Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History Part 18

Teufelsdrockh accepts Authors.h.i.+p as his divine calling. The scope of the command _Thou shalt not steal_.--Editor begins to suspect the authenticity of the Biographical doc.u.ments; and abandons them for the great Clothes volume. Result of the preceding ten Chapters: Insight into the character of Teufelsdrockh: His fundamental beliefs, and how he was forced to seek and find them (p. 149).

BOOK III

CHAP. I. _Incident in Modern History_

Story of George Fox the Quaker; and his perennial suit of Leather. A man G.o.d-possessed, witnessing for spiritual freedom and manhood (p. 156).

CHAP. II. _Church-Clothes_

Church-Clothes defined; the Forms under which the Religious principle is temporarily embodied. Outward Religion originates by Society: Society becomes possible by Religion. The condition of Church-Clothes in our time (p. 161).

CHAP. III. _Symbols_

The benignant efficacies of Silence and Secrecy. Symbols; revelations of the Infinite in the Finite: Man everywhere encompa.s.sed by them; lives and works by them. Theory of Motive-millwrights, a false account of human nature. Symbols of an extrinsic value; as Banners, Standards: Of intrinsic value; as Works of Art, Lives and Deaths of Heroic men.

Religious Symbols; Christianity. Symbols hallowed by Time; but finally defaced and desecrated. Many superannuated Symbols in our time, needing removal (p. 163).

CHAP. IV. _Helotage_

Heuschrecke's Malthusian Tract, and Teufelsdrockh's marginal notes thereon. The true workman, for daily bread, or spiritual bread, to be honoured; and no other. The real privation of the Poor not poverty or toil, but ignorance. Over-population: With a world like ours and wide as ours, can there be too many men?

Emigration (p. 170).

CHAP. V. _The Phoenix_

Teufelsdrockh considers Society as _dead_; its soul (Religion) gone, its body (existing Inst.i.tutions) going.

Utilitarianism, needing little farther preaching, is now in full activity of Destruction.--Teufelsdrockh would yield to the Inevitable, accounting that the best: a.s.surance of a fairer Living Society, arising, Phoenix-like, out of the ruins of the old dead one. Before that Phoenix death-birth is accomplished, long time, struggle, and suffering must intervene (p. 174).

CHAP. VI. _Old Clothes_

Courtesy due from all men to all men: The Body of Man a Revelation in the Flesh. Teufelsdrockh's respect for Old Clothes, as the 'Ghosts of Life.' Walk in Monmouth Street, and meditations there (p. 179).

CHAP. VII. _Organic Filaments_

Destruction and Creation ever proceed together; and organic filaments of the Future are even now spinning. Wonderful connection of each man with all men; and of each generation with all generations, before and after: Mankind is One.

Sequence and progress of all human work, whether of creation or destruction, from age to age.--t.i.tles, hitherto derived from Fighting, must give way to others. Kings will remain and their t.i.tle. Political Freedom, not to be attained by any mechanical contrivance. Hero-wors.h.i.+p, perennial amongst men; the cornerstone of polities in the Future. Organic filaments of the New Religion: Newspapers and Literature. Let the faithful soul take courage! (p. 183).

CHAP. VIII. _Natural Supernaturalism_

Deep significance of Miracles. Littleness of human Science: Divine incomprehensibility of Nature. Custom blinds us to the miraculousness of daily-recurring miracles; so do Names. s.p.a.ce and Time, appearances only; forms of human Thought: A glimpse of Immortality. How s.p.a.ce hides from us the wondrousness of our commonest powers; and Time, the divinely miraculous course of human history (p. 191).

CHAP. IX. _Circ.u.mspective_

Recapitulation. Editor congratulates the few British readers who have accompanied Teufelsdrockh through all his speculations. The true use of the _Sartor Resartus_, to exhibit the Wonder of daily life and common things; and to show that all Forms are but Clothes, and temporary. Practical inferences enough will follow (p. 201).

CHAP. X. _The Dandiacal Body_

The Dandy defined. The Dandiacal Sect a new modification of the primeval superst.i.tion Self-wors.h.i.+p: How to be distinguished. Their Sacred Books (Fas.h.i.+onable Novels) unreadable. Dandyism's Articles of Faith.--Brotherhood of Poor-Slaves: vowed to perpetual Poverty; wors.h.i.+ppers of Earth; distinguished by peculiar costume and diet. Picture of a Poor-Slave Household; and of a Dandiacal. Teufelsdrockh fears these two Sects may spread, till they part all England between them, and then frightfully collide (p. 204).

