Chapter II: Part 2

How much greater is our nation in poetry than prose! How much better do the productions of its spirit show in the qualities of genius than in the qualities of intelligence! But the question as to the utility of academies to the intellectual life of a nation is not settled when we say that we have never had an academy, yet we have, confessedly, a very great literature. It is by no means sure that either our literature or the general intellectual life of our nation has got already without academies all that academies can give. Our literature, in spite of the genius manifested in it, may fall short in form, method, precision, proportions, arrangement--all things where intelligence proper comes in. It may be weak in prose, full of haphazard, crudeness, provincialism, eccentricity, violence, blundering; and instead of always fixing our thoughts upon the points in which our literature is strong, we should, from time to time, fix them upon those in which it is weak. In France, the Academy serves as a sort of centre and rallying-point to educated opinion, and gives it a force which it has not got here. In the bulk of the intellectual work of a nation which has no centre, no intellectual metropolis like an academy, there is observable a note of provinciality. Great powers of mind will make a man think profoundly, but not even great powers of mind will keep his taste and style perfectly sound and sure if he is left too much to himself with no sovereign organ of opinion near him.

Even men like Jeremy Taylor and Burke suffer here. Theirs is too often extravagant prose; prose too much suffered to indulge its caprices; prose at too great a distance from the centre of good taste; prose with the note of provinciality; Asiatic prose, somewhat barbarously rich and overloaded. The note of provinciality in Addison is to be found in the commonplace of his ideas, though his style is classical. Where there is no centre like an academy, if you have genius and powerful ideas, you are apt not to have the best style going; if you have precision of style and not genius, you are apt not to have the best ideas going.

The provincial spirit exaggerates the value of its ideas for want of a high standard at hand by which to try them; it is hurried away by fancies; it likes and dislikes too passionately, too exclusively; its admiration weeps hysterical tears, and its disapprobation foams at the mouth. So we get the eruptive and aggressive manner in literature. Not having the lucidity of a large and centrally-placed intelligence, the provincial spirit has not its graciousness; it does not persuade, it makes war; it has not urbanity, the tone of the city, of the centre, the tone that always aims at a spiritual and intellectual effect. It loves hard-hitting rather than persuading. The newspaper, with its party spirit, its resolute avoidance of shades and distinctions, is its true literature. In England there needs a miracle of genius like Shakespeare to produce balance of mind, and a miracle of intellectual delicacy like Dr. Newman's to produce urbanity of style.

The reader will ask for some practical conclusion about the establishment of an academy in this country, and perhaps I shall hardly give him the one he expects. Nations have their own modes of acting, and these modes are not easily changed; they are even consecrated when great things have been done in them. When a literature has produced a Shakespeare and a Milton, when it has even produced a Barrow and a Burke, it cannot well abandon its traditions; it can hardly begin at this late time of day with an institution like the French Academy. An academy quite like the French Academy, a sovereign organ of the highest literary opinion, a recognised authority in matters of intellectual tone and taste, we shall hardly have, and perhaps ought not to wish to have. But then every one amongst us with any turn for literature at all will do well to remember to what shortcomings and excesses, which such an academy tends to correct, we are liable, and the more liable, of course, for not having it. He will do well constantly to try himself in respect of these, steadily to widen his culture, and severely to check in himself the provincial spirit.

_VI.--Some Illustrative Criticisms_

To try and approach Truth on one side after another, not to strive or cry, not to persist in pressing forward on any one side with violence and self-will--it is only thus that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious goddess whom we shall never see except in outline.

The grand power of poetry is the power of dealing with things so as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new and intimate sense of them and of our relation with them, so that we feel ourselves to be in contact with the essential nature of those objects, to have their secret, and be in harmony with them, and this feeling calms and satisfies us as no other can. Maurice de Guérin manifested this magical power of poetry in singular eminence. His passion for perfection disdained all poetical work that was not perfectly adequate and felicitous.

His sister Eugénie de Guérin has the same characteristic quality--distinction. Of this quality the world is impatient; it chafes against it, rails at it, insults it, hates it, but ends by receiving its influence and by undergoing its law. This quality at last inexorably corrects the world's blunders, and fixes the world's ideals.

Heine claimed that he was "a brave soldier in the war of the liberation of humanity." That was his significance. He was, if not pre-eminently a brave, yet a brilliant soldier in the war of liberation of humanity. He was not an adequate interpreter of the modern world, but only a brilliant soldier.

Born in 1754, and dying in 1824, Joseph Joubert chose to hide his life; but he was a man of extraordinary ardour in the search for truth and of extraordinary fineness in the perception of it. He was one of those wonderful lovers of light who, when they have an idea to put forth, brood long over it first, and wait patiently till it shines.

