap jesting there: but come of it what might, this thing
to Knox was and must continue nothing other than the real truth; it was a
_pented bredd_: worship it he would not.

He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of courage; the
Cause they had was the true one, and must and would prosper; the whole
world could not put it down. Reality is of God's making; it is alone
strong. How many _pented bredds_, pretending to be real, are fitter to
swim than to be worshipped!--This Knox cannot live but by fact: he clings
to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. He is an instance to us
how a man, by sincerity itself, becomes heroic: it is the grand gift he
has. We find in Knox a good honest intellectual talent, no transcendent
one;--a narrow, inconsiderable man, as compared with Luther: but in
heartfelt instinctive adherence to truth, in _sincerity_, as we say, he has
no superior; nay, one might ask, What equal he has? The heart of him is of
the true Prophet cast. "He lies there," said the Earl of Morton at his
grave, "who never feared the face of man." He resembles, more than any of
the moderns, an Old-Hebrew Prophet. The same inflexibility, intolerance,
rigid narrow-looking adherence to God's truth, stern rebuke in the name of
God to all that forsake truth: an Old-Hebrew Prophet in the guise of an
Edinburgh Minister of the Sixteenth Century. We are to take him for that;
not require him to be other.

Knox's conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh visits he used to make in her own
palace, to reprove her there, have been much commented upon. Such cruelty,
such coarseness fills us with indignation. On reading the actual narrative
of the business, what Knox said, and what Knox meant, I must say one's
tragic feeling is rather disappointed. They are not so coarse, these
speeches; they seem to me about as fine as the circumstances would permit!
Knox was not there to do the courtier; he came on another errand. Whoever,
reading these colloquies of his with the Queen, thinks they are vulgar
insolences of a plebeian priest to a delicate high lady, mistakes the
purport and essence of them altogether. It was unfortunately not possible
to be polite with the Queen of Scotland, unless one proved untrue to the
Nation and Cause of Scotland. A man who did not wish to see the land of
his birth made a hunting-field for intriguing ambitious Guises, and the
Cause of God trampled underfoot of Falsehoods, Formulas and the Devil's
Cause, had no method of making himself agreeable! "Better that women
weep," said Morton, "than that bearded men be forced to weep." Knox was
the constitutional opposition-party in Scotland: the Nobles of the
country, called by their station to take that post, were not found in it;
Knox had to go, or no one. The hapless Queen;--but the still more hapless
Country, if _she_ were made happy! Mary herself was not without sharpness
enough, among her other qualities: "Who are you," said she once, "that
presume to school the nobles and sovereign of this realm?"--"Madam, a
subject born within the same," answered he. Reasonably answered! If the
"subject" have truth to speak, it is not the "subject's" footing that will
fail him here.--

We blame Knox for his intolerance. Well, surely it is good that each of us
be as tolerant as possible. Yet, at bottom, after all the talk there is
and has been about it, what is tolerance? Tolerance has to tolerate the
unessential; and to see well what that is. Tolerance has to be noble,
measured, just in its very wrath, when it can tolerate no longer. But, on
the whole, we are not altogether here to tolerate! We are here to resist,
to control and vanquish withal. We do not "tolerate" Falsehoods,
Thieveries, Iniquities, when they fasten on us; we say to them, Thou art
false, thou art not tolerable! We are here to extinguish Falsehoods, and
put an end to them, in some wise way! I will not quarrel so much with the
way; the doing of the thing is our great concern. In this sense Knox was,
full surely, intolerant.

A man sent to row in French Galleys, and such like, for teaching the Truth
in his own land, cannot always be in the mildest humor! I am not prepared
to say that Knox had a soft temper; nor do I know that he had what we call
an ill temper. An ill nature he decidedly had not. Kind honest affections
dwelt in the much-enduring, hard-worn, ever-battling man. That he _could_
rebuke Queens, and had such weight among those proud turbulent Nobles,
proud enough whatever else they were; and could maintain to the end a kind
of virtual Presidency and Sovereignty in that wild realm, he who was only
"a subject born within the same:" this of itself will prove to us that he
was found, close at hand, to be no mean acrid man; but at heart a
healthful, strong, sagacious man. Such alone can bear rule in that kind.
They blame him for pulling down cathedrals, and so forth, as if he were a
seditious rioting demagogue: precisely the reverse is seen to be the fact,
in regard to cathedrals and the rest of it, if we examine! Knox wanted no
pulling down of stone edifices; he wanted leprosy and darkness to be thrown
out of the lives of men. Tumult was not his element; it was the tragic
feature of his life that he was forced to dwell so much in that. Every
such man is the born enemy of Disorder; hates to be in it: but what then?
Smooth Falsehood is not Order; it is the general sum-total of Disorder.
Order is _Truth_,--each thing standing on the basis that belongs to it:
Order and Falsehood cannot subsist together.

