put out his eyes, or tied shackles on himself; he was at home in
that Catholicism of his, a free-seeing soul in it,--if many a poor
Hogstraten, Tetzel, and Dr. Eck had now become slaves in it. Liberty of
judgment? No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever
compel the soul of a man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own
indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign, and believe
there, by the grace of God alone! The sorriest sophistical Bellarmine,
preaching sightless faith and passive obedience, must first, by some
kind of _conviction_, have abdicated his right to be convinced. His
"private judgment" indicated that, as the advisablest step _he_ could
take. The right of private judgment will subsist, in full force,
wherever true men subsist. A true man _believes_ with his whole
judgment, with all the illumination and discernment that is in him, and
has always so believed. A false man, only struggling to "believe that
he believes," will naturally manage it in some other way. Protestantism
said to this latter, Woe! and to the former, Well done! At bottom, it
was no new saying; it was a return to all old sayings that ever had been
said. Be genuine, be sincere: that was, once more, the meaning of it.
Mahomet believed with his whole mind; Odin with his whole mind,--he, and
all _true_ Followers of Odinism. They, by their private judgment, had
"judged "--_so_.

And now I venture to assert, that the exercise of private judgment,
faithfully gone about, does by no means necessarily end in selfish
independence, isolation; but rather ends necessarily in the opposite
of that. It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error,
insincerity, half-belief and untruth that make it. A man protesting
against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that
believe in truth. There is no communion possible among men who believe
only in hearsays. The heart of each is lying dead; has no power of
sympathy even with _things_,--or he would believe _them_ and not
hearsays. No sympathy even with things; how much less with his
fellow-men! He cannot unite with men; he is an anarchic man. Only in a
world of sincere men is unity possible;--and there, in the long-run, it
is as good as _certain_.

For observe one thing, a thing too often left out of view, or rather
altogether lost sight of in this controversy: That it is not necessary a
man should himself have _discovered_ the truth he is to believe in, and
never so _sincerely_ to believe in. A Great Man, we said, was always
sincere, as the first condition of him. But a man need not be great in
order to be sincere; that is not the necessity of Nature and all Time,
but only of certain corrupt unfortunate epochs of Time. A man can
believe, and make his own, in the most genuine way, what he has received
from another;--and with boundless gratitude to that other! The merit of
_originality_ is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the
original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not
for another. Every son of Adam can become a sincere man, an original
man, in this sense; no mortal is doomed to be an insincere man. Whole
ages, what we call ages of Faith, are original; all men in them, or the
most of men in them, sincere. These are the great and fruitful ages:
every worker, in all spheres, is a worker not on semblance but on
substance; every work issues in a result: the general sum of such work
is great; for all of it, as genuine, tends towards one goal; all of
it is _additive_, none of it subtractive. There is true union, true
kingship, loyalty, all true and blessed things, so far as the poor Earth
can produce blessedness for men.

Hero-worship? Ah me, that a man be self-subsistent, original, true, or
what we call it, is surely the farthest in the world from indisposing
him to reverence and believe other men's truth! It only disposes,
necessitates and invincibly compels him to disbelieve other men's dead
formulas, hearsays and untruths. A man embraces truth with his eyes
open, and because his eyes are open: does he need to shut them before he
can love his Teacher of truth? He alone can love, with a right gratitude
and genuine loyalty of soul, the Hero-Teacher who has delivered him
out of darkness into light. Is not such a one a true Hero and
Serpent-queller; worthy of all reverence! The black monster, Falsehood,
our one enemy in this world, lies prostrate by his valor; it was he that
conquered the world for us!--See, accordingly, was not Luther himself
reverenced as a true Pope, or Spiritual Father, _being_ verily such?
Napoleon, from amid boundless revolt of Sansculottism, became a King.
Hero-worship never dies, nor can die. Loyalty and Sovereignty are
everlasting in the world:--and there is this in them, that they
are grounded not on garnitures and semblances, but on realities and
sincerities. Not by shutting your eyes, your "private judgment;" no, but
by opening them, and by having something to see! Luther's message was
deposition and abolition to all false Popes and Potentates, but life and
strength, though afar off, to new genuine ones.

All this of Liberty and Equality, Electoral suffrages, Independence and
so forth, we will take, therefore, to be a temporary phenomenon, by no
means a final one. Though likely to last a long time, with sad enough
embroilments for us all, we must welcome it, as the penalty of sins that
are past, the pledge of inestimable benefits that are coming. In all
ways, it behooved men to quit simulacra and return to fact; cost what it
might, that did behoove to be done. With spurious Popes, and Believers
having no private judgment,--quacks pretending to command over
dupes,--what can you do? Misery and mischief only. You cannot make an
association out of insincere men; you cannot build an edifice except
by plummet and level,--at right-angles to one another! In all this wild
revolutionary work, from Protestantism downwards, I see the blessedest
result preparing itself: not abolition of Hero-worship, but rather what
I would call a whole World of Heroes. If Hero mean _sincere man_, why
may not every one of us be a Hero? A world all sincere, a believing
world: the like has been; the like will again be,--cannot help being.
That were the right sort of Worshippers for Heroes: never could the
truly Better be so reverenced as where all were True and Good!--But we
must hasten to Luther and his Life.

Luther's birthplace was Eisleben in Saxony; he came into the world there
on the 10th of November, 1483. It was an accident that gave this honor
to Eisleben. His parents, poor mine-laborers in a village of that
region, named Mohra, had gone to the Eisleben Winter-Fair: in the tumult
of this scene the Frau Luther was taken with travail, found refuge in
some poor house there, and the boy she bore was named MARTIN LUTHER.
Strange enough to reflect upon it. This poor Frau Luther, she had gone
with her husband to make her small merchandisings; perhaps to sell the
lock of yarn she had been spinning, to buy the small winter-necessaries
for her narrow hut or household; in the whole world, that day, there was
not a more entirely unimportant-looking pair of people than this Miner
and his Wife. And yet what were all Emperors, Popes and Potentates, in
comparison? There was born here, once more, a Mighty Man; whose light
was to flame as the beacon over long centuries and epochs of the world;
the whole world and its history was waiting for this man. It is strange,
it is great. It leads us back to another Birth-hour, in a still meaner
environment, Eighteen Hundred years ago,--of which it is fit that we
_say_ nothing, that we think only in silence; for what words are there!
The Age of Miracles past? The Age of Miracles is forever here--!

I find it altogether suitable to Luther's function in this Earth, and
doubtless wisely ordered to that end by the Providence presiding over
him and us and all things, that he was born poor, and brought up poor,
one of the poorest of men. He had to beg, as the school-children
in those times did; singing for alms and bread, from door to door.
Hardship, rigorous Necessity was the poor boy's companion; no man nor no
thing would put on a false face to flatter Martin Luther. Among things,
not among the shows of things, had he to grow. A boy of rude figure, yet
with weak health, with his large greedy soul, full of all faculty and
sensibility, he suffered greatly. But it was his task to get acquainted
with _realities_, and keep acquainted with them, at whatever cost: his
task was to bring the whole world back to reality, for it had dwelt too
long with semblance! A youth nursed up in wintry whirlwinds, in desolate
darkness and difficulty, that he may step forth at last from his stormy
Scandinavia, strong as a true man, as a god: a Christian Odin,--a right
Thor once more, with his thunder-hammer, to smite asunder ugly enough
_Jotuns_ and Giant-monsters!

Perhaps the turning incident of his life, we may fancy, was that death
of his friend Alexis, by lightning, at the gate of Erfurt. Luther had
struggled up through boyhood, better and worse; displaying, in spite
of all hindrances, the largest intellect, eager to learn: his father
judging doubtless that he might promote himself in the world, set him
upon the study of Law. This was the path to rise; Luther, with little
will in it either way, had consented: he was now nineteen years of age.
Alexis and he had been to see the old Luther people at Mansfeldt; were
got back again near Erfurt, when a thunder-storm came on; the bolt
struck Alexis, he fell dead at Luther's feet. What is this Life
of ours?--gone in a moment, burnt up like a scroll, into the blank
Eternity! What are all earthly preferments, Chancellorships, Kingships?
They lie shrunk together--there! The Earth has opened on them; in a
moment they are not, and Eternity is. Luther, struck to the heart,
determined to devote himself to God and God's service alone. In spite
of all dissuasions from his father and others, he became a Monk in the
Augustine Convent at Erfurt.

This was probably the first light-point in the history of Luther, his
purer will now first decisively uttering itself; but, for the present,
it was still as one light-point in an element all of darkness. He says
he was a pious monk, _ich bin ein frommer Monch gewesen_; faithfully,
painfully struggling to work out the truth of this high act of his; but
it was to little purpose. His misery had not lessened; had rather, as it
were, increased into infinitude. The drudgeries he had to do, as novice
in his Convent, all sorts of slave-work, were not his grievance:
the deep earnest soul of the man had fallen into all manner of black
scruples, dubitations; he believed himself likely to die soon, and far
worse than die. One hears with a new interest for poor Luther that, at
this time, he lived in terror of the unspeakable misery; fancied that he
was doomed to eternal reprobation. Was it not the humble sincere nature
of the man? What was he, that he should be raised to Heaven! He that
had known only misery, and mean slavery: the news was too blessed to
be credible. It could not become clear to him how, by fasts, vigils,
formalities and mass-work, a man's soul could be saved. He fell into
the blackest wretchedness; had to wander staggering as on the verge of
bottomless Despair.

It must have been a most blessed discovery, that of an old Latin Bible
which he found in the Erfurt Library about this time. He had never seen
the Book before. It taught him another lesson than that of fasts and
vigils. A brother monk too, of pious experience, was helpful. Luther
learned now that a man was saved not by singing masses, but by the
infinite grace of God: a more credible hypothesis. He gradually got
himself founded, as on the rock. No wonder he should venerate the Bible,
which had brought this blessed help to him. He prized it as the Word of
the Highest must be prized by such a man. He determined to hold by that;
as through life and to death he firmly did.

This, then, is his deliverance from darkness, his final triumph over
darkness, what we call his conversion; for himself the most important of
all epochs. That he should now grow daily in peace and clearness; that,
unfolding now the great talents and virtues implanted in him, he should
rise to importance in his Convent, in his country, and be found more and
more useful in all honest business of life, is a natural result. He was
sent on missions by his Augustine Order, as a man of talent and fidelity
fit to do their business well: the Elector of Saxony, Friedrich, named
the Wise, a truly wise and just prince, had cast his eye on him as a
valuable person; made him Professor in his new University of Wittenberg,
Preacher too at Wittenberg; in both which capacities, as in all duties
he did, this Luther, in the peaceable sphere of common life, was gaining
more and more esteem with all good men.