GEORGE BRANDES

Main Currents of the Literature of the Nineteenth Century

George Brandes was born in Copenhagen on February 4, 1842, and
was educated at the University of Copenhagen. The appearance
of his "Æsthetic Studies" in 1868 established his reputation
among men of letters of all lands. His criticism received a
philosophic bent from his study of John Stuart Mill, Comte, and
Renan. Complaint is often made of the bias exhibited by Brandes
in his works, which is somewhat of a blemish on the breadth
of his judgment. This bias finds its chief expression in his
anti-clericalism. His publications number thirty-three volumes,
and include works on history, literature, and criticism. He
has written studies of Shakespeare, of Lord Beaconsfield, of
Ibsen, and of Ferdinand Lassalle. His greatest work is the "Main
Currents of the Literature of the Nineteenth Century." The field
covered is so vast that any attempted synopsis of the volume is
impossible here, so in this place we merely indicate the scope of
Brandes's monumental work, and state his general conclusions.

_The Man and the Book_

This remarkable essay in literary criticism is limited to the first half of the nineteenth century; it concludes with the historical turning-point of 1848. Within this period the author discovers, first, a reaction against the literature of the eighteenth century; and then, the vanquishment of that reaction. Or, in other words, there is first a fading away and disappearance of the ideas and feelings of the preceding century, and then a return of the ideas of progress in new and higher waves.

"Literary history is, in its profoundest significance, psychology, the study, the history of the soul"; and literary criticism is, with our author, nothing less than the interior history of peoples. Whether we happen to agree or to disagree with his personal sympathies, which lie altogether with liberalism and whether his interpretation of these complex movements be accepted or rejected by future criticism, it is at least unquestionable that his estimate of his science is the right one, and that his method is the right one, and that no one stands beside Brandes as an exponent.

The historical movement of the years 1800 to 1848 is here likened to a drama, of which six different literary groups represent the six acts. The first three acts incorporate the reaction against progress and liberty. They are, first, the French Emigrant Literature, inspired by Rousseau; secondly, the semi-Catholic Romantic school of Germany, wherein the reaction has separated itself more thoroughly from the contemporary struggle for liberty, and has gained considerably in depth and vigour; and, thirdly, the militant and triumphant reaction as shown in Joseph de Maistre, Lamennais, Lamartine and Victor Hugo, standing out for pope and monarch. The drama of reaction has here come to its climax; and the last three acts are to witness its fall, and the revival, in its place, of the ideas of liberty and of progress.

"It is one man, Byron, who produces the revulsion in the great drama." And Byron and his English contemporaries, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Keats and Shelley, hold the stage in the fourth act, "Naturalism in England." The fifth act belongs to the Liberal movement in France, the "French Romantic School," including the names of Lamennais, Lamartine and Hugo in their second phase; and also those of De Musset and George Sand. The movement passes from France into "Young Germany," where the sixth act is played by Heine, Ruge, Feuerbach and others; and the ardent revolutionary writers of France and of Germany together prepare for the great political transformation of 1848.

_I.--The Emigrant Literature_

At the beginning of our period, France was subjected to two successive tyrannies: those, namely, of the Convention and of the Empire, both of which suppressed all independent thought and literature. Writers were, perforce, emigrants beyond the frontiers of French power, and were, one and all, in opposition to the Reign of Terror, or to the Napoleonic tyranny, or to both; one and all they were looking forward to the new age which should come.

There was, therefore, a note of expectancy in this emigrant literature, which had also the advantage of real knowledge, gained in long exile, of foreign lands and peoples. Although it reacts against the dry and narrow rationalism of the eighteenth century, it is not as yet a complete reaction against the Liberalism of that period; the writers of the emigrant group are still ardent in the cause of Liberty. They are contrary to the spirit of Voltaire; but they are all profoundly influenced by Rousseau.

Chateaubriand's romances, "Atala" and "René," Rousseau's "The New Héloïse" and Goethe's "Werther" are the subjects of studies which lead our critic to a consideration of that new spiritual condition of which they are the indications. "All the spiritual maladies," he says, "which make their appearance at this time may be regarded as the products of two great events--the emancipation of the individual and the emancipation of thought."

Every career now lies open, potentially, to the individual. His opportunities, and therefore his desires, but not his powers, have become boundless; and "inordinate desire is always accompanied by inordinate melancholy." His release from the old order, which limited his importance, has set him free for self-idolatry; the old laws have broken down, and everything now seems permissible. He no longer feels himself part of a whole; he feels himself to be a little world which reflects the great world. The belief in the saving power of enlightenment had been rudely shaken, and the minds of men were confused like an army which receives contradictory orders in the midst of a battle. Sénancour, Nodier and Benjamin Constant have left us striking romances picturing the human spirit in this dilemma; they show also a new feeling for Nature, new revelations of subjectivity, and new ideas of womanhood and of passion.