Withal, unexpectedly enough, this Knox has a vein of drollery in him; which
I like much, in combination with his other qualities. He has a true eye
for the ridiculous. His _History_, with its rough earnestness, is
curiously enlivened with this. When the two Prelates, entering Glasgow
Cathedral, quarrel about precedence; march rapidly up, take to hustling one
another, twitching one another's rochets, and at last flourishing their
crosiers like quarter-staves, it is a great sight for him every way! Not
mockery, scorn, bitterness alone; though there is enough of that too. But
a true, loving, illuminating laugh mounts up over the earnest visage; not a
loud laugh; you would say, a laugh in the _eyes_ most of all. An
honest-hearted, brotherly man; brother to the high, brother also to the
low; sincere in his sympathy with both. He had his pipe of Bourdeaux too,
we find, in that old Edinburgh house of his; a cheery social man, with
faces that loved him! They go far wrong who think this Knox was a gloomy,
spasmodic, shrieking fanatic. Not at all: he is one of the solidest of
men. Practical, cautious-hopeful, patient; a most shrewd, observing,
quietly discerning man. In fact, he has very much the type of character we
assign to the Scotch at present: a certain sardonic taciturnity is in him;
insight enough; and a stouter heart than he himself knows of. He has the
power of holding his peace over many things which do not vitally concern
him,--"They? what are they?" But the thing which does vitally concern him,
that thing he will speak of; and in a tone the whole world shall be made to
hear: all the more emphatic for his long silence.

This Prophet of the Scotch is to me no hateful man!--He had a sore fight of
an existence; wrestling with Popes and Principalities; in defeat,
contention, life-long struggle; rowing as a galley-slave, wandering as an
exile. A sore fight: but he won it. "Have you hope?" they asked him in
his last moment, when he could no longer speak. He lifted his finger,
"pointed upwards with his finger," and so died. Honor to him! His works
have not died. The letter of his work dies, as of all men's; but the
spirit of it never.

One word more as to the letter of Knox's work. The unforgivable offence in
him is, that he wished to set up Priests over the head of Kings. In other
words, he strove to make the Government of Scotland a _Theocracy_. This
indeed is properly the sum of his offences, the essential sin; for which
what pardon can there be? It is most true, he did, at bottom, consciously
or unconsciously, mean a Theocracy, or Government of God. He did mean that
Kings and Prime Ministers, and all manner of persons, in public or private,
diplomatizing or whatever else they might be doing, should walk according
to the Gospel of Christ, and understand that this was their Law, supreme
over all laws. He hoped once to see such a thing realized; and the
Petition, _Thy Kingdom come_, no longer an empty word. He was sore grieved
when he saw greedy worldly Barons clutch hold of the Church's property;
when he expostulated that it was not secular property, that it was
spiritual property, and should be turned to _true_ churchly uses,
education, schools, worship;--and the Regent Murray had to answer, with a
shrug of the shoulders, "It is a devout imagination!" This was Knox's
scheme of right and truth; this he zealously endeavored after, to realize
it. If we think his scheme of truth was too narrow, was not true, we may
rejoice that he could not realize it; that it remained after two centuries
of effort, unrealizable, and is a "devout imagination" still. But how
shall we blame _him_ for struggling to realize it? Theocracy, Government
of God, is precisely the thing to be struggled for! All Prophets, zealous
Priests, are there for that purpose. Hildebrand wished a Theocracy;
Cromwell wished it, fought for it; Mahomet attained it. Nay, is it not
what all zealous men, whether called Priests, Prophets, or whatsoever else
called, do essentially wish, and must wish? That right and truth, or God's
Law, reign supreme among men, this is the Heavenly Ideal (well named in
Knox's time, and namable in all times, a revealed "Will of God") towards
which the Reformer will insist that all be more and more approximated. All
true Reformers, as I said, are by the nature of them Priests, and strive
for a Theocracy.

How far such Ideals can ever be introduced into Practice, and at what point
our impatience with their non-introduction ought to begin, is always a
question. I think we may say safely, Let them introduce themselves as far
as they can contrive to do it! If they are the true faith of men, all men
ought to be more or less impatient always where they are not found
introduced. There will never be wanting Regent Murrays enough to shrug
their shoulders, and say, "A devout imagination!" We will praise the
Hero-priest rather, who does what is in him to bring them in; and wears
out, in toil, calumny, contradiction, a noble life, to make a God's Kingdom
of this Earth. The Earth will not become too godlike!

[May 19, 1840.]
LECTURE V.
THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. JOHNSON, ROUSSEAU, BURNS.

Hero-Gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are forms of Heroism that belong to the
old ages, make their appearance in the remotest times; some of them have
ceased to be possible long since, and cannot any more show themselves in
this world. The Hero as _Man of Letters_, again, of which class we are to
speak to-day, is altogether a product of these new ages; and so long as the
wondrous art of _Writing_, or of Ready-writing which we call _Printing_,
subsists, he may be expected to continue, as one of the main forms of
Heroism for all future ages. He is, in various respects, a very singular
phenomenon.

He is new, I say; he has hardly lasted above a century in the world yet.
Never, till about a hundred years ago, was there seen any figure of a Great
Soul living apart in that anomalous manner; endeavoring to speak forth the
inspiration that was in him by Printed Books, and find place and
subsistence by what the world would please to give him for doing that.
Much had been sold and bought, and left to make its own bargain in the
market-place; but the inspired wisdom of a Heroic Soul never till then, in
that naked manner. He, with his copy-rights and copy-wrongs, in his
squalid garret, in his rusty coat; ruling (for this is what he does), from
his grave, after death, whole nations and generations who would, or would
not, give him bread while living,--is a rather curious spectacle! Few
shapes of Heroism can be more unexpected.

Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strange shapes:
the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign is his
aspect in the world! It seemed absurd to us, that men, in their rude
admiration, should take some wise great Odin for a god, and worship him as
such; some wise great Mahomet for one god-inspired, and religiously follow
his Law for twelve centuries: but that a wise great Johnson, a Burns, a
Rousseau, should be taken for some idle nondescript, extant in the world to
amuse idleness, and have a few coins and applauses thrown him, that he
might live thereby; _this_ perhaps, as before hinted, will one day seem a
still absurder phasis of things!--Meanwhile, since it is the spiritual
always that determines the material, this same Man-of-Letters Hero must be
regarded as our most important modern person. He, such as he may be, is
the soul of all. What he teaches, the whole world will do and make. The
world's manner of dealing with him is the most significant feature of the
world's general position. Looking well at his life, we may get a glance,
as deep as is readily possible for us, into the life of those singular
centuries which have produced him, in which we ourselves live and work.

There are genuine Men of Letters, and not genuine; as in every kind there
is a genuine and a spurious. If _hero_ be taken to mean genuine, then I
say the Hero as Man of Letters will be found discharging a function for us
which is ever honorable, ever the highest; and was once well known to be
the highest. He is uttering forth, in such way as he has, the inspired
soul of him; all that a man, in any case, can do. I say _inspired_; for
what we call "originality," "sincerity," "genius," the heroic quality we
have no good name for, signifies that. The Hero is he who lives in the
inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists
always, unseen to most, under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in
that; he declares that abroad, by act or speech as it may be in declaring
himself abroad. His life, as we said before, is a piece of the everlasting
heart of Nature herself: all men's life is,--but the weak many know not
the fact, and are untrue to it, in most times; the strong few are strong,
heroic, perennial, because it cannot be hidden from them. The Man of
Letters, like every Hero, is there to proclaim this in such sort as he can.
Intrinsically it is the same function which the old generations named a man
Prophet, Priest, Divinity for doing; which all manner of Heroes, by speech
or by act, are sent into the world to do.

Fichte the German Philosopher delivered, some forty years ago at Erlangen,
a highly remarkable Course of Lectures on this subject: "_Ueber das Wesen
des Gelehrten_, On the Nature of the Literary Man." Fichte, in conformity
with the Transcendental Philosophy, of which he was a distinguished
teacher, declares first: That all things which we see or work with in this
Earth, especially we ourselves and all persons, are as a kind of vesture or
sensuous Appearance: that under all there lies, as the essence of them,
what he calls the "Divine Idea of the World;" this is the Reality which
"lies at the bottom of all Appearance." To the mass of men no such Divine
Idea is recognizable in the world; they live merely, says Fichte, among the
superficialities, practicalities and shows of the world, not dreaming that
there is anything divine under them. But the Man of Letters is sent hither
specially that he may discern for himself, and make manifest to us, this
same Divine Idea: in every new generation it will manifest itself in a new
dialect; and he is there for the purpose of doing that. Such is Fichte's
phraseology; with which we need not quarrel. It is his way of naming what
I here, by other words, am striving imperfectly to name; what there is at
present no name for: The unspeakable Divine Significance, full of
splendor, of wonder and terror, that lies in the being of every man, of
every thing,--the Presence of the God who made every man and thing.
Mahomet taught this in his dialect; Odin in his: it is the thing which all
thinking hearts, in one dialect or another, are here to teach.

Fichte calls the Man of Letters, therefore, a Prophet, or as he prefers to
phrase it, a Priest, continually unfolding the Godlike to men: Men of
Letters are a perpetual Priesthood, from age to age, teaching all men that
a God is still present in their life, that all "Appearance," whatsoever we
see in the world, is but as a vesture for the "Divine Idea of the World,"
for "that which lies at the bottom of Appearance." In the true Literary
Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he
is the light of the world; the world's Priest;--guiding it, like a sacred
Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time. Fichte
discriminates with sharp zeal the _true_ Literary Man, what we here call
the _Hero_ as Man of Letters, from multitudes of false unheroic. Whoever
lives not wholly in this Divine Idea, or living partially in it, struggles
not, as for the one good, to live wholly in it,--he is, let him live where
else he like, in what pomps and prosperities he like, no Literary Man; he
is, says Fichte, a "Bungler, _Stumper_." Or at best, if he belong to the
prosaic provinces, he may be a "Hodman; " Fichte even calls him elsewhere a
"Nonentity," and has in short no mercy for him, no wish that _he_ should
continue happy among us! This is Fichte's notion of the Man of Letters.
It means, in its own form, precisely what we here mean.

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-splendor 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 realized. 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 disorganized
condition of society: how ill many forces of society fulfil their work;
how many powerful 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 disorganizations;--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
civilized 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_, 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, harbors 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.

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