CHAP. XI. _Tailors_

Injustice done to Tailors, actual and metaphorical. Their rights and great services will one day be duly recognised (p. 216).

CHAP. XII. _Farewell_

Teufelsdrockh's strange manner of speech, but resolute, truthful character: His purpose seemingly to proselytise, to unite the wakeful earnest in these dark times. Letter from Hofrath Heuschrecke announcing that Teufelsdrockh has disappeared from Weissnichtwo. Editor guesses he will appear again, Friendly Farewell (p. 219).

ON HEROES, HERO-WORs.h.i.+P, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY

LECTURE I

THE HERO AS DIVINITY. ODIN. PAGANISM: SCANDINAVIAN MYTHOLOGY

[_Tuesday, 5th May 1840_]

We have undertaken to discourse here for a little on Great Men, their manner of appearance in our world's business, how they have shaped themselves in the world's history, what ideas men formed of them, what work they did;--on Heroes, namely, and on their reception and performance; what I call Hero-wors.h.i.+p and the Heroic in human affairs.

Too evidently this is a large topic; deserving quite other treatment than we can expect to give it at present. A large topic; indeed, an illimitable one; wide as Universal History itself. For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.

They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general ma.s.s of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these. Too clearly it is a topic we shall do no justice to in this place!

One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary s.h.i.+ning by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic n.o.bleness;--in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them. On any terms whatsoever, you will not grudge to wander in such neighbourhood for a while. These Six cla.s.ses of Heroes, chosen out of widely-distant countries and epochs, and in mere external figure differing altogether, ought, if we look faithfully at them, to ill.u.s.trate several things for us. Could we see _them_ well, we should get some glimpses into the very marrow of the world's history. How happy, could I but, in any measure, in such times as these, make manifest to you the meanings of Heroism; the divine relation (for I may well call it such) which in all times unites a Great Man to other men; and thus, as it were, not exhaust my subject, but so much as break ground on it! At all events, I must make the attempt.

It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man's, or a nation of men's. By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, a.s.sert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and a.s.sertion; which is often only a profession and a.s.sertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that. But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough _without_ a.s.serting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his _religion_; or it may be, his mere scepticism and _no-religion_: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they had?

Was it Heathenism,--plurality of G.o.ds, mere sensuous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief recognised element therein Physical Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a n.o.bler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Scepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one;--doubt as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial?

Answering of this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual;--their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them. In these Discourses, limited as we are, it will be good to direct our survey chiefly to that religious phasis of the matter. That once known well, all is known. We have chosen as the first Hero in our series, Odin the central figure of Scandinavian Paganism; an emblem to us of a most extensive province of things. Let us look for a little at the Hero as Divinity, the oldest primary form of Heroism.

Surely it seems a very strange-looking thing this Paganism; almost inconceivable to us in these days. A bewildering, inextricable jungle of delusions, confusions, falsehoods and absurdities, covering the whole field of Life! A thing that fills us with astonishment, almost, if it were possible, with incredulity,--for truly it is not easy to understand that sane men could ever calmly, with their eyes open, believe and live by such a set of doctrines. That men should have wors.h.i.+pped their poor fellow-man as a G.o.d, and not him only, but stocks and stones, and all manner of animate and inanimate objects; and fas.h.i.+oned for themselves such a distracted chaos of hallucinations by way of Theory of the Universe: all this looks like an incredible fable. Nevertheless it is a clear fact that they did it. Such hideous inextricable jungle of miswors.h.i.+ps, misbeliefs, men, made as we are, did actually hold by, and live at home in. This is strange. Yes, we may pause in sorrow and silence over the depths of darkness that are in man; if we rejoice in the heights of purer vision he has attained to. Such things were and are in man; in all men; in us too.