But of the emigrant literature Madame de Staël is the chief and central figure. The lawless savagery of the Revolution did not weaken her fidelity to personal and political freedom. "She wages war with absolutism in the state and hypocrisy in society. She teaches her countrymen to appreciate the characteristics and literature of the neighbouring nations; she breaks down with her own hands the wall of self-sufficiency with which victorious France had surrounded itself. Barante, with his perspective view of eighteenth-century France, only continues and completes her work."

_II.--The Romantic School in Germany_

German Romanticism continues the growing reaction against the eighteenth century; yet, though it is essentially reaction, it is not mere reaction, but contains the seeds of a new development. It is intellectual, poetical, philosophical and full of real life.

This literary period, marked by the names of Hölderlin, A. W. Schlegel, Tieck, Jean Paul Richter, Schleiermacher, Wackenroder, Novalis, Arnim, Brentano, resulted in little that has endured. It produced no typical forms; the character of its literature is musical rather than plastic; its impulse is not a clear perception or creation, but an infinite and ineffable aspiration.

An intenser spiritual life was at once the impulse and the goal of the Romanticists, in whom wonder and infinite desire are born again. A sympathetic interest in the fairy tale and the legend, in the face of Nature and in her creatures, in history, institutions and law, and a keener emotional sensitiveness in poetry, were the result of this refreshed interior life. In religion, the movement was towards the richly-coloured mystery and child-like faith of Catholicism; and in respect of human love it was towards freedom, spontaneity, intensity, and against the hard bonds of social conventions.

But its emotions became increasingly morbid, abnormal and ineffectual. Romanticism tended really, not to the spiritual emancipation that was its avowed aim, but to a refinement of sensuality; an indolent and passive enjoyment is its actual goal; and it repudiates industry and utility as the philistine barriers which exclude us from Paradise. Retrogression, the going back to a fancied Paradise or Golden Age, is the central idea of Romanticism, and is the secret of the practical ineffectiveness of the movement.

Friedrich Schlegel's romance, "Lucinde," is a very typical work of this period. It is based on the Romantic idea that life and poetry are identical, and its aim is to counsel the transformation of our actual life into a poem or work of art. It is a manifesto of self-absorption and of subjectivity; the reasoned defence of idleness, of enjoyment, of lawlessness, of the arbitrary expression of the Self, supreme above all.

The mysticism of Novalis, who preferred sickness to health, night to day, and invested death itself with sensual delights, is described by himself as voluptuousness. It is full of a feverish, morbid desire, which becomes at last the desire for nothingness. The "blue flower," in his story "Heinrich von Ofterdingen," is the ideal, personal happiness, sought for in all Romanticism, but by its very nature never attainable.

_III.--The Reaction in France_

Herein we have the culmination of the reactionary movement. Certain authors are grouped together as labouring for the re-establishment of the fallen power of authority; and by the principle of authority is to be understood "the principle which assumes the life of the individual and of the nation to be based upon reverence for inherited tradition." Further, "the principle of authority in general stood or fell with the authority of the Church. When that was undermined, it drew all other authorities with it in its fall."

After a study of the Revolution in its quality as a religious movement, and the story of the Concordat, our author traces the genesis of this extreme phase of the reaction. Its promoters were all of noble birth and bound by close ties to the old royal families; their aim was political rather than religious; "they craved for religion as a panacea for lawlessness." Their ruling idea was the principle of externality, as opposed to that of inward, personal feeling and private investigation; it was the principle of theocracy, as opposed to the sovereignty of the people; it was the principle of power, as opposed to the principles of human rights and liberties.

Chateaubriand's famous book, "Le Génie du Christianisme," devoid of real feeling, attempts to vindicate authority by means of an appeal to sentiment, as if taking for granted that a reasoned faith was now impossible. His point of view is romantic, and therefore, religiously, false; his reasoning is of the "how beautiful!" style.

But the principle was enthroned by Count Joseph de Maistre, a very different man. The minister of the King of Sardinia at the court of Russia, he gained the emperor's confidence by his strong and pure character, his royalist principles, and his talents. His more important works, "Du Pape," "De l'Eglise Gallicane," and "Soirées de St. Pétersbourg," are the most uncompromising defence of political and religious autocracy. The fundamental idea of his works is that "there is no human society without government, no government without sovereignty, and no sovereignty without infallibility." Beside De Maistre stands Bonald, a man of the same views, but without the other's daring and versatile wit. Chateaubriand's prose epic "Les Martyrs," the mystically sensual writings of Madame Krüdener, and the lyric poetry of Lamartine and Victor Hugo further popularised the reaction, which reached its breaking point in Lamennais.

