Part 8 (1/2)
”Ah, could you crush that ever craving l.u.s.t For bliss, which kills all bliss, and lose your life, Your barren unit life, to find again A thousand times in those for whom you die-- So were you men and women, and should hold Your rightful rank in G.o.d's great universe, Wherein, in heaven or earth, by will or nature, Naught lives for self. All, all, from crown to base-- The Lamb, before the world's foundation slain-- The angels, ministers to G.o.d's elect-- The sun, who only s.h.i.+nes to light the worlds-- The clouds, whose glory is to die in showers-- The fleeting streams, who in their ocean graves Flee the decay of stagnant self-content-- The oak, enn.o.bled by the s.h.i.+pwright's axe-- The soil, which yields its marrow to the flower-- The flower, which feeds a thousand velvet worms Born only to be prey to every bird-- All spend themselves on others: and shall man, Whose two-fold being is the mystic knot Which couples earth with heaven, doubly bound, As being both worm and angel, to that service By which both worms and angels hold their life, Shall he, whose every breath is debt on debt, Refuse, forsooth, to be what G.o.d has made him?
No; let him show himself the creatures' Lord By free-will gift of that self-sacrifice Which they, perforce, by Nature's laws endure.”
My friends, scientific and others, if the study of bio-geology shall help to teach you this, or anything like this; I think that though it may not make you more happy, it may yet make you more wise; and, therefore, what is better than being more happy, namely, more blessed.
HEROISM
It is an open question whether the policeman is not demoralizing us; and that in proportion as he does his duty well; whether the perfection of justice and safety, the complete ”preservation of body and goods,” may not reduce the educated and comfortable cla.s.ses into that lap-dog condition in which not conscience, but comfort, doth make cowards of us all. Our forefathers had, on the whole, to take care of themselves; we find it more convenient to hire people to take care of us. So much the better for us, in some respects: but, it may be, so much the worse in others. So much the better; because, as usually results from the division of labour, these people, having little or nothing to do save to take care of us, do so far better than we could; and so prevent a vast amount of violence and wrong, and therefore of misery, especially to the weak: for which last reason we will acquiesce in the existence of policemen and lawyers, as we do in the results of arbitration, as the lesser of two evils. The odds in war are in favour of the bigger bully; in arbitration, in favour of the bigger rogue; and it is a question whether the lion or the fox be the safer guardian of human interests. But arbitration prevents war: and that, in three cases out of four, is full reason for employing it.
On the other hand, the lap-dog condition, whether in dogs or in men, is certainly unfavourable to the growth of the higher virtues. Safety and comfort are good, indeed, for the good; for the brave, the self-originating, the earnest. They give to such a clear stage and no favour wherein to work unhindered for their fellow-men. But for the majority, who are neither brave, self-originating, nor earnest, but the mere puppets of circ.u.mstance, safety and comfort may, and actually do, merely make their lives mean and petty, effeminate and dull. Therefore their hearts must be awakened, as often as possible, to take exercise enough for health; and they must be reminded, perpetually and importunately, of what a certain great philosopher called ”whatsoever things are true, honourable, just, pure, lovely, and of good report;” ”if there be any manhood, and any just praise, to think of such things.”
This pettiness and dulness of our modern life is just what keeps alive our stage, to which people go to see something a little less petty, a little less dull, than what they see at home. It is, too, the cause of--I had almost said the excuse for--the modern rage for sensational novels.
Those who read them so greedily are conscious, poor souls, of capacities in themselves of pa.s.sion and action, for good and evil, for which their frivolous humdrum daily life gives no room, no vent. They know too well that human nature can be more fertile, whether in weeds and poisons, or in flowers and fruits, than it is usually in the streets and houses of a well-ordered and tolerably sober city. And because the study of human nature is, after all, that which is nearest to every one and most interesting to every one, therefore they go to fiction, since they cannot go to fact, to see what they themselves might be had they the chance; to see what fantastic tricks before high heaven men and women like themselves can play; and how they play them.
Well: it is not for me to judge, for me to blame. I will only say that there are those who cannot read sensational novels, or, indeed, any novels at all, just because they see so many sensational novels being enacted round them in painful facts of sinful flesh and blood. There are those, too, who have looked in the mirror too often to wish to see their own disfigured visage in it any more; who are too tired of themselves and ashamed of themselves to want to hear of people like themselves; who want to hear of people utterly unlike themselves, more n.o.ble, and able, and just, and sweet, and pure; who long to hear of heroism and to converse with heroes; and who, if by chance they meet with an heroic act, bathe their spirits in that, as in May-dew, and feel themselves thereby, if but for an hour, more fair.
If any such shall chance to see these words, let me ask them to consider with me that one word Hero, and what it means.
Hero; Heroic; Heroism. These words point to a phase of human nature, the capacity for which we all have in ourselves, which is as startling and as interesting in its manifestations as any, and which is always beautiful, always enn.o.bling, and therefore always attractive to those whose hearts are not yet seared by the world or brutalized by self-indulgence.