It was in his twenty-seventh year that he first saw Rome; being sent
thither, as I said, on mission from his Convent. Pope Julius the Second,
and what was going on at Rome, must have filled the mind of Luther
with amazement. He had come as to the Sacred City, throne of God's
High-priest on Earth; and he found it--what we know! Many thoughts it
must have given the man; many which we have no record of, which perhaps
he did not himself know how to utter. This Rome, this scene of false
priests, clothed not in the beauty of holiness, but in far other
vesture, is _false_: but what is it to Luther? A mean man he, how shall
he reform a world? That was far from his thoughts. A humble, solitary
man, why should he at all meddle with the world? It was the task of
quite higher men than he. His business was to guide his own footsteps
wisely through the world. Let him do his own obscure duty in it well;
the rest, horrible and dismal as it looks, is in God's hand, not in his.

It is curious to reflect what might have been the issue, had Roman
Popery happened to pass this Luther by; to go on in its great wasteful
orbit, and not come athwart his little path, and force him to assault
it! Conceivable enough that, in this case, he might have held his peace
about the abuses of Rome; left Providence, and God on high, to deal with
them! A modest quiet man; not prompt he to attack irreverently persons
in authority. His clear task, as I say, was to do his own duty; to
walk wisely in this world of confused wickedness, and save his own soul
alive. But the Roman High-priesthood did come athwart him: afar off
at Wittenberg he, Luther, could not get lived in honesty for it; he
remonstrated, resisted, came to extremity; was struck at, struck again,
and so it came to wager of battle between them! This is worth attending
to in Luther's history. Perhaps no man of so humble, peaceable a
disposition ever filled the world with contention. We cannot but see
that he would have loved privacy, quiet diligence in the shade; that it
was against his will he ever became a notoriety. Notoriety: what would
that do for him? The goal of his march through this world was the
Infinite Heaven; an indubitable goal for him: in a few years, he should
either have attained that, or lost it forever! We will say nothing at
all, I think, of that sorrowfulest of theories, of its being some mean
shopkeeper grudge, of the Augustine Monk against the Dominican,
that first kindled the wrath of Luther, and produced the Protestant
Reformation. We will say to the people who maintain it, if indeed any
such exist now: Get first into the sphere of thought by which it is
so much as possible to judge of Luther, or of any man like Luther,
otherwise than distractedly; we may then begin arguing with you.

The Monk Tetzel, sent out carelessly in the way of trade, by Leo
Tenth,--who merely wanted to raise a little money, and for the rest
seems to have been a Pagan rather than a Christian, so far as he was
anything,--arrived at Wittenberg, and drove his scandalous trade there.
Luther's flock bought Indulgences; in the confessional of his Church,
people pleaded to him that they had already got their sins pardoned.
Luther, if he would not be found wanting at his own post, a false
sluggard and coward at the very centre of the little space of ground
that was his own and no other man's, had to step forth against
Indulgences, and declare aloud that _they_ were a futility and sorrowful
mockery, that no man's sins could be pardoned by _them_. It was the
beginning of the whole Reformation. We know how it went; forward from
this first public challenge of Tetzel, on the last day of October, 1517,
through remonstrance and argument;--spreading ever wider, rising ever
higher; till it became unquenchable, and enveloped all the world.
Luther's heart's desire was to have this grief and other griefs amended;
his thought was still far other than that of introducing separation in
the Church, or revolting against the Pope, Father of Christendom.--The
elegant Pagan Pope cared little about this Monk and his doctrines;
wished, however, to have done with the noise of him: in a space of some
three years, having tried various softer methods, he thought good to end
it by _fire_. He dooms the Monk's writings to be burnt by the hangman,
and his body to be sent bound to Rome,--probably for a similar purpose.
It was the way they had ended with Huss, with Jerome, the century
before. A short argument, fire. Poor Huss: he came to that Constance
Council, with all imaginable promises and safe-conducts; an earnest,
not rebellious kind of man: they laid him instantly in a stone dungeon
"three feet wide, six feet high, seven feet long;" _burnt_ the true
voice of him out of this world; choked it in smoke and fire. That was
_not_ well done!

I, for one, pardon Luther for now altogether revolting against the Pope.
The elegant Pagan, by this fire-decree of his, had kindled into noble
just wrath the bravest heart then living in this world. The bravest, if
also one of the humblest, peaceablest; it was now kindled. These words
of mine, words of truth and soberness, aiming faithfully, as human
inability would allow, to promote God's truth on Earth, and save men's
souls, you, God's vicegerent on earth, answer them by the hangman and
fire? You will burn me and them, for answer to the God's-message they
strove to bring you? You are not God's vicegerent; you are another's
than his, I think! I take your Bull, as an emparchmented Lie, and burn
_it_. _You_ will do what you see good next: this is what I do.--It was
on the 10th of December, 1520, three years after the beginning of the
business, that Luther, "with a great concourse of people," took this
indignant step of burning the Pope's fire-decree "at the Elster-Gate of
Wittenberg." Wittenberg looked on "with shoutings;" the whole world was
looking on. The Pope should not have provoked that "shout"! It was
the shout of the awakening of nations. The quiet German heart, modest,
patient of much, had at length got more than it could bear. Formulism,
Pagan Popeism, and other Falsehood and corrupt Semblance had ruled long
enough: and here once more was a man found who durst tell all men that
God's-world stood not on semblances but on realities; that Life was a
truth, and not a lie!

At bottom, as was said above, we are to consider Luther as a Prophet
Idol-breaker; a bringer-back of men to reality. It is the function of
great men and teachers. Mahomet said, These idols of yours are wood; you
put wax and oil on them, the flies stick on them: they are not God, I
tell you, they are black wood! Luther said to the Pope, This thing of
yours that you call a Pardon of Sins, it is a bit of rag-paper with ink.
It is nothing else; it, and so much like it, is nothing else. God alone
can pardon sins. Popeship, spiritual Fatherhood of God's Church, is that
a vain semblance, of cloth and parchment? It is an awful fact. God's
Church is not a semblance, Heaven and Hell are not semblances. I stand
on this, since you drive me to it. Standing on this, I a poor German
Monk am stronger than you all. I stand solitary, friendless, but on
God's Truth; you with your tiaras, triple-hats, with your treasuries and
armories, thunders spiritual and temporal, stand on the Devil's Lie, and
are not so strong--!

The Diet of Worms, Luther's appearance there on the 17th of April, 1521,
may be considered as the greatest scene in Modern European History; the
point, indeed, from which the whole subsequent history of civilization
takes its rise. After multiplied negotiations, disputations, it had
come to this. The young Emperor Charles Fifth, with all the Princes
of Germany, Papal nuncios, dignitaries spiritual and temporal, are
assembled there: Luther is to appear and answer for himself, whether he
will recant or not. The world's pomp and power sits there on this
hand: on that, stands up for God's Truth, one man, the poor miner Hans
Luther's Son. Friends had reminded him of Huss, advised him not to go;
he would not be advised. A large company of friends rode out to meet
him, with still more earnest warnings; he answered, "Were there as many
Devils in Worms as there are roof-tiles, I would on." The people, on
the morrow, as he went to the Hall of the Diet, crowded the windows and
house-tops, some of them calling out to him, in solemn words, not to
recant: "Whosoever denieth me before men!" they cried to him,--as in
a kind of solemn petition and adjuration. Was it not in reality our
petition too, the petition of the whole world, lying in dark bondage
of soul, paralyzed under a black spectral Nightmare and triple-hatted
Chimera, calling itself Father in God, and what not: "Free us; it rests
with thee; desert us not!"

Luther did not desert us. His speech, of two hours, distinguished itself
by its respectful, wise and honest tone; submissive to whatsoever could
lawfully claim submission, not submissive to any more than that. His
writings, he said, were partly his own, partly derived from the Word of
God. As to what was his own, human infirmity entered into it; unguarded
anger, blindness, many things doubtless which it were a blessing for him
could he abolish altogether. But as to what stood on sound truth and
the Word of God, he could not recant it. How could he? "Confute me," he
concluded, "by proofs of Scripture, or else by plain just arguments: I
cannot recant otherwise. For it is neither safe nor prudent to do aught
against conscience. Here stand I; I can do no other: God assist me!"--It
is, as we say, the greatest moment in the Modern History of Men. English
Puritanism, England and its Parliaments, Americas, and vast work these
two centuries; French Revolution, Europe and its work everywhere at
present: the germ of it all lay there: had Luther in that moment done
other, it had all been otherwise! The European World was asking him:
Am I to sink ever lower into falsehood, stagnant putrescence, loathsome
accursed death; or, with whatever paroxysm, to cast the falsehoods out
of me, and be cured and live?--

Great wars, contentions and disunion followed out of this Reformation;
which last down to our day, and are yet far from ended. Great talk and
crimination has been made about these. They are lamentable, undeniable;
but after all, what has Luther or his cause to do with them? It seems
strange reasoning to charge the Reformation with all this. When Hercules
turned the purifying river into King Augeas's stables, I have no doubt
the confusion that resulted was considerable all around: but I think
it was not Hercules's blame; it was some other's blame! The Reformation
might bring what results it liked when it came, but the Reformation
simply could not help coming. To all Popes and Popes' advocates,
expostulating, lamenting and accusing, the answer of the world is: Once
for all, your Popehood has become untrue. No matter how good it was, how
good you say it is, we cannot believe it; the light of our whole mind,
given us to walk by from Heaven above, finds it henceforth a thing
unbelievable. We will not believe it, we will not try to believe it,--we
dare not! The thing is _untrue_; we were traitors against the Giver
of all Truth, if we durst pretend to think it true. Away with it; let
whatsoever likes come in the place of it: with _it_ we can have no
farther trade!--Luther and his Protestantism is not responsible
for wars; the false Simulacra that forced him to protest, they are
responsible. Luther did what every man that God has made has not only
the right, but lies under the sacred duty, to do: answered a Falsehood
when it questioned him, Dost thou believe me?--No!--At what cost soever,
without counting of costs, this thing behooved to be done. Union,
organization spiritual and material, a far nobler than any Popedom or
Feudalism in their truest days, I never doubt, is coming for the world;
sure to come. But on Fact alone, not on Semblance and Simulacrum, will
it be able either to come, or to stand when come. With union grounded
on falsehood, and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have
anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable, the noisome grave
is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!