It was at this moment, April, 1824, that the news came of Byron's death in Greece. The illusion dissolved; the reaction came to an end. The principle of authority fell, never to rise again; and the Immanuelistic school was succeeded by the Satanic.

_IV.--Naturalism in England_

The distinguishing character which our author discovers in the English poets is a love of Nature, of the country and the sea, of domestic animals and vegetation. This Naturalism, common to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Keats, Moore, Shelley and Byron, becomes, when transferred to social interests, revolutionary; the English poet is a Radical. Literary questions interest him not; he is at heart a politician.

The political background of English intellectual life at this period is painted forcibly and in the darkest tones. It was "dark with terror produced in the middle classes by the excesses of the liberty movement in France, dark with the tyrannic lusts of proud Tories and the Church's oppressions, dark with the spilt blood of Irish Catholics and English artisans." In the midst of all this misery, Wordsworth and Coleridge recalled the English mind to the love of real Nature and to the love of liberty. Wordsworth's conviction was that in town life and its distractions men had forgotten Nature, and had been punished for it; constant social intercourse had dissipated their talents and impaired their susceptibility to simple and pure impressions. His naturalism is antagonistic to all official creeds; it is akin to the old Greek conception of Nature, and is impregnated with pantheism.

The separate studies which follow, dealing with the natural Romanticism of Coleridge, Southey's Oriental Romanticism, the Lake school's conception of Liberty, the Historic Naturalism of Scott, the sensuous poetry of Keats, the poetry of Irish opposition and revolt, Thomas Campbell's poetry of freedom, the Republican Humanism of Landor, Shelley's Radical Naturalism, and like subjects, are of the highest importance to every English reader who would understand the time in which he lives. But Byron's is the heroic figure in this act. "Byron's genius takes possession of him, and makes him great and victorious in his argument, directing his aim with absolute certainty to the vital points." Byron's whole being burned with the profoundest compassion for the immeasurable sufferings of humanity. It was liberty that he worshipped, and he died for liberty.

_V.--The Romantic School in France_

During the Revolution the national property had been divided into twenty times as many hands as before, and with the fall of Napoleon the industrial period begins. All restrictions had been removed from industry and commerce, and capital became the moving power of society and the object of individual desires. The pursuit of money helps to give to the literature of the day its romantic, idealistic stamp. Balzac alone, however, made money the hero of his epic. Other great writers of the period, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, George Sand, Beyle, Mérimée, Théophile Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, kept as far as possible from the new reality.

The young Romanticists of 1830 burned with a passion for art and a detestation of drab bourgeoisie. A break with tradition was demanded in all the arts; the original, the unconscious, the popular, were what they aimed at. It was now, as in Hugo's dramas, that the passionate plebeian appeared on the scene as hero; Mérimée, as in "Carmen," painted savage emotions; Nodier's children spoke like real children; George Sand depicted, in woman, not conscious virtue and vice, but the innate nobility and natural goodness of a noble woman's heart. The poet was no longer looked on as a courtier, but as the despised high-priest of humanity.

The French Romantic school is the greatest literary school of the nineteenth century. It displayed three main tendencies--the endeavour to reproduce faithfully some real piece of past history or some phase of modern life; the endeavour after perfection of form; and enthusiasm for great religious or social reformatory ideas. These three tendencies are traced out in the ideals and work of the brilliant authors of the period; in George Sand, for instance, who proclaimed that the mission of art is a mission of sentiment and love; and in Balzac, who views society as the scientist investigates Nature--"he never moralises and condemns; he never allows himself to be led by disgust or enthusiasm to describe otherwise than truthfully; nothing is too small, nothing is too great to be examined and explained."

The impressions which our author gives of Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, George Sand, Balzac and Mérimée are vivid and concrete; they are high achievements in literary portraiture, set in a real historic background.

_VI.--Young Germany_

The personality, writings, and actions of Byron had an extraordinary influence upon "Young Germany," a movement initiated by Heine and Börne, and characterised by a strong craving for liberty. "Byron, with his contempt for the real negation of liberty that lay concealed beneath the 'wars of liberty' against Napoleon, with his championship of the oppressed, his revolt against social custom, his sensuality and spleen, his passionate love of liberty in every domain, seemed to the men of that day to be an embodiment of all that they understood by the modern spirit, modern poetry."

The literary group known as Young Germany has no creative minds of the highest, and only one of very high rank, namely, Heine. "It denied, it emancipated, it cleared up, it let in fresh air. It is strong through its doubt, its hatred of thraldom, its individualism." The Germany of those days has been succeeded by a quite new Germany, organised to build up and to put forth material strength, and the writers of the first half of the nineteenth century, who were always praising France and condemning the sluggishness of their own country, are but little read.