Some speculators have a short way of accounting for the Pagan religion: mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say they; no sane man ever did believe it,--merely contrived to persuade other men, not worthy of the name of sane, to believe it! It will be often our duty to protest against this sort of hypothesis about men's doings and history; and I here, on the very threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other _isms_ by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this world. They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of their being about to die! Let us never forget this. It seems to me a most mournful hypothesis, that of quackery giving birth to any faith even in savage men. Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things. We shall not see into the true heart of anything, or if we look merely at the quackeries of it; if we do not reject the quackeries altogether; as mere diseases, corruptions, with which our and all men's sole duty is to have done with them, to sweep them out of our thoughts as out of our practice. Man everywhere is the born enemy of lies. I find Grand Lamaism itself to have a kind of truth in it. Read the candid, clear-sighted, rather sceptical Mr Turner's _Account of his Emba.s.sy_ to that country, and see. They have their belief, these poor Thibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, belief that there is a _Greatest_ Man; that _he_ is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds! This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the 'discoverability' is the only error here. The Thibet priests have methods of their own of discovering what Man is Greatest, fit to be supreme over them. Bad methods: but are they so much worse than our methods,--of understanding him to be always the eldest born of a certain genealogy? Alas, it is a difficult thing to find good methods for!--We shall begin to have a chance of understanding Paganism, when we first admit that to its followers it was, at one time, earnestly true. Let us consider it very certain that men did believe in Paganism; men with open eyes, sound senses, men made altogether like ourselves; that we, had we been there, should have believed in it. Ask now, What Paganism could have been?

Another theory, somewhat more respectable, attributes such things to Allegory. It was a play of poetic minds, say these theorists; a shadowing-forth, in allegorical fable, in personification and visual form, of what such poetic minds had known and felt of this Universe.

Which agrees, add they, with a primary law of human nature, still everywhere observably at work, though in less important things, That what a man feels intensely, he struggles to speak-out of him, to see represented before him in visual shape, and as if with a kind of life and historical reality in it. Now doubtless there is such a law, and it is one of the deepest in human nature; neither need we doubt that it did operate fundamentally in this business. The hypothesis which ascribes Paganism wholly or mostly to this agency, I call a little more respectable; but I cannot yet call it the true hypothesis. Think, would _we_ believe, and take with us as our life-guidance, an allegory, a poetic sport? Not sport but earnest is what we should require. It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to die is not sport for a man. Man's life never was a sport to him; it was a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!

I find, therefore, that though these Allegory theorists are on the way towards truth in this matter, they have not reached it either. Pagan Religion is indeed an Allegory, a Symbol of what men felt and knew about the Universe; and all Religions are Symbols of that, altering always as that alters: but it seems to me a radical perversion, and even _in_version, of the business, to put that forward as the origin and moving cause, when it was rather the result and termination. To get beautiful allegories, a perfect poetic symbol, was not the want of men; but to know what they were to believe about this Universe, what course they were to steer in it; what, in this mysterious Life of theirs, they had to hope and to fear, to do and to forbear doing. The _Pilgrim's Progress_ is an Allegory, and a beautiful, just and serious one: but consider whether Bunyan's Allegory could have _preceded_ the Faith it symbolises! The Faith had to be already there, standing believed by everybody;--of which the Allegory could _then_ become a shadow; and, with all its seriousness, we may say a _sportful_ shadow, a mere play of the Fancy, in comparison with that awful Fact and scientific certainty which it poetically strives to emblem. The Allegory is the product of the certainty, not the producer of it; not in Bunyan's, nor in any other case. For Paganism, therefore, we have still to inquire, Whence came that scientific certainty, the parent of such a bewildered heap of allegories, errors and confusions? How was it, what was it?

Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend 'explaining,' in this place, or in any place, such a phenomenon as that far-distant distracted cloudy imbroglio of Paganism,--more like a cloudfield than a distant continent of firm land and facts! It is no longer a reality, yet it was one. We ought to understand that this seeming cloudfield was once a reality; that not poetic allegory, least of all that dupery and deception was the origin of it. Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories; men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks. Let us try if, leaving out both the quack theory and the allegory one, and listening with affectionate attention to that far-off confused rumour of the Pagan ages, we cannot ascertain so much as this at least, That there was a kind of fact at the heart of them; that they too were not mendacious and distracted, but in their own poor way true and sane!