And yet, in prizing justly the indispensable blessings of the New, let
us not be unjust to the Old. The Old was true, if it no longer is. In
Dante's days it needed no sophistry, self-blinding or other dishonesty,
to get itself reckoned true. It was good then; nay there is in the soul
of it a deathless good. The cry of "No Popery" is foolish enough in
these days. The speculation that Popery is on the increase, building new
chapels and so forth, may pass for one of the idlest ever started. Very
curious: to count up a few Popish chapels, listen to a few Protestant
logic-choppings,--to much dull-droning drowsy inanity that still calls
itself Protestant, and say: See, Protestantism is _dead_; Popeism is
more alive than it, will be alive after it!--Drowsy inanities, not a
few, that call themselves Protestant are dead; but _Protestantism_ has
not died yet, that I hear of! Protestantism, if we will look, has in
these days produced its Goethe, its Napoleon; German Literature and the
French Revolution; rather considerable signs of life! Nay, at bottom,
what else is alive _but_ Protestantism? The life of most else that one
meets is a galvanic one merely,--not a pleasant, not a lasting sort of
life!

Popery can build new chapels; welcome to do so, to all lengths. Popery
cannot come back, any more than Paganism can,--_which_ also still
lingers in some countries. But, indeed, it is with these things, as with
the ebbing of the sea: you look at the waves oscillating hither, thither
on the beach; for _minutes_ you cannot tell how it is going; look in
half an hour where it is,--look in half a century where your Popehood
is! Alas, would there were no greater danger to our Europe than the poor
old Pope's revival! Thor may as soon try to revive.--And withal this
oscillation has a meaning. The poor old Popehood will not die away
entirely, as Thor has done, for some time yet; nor ought it. We may say,
the Old never dies till this happen, Till all the soul of good that was
in it have got itself transfused into the practical New. While a good
work remains capable of being done by the Romish form; or, what is
inclusive of all, while a pious _life_ remains capable of being led
by it, just so long, if we consider, will this or the other human soul
adopt it, go about as a living witness of it. So long it will obtrude
itself on the eye of us who reject it, till we in our practice too have
appropriated whatsoever of truth was in it. Then, but also not till
then, it will have no charm more for any man. It lasts here for a
purpose. Let it last as long as it can.--

Of Luther I will add now, in reference to all these wars and bloodshed,
the noticeable fact that none of them began so long as he continued
living. The controversy did not get to fighting so long as he was there.
To me it is proof of his greatness in all senses, this fact. How seldom
do we find a man that has stirred up some vast commotion, who does
not himself perish, swept away in it! Such is the usual course of
revolutionists. Luther continued, in a good degree, sovereign of this
greatest revolution; all Protestants, of what rank or function soever,
looking much to him for guidance: and he held it peaceable, continued
firm at the centre of it. A man to do this must have a kingly faculty:
he must have the gift to discern at all turns where the true heart of
the matter lies, and to plant himself courageously on that, as a strong
true man, that other true men may rally round him there. He will not
continue leader of men otherwise. Luther's clear deep force of judgment,
his force of all sorts, of _silence_, of tolerance and moderation, among
others, are very notable in these circumstances.

Tolerance, I say; a very genuine kind of tolerance: he distinguishes
what is essential, and what is not; the unessential may go very much as
it will. A complaint comes to him that such and such a Reformed Preacher
"will not preach without a cassock." Well, answers Luther, what harm
will a cassock do the man? "Let him have a cassock to preach in; let
him have three cassocks if he find benefit in them!" His conduct in the
matter of Karlstadt's wild image-breaking; of the Anabaptists; of the
Peasants' War, shows a noble strength, very different from spasmodic
violence. With sure prompt insight he discriminates what is what: a
strong just man, he speaks forth what is the wise course, and all men
follow him in that. Luther's Written Works give similar testimony of
him. The dialect of these speculations is now grown obsolete for us;
but one still reads them with a singular attraction. And indeed the mere
grammatical diction is still legible enough; Luther's merit in literary
history is of the greatest: his dialect became the language of all
writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of
his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no
Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of
a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged
sterling sense and strength. He dashes out illumination from him; his
smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the
matter. Good humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness and depth: this
man could have been a Poet too! He had to _work_ an Epic Poem, not
write one. I call him a great Thinker; as indeed his greatness of heart
already betokens that.

Richter says of Luther's words, "His words are half-battles." They may
be called so. The essential quality of him was, that he could fight and
conquer; that he was a right piece of human Valor. No more valiant man,
no mortal heart to be called _braver_, that one has record of, ever
lived in that Teutonic Kindred, whose character is valor. His defiance
of the "Devils" in Worms was not a mere boast, as the like might be if
now spoken. It was a faith of Luther's that there were Devils, spiritual
denizens of the Pit, continually besetting men. Many times, in his
writings, this turns up; and a most small sneer has been grounded on it
by some. In the room of the Wartburg where he sat translating the Bible,
they still show you a black spot on the wall; the strange memorial of
one of these conflicts. Luther sat translating one of the Psalms; he was
worn down with long labor, with sickness, abstinence from food: there
rose before him some hideous indefinable Image, which he took for the
Evil One, to forbid his work: Luther started up, with fiend-defiance;
flung his inkstand at the spectre, and it disappeared! The spot still
remains there; a curious monument of several things. Any apothecary's
apprentice can now tell us what we are to think of this apparition, in
a scientific sense: but the man's heart that dare rise defiant, face to
face, against Hell itself, can give no higher proof of fearlessness.
The thing he will quail before exists not on this Earth or under
it.--Fearless enough! "The Devil is aware," writes he on one occasion,
"that this does not proceed out of fear in me. I have seen and defied
innumerable Devils. Duke George," of Leipzig, a great enemy of his,
"Duke George is not equal to one Devil,"--far short of a Devil! "If I
had business at Leipzig, I would ride into Leipzig, though it rained
Duke Georges for nine days running." What a reservoir of Dukes to ride
into--!

At the same time, they err greatly who imagine that this man's courage
was ferocity, mere coarse disobedient obstinacy and savagery, as many
do. Far from that. There may be an absence of fear which arises from the
absence of thought or affection, from the presence of hatred and stupid
fury. We do not value the courage of the tiger highly! With Luther it
was far otherwise; no accusation could be more unjust than this of mere
ferocious violence brought against him. A most gentle heart withal, full
of pity and love, as indeed the truly valiant heart ever is. The tiger
before a _stronger_ foe--flies: the tiger is not what we call valiant,
only fierce and cruel. I know few things more touching than those soft
breathings of affection, soft as a child's or a mother's, in this great
wild heart of Luther. So honest, unadulterated with any cant; homely,
rude in their utterance; pure as water welling from the rock. What, in
fact, was all that down-pressed mood of despair and reprobation,
which we saw in his youth, but the outcome of pre-eminent thoughtful
gentleness, affections too keen and fine? It is the course such men as
the poor Poet Cowper fall into. Luther to a slight observer might have
seemed a timid, weak man; modesty, affectionate shrinking tenderness the
chief distinction of him. It is a noble valor which is roused in a heart
like this, once stirred up into defiance, all kindled into a heavenly
blaze.

In Luther's _Table-Talk_, a posthumous Book of anecdotes and sayings
collected by his friends, the most interesting now of all the Books
proceeding from him, we have many beautiful unconscious displays of the
man, and what sort of nature he had. His behavior at the death-bed of
his little Daughter, so still, so great and loving, is among the most
affecting things. He is resigned that his little Magdalene should die,
yet longs inexpressibly that she might live;--follows, in awe-struck
thought, the flight of her little soul through those unknown realms.
Awe-struck; most heartfelt, we can see; and sincere,--for after all
dogmatic creeds and articles, he feels what nothing it is that we know,
or can know: His little Magdalene shall be with God, as God wills; for
Luther too that is all; _Islam_ is all.

Once, he looks out from his solitary Patmos, the Castle of Coburg, in
the middle of the night: The great vault of Immensity, long flights of
clouds sailing through it,--dumb, gaunt, huge:--who supports all that?
"None ever saw the pillars of it; yet it is supported." God supports it.
We must know that God is great, that God is good; and trust, where
we cannot see.--Returning home from Leipzig once, he is struck by the
beauty of the harvest-fields: How it stands, that golden yellow corn,
on its fair taper stem, its golden head bent, all rich and waving
there,--the meek Earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it once
again; the bread of man!--In the garden at Wittenberg one evening at
sunset, a little bird has perched for the night: That little bird, says
Luther, above it are the stars and deep Heaven of worlds; yet it has
folded its little wings; gone trustfully to rest there as in its home:
the Maker of it has given it too a home!--Neither are mirthful turns
wanting: there is a great free human heart in this man. The common
speech of him has a rugged nobleness, idiomatic, expressive, genuine;
gleams here and there with beautiful poetic tints. One feels him to be
a great brother man. His love of Music, indeed, is not this, as it were,
the summary of all these affections in him? Many a wild unutterability
he spoke forth from him in the tones of his flute. The Devils fled from
his flute, he says. Death-defiance on the one hand, and such love of
music on the other; I could call these the two opposite poles of a great
soul; between these two all great things had room.

Luther's face is to me expressive of him; in Kranach's best portraits
I find the true Luther. A rude plebeian face; with its huge crag-like
brows and bones, the emblem of rugged energy; at first, almost a
repulsive face. Yet in the eyes especially there is a wild silent
sorrow; an unnamable melancholy, the element of all gentle and fine
affections; giving to the rest the true stamp of nobleness. Laughter was
in this Luther, as we said; but tears also were there. Tears also were
appointed him; tears and hard toil. The basis of his life was Sadness,
Earnestness. In his latter days, after all triumphs and victories, he
expresses himself heartily weary of living; he considers that God alone
can and will regulate the course things are taking, and that perhaps the
Day of Judgment is not far. As for him, he longs for one thing: that
God would release him from his labor, and let him depart and be at rest.
They understand little of the man who cite this in discredit of him!--I
will call this Luther a true Great Man; great in intellect, in courage,
affection and integrity; one of our most lovable and precious men.
Great, not as a hewn obelisk; but as an Alpine mountain,--so simple,
honest, spontaneous, not setting up to be great at all; there for quite
another purpose than being great! Ah yes, unsubduable granite, piercing
far and wide into the Heavens; yet in the clefts of it fountains, green
beautiful valleys with flowers! A right Spiritual Hero and Prophet; once
more, a true Son of Nature and Fact, for whom these centuries, and many
that are to come yet, will be thankful to Heaven.