The literary figures of this period who are painted by our author, are Börne, Heine, Immermann, Menzel, Gutzkow, Laube, Mundt, Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, Bettina von Arnim, Charlotte Stieglitz, and many others, to whose writings, in conjunction with those of the French Romanticists, Brandes ascribes the general revolt of the oppressed peoples of Europe in 1848. Of the men of that date he says: "They had a faith that could remove mountains, and a hope that could shake the earth. Liberty, parliament, national unity, liberty of the Press, republic, were to them magic words, at the very sound of which their hearts leaped like the heart of a youth who suddenly sees his beloved."

ROBERT BURTON

The Anatomy of Melancholy

Robert Burton was born on February 8, 1576, of an old family, at
Lindley, Leicestershire, England; was educated at the free school
of Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, and at Brasenose College,
Oxford, and in 1599 was elected student of Christ Church. In
1616 he was presented with the vicarage of St. Thomas, Oxford,
and in 1636 with the rectory of Segrave, in Leicestershire, and
kept both these livings until his death. But he lived chiefly
in his rooms at Christ Church, Oxford, where, burrowing in the
treasures of the Bodleian Library, he elaborated his learned
and whimsical book. He died on January 25, 1639, and was buried
in Christ Church Cathedral. The "Anatomy of Melancholy" is
an enormous compendium of sound sense, sly humour, universal
erudition, mediæval science, fantastic conceits, and noble
sentiments, arranged in the form of a most methodical treatise,
divided, and subdivided again, into sections dealing with every
conceivable aspect of this fell disorder. It is an intricate
tissue of quotations and allusions, and its interest lies as
much in its texture as in its argument. The "Anatomy" consists
of an introduction, "Democritus Junior to the Reader," and
then of three "Partitions," of which the first treats of the
Causes of Melancholy, the second of its Cure, and the third
of Love-Melancholy, wherewith is included the Melancholy of
Superstition.

_I.--Democritus Junior to the Reader_

Gentle reader, I presume thou wilt be very inquisitive to know what antic or personate actor this is that so insolently intrudes upon this common theatre to the world's view, arrogating another man's name; whence he is, why he doth it, and what he hath to say. Seek not after that which is hid; if the contents please thee, suppose the man in the moon, or whom thou wilt, to be the author; I would not willingly be known.

I have masked myself under this visard because, like Democritus, I have lived a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life in the university, penned up most part in my study. Though by my profession a divine, yet, out of a running wit, an unconstant, unsettled mind, I had a great desire to have some smattering in all subjects; which Plato commends as fit to be imprinted in all curious wits, not to be a slave of one science, as most do, but to rove abroad, to have an oar in every man's boat, to taste of every dish, and to sip of every cup; which, saith Montaigne, was well performed by Aristotle.

I have little, I want nothing; all my treasure is in Minerva's tower. Though I lead a monastic life, myself my own theatre, I hear and see what is done abroad, how others run, ride, turmoil, in court and country. Amid the gallantry and misery of the world, jollity, pride, perplexities and cares, simplicity and villainy, subtlety, knavery, candour, and integrity, I rub on in private, left to a solitary life and mine own domestic discontents.

So I call myself Democritus, to assume a little more liberty of speech, or, if you will needs know, for that reason which Hippocrates relates, how, coming to visit him one day, he found Democritus in his garden at Abdera, under a shady bower, with a book on his knees, busy at his study, sometimes writing, sometimes walking. The subject of his book was melancholy and madness. About him lay the carcasses of many several beasts, newly by him cut up and anatomised; not that he did contemn God's creatures, but to find out the seat of this black bile, or melancholy, and how it is engendered in men's bodies, to the intent he might better cure it in himself, and by his writings teach others how to avoid it; which good intent of his Democritus Junior is bold to imitate, and because he left it imperfect and it is now lost, to revive again, prosecute, and finish in this treatise. I seek not applause; I fear good men's censures, and to their favourable acceptance I submit my labours. But as the barking of a dog I contemn those malicious and scurrile obloquies, flouts, calumnies of railers and detractors.

Of the necessity of what I have said, if any man doubt of it, I shall desire him to make a brief survey of the world, as Cyprian adviseth Donate; supposing himself to be transported to the top of some high mountain, and thence to behold the tumults and chances of this wavering world, he cannot choose but either laugh at, or pity it. St. Hierom, out of a strong imagination, being in the wilderness, conceived that he saw them dancing in Rome; and if thou shalt climb to see, thou shalt soon perceive that all the world is mad, that it is melancholy, dotes; that it is a common prison of gulls, cheats, flatterers, etc., and needs to be reformed. Kingdoms and provinces are melancholy; cities and families, all creatures vegetal, sensible and rational, all sorts, sects, ages, conditions, are out of tune; from the highest to the lowest have need of physic. Who is not brain-sick? Oh, giddy-headed age! Mad endeavours! Mad actions!