You remember that fancy of Plato's, of a man who had grown to maturity in some dark distance, and was brought on a sudden into the upper air to see the sun rise. What would his wonder be, his rapt astonishment at the sight we daily witness with indifference! With the free open sense of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole heart would be kindled by that sight, he would discern it well to be G.o.dlike, his soul would fall down in wors.h.i.+p before it. Now, just such a childlike greatness was in the primitive nations. The first Pagan Thinker among rude men, the first man that began to think, was precisely this child-man of Plato's. Simple, open as a child, yet with the depth and strength of a man. Nature had as yet no name to him; he had not yet united under a name the infinite variety of sights, sounds, shapes and motions, which we now collectively name Universe, Nature, or the like,--and so with a name dismiss it from us. To the wild deep-hearted man all was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas; it stood naked, flas.h.i.+ng-in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was to this man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is, _preter_natural. This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;--that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fas.h.i.+oning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain; what _is_ it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all. It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty; it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our _want_ of insight. It is by _not_ thinking that we cease to wonder at it. Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere _words_. We call that fire of the black thundercloud 'electricity,' and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of gla.s.s and silk: but _what_ is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, _magical_ and more, to whosoever will _think_ of it.

That great mystery of TIME, were there no other: the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rus.h.i.+ng on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which _are_, and then _are not_: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,--for we have no word to speak about it. This Universe, ah me--what could the wild man know of it; what can we yet know? That it is a Force, and thousandfold Complexity of Forces; a Force which is _not we_. That is all; it is not we, it is altogether different from _us_. Force, Force, everywhere Force; we ourselves a mysterious Force in the centre of that. 'There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it: how else could it rot?' Nay surely, to the Atheistic Thinker, if such a one were possible, it must be a miracle too, this huge illimitable whirlwind of Force, which envelops us here; never-resting whirlwind, high as Immensity, old as Eternity. What is it? G.o.d's creation, the religious people answer; it is the Almighty G.o.d's! Atheistic science babbles poorly of it, with scientific nomenclatures, experiments and what-not, as if it were a poor dead thing, to be bottled up in Leyden jars and sold over counters: but the natural sense of man, in all times, if he will honestly apply his sense, proclaims it to be a living thing,--ah, an unspeakable, G.o.dlike thing; towards which the best att.i.tude for us, after never so much science, is awe, devout prostration and humility of soul; wors.h.i.+p if not in words, then in silence.

But now I remark farther: What in such a time as ours it requires a Prophet or Poet to teach us, namely, the stripping-off of those poor undevout wrappages, nomenclatures and scientific hearsays,---this, the ancient earnest soul, as yet unenc.u.mbered with these things, did for itself. The world, which is now divine only to the gifted, was then divine to whosoever would turn his eye upon it. He stood bare before it face to face. 'All was G.o.dlike or G.o.d:'--Jean Paul still finds it so; the giant Jean Paul, who has power to escape out of hearsays: but there then were no hearsays. Canopus s.h.i.+ning-down over the desert, with its blue diamond brightness (that wild blue spirit-like brightness, far brighter than we ever witness here), would pierce into the heart of the wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it was guiding through the solitary waste there. To his wild heart, with all feelings in it, with no _speech_ for any feeling, it may seem a little eye, that Canopus, glancing-out on him from the great deep Eternity; revealing the inner Splendour to him. Cannot we understand how these men _wors.h.i.+pped_ Canopus; became what we call Sabeans, wors.h.i.+pping the stars? Such is to me the secret of all forms of Paganism. Wors.h.i.+p is transcendent wonder; wonder for which there is now no limit or measure; that is wors.h.i.+p. To these primeval men, all things and everything they saw exist beside them were an emblem of the G.o.dlike, of some G.o.d.

And look what perennial fibre of truth was in that. To us also, through every star, through every blade of gra.s.s, is not a G.o.d made visible, if we will open our minds and eyes? We do not wors.h.i.+p in that way now: but is it not reckoned still a merit, proof of what we call a 'poetic nature,' that we recognise how every object has a divine beauty in it; how every object still verily is 'a window through which we may look into Infinitude itself'? He that can discern the loveliness of things, we call him Poet, Painter, Man of Genius, gifted, lovable. These poor Sabeans did even what he does,--in their own fas.h.i.+on. That they did it, in what fas.h.i.+on soever, was a merit: better than what the entirely stupid man did, what the horse and camel did,--namely, nothing!