The most interesting phasis which the Reformation anywhere assumes,
especially for us English, is that of Puritanism. In Luther's own
country Protestantism soon dwindled into a rather barren affair: not a
religion or faith, but rather now a theological jangling of argument,
the proper seat of it not the heart; the essence of it sceptical
contention: which indeed has jangled more and more, down to
Voltaireism itself,--through Gustavus-Adolphus contentions onwards to
French-Revolution ones! But in our Island there arose a Puritanism,
which even got itself established as a Presbyterianism and National
Church among the Scotch; which came forth as a real business of the
heart; and has produced in the world very notable fruit. In some senses,
one may say it is the only phasis of Protestantism that ever got to the
rank of being a Faith, a true heart-communication with Heaven, and of
exhibiting itself in History as such. We must spare a few words for
Knox; himself a brave and remarkable man; but still more important as
Chief Priest and Founder, which one may consider him to be, of the Faith
that became Scotland's, New England's, Oliver Cromwell's. History will
have something to say about this, for some time to come!

We may censure Puritanism as we please; and no one of us, I suppose,
but would find it a very rough defective thing. But we, and all men, may
understand that it was a genuine thing; for Nature has adopted it,
and it has grown, and grows. I say sometimes, that all goes by
wager-of-battle in this world; that _strength_, well understood, is
the measure of all worth. Give a thing time; if it can succeed, it is a
right thing. Look now at American Saxondom; and at that little Fact of
the sailing of the Mayflower, two hundred years ago, from Delft Haven in
Holland! Were we of open sense as the Greeks were, we had found a Poem
here; one of Nature's own Poems, such as she writes in broad facts over
great continents. For it was properly the beginning of America: there
were straggling settlers in America before, some material as of a body
was there; but the soul of it was first this. These poor men, driven
out of their own country, not able well to live in Holland, determine
on settling in the New World. Black untamed forests are there, and wild
savage creatures; but not so cruel as Star-chamber hangmen. They
thought the Earth would yield them food, if they tilled honestly; the
everlasting heaven would stretch, there too, overhead; they should be
left in peace, to prepare for Eternity by living well in this world of
Time; worshipping in what they thought the true, not the idolatrous way.
They clubbed their small means together; hired a ship, the little ship
Mayflower, and made ready to set sail.

In Neal's _History of the Puritans_ [Neal (London, 1755), i. 490] is an
account of the ceremony of their departure: solemnity, we might call it
rather, for it was a real act of worship. Their minister went down with
them to the beach, and their brethren whom they were to leave behind;
all joined in solemn prayer, That God would have pity on His poor
children, and go with them into that waste wilderness, for He also had
made that, He was there also as well as here.--Hah! These men, I think,
had a work! The weak thing, weaker than a child, becomes strong one day,
if it be a true thing. Puritanism was only despicable, laughable then;
but nobody can manage to laugh at it now. Puritanism has got weapons and
sinews; it has firearms, war-navies; it has cunning in its ten fingers,
strength in its right arm; it can steer ships, fell forests, remove
mountains;--it is one of the strongest things under this sun at present!

In the history of Scotland, too, I can find properly but one epoch:
we may say, it contains nothing of world-interest at all but this
Reformation by Knox. A poor barren country, full of continual broils,
dissensions, massacrings; a people in the last state of rudeness and
destitution; little better perhaps than Ireland at this day. Hungry
fierce barons, not so much as able to form any arrangement with each
other _how to divide_ what they fleeced from these poor drudges; but
obliged, as the Colombian Republics are at this day, to make of every
alteration a revolution; no way of changing a ministry but by hanging
the old ministers on gibbets: this is a historical spectacle of no very
singular significance! "Bravery" enough, I doubt not; fierce fighting in
abundance: but not braver or fiercer than that of their old Scandinavian
Sea-king ancestors; _whose_ exploits we have not found worth dwelling
on! It is a country as yet without a soul: nothing developed in it but
what is rude, external, semi-animal. And now at the Reformation, the
internal life is kindled, as it were, under the ribs of this outward
material death. A cause, the noblest of causes kindles itself, like a
beacon set on high; high as Heaven, yet attainable from Earth;--whereby
the meanest man becomes not a Citizen only, but a Member of Christ's
visible Church; a veritable Hero, if he prove a true man!

Well; this is what I mean by a whole "nation of heroes;" a _believing_
nation. There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a
god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great
soul! The like has been seen, we find. The like will be again seen,
under wider forms than the Presbyterian: there can be no lasting good
done till then.--Impossible! say some. Possible? Has it not _been_, in
this world, as a practiced fact? Did Hero-worship fail in Knox's case?
Or are we made of other clay now? Did the Westminster Confession of
Faith add some new property to the soul of man? God made the soul
of man. He did not doom any soul of man to live as a Hypothesis and
Hearsay, in a world filled with such, and with the fatal work and fruit
of such--!

But to return: This that Knox did for his Nation, I say, we may really
call a resurrection as from death. It was not a smooth business; but it
was welcome surely, and cheap at that price, had it been far rougher. On
the whole, cheap at any price!--as life is. The people began to _live_:
they needed first of all to do that, at what cost and costs soever.
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. Or what of
Scotland? The Puritanism of Scotland became that of England, of
New England. A tumult in the High Church of Edinburgh spread into a
universal battle and struggle over all these realms;--there came
out, after fifty years' struggling, what we all call the "_Glorious_
Revolution" a _Habeas Corpus_ Act, Free Parliaments, and much
else!--Alas, is it not too true what we said, That many men in the van
do always, like Russian soldiers, march into the ditch of Schweidnitz,
and fill it up with their dead bodies, that the rear may pass over them
dry-shod, and gain the honor? How many earnest rugged Cromwells, Knoxes,
poor Peasant Covenanters, wrestling, battling for very life, in rough
miry places, have to struggle, and suffer, and fall, greatly censured,
_bemired_,--before a beautiful Revolution of Eighty-eight can step
over them in official pumps and silk-stockings, with universal
three-times-three!

It seems to me hard measure that this Scottish man, now after three
hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit before the world;
intrinsically for having been, in such way as it was then possible to
be, the bravest of all Scotchmen! Had he been a poor Half-and-half, he
could have crouched into the corner, like so many others; Scotland
had not been delivered; and Knox had been without blame. He is the one
Scotchman to whom, of all others, his country and the world owe a debt.
He has to plead that Scotland would forgive him for having been worth to
it any million "unblamable" Scotchmen that need no forgiveness! He bared
his breast to the battle; had to row in French galleys, wander forlorn
in exile, in clouds and storms; was censured, shot at through his
windows; had a right sore fighting life: if this world were his place of
recompense, he had made but a bad venture of it. I cannot apologize for
Knox. To him it is very indifferent, these two hundred and fifty years
or more, what men say of him. But we, having got above all those details
of his battle, and living now in clearness on the fruits of his victory,
we, for our own sake, ought to look through the rumors and controversies
enveloping the man, into the man himself.

For one thing, I will remark that this post of Prophet to his Nation was
not of his seeking; Knox had lived forty years quietly obscure, before
he became conspicuous. He was the son of poor parents; had got a college
education; become a Priest; adopted the Reformation, and seemed well
content to guide his own steps by the light of it, nowise unduly
intruding it on others. He had lived as Tutor in gentlemen's families;
preaching when any body of persons wished to hear his doctrine: resolute
he to walk by the truth, and speak the truth when called to do it;
not ambitious of more; not fancying himself capable of more. In this
entirely obscure way he had reached the age of forty; was with the small
body of Reformers who were standing siege in St. Andrew's Castle,--when
one day in their chapel, the Preacher after finishing his exhortation to
these fighters in the forlorn hope, said suddenly, That there ought to
be other speakers, that all men who had a priest's heart and gift in
them ought now to speak;--which gifts and heart one of their own number,
John Knox the name of him, had: Had he not? said the Preacher, appealing
to all the audience: what then is _his_ duty? The people answered
affirmatively; it was a criminal forsaking of his post, if such a man
held the word that was in him silent. Poor Knox was obliged to stand
up; he attempted to reply; he could say no word;--burst into a flood
of tears, and ran out. It is worth remembering, that scene. He was in
grievous trouble for some days. He felt what a small faculty was his
for this great work. He felt what a baptism he was called to be baptized
withal. He "burst into tears."

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!

LECTURE V. THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS. JOHNSON, ROUSSEAU, BURNS.

[May 19, 1840.]

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.

To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a notable,
respectable product of the modern ages. Their existence too is modified,
to the very basis of it, by the existence of Books. Universities arose
while there were yet no Books procurable; while a man, for a single
Book, had to give an estate of land. That, in those circumstances, when
a man had some knowledge to communicate, he should do it by gathering
the learners round him, face to face, was a necessity for him. If you
wanted to know what Abelard knew, you must go and listen to Abelard.
Thousands, as many as thirty thousand, went to hear Abelard and that
metaphysical theology of his. And now for any other teacher who had also
something of his own to teach, there was a great convenience opened:
so many thousands eager to learn were already assembled yonder; of all
places the best place for him was that. For any third teacher it was
better still; and grew ever the better, the more teachers there came.
It only needed now that the King took notice of this new phenomenon;
combined or agglomerated the various schools into one school; gave it
edifices, privileges, encouragements, and named it _Universitas_,
or School of all Sciences: the University of Paris, in its essential
characters, was there. The model of all subsequent Universities; which
down even to these days, for six centuries now, have gone on to found
themselves. Such, I conceive, was the origin of Universities.