If Democritus were alive now, and should but see the superstition of our age, our religious madness, so many professed Christians, yet so few imitators of Christ, so much talk and so little conscience, so many preachers and such little practice, such variety of sects--how dost thou think he might have been affected? What would he have said to see, hear, and read so many bloody battles, such streams of blood able to turn mills, to make sport for princes, without any just cause? Men well proportioned, carefully brought up, able in body and mind, led like so many beasts to the slaughter in the flower of their years, without remorse and pity, killed for devils' food, 40,000 at once! At once? That were tolerable; but these wars last always; and for many ages, nothing so familiar as this hacking and hewing, massacres, murders, desolations! Who made creatures, so peaceable, born to love, mercy, meekness, so to rave like beasts and run to their own destruction?

How would our Democritus have been affected to see so many lawyers, advocates, so many tribunals, so little justice; so many laws, yet never more disorders; the tribunal a labyrinth; to see a lamb executed, a wolf pronounce sentence? What's the market but a place wherein they cozen one another, a trap? Nay, what's the world itself but a vast chaos, a theatre of hypocrisy, a shop of knavery, a scene of babbling, the academy of vice? A warfare, in which you must kill or be killed, wherein every man is for himself; no charity, love, friendship, fear of God, alliance, affinity, consanguinity, can contain them. Our goddess is Queen Money, to whom we daily offer sacrifice. It's not worth, virtue, wisdom, valour, learning, honesty, religion, for which we are respected, but money, greatness, office, honour. All these things are easy to be discerned, but how would Democritus have been moved had he seen the secrets of our hearts! All the world is mad, and every member of it, and I can but wish myself and them a good physician, and all of us a better mind.

_II.--The Causes of Melancholy_

The impulsive cause of these miseries in man was the sin of our first parent, Adam; and this, belike, is that which our poets have shadowed unto us in the tale of Pandora's Box, which, being opened through her curiosity, filled the world full of all manner of diseases. But as our sins are the principal cause, so the instrumental causes of our infirmities are as diverse as the infirmities themselves. Stars, heavens, elements, and all those creatures which God hath made, are armed against sinners. But the greatest enemy to man is man, his own executioner, a wolf, a devil to himself and others. Again, no man amongst us so sound that hath not some impediment of body or mind. There are diseases acute and chronic, first and secondary, lethal, salutary, errant, fixed, simple, compound, etc. Melancholy is the most eminent of the diseases of the phantasy or imagination; and dotage, phrensy, madness, hydrophobia, lycanthropy, St. Vitus' dance, and ecstasy are forms of it.

Melancholy is either in disposition or habit. In disposition it is that transitory melancholy which comes and goes upon every small occasion of sorrow; we call him melancholy that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill-disposed, and solitary; and from these dispositions no man living is free; none so wise, patient, happy, generous, or godly, that can vindicate himself.

Melancholy is a cold and dry, thick, black, and sour humour, purged from the spleen; it is a bridle to the other two hot humours, blood and choler, preserving them in the blood and nourishing the bones. Such as have the Moon, Saturn, Mercury, misaffected in their genitures; such as live in over-cold or over-hot climates; such as are solitary by nature; great students, given to much contemplation; such as lead a life out of action; all are most subject to melancholy.

Six things are much spoken of amongst physicians as principal causes of this disease; if a man be melancholy, he hath offended in one of the six. They are diet, air, exercise, sleeping, and walking, and perturbations of the mind.

Idleness, the badge of gentry, or want of exercise, the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, the chief author of all mischief, one of the seven deadly sins, and a sole cause of this and many other maladies, the devil's cushion and chief reposal, begets melancholy sooner than anything else. Such as live at ease, and have no ordinary employment to busy themselves about, cannot compose themselves to do aught; they cannot abide work, though it be necessary, easy, as to dress themselves, write a letter, or the like. He or she that is idle, be they never so rich, fortunate, happy, let them have all that heart can desire, they shall never be pleased, never well in body and mind, but weary still, sickly still, vexed still, loathing still, weeping, sighing, grieving, suspecting, offended with the world, with every object, wishing themselves gone or dead, or else carried away with some foolish phantasy or other.

Others, giving way to the passions and perturbations of fear, grief, shame, revenge, hatred, malice, etc., are torn in pieces, as Actæon was with his dogs, and crucify their own souls. Every society and private family is full of envy; it takes hold of all sorts of men, from prince to ploughman; scarce three in a company, but there is siding, faction, emulation, between two of them, some jar, private grudge, heart-burning in the midst. Scarce two great scholars in an age, but with bitter invectives they fall foul one on the other. Being that we are so peevish and perverse, insolent and proud, so factious and seditious, malicious and envious, we do maul and vex one another, torture, disquiet, and precipitate ourselves into that gulf of woes and cares, aggravate our misery and melancholy, and heap upon us hell and eternal damnation.