But let us first be sure what the words mean. There is no use talking about a word till we have got at its meaning. We may use it as a cant phrase, as a party cry on platforms; we may even hate and persecute our fellow-men for the sake of it: but till we have clearly settled in our own minds what a word means, it will do for fighting with, but not for working with. Socrates of old used to tell the young Athenians that the ground of all sound knowledge was--to understand the true meaning of the words which were in their mouths all day long; and Socrates was a wiser man than we shall ever see. So, instead of beginning an oration in praise of heroism, I shall ask my readers to think with me what heroism is.
Now, we shall always get most surely at the meaning of a word by getting at its etymology--that is, at what it meant at first. And if heroism means behaving like a hero, we must find out, it seems to me, not merely what a hero may happen to mean just now, but what it meant in the earliest human speech in which we find it.
A hero or a heroine, then, among the old Homeric Greeks, meant a man or woman who was like the G.o.ds; and who, from that likeness, stood superior to his or her fellow-creatures. G.o.ds, heroes, and men, is a threefold division of rational beings, with which we meet more than once or twice.
Those grand old Greeks felt deeply the truth of the poet's saying--
”Unless above himself he can Exalt himself, how poor a thing is man.”
But more: the Greeks supposed these heroes to be, in some way or other, partakers of a divine nature; akin to the G.o.ds; usually, either they, or some ancestor of theirs, descended from a G.o.d or G.o.ddess. Those who have read Mr. Gladstone's 'Juventus Mundi' will remember the section (cap. ix.
section 6) on the modes of the approximation between the divine and the human natures; and whether or not they agree with the author altogether, all will agree, I think, that the first idea of a hero or a heroine was a G.o.dlike man or G.o.dlike woman.
A G.o.dlike man. What varied, what infinite forms of n.o.bleness that word might include, ever increasing, as men's notions of the G.o.ds became purer and loftier, or, alas! decreasing, as their notions became degraded. The old Greeks, with that intense admiration of beauty which made them, in after ages, the master sculptors and draughtsmen of their own, and, indeed, of any age, would, of course, require in their hero, their G.o.dlike man, beauty and strength, manners, too, and eloquence, and all outward perfections of humanity, and neglect his moral qualities.
Neglect, I say, but not ignore. The hero, by virtue of his kindred with the G.o.ds, was always expected to be a better man than common men, as virtue was then understood. And how better? Let us see.
The hero was at least expected to be more reverent than other men to those divine beings of whose nature he partook, whose society he might enjoy even here on earth. He might be unfaithful to his own high lineage; he might misuse his gifts by selfishness and self-will; he might, like Ajax, rage with mere jealousy and wounded pride till his rage ended in shameful madness and suicide. He might rebel against the very G.o.ds, and all laws of right and wrong, till he perished in his [Greek text],
”Smitten down, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to mortals.”
But he ought to have, he must have, to be true to his name of Hero, justice, self-restraint, and [Greek text]--that highest form of modesty, for which we have, alas! no name in the English tongue; that perfect respect for the feelings of others which springs out of perfect self-respect. And he must have, too--if he were to be a hero of the highest type--the instinct of helpfulness; the instinct that, if he were a kinsman of the G.o.ds, he must fight on their side, through toil and danger, against all that was unlike them, and therefore hateful to them.
Who loves not the old legends, unsurpa.s.sed for beauty in the literature of any race, in which the hero stands out as the deliverer, the destroyer of evil? Theseus ridding the land of robbers, and delivering it from the yearly tribute of boys and maidens to be devoured by the Minotaur; Perseus slaying the Gorgon, and rescuing Andromeda from the sea-beast; Heracles with his twelve famous labours against giants and monsters; and all the rest--
”Who dared, in the G.o.d-given might of their manhood Greatly to do and to suffer, and far in the fens and the forests Smite the devourers of men, heaven-hated, brood of the giants; Transformed, strange, without like, who obey not the golden-haired rulers”--
These are figures whose divine moral beauty has sunk into the hearts, not merely of poets or of artists, but of men and women who suffered and who feared; the memory of them, fables though they may have been, enn.o.bled the old Greek heart; they enn.o.bled the heart of Europe in the fifteenth century, at the rediscovery of Greek literature. So far from contradicting the Christian ideal, they harmonised with--I had almost said they supplemented--that more tender and saintly ideal of heroism which had sprung up during the earlier Middle Ages. They justified, and actually gave a new life to, the old n.o.blenesses of chivalry, which had grown up in the later Middle Ages as a necessary supplement of active and manly virtue to the pa.s.sive and feminine virtue of the cloister. They inspired, mingling with these two other elements, a literature, both in England, France, and Italy, in which the three elements, the saintly, the chivalrous, and the Greek heroic, have become one and undistinguishable, because all three are human, and all three divine; a literature which developed itself in Ariosto, in Ta.s.so, in the Hypnerotomachia, the Arcadia, the Euphues, and other forms, sometimes fantastic, sometimes questionable, but which reached its perfection in our own Spenser's 'Fairy Queen'--perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever been penned by mortal man.
And why? What has made these old Greek myths live, myths though they be, and fables, and fair dreams? What, though they have no body, and, perhaps, never had, has given them an immortal soul, which can speak to the immortal souls of all generations to come?
What but this, that in them--dim it may be and undeveloped, but still there--lies the divine idea of self-sacrifice as the perfection of heroism; of self-sacrifice, as the highest duty and the highest joy of him who claims a kindred with the G.o.ds?