It is clear, however, that with this simple circumstance, facility of
getting Books, the whole conditions of the business from top to bottom
were changed. Once invent Printing, you metamorphosed all Universities,
or superseded them! The Teacher needed not now to gather men personally
round him, that he might _speak_ to them what he knew: print it in a
Book, and all learners far and wide, for a trifle, had it each at his
own fireside, much more effectually to learn it!--Doubtless there is
still peculiar virtue in Speech; even writers of Books may still, in
some circumstances, find it convenient to speak also,--witness our
present meeting here! There is, one would say, and must ever remain
while man has a tongue, a distinct province for Speech as well as for
Writing and Printing. In regard to all things this must remain; to
Universities among others. But the limits of the two have nowhere yet
been pointed out, ascertained; much less put in practice: the University
which would completely take in that great new fact, of the existence of
Printed Books, and stand on a clear footing for the Nineteenth
Century as the Paris one did for the Thirteenth, has not yet come into
existence. If we think of it, all that a University, or final highest
School can do for us, is still but what the first School began
doing,--teach us to _read_. We learn to _read_, in various languages,
in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner
of Books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic
knowledge, is the Books themselves! It depends on what we read,
after all manner of Professors have done their best for us. The true
University of these days is a Collection of Books.

But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, all is changed, in its
preaching, in its working, by the introduction of Books. The Church is
the working recognized Union of our Priests or Prophets, of those who by
wise teaching guide the souls of men. While there was no Writing, even
while there was no Easy-writing, or _Printing_, the preaching of the
voice was the natural sole method of performing this. But now with
Books!--He that can write a true Book, to persuade England, is not he
the Bishop and Archbishop, the Primate of England and of All England?
I many a time say, the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books,
these _are_ the real working effective Church of a modern country. Nay
not only our preaching, but even our worship, is not it too accomplished
by means of Printed Books? The noble sentiment which a gifted soul
has clothed for us in melodious words, which brings melody into our
hearts,--is not this essentially, if we will understand it, of the
nature of worship? There are many, in all countries, who, in this
confused time, have no other method of worship. He who, in any way,
shows us better than we knew before that a lily of the fields is
beautiful, does he not show it us as an effluence of the Fountain of all
Beauty; as the _handwriting_, made visible there, of the great Maker of
the Universe? He has sung for us, made us sing with him, a little verse
of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How much more he who sings, who
says, or in any way brings home to our heart the noble doings, feelings,
darings and endurances of a brother man! He has verily touched our
hearts as with a live coal _from the altar_. Perhaps there is no worship
more authentic.

Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an "apocalypse of Nature," a
revealing of the "open secret." It may well enough be named, in Fichte's
style, a "continuous revelation" of the Godlike in the Terrestrial and
Common. The Godlike does ever, in very truth, endure there; is
brought out, now in this dialect, now in that, with various degrees
of clearness: all true gifted Singers and Speakers are, consciously or
unconsciously, doing so. The dark stormful indignation of a Byron, so
wayward and perverse, may have touches of it; nay the withered mockery
of a French sceptic,--his mockery of the False, a love and worship of
the True. How much more the sphere-harmony of a Shakspeare, of a Goethe;
the cathedral music of a Milton! They are something too, those humble
genuine lark-notes of a Burns,--skylark, starting from the humble
furrow, far overhead into the blue depths, and singing to us so
genuinely there! For all true singing is of the nature of worship; as
indeed all true _working_ may be said to be,--whereof such _singing_ is
but the record, and fit melodious representation, to us. Fragments of a
real "Church Liturgy" and "Body of Homilies," strangely disguised from
the common eye, are to be found weltering in that huge froth-ocean of
Printed Speech we loosely call Literature! Books are our Church too.

Or turning now to the Government of men. Witenagemote, old Parliament,
was a great thing. The affairs of the nation were there deliberated and
decided; what we were to _do_ as a nation. But does not, though the name
Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now, everywhere
and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, _out_ of Parliament
altogether? Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but,
in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a _Fourth Estate_ more
important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty
saying; it is a literal fact,--very momentous to us in these times.
Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out
of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing,
Democracy is inevitable. Writing brings Printing; brings universal
everyday extempore Printing, as we see at present. Whoever can
speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch
of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of
authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures.
the requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which others will listen
to; this and nothing more is requisite. The nation is governed by all
that has tongue in the nation: Democracy is virtually _there_. Add only,
that whatsoever power exists will have itself, by and by, organized;
working secretly under bandages, obscurations, obstructions, it will
never rest till it get to work free, unencumbered, visible to all.
Democracy virtually extant will insist on becoming palpably extant.--

On all sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of the things
which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous,
wonderful and worthy are the things we call Books! Those poor bits
of rag-paper with black ink on them;--from the Daily Newspaper to
the sacred Hebrew BOOK, what have they not done, what are they not
doing!--For indeed, whatever be the outward form of the thing (bits
of paper, as we say, and black ink), is it not verily, at bottom, the
highest act of man's faculty that produces a Book? It is the _Thought_
of man; the true thaumaturgic virtue; by which man works all things
whatsoever. All that he does, and brings to pass, is the vesture of a
Thought. This London City, with all its houses, palaces, steam-engines,
cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what is it but a
Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One;--a huge immeasurable
Spirit of a THOUGHT, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces,
Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not
a brick was made but some man had to _think_ of the making of that
brick.--The thing we called "bits of paper with traces of black ink," is
the _purest_ embodiment a Thought of man can have. No wonder it is, in
all ways, the activest and noblest.

All this, of the importance and supreme importance of the Man of Letters
in modern Society, and how the Press is to such a degree superseding
the Pulpit, the Senate, the _Senatus Academicus_ and much else, has been
admitted for a good while; and recognized often enough, in late times,
with a sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment. It seems to me, the
Sentimental by and by will have to give place to the Practical. If Men
of Letters _are_ so incalculably influential, actually performing such
work for us from age to age, and even from day to day, then I think
we may conclude that Men of Letters will not always wander like
unrecognized unregulated Ishmaelites among us! Whatsoever thing, as I
said above, has virtual unnoticed power will cast off its wrappages,
bandages, and step forth one day with palpably articulated, universally
visible power. That one man wear the clothes, and take the wages, of a
function which is done by quite another: there can be no profit in
this; this is not right, it is wrong. And yet, alas, the _making_ of it
right,--what a business, for long times to come! Sure enough, this that
we call Organization of the Literary Guild is still a great way off,
encumbered with all manner of complexities. If you asked me what were
the best possible organization for the Men of Letters in modern society;
the arrangement of furtherance and regulation, grounded the most
accurately on the actual facts of their position and of the world's
position,--I should beg to say that the problem far exceeded my faculty!
It is not one man's faculty; it is that of many successive men turned
earnestly upon it, that will bring out even an approximate solution.
What the best arrangement were, none of us could say. But if you ask,
Which is the worst? I answer: This which we now have, that Chaos should
sit umpire in it; this is the worst. To the best, or any good one, there
is yet a long way.

One remark I must not omit, That royal or parliamentary grants of money
are by no means the chief thing wanted! To give our Men of Letters
stipends, endowments and all furtherance of cash, will do little
towards the business. On the whole, one is weary of hearing about the
omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is
no evil to be poor; that there ought to be Literary Men poor,--to show
whether they are genuine or not! Mendicant Orders, bodies of good men
doomed to beg, were instituted in the Christian Church; a most natural
and even necessary development of the spirit of Christianity. It was
itself founded on Poverty, on Sorrow, Contradiction, Crucifixion, every
species of worldly Distress and Degradation. We may say, that he who has
not known those things, and learned from them the priceless lessons they
have to teach, has missed a good opportunity of schooling. To beg, and
go barefoot, in coarse woollen cloak with a rope round your loins,
and be despised of all the world, was no beautiful business;--nor an
honorable one in any eye, till the nobleness of those who did so had
made it honored of some!

Begging is not in our course at the present time: but for the rest of
it, who will say that a Johnson is not perhaps the better for being
poor? It is needful for him, at all rates, to know that outward profit,
that success of any kind is _not_ the goal he has to aim at. Pride,
vanity, ill-conditioned egoism of all sorts, are bred in his heart, as
in every heart; need, above all, to be cast out of his heart,--to be,
with whatever pangs, torn out of it, cast forth from it, as a thing
worthless. Byron, born rich and noble, made out even less than
Burns, poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in that same "best possible
organization" as yet far off, Poverty may still enter as an important
element? What if our Men of Letters, men setting up to be Spiritual
Heroes, were still _then_, as they now are, a kind of "involuntary
monastic order;" bound still to this same ugly Poverty,--till they had
tried what was in it too, till they had learned to make it too do for
them! Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know
the province of it, and confine it there; and even spurn it back, when
it wishes to get farther.

Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season for them, the
fit assigner of them, all settled,--how is the Burns to be recognized
that merits these? He must pass through the ordeal, and prove himself.
_This_ ordeal; this wild welter of a chaos which is called Literary
Life: this too is a kind of ordeal! There is clear truth in the idea
that a struggle from the lower classes of society, towards the upper
regions and rewards of society, must ever continue. Strong men are
born there, who ought to stand elsewhere than there. The manifold,
inextricably complex, universal struggle of these constitutes, and must
constitute, what is called the progress of society. For Men of Letters,
as for all other sorts of men. How to regulate that struggle? There is
the whole question. To leave it as it is, at the mercy of blind Chance;
a whirl of distracted atoms, one cancelling the other; one of the
thousand arriving saved, nine hundred and ninety-nine lost by the way;
your royal Johnson languishing inactive in garrets, or harnessed to the
yoke of Printer Cave; your Burns dying broken-hearted as a Gauger; your
Rousseau driven into mad exasperation, kindling French Revolutions
by his paradoxes: this, as we said, is clearly enough the _worst_
regulation. The _best_, alas, is far from us!

And yet there can be no doubt but it is coming; advancing on us, as yet
hidden in the bosom of centuries: this is a prophecy one can risk.
For so soon as men get to discern the importance of a thing, they do
infallibly set about arranging it, facilitating, forwarding it; and rest
not till, in some approximate degree, they have accomplished that. I
say, of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes at present
extant in the world, there is no class comparable for importance to that
Priesthood of the Writers of Books. This is a fact which he who runs may
read,--and draw inferences from. "Literature will take care of itself,"
answered Mr. Pitt, when applied to for some help for Burns. "Yes," adds
Mr. Southey, "it will take care of itself; _and of you too_, if you do
not look to it!"