_III.--The Cure of Melancholy_

"It matters not," saith Paracelsus, "whether it be God or the devil, angels or unclean spirits, cure him, so that he be eased." Some have recourse to witches; but much better were it for patients that are troubled with melancholy to endure a little misery in this life than to hazard their souls' health for ever. All unlawful cures are to be refused, and it remains to treat of those that are admitted.

These are such as God hath appointed, by virtue of stones, herbs, plants, meats, and the like, which are prepared and applied to our use by the art and industry of physicians, God's intermediate ministers. We must begin with prayer and then use physic; not one without the other, but both together.

Diet must be rectified in substance and in quantity; air rectified; for there is much in choice of place and of chamber, in opportune opening and shutting of windows, and in walking abroad at convenient times. Exercise must be rectified of body and mind. Hawking, hunting, fishing are good, especially the last, which is still and quiet, and if so be the angler catch no fish, yet he hath a wholesome walk and pleasant shade by the sweet silver streams. But the most pleasant of all pastimes is to make a merry journey now and then with some good companions, to visit friends, see cities, castles, towns, to walk amongst orchards, gardens, bowers, to disport in some pleasant plain. St. Bernard, in the description of his monastery, is almost ravished with the pleasures of it. "Good God," saith he, "what a company of pleasures hast Thou made for man!" But what is so fit and proper to expel idleness and melancholy as study? What so full of content as to read, and see maps, pictures, statues, jewels, and marbles, so exquisite to be beheld that, as Chrysostom thinketh, "if any man be sickly or troubled in mind, and shall but stand over against one of Phidias's images, he will forget all care in an instant?"

If thou receivest wrong, compose thyself with patience to bear it. Thou shalt find greatest ease to be quiet. I say the same of scoffs, slanders, detractions, which tend to our disgrace; 'tis but opinion; if we would neglect or contemn them, they would reflect disgrace on them that offered them. "Yea, but I am ashamed, disgraced, degraded, exploded; my notorious crimes and villainies are come to light!" Be content; 'tis but a nine days' wonder; 'tis heavy, ghastly, fearful news at first, but thine offence will be forgotten in an instant. Thou art not the first offender, nor shalt thou be the last. If he alone should accuse thee that were faultless, how many executioners, how many accusers, would thou have? Shall every man have his desert, thou wouldst peradventure be a saint in comparison. Be not dismayed; it is human to err. Be penitent, ask forgiveness, and vex thyself no more. Doth the moon care for the barking of a dog?

_IV.--Love-Melancholy_

There will not be wanting those who will much discommend this treatise of love-melancholy, and object that it is too light for a divine, too phantastical, and fit only for a wanton poet. So that they may be admired for grave philosophers, and staid carriage, they cannot abide to hear talk of love-toys; in all their outward actions they are averse; and yet, in their cogitations, they are all but as bad, if not worse than others. I am almost afraid to relate the passions which this tyrant love causeth among men; it hath wrought such stupendous and prodigious effects, such foul offences.

As there be divers causes of this heroical love, so there be many good remedies, among which good counsel and persuasion are of great moment, especially if it proceed from a wise, fatherly, discreet person. They will lament and howl for a while; but let him proceed, by foreshewing the miserable dangers that will surely happen, the pains of hell, joys of paradise, and the like; and this is a very good means, for love is learned of itself, but hardly left without a tutor.

In sober sadness, marriage is a bondage, a thraldom, a hindrance to all good enterprises; "he hath married a wife, and therefore cannot come"; a rock on which many are saved, many are cast away. Not that the thing is evil in itself, or troublesome, but full of happiness, and a thing which pleases God; but to indiscreet, sensual persons, it is a feral plague, many times an hell itself. If thy wife be froward, all is in an uproar; if wise and learned, she will be insolent and peevish; if poor, she brings beggary; if young, she is wanton and untaught. Say the best, she is a commanding servant; thou hadst better have taken a good housewifely maid in her smock. Since, then, there is such hazard, keep thyself as thou art; 'tis good to match, much better to be free. Consider withal how free, how happy, how secure, how heavenly, in respect, a single man is.

But when all is said, since some be good, some bad, let's put it to the venture. Marry while thou mayest, and take thy fortune as it falls. Be not so covetous, so distrustful, so curious and nice, but let's all marry; to-morrow is St. Valentine's Day. Since, then, marriage is the last and best cure of heroical love, all doubts are cured and impediments removed; God send us all good wives!

Take this for a corollory and conclusion; as thou tenderest thine own welfare in love-melancholy, in the melancholy of religion, and in all other melancholy; observe this short precept--Be not solitary; be not idle.