The result to individual Men of Letters is not the momentous one; they
are but individuals, an infinitesimal fraction of the great body; they
can struggle on, and live or else die, as they have been wont. But it
deeply concerns the whole society, whether it will set its _light_ on
high places, to walk thereby; or trample it under foot, and scatter it
in all ways of wild waste (not without conflagration), as heretofore!
Light is the one thing wanted for the world. Put wisdom in the head of
the world, the world will fight its battle victoriously, and be the best
world man can make it. I called this anomaly of a disorganic Literary
Class the heart of all other anomalies, at once product and parent; some
good arrangement for that would be as the _punctum saliens_ of a
new vitality and just arrangement for all. Already, in some European
countries, in France, in Prussia, one traces some beginnings of an
arrangement for the Literary Class; indicating the gradual possibility
of such. I believe that it is possible; that it will have to be
possible.

By far the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese is one on
which we cannot arrive at clearness, but which excites endless curiosity
even in the dim state: this namely, that they do attempt to make their
Men of Letters their Governors! It would be rash to say, one understood
how this was done, or with what degree of success it was done. All
such things must be very unsuccessful; yet a small degree of success is
precious; the very attempt how precious! There does seem to be, all over
China, a more or less active search everywhere to discover the men of
talent that grow up in the young generation. Schools there are for
every one: a foolish sort of training, yet still a sort. The youths who
distinguish themselves in the lower school are promoted into
favorable stations in the higher, that they may still more distinguish
themselves,--forward and forward: it appears to be out of these that
the Official Persons, and incipient Governors, are taken. These are they
whom they _try_ first, whether they can govern or not. And surely with
the best hope: for they are the men that have already shown intellect.
Try them: they have not governed or administered as yet; perhaps they
cannot; but there is no doubt they _have_ some Understanding,--without
which no man can! Neither is Understanding a _tool_, as we are too apt
to figure; "it is a _hand_ which can handle any tool." Try these men:
they are of all others the best worth trying.--Surely there is no
kind of government, constitution, revolution, social apparatus or
arrangement, that I know of in this world, so promising to one's
scientific curiosity as this. The man of intellect at the top of
affairs: this is the aim of all constitutions and revolutions, if they
have any aim. For the man of true intellect, as I assert and believe
always, is the noble-hearted man withal, the true, just, humane and
valiant man. Get him for governor, all is got; fail to get him, though
you had Constitutions plentiful as blackberries, and a Parliament in
every village, there is nothing yet got--!

These things look strange, truly; and are not such as we commonly
speculate upon. But we are fallen into strange times; these things will
require to be speculated upon; to be rendered practicable, to be in some
way put in practice. These, and many others. On all hands of us, there
is the announcement, audible enough, that the old Empire of Routine
has ended; that to say a thing has long been, is no reason for its
continuing to be. The things which have been are fallen into decay, are
fallen into incompetence; large masses of mankind, in every society of
our Europe, are no longer capable of living at all by the things which
have been. When millions of men can no longer by their utmost exertion
gain food for themselves, and "the third man for thirty-six weeks each
year is short of third-rate potatoes," the things which have been must
decidedly prepare to alter themselves!--I will now quit this of the
organization of Men of Letters.

Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest on those Literary Heroes of ours
was not the want of organization for Men of Letters, but a far deeper
one; out of which, indeed, this and so many other evils for the Literary
Man, and for all men, had, as from their fountain, taken rise. That our
Hero as Man of Letters had to travel without highway, companionless,
through an inorganic chaos,--and to leave his own life and faculty lying
there, as a partial contribution towards _pushing_ some highway through
it: this, had not his faculty itself been so perverted and paralyzed, he
might have put up with, might have considered to be but the common lot
of Heroes. His fatal misery was the _spiritual paralysis_, so we may
name it, of the Age in which his life lay; whereby his life too, do what
he might, was half paralyzed! The Eighteenth was a _Sceptical_ Century;
in which little word there is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries.
Scepticism means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all
sorts of infidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, in few
centuries that one could specify since the world began, was a life of
Heroism more difficult for a man. That was not an age of Faith,--an
age of Heroes! The very possibility of Heroism had been, as it were,
formally abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever;
Triviality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. The "age of
miracles" had been, or perhaps had not been; but it was not any longer.
An effete world; wherein Wonder, Greatness, Godhood could not now
dwell;--in one word, a godless world!

How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time,--compared
not with the Christian Shakspeares and Miltons, but with the old Pagan
Skalds, with any species of believing men! The living TREE Igdrasil,
with the melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs,
deep-rooted as Hela, has died out into the clanking of a World-MACHINE.
"Tree" and "Machine:" contrast these two things. I, for my share,
declare the world to be no machine! I say that it does _not_ go by
wheel-and-pinion "motives" self-interests, checks, balances; that there
is something far other in it than the clank of spinning-jennies, and
parliamentary majorities; and, on the whole, that it is not a machine at
all!--The old Norse Heathen had a truer motion of God's-world than these
poor Machine-Sceptics: the old Heathen Norse were _sincere_ men. But
for these poor Sceptics there was no sincerity, no truth. Half-truth and
hearsay was called truth. Truth, for most men, meant plausibility; to be
measured by the number of votes you could get. They had lost any
notion that sincerity was possible, or of what sincerity was. How many
Plausibilities asking, with unaffected surprise and the air of offended
virtue, What! am not I sincere? Spiritual Paralysis, I say, nothing left
but a Mechanical life, was the characteristic of that century. For the
common man, unless happily he stood _below_ his century and belonged to
another prior one, it was impossible to be a Believer, a Hero; he lay
buried, unconscious, under these baleful influences. To the strongest
man, only with infinite struggle and confusion was it possible to work
himself half loose; and lead as it were, in an enchanted, most tragical
way, a spiritual death-in-life, and be a Half-Hero!

Scepticism is the name we give to all this; as the chief symptom, as the
chief origin of all this. Concerning which so much were to be said! It
would take many Discourses, not a small fraction of one Discourse, to
state what one feels about that Eighteenth Century and its ways. As
indeed this, and the like of this, which we now call Scepticism, is
precisely the black malady and life-foe, against which all teaching and
discoursing since man's life began has directed itself: the battle of
Belief against Unbelief is the never-ending battle! Neither is it in the
way of crimination that one would wish to speak. Scepticism, for that
century, we must consider as the decay of old ways of believing, the
preparation afar off for new better and wider ways,--an inevitable
thing. We will not blame men for it; we will lament their hard fate. We
will understand that destruction of old _forms_ is not destruction of
everlasting _substances_; that Scepticism, as sorrowful and hateful as
we see it, is not an end but a beginning.

The other day speaking, without prior purpose that way, of Bentham's
theory of man and man's life, I chanced to call it a more beggarly one
than Mahomet's. I am bound to say, now when it is once uttered, that
such is my deliberate opinion. Not that one would mean offence against
the man Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe him. Bentham
himself, and even the creed of Bentham, seems to me comparatively worthy
of praise. It is a determinate _being_ what all the world, in a cowardly
half-and-half manner, was tending to be. Let us have the crisis; we
shall either have death or the cure. I call this gross, steam-engine
Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith. It was a laying-down
of cant; a saying to oneself: "Well then, this world is a dead iron
machine, the god of it Gravitation and selfish Hunger; let us see what,
by checking and balancing, and good adjustment of tooth and pinion,
can be made of it!" Benthamism has something complete, manful, in such
fearless committal of itself to what it finds true; you may call it
Heroic, though a Heroism with its _eyes_ put out! It is the culminating
point, and fearless ultimatum, of what lay in the half-and-half state,
pervading man's whole existence in that Eighteenth Century. It seems to
me, all deniers of Godhood, and all lip-believers of it, are bound to
be Benthamites, if they have courage and honesty. Benthamism is an
_eyeless_ Heroism: the Human Species, like a hapless blinded Samson
grinding in the Philistine Mill, clasps convulsively the pillars of
its Mill; brings huge ruin down, but ultimately deliverance withal. Of
Bentham I meant to say no harm.

But this I do say, and would wish all men to know and lay to heart,
that he who discerns nothing but Mechanism in the Universe has in the
fatalest way missed the secret of the Universe altogether. That all
Godhood should vanish out of men's conception of this Universe seems to
me precisely the most brutal error,--I will not disparage Heathenism by
calling it a Heathen error,--that men could fall into. It is not true;
it is false at the very heart of it. A man who thinks so will think
_wrong_ about all things in the world; this original sin will vitiate
all other conclusions he can form. One might call it the most lamentable
of Delusions,--not forgetting Witchcraft itself! Witchcraft worshipped
at least a living Devil; but this worships a dead iron Devil; no God,
not even a Devil! Whatsoever is noble, divine, inspired, drops
thereby out of life. There remains everywhere in life a despicable
_caput-mortuum_; the mechanical hull, all soul fled out of it. How can a
man act heroically? The "Doctrine of Motives" will teach him that it is,
under more or less disguise, nothing but a wretched love of Pleasure,
fear of Pain; that Hunger, of applause, of cash, of whatsoever victual
it may be, is the ultimate fact of man's life. Atheism, in brief;--which
does indeed frightfully punish itself. The man, I say, is become
spiritually a paralytic man; this godlike Universe a dead mechanical
steam-engine, all working by motives, checks, balances, and I know not
what; wherein, as in the detestable belly of some Phalaris'-Bull of his
own contriving, he the poor Phalaris sits miserably dying!

Belief I define to be the healthy act of a man's mind. It
is a mysterious indescribable process, that of getting to
believe;--indescribable, as all vital acts are. We have our mind given
us, not that it may cavil and argue, but that it may see into something,
give us clear belief and understanding about something, whereon we are
then to proceed to act. Doubt, truly, is not itself a crime. Certainly
we do not rush out, clutch up the first thing we find, and straightway
believe that! All manner of doubt, inquiry, [Gr.] _skepsis_ as it is
named, about all manner of objects, dwells in every reasonable mind. It
is the mystic working of the mind, on the object it is _getting_ to know
and believe. Belief comes out of all this, above ground, like the tree
from its hidden _roots_. But now if, even on common things, we require
that a man keep his doubts _silent_, and not babble of them till they in
some measure become affirmations or denials; how much more in regard to
the highest things, impossible to speak of in words at all! That a man
parade his doubt, and get to imagine that debating and logic (which
means at best only the manner of _telling_ us your thought, your belief
or disbelief, about a thing) is the triumph and true work of what
intellect he has: alas, this is as if you should _overturn_ the tree,
and instead of green boughs, leaves and fruits, show us ugly taloned
roots turned up into the air,--and no growth, only death and misery
going on!

For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral
also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by
believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A
sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something
he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and
digest! Lower than that he will not get. We call those ages in which
he gets so low the mournfulest, sickest and meanest of all ages. The
world's heart is palsied, sick: how can any limb of it be whole?
Genuine Acting ceases in all departments of the world's work; dexterous
Similitude of Acting begins. The world's wages are pocketed, the
world's work is not done. Heroes have gone out; Quacks have come in.
Accordingly, what Century, since the end of the Roman world, which also
was a time of scepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, so
abounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth? Consider them, with their
tumid sentimental vaporing about virtue, benevolence,--the wretched
Quack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head of them! Few men were without
quackery; they had got to consider it a necessary ingredient and amalgam
for truth. Chatham, our brave Chatham himself, comes down to the House,
all wrapt and bandaged; he "has crawled out in great bodily suffering,"
and so on;--_forgets_, says Walpole, that he is acting the sick man; in
the fire of debate, snatches his arm from the sling, and oratorically
swings and brandishes it! Chatham himself lives the strangest mimetic
life, half-hero, half-quack, all along. For indeed the world is full of
dupes; and you have to gain the _world's_ suffrage! How the duties of
the world will be done in that case, what quantities of error, which
means failure, which means sorrow and misery, to some and to many, will
gradually accumulate in all provinces of the world's business, we need
not compute.

It seems to me, you lay your finger here on the heart of the world's
maladies, when you call it a Sceptical World. An insincere world; a
godless untruth of a world! It is out of this, as I consider, that the
whole tribe of social pestilences, French Revolutions, Chartisms, and
what not, have derived their being,--their chief necessity to be. This
must alter. Till this alter, nothing can beneficially alter. My one hope
of the world, my inexpugnable consolation in looking at the miseries of
the world, is that this is altering. Here and there one does now find
a man who knows, as of old, that this world is a Truth, and no
Plausibility and Falsity; that he himself is alive, not dead or
paralytic; and that the world is alive, instinct with Godhood, beautiful
and awful, even as in the beginning of days! One man once knowing this,
many men, all men, must by and by come to know it. It lies there clear,
for whosoever will take the _spectacles_ off his eyes and honestly look,
to know! For such a man the Unbelieving Century, with its unblessed
Products, is already past; a new century is already come. The old
unblessed Products and Performances, as solid as they look, are
Phantasms, preparing speedily to vanish. To this and the other noisy,
very great-looking Simulacrum with the whole world huzzaing at its
heels, he can say, composedly stepping aside: Thou art not _true_; thou
art not extant, only semblant; go thy way!--Yes, hollow Formulism, gross
Benthamism, and other unheroic atheistic Insincerity is visibly and
even rapidly declining. An unbelieving Eighteenth Century is but an
exception,--such as now and then occurs. I prophesy that the world will
once more become _sincere_; a believing world; with _many_ Heroes in it,
a heroic world! It will then be a victorious world; never till then.

Or indeed what of the world and its victories? Men speak too much about
the world. Each one of us here, let the world go how it will, and be
victorious or not victorious, has he not a Life of his own to lead? One
Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to
us forevermore! It were well for us to live not as fools and simulacra,
but as wise and realities. The world's being saved will not save us; nor
the world's being lost destroy us. We should look to ourselves: there is
great merit here in the "duty of staying at home"! And, on the whole,
to say truth, I never heard of "world's" being "saved" in any other way.
That mania of saving worlds is itself a piece of the Eighteenth Century
with its windy sentimentalism. Let us not follow it too far. For the
saving of the _world_ I will trust confidently to the Maker of the
world; and look a little to my own saving, which I am more competent
to!--In brief, for the world's sake, and for our own, we will rejoice
greatly that Scepticism, Insincerity, Mechanical Atheism, with all their
poison-dews, are going, and as good as gone.--

Now it was under such conditions, in those times of Johnson, that our
Men of Letters had to live. Times in which there was properly no truth
in life. Old truths had fallen nigh dumb; the new lay yet hidden, not
trying to speak. That Man's Life here below was a Sincerity and Fact,
and would forever continue such, no new intimation, in that dusk of
the world, had yet dawned. No intimation; not even any French
Revolution,--which we define to be a Truth once more, though a Truth
clad in hell-fire! How different was the Luther's pilgrimage, with
its assured goal, from the Johnson's, girt with mere traditions,
suppositions, grown now incredible, unintelligible! Mahomet's Formulas
were of "wood waxed and oiled," and could be burnt out of one's way:
poor Johnson's were far more difficult to burn.--The strong man will
ever find _work_, which means difficulty, pain, to the full measure of
his strength. But to make out a victory, in those circumstances of our
poor Hero as Man of Letters, was perhaps more difficult than in any. Not
obstruction, disorganization, Bookseller Osborne and Fourpence-halfpenny
a day; not this alone; but the light of his own soul was taken from him.
No landmark on the Earth; and, alas, what is that to having no loadstar
in the Heaven! We need not wonder that none of those Three men rose to
victory. That they fought truly is the highest praise. With a mournful
sympathy we will contemplate, if not three living victorious Heroes, as
I said, the Tombs of three fallen Heroes! They fell for us too; making
a way for us. There are the mountains which they hurled abroad in their
confused War of the Giants; under which, their strength and life spent,
they now lie buried.

I have already written of these three Literary Heroes, expressly or
incidentally; what I suppose is known to most of you; what need not be
spoken or written a second time. They concern us here as the singular
_Prophets_ of that singular age; for such they virtually were; and the
aspect they and their world exhibit, under this point of view, might
lead us into reflections enough! I call them, all three, Genuine Men
more or less; faithfully, for most part unconsciously, struggling to be
genuine, and plant themselves on the everlasting truth of things. This
to a degree that eminently distinguishes them from the poor artificial
mass of their contemporaries; and renders them worthy to be considered
as Speakers, in some measure, of the everlasting truth, as Prophets in
that age of theirs. By Nature herself a noble necessity was laid on them
to be so. They were men of such magnitude that they could not live on
unrealities,--clouds, froth and all inanity gave way under them: there
was no footing for them but on firm earth; no rest or regular motion for
them, if they got not footing there. To a certain extent, they were Sons
of Nature once more in an age of Artifice; once more, Original Men.

As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by nature, one
of our great English souls. A strong and noble man; so much left
undeveloped in him to the last: in a kindlier element what might he not
have been,--Poet, Priest, sovereign Ruler! On the whole, a man must not
complain of his "element," of his "time," or the like; it is thriftless
work doing so. His time is bad: well then, he is there to make it
better!--Johnson's youth was poor, isolated, hopeless, very miserable.
Indeed, it does not seem possible that, in any the favorablest outward
circumstances, Johnson's life could have been other than a painful one.
The world might have had more of profitable _work_ out of him, or less;
but his _effort_ against the world's work could never have been a light
one. Nature, in return for his nobleness, had said to him, Live in an
element of diseased sorrow. Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the nobleness
were intimately and even inseparably connected with each other. At all
events, poor Johnson had to go about girt with continual hypochondria,
physical and spiritual pain. Like a Hercules with the burning
Nessus'-shirt on him, which shoots in on him dull incurable misery: the
Nessus'-shirt not to be stript off, which is his own natural skin! In
this manner _he_ had to live. Figure him there, with his scrofulous
diseases, with his great greedy heart, and unspeakable chaos of
thoughts; stalking mournful as a stranger in this Earth; eagerly
devouring what spiritual thing he could come at: school-languages
and other merely grammatical stuff, if there were nothing better! The
largest soul that was in all England; and provision made for it of
"fourpence-halfpenny a day." Yet a giant invincible soul; a true man's.
One remembers always that story of the shoes at Oxford: the rough,
seamy-faced, rawboned College Servitor stalking about, in winter-season,
with his shoes worn out; how the charitable Gentleman Commoner secretly
places a new pair at his door; and the rawboned Servitor, lifting them,
looking at them near, with his dim eyes, with what thoughts,--pitches
them out of window! Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will; but
not beggary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help here;
a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of
nobleness and manfulness withal. It is a type of the man's life,
this pitching away of the shoes. An original man;--not a second-hand,
borrowing or begging man. Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On
such shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but
honestly on that;--on the reality and substance which Nature gives _us_,
not on the semblance, on the thing she has given another than us--!

And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there
ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was
really higher than he? Great souls are always loyally submissive,
reverent to what is over them; only small mean souls are otherwise. I
could not find a better proof of what I said the other day, That the
sincere man was by nature the obedient man; that only in a World
of Heroes was there loyal Obedience to the Heroic. The essence of
_originality_ is not that it be _new_: Johnson believed altogether in
the old; he found the old opinions credible for him, fit for him; and in
a right heroic manner lived under them. He is well worth study in regard
to that. For we are to say that Johnson was far other than a mere man
of words and formulas; he was a man of truths and facts. He stood by the
old formulas; the happier was it for him that he could so stand: but in
all formulas that _he_ could stand by, there needed to be a most
genuine substance. Very curious how, in that poor Paper-age, so barren,
artificial, thick-quilted with Pedantries, Hearsays, the great Fact of
this Universe glared in, forever wonderful, indubitable, unspeakable,
divine-infernal, upon this man too! How he harmonized his Formulas with
it, how he managed at all under such circumstances: that is a thing
worth seeing. A thing "to be looked at with reverence, with pity, with
awe." That Church of St. Clement Danes, where Johnson still _worshipped_
in the era of Voltaire, is to me a venerable place.

It was in virtue of his _sincerity_, of his speaking still in some sort
from the heart of Nature, though in the current artificial dialect, that
Johnson was a Prophet. Are not all dialects "artificial"? Artificial
things are not all false;--nay every true Product of Nature will
infallibly _shape_ itself; we may say all artificial things are, at
the starting of them, _true_. What we call "Formulas" are not in their
origin bad; they are indispensably good. Formula is _method_, habitude;
found wherever man is found. Formulas fashion themselves as Paths do, as
beaten Highways, leading toward some sacred or high object, whither many
men are bent. Consider it. One man, full of heartfelt earnest impulse,
finds out a way of doing somewhat,--were it of uttering his soul's
reverence for the Highest, were it but of fitly saluting his fellow-man.
An inventor was needed to do that, a _poet_; he has articulated the
dim-struggling thought that dwelt in his own and many hearts. This
is his way of doing that; these are his footsteps, the beginning of a
"Path." And now see: the second men travels naturally in the footsteps
of his foregoer, it is the _easiest_ method. In the footsteps of his
foregoer; yet with improvements, with changes where such seem good; at
all events with enlargements, the Path ever _widening_ itself as more
travel it;--till at last there is a broad Highway whereon the whole
world may travel and drive. While there remains a City or Shrine, or
any Reality to drive to, at the farther end, the Highway shall be right
welcome! When the City is gone, we will forsake the Highway. In this
manner all Institutions, Practices, Regulated Things in the world have
come into existence, and gone out of existence. Formulas all begin
by being _full_ of substance; you may call them the _skin_, the
articulation into shape, into limbs and skin, of a substance that is
already there: _they_ had not been there otherwise. Idols, as we said,
are not idolatrous till they become doubtful, empty for the worshipper's
heart. Much as we talk against Formulas, I hope no one of us is ignorant
withal of the high significance of _true_ Formulas; that they were, and
will ever be, the indispensablest furniture of our habitation in this
world.--

Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his "sincerity." He has no
suspicion of his being particularly sincere,--of his being particularly
anything! A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or "scholar" as he calls
himself, trying hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not
to starve, but to live--without stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in
him. He does not "engrave _Truth_ on his watch-seal;" no, but he stands
by truth, speaks by it, works and lives by it. Thus it ever is. Think of
it once more. The man whom Nature has appointed to do great things is,
first of all, furnished with that openness to Nature which renders him
incapable of being _in_sincere! To his large, open, deep-feeling heart
Nature is a Fact: all hearsay is hearsay; the unspeakable greatness of
this Mystery of Life, let him acknowledge it or not, nay even though
he seem to forget it or deny it, is ever present to _him_,--fearful
and wonderful, on this hand and on that. He has a basis of sincerity;
unrecognized, because never questioned or capable of question. Mirabeau,
Mahomet, Cromwell, Napoleon: all the Great Men I ever heard of have
this as the primary material of them. Innumerable commonplace men are
debating, are talking everywhere their commonplace doctrines, which they
have learned by logic, by rote, at second-hand: to that kind of man all
this is still nothing. He must have truth; truth which _he_ feels to be
true. How shall he stand otherwise? His whole soul, at all moments, in
all ways, tells him that there is no standing. He is under the noble
necessity of being true. Johnson's way of thinking about this world is
not mine, any more than Mahomet's was: but I recognize the everlasting
element of _heart-sincerity_ in both; and see with pleasure how neither
of them remains ineffectual. Neither of them is as _chaff_ sown; in both
of them is something which the seedfield will _grow_.

Johnson was a Prophet to his people; preached a Gospel to them,--as all
like him always do. The highest Gospel he preached we may describe as a
kind of Moral Prudence: "in a world where much is to be done, and little
is to be known," see how you will _do_ it! A thing well worth preaching.
"A world where much is to be done, and little is to be known:" do not
sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of Doubt, of wretched
god-forgetting Unbelief;--you were miserable then, powerless, mad:
how could you _do_ or work at all? Such Gospel Johnson preached and
taught;--coupled, theoretically and practically, with this other great
Gospel, "Clear your mind of Cant!" Have no trade with Cant: stand on the
cold mud in the frosty weather, but let it be in your own _real_ torn
shoes: "that will be better for you," as Mahomet says! I call this, I
call these two things _joined together_, a great Gospel, the greatest
perhaps that was possible at that time.

Johnson's Writings, which once had such currency and celebrity, are
now as it were disowned by the young generation. It is not wonderful;
Johnson's opinions are fast becoming obsolete: but his style of thinking
and of living, we may hope, will never become obsolete. I find in
Johnson's Books the indisputablest traces of a great intellect and great
heart;--ever welcome, under what obstructions and perversions soever.
They are _sincere_ words, those of his; he means things by them. A
wondrous buckram style,--the best he could get to then; a measured
grandiloquence, stepping or rather stalking along in a very solemn
way, grown obsolete now; sometimes a tumid _size_ of phraseology not in
proportion to the contents of it: all this you will put up with. For
the phraseology, tumid or not, has always _something within it_. So
many beautiful styles and books, with _nothing_ in them;--a man is
a malefactor to the world who writes such! _They_ are the avoidable
kind!--Had Johnson left nothing but his _Dictionary_, one might have
traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. Looking to its clearness
of definition, its general solidity, honesty, insight and successful
method, it may be called the best of all Dictionaries. There is in it
a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great solid
square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a
true Builder did it.

One word, in spite of our haste, must be granted to poor Bozzy. He
passes for a mean, inflated, gluttonous creature; and was so in many
senses. Yet the fact of his reverence for Johnson will ever remain
noteworthy. The foolish conceited Scotch Laird, the most conceited man
of his time, approaching in such awe-struck attitude the great dusty
irascible Pedagogue in his mean garret there: it is a genuine reverence
for Excellence; a _worship_ for Heroes, at a time when neither Heroes
nor worship were surmised to exist. Heroes, it would seem, exist always,
and a certain worship of them! We will also take the liberty to deny
altogether that of the witty Frenchman, that no man is a Hero to his
valet-de-chambre. Or if so, it is not the Hero's blame, but the Valet's:
that his soul, namely, is a mean _valet_-soul! He expects his Hero
to advance in royal stage-trappings, with measured step, trains borne
behind him, trumpets sounding before him. It should stand rather, No
man can be a _Grand-Monarque_ to his valet-de-chambre. Strip your Louis
Quatorze of his king-gear, and there _is_ left nothing but a poor forked
radish with a head fantastically carved;--admirable to no valet. The
Valet does not know a Hero when he sees him! Alas, no: it requires a
kind of _Hero_ to do that;--and one of the world's wants, in _this_ as
in other senses, is for most part want of such.

On the whole, shall we not say, that Boswell's admiration was well
bestowed; that he could have found no soul in all England so worthy of
bending down before? Shall we not say, of this great mournful Johnson
too, that he guided his difficult confused existence wisely; led it
_well_, like a right valiant man? That waste chaos of Authorship by
trade; that waste chaos of Scepticism in religion and politics, in
life-theory and life-practice; in his poverty, in his dust and dimness,
with the sick body and the rusty coat: he made it do for him, like a
brave man. Not wholly without a loadstar in the Eternal; he had still
a loadstar, as the brave all need to have: with his eye set on that, he
would change his course for nothing in these confused vortices of the
lower sea of Time. "To the Spirit of Lies, bearing death and hunger, he
would in nowise strike his flag." Brave old Samuel: _ultimus Romanorum_!

Of Rousseau and his Heroism I cannot say so much. He is not what I
call a strong man. A morbid, excitable, spasmodic man; at best, intense
rather than strong. He had not "the talent of Silence," an invaluable
talent; which few Frenchmen, or indeed men of any sort in these times,
excel in! The suffering man ought really "to consume his own smoke;"
there is no good in emitting _smoke_ till you have made it into
_fire_,--which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable
of becoming! Rousseau has not depth or width, not calm force for
difficulty; the first characteristic of true greatness. A fundamental
mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who
takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then. He that can
walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong
man. We need forever, especially in these loud-shrieking days, to remind
ourselves of that. A man who cannot _hold his peace_, till the time come
for speaking and acting, is no right man.

Poor Rousseau's face is to me expressive of him. A high but narrow
contracted intensity in it: bony brows; deep, strait-set eyes, in
which there is something bewildered-looking,--bewildered, peering with
lynx-eagerness. A face full of misery, even ignoble misery, and also of
the antagonism against that; something mean, plebeian there, redeemed
only by _intensity_: the face of what is called a Fanatic,--a sadly
_contracted_ Hero! We name him here because, with all his drawbacks, and
they are many, he has the first and chief characteristic of a Hero: he
is heartily _in earnest_. In earnest, if ever man was; as none of these
French Philosophers were. Nay, one would say, of an earnestness too
great for his otherwise sensitive, rather feeble nature; and which
indeed in the end drove him into the strangest incoherences, almost
delirations. There had come, at last, to be a kind of madness in him:
his Ideas _possessed_ him like demons; hurried him so about, drove him
over steep places--!

The fault and misery of Rousseau was what we easily name by a single
word, _Egoism_; which is indeed the source and summary of all faults and
miseries whatsoever. He had not perfected himself into victory over mere
Desire; a mean Hunger, in many sorts, was still the motive principle of
him. I am afraid he was a very vain man; hungry for the praises of men.
You remember Genlis's experience of him. She took Jean Jacques to the
Theatre; he bargaining for a strict incognito,--"He would not be seen
there for the world!" The curtain did happen nevertheless to be drawn
aside: the Pit recognized Jean Jacques, but took no great notice of him!
He expressed the bitterest indignation; gloomed all evening, spake no
other than surly words. The glib Countess remained entirely convinced
that his anger was not at being seen, but at not being applauded
when seen. How the whole nature of the man is poisoned; nothing but
suspicion, self-isolation, fierce moody ways! He could not live with
anybody. A man of some rank from the country, who visited him often, and
used to sit with him, expressing all reverence and affection for him,
comes one day; finds Jean Jacques full of the sourest unintelligible
humor. "Monsieur," said Jean Jacques, with flaming eyes, "I know why you
come here. You come to see what a poor life I lead; how little is in my
poor pot that is boiling there. Well, look into the pot! There is half a
pound of meat, one carrot and three onions; that is all: go and tell the
whole world that, if you like, Monsieur!"--A man of this sort was far
gone. The whole world got itself supplied with anecdotes, for light
laughter, for a certain theatrical interest, from these perversions and
contortions of poor Jean Jacques. Alas, to him they were not laughing or
theatrical; too real to him! The contortions of a dying gladiator: the
crowded amphitheatre looks on with entertainment; but the gladiator is
in agonies and dying.

And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passionate appeals to
Mothers, with his _contrat-social_, with his celebrations of Nature,
even of savage life in Nature, did once more touch upon Reality,
struggle towards Reality; was doing the function of a Prophet to his
Time. As he could, and as the Time could! Strangely through all that
defacement, degradation and almost madness, there is in the inmost heart
of poor Rousseau a spark of real heavenly fire. Once more, out of
the element of that withered mocking Philosophism, Scepticism and
Persiflage, there has arisen in this man the ineradicable feeling and