THOMAS CARLYLE

On Heroes and Hero-Worship

This is the last of four series of lectures which Carlyle (see
Vol. IX, p. 99) delivered in London in successive years, and is
the only series which was published. The "Lectures on Heroes"
were given in May, 1840, and were published, with emendations
and additions, from the reporter's notes in 1841. The preceding
series were on "German Literature," 1837; "The Successive Periods
of European Culture," 1838; and "The Revolutions of Modern
Europe," 1839. Carlyle's profound and impassioned belief in the
quasi-divine inspiration of great men, in the authoritative
nature of their "message," and in their historical effectiveness,
was a reaction against a way of writing history which finds the
origin of events in "movements," "currents," and "tendencies"
neglecting or minimising the power of personality. For Carlyle,
biography was the essential element in history; his view of
events was the dramatic view, as opposed to the scientific
view. It is idle to inquire which is the better or truer view,
where both are necessary. But Carlyle is here specially tilting
against a prejudice which has so utterly passed away that it
is difficult even to imagine it. This was to the effect that
eminent historical figures have been in some sense impostors.
This work suffers a good deal from its origin, but, like others
of Carlyle's writings, it has had great effect in discrediting a
barren and flippant rationalism.

_I.--The Hero as Divinity_

We have undertaken to discourse on great men, their manner of appearance in our world's business, how they shaped themselves in the world's history, what ideas men formed of them, and what work they did. We are to treat of hero-worship and the heroic in human affairs. The topic is as wide as universal history itself, for the history of what man has accomplished in this world is, at bottom, the history of the great men who have worked here.

It is well said that a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him. I do not mean the Church creed which he professes, but the thing that he does practically believe, the manner in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the unseen world. Was it heathenism, a plurality of gods, a mere sensuous representation of the mystery of life, and for chief recognised element therein physical force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible as the only reality; time ever resting on eternity; pagan empire of force displaced by the nobler supremacy of holiness? Was it scepticism, uncertainty, and inquiry whether there was an unseen world at all, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial? The answer to these questions gives us the soul of the history of the man or nation.

Odin, the central figure of Scandinavian paganism, shall be our emblem of the hero as divinity. And in the first place I protest against the theory that this paganism or any other religion has consisted of mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery. Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all. Man everywhere is the born enemy of lies, and paganism, to its followers, was at one time earnestly true. Nor can we admit that other theory, which attributed these mythologies to allegory, or to the play of poetic minds. Pagan religion, like every other, is indeed a symbol of what men felt about the universe, but a practical guiding knowledge of this mysterious life of theirs, and not a perfect poetic symbol of it, has been the want of men. The "Pilgrim's Progress" is a just and beautiful allegory, but it could never have preceded the faith which it symbolises. Men never risked their soul's life on allegories; there was a kind of fact at the heart of paganism.

To the primitive pagan thinker, who was simple as a child, yet had a man's depth and strength, nature had as yet no name. It stood naked, flashing in on him, beautiful, awful, unspeakable; nature was preternatural. The world, which is now divine only to the gifted, was then divine to whosoever would turn his eye upon it. Still more was the body of man, and the mystery of his consciousness, an emblem to them of God, and truly worshipful.

How much more, then, was the worship of a hero reasonable--the transcendent admiration of a great man! For great men are still admirable. At bottom there is nothing else admirable. Admiration for one higher than himself is to this hour the vivifying influence in man's life, and is the germ of Christianity itself. The greatest of all heroes is One whom we do not name here.

Without doubt there was a first teacher and captain of these northern peoples, an Odin palpable to the sense, a real hero of flesh and blood. Tradition calls him inventor of the Runes, or Scandinavian alphabet, and again of poetry. To the wild Norse souls this noble-hearted man was hero, prophet, god. That the man Odin, speaking with a hero's voice and heart, as with an impressiveness out of Heaven, told his people the infinite importance of valour, how man thereby became a god; and that his people believed this message of his, and thought it a message out of Heaven, and believed him a divinity for telling it to them--this seems to me the primary seed-grain of the Norse religion. For that religion was a sternly impressive consecration of valour.

_II.--The Hero as Prophet_

We turn now to Mohammedanism among the Arabs for the second phase of hero-worship, wherein the hero is not now regarded as a god, but as one God-inspired, a prophet. Mohammed is not the most eminent prophet, but is the one of whom we are freest to speak. Nor is he the truest of prophets but I do esteem him a true one. Let us try to understand what he meant with the world; what the world meant and means with him will then be more answerable.

Certainly he was no scheming impostor, no falsehood incarnate; theories of that kind are the product of an age of scepticism, and indicate the saddest spiritual paralysis. A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house! No Mirabeau, Napoleon, Burns, Cromwell, no man adequate to do anything, but is first of all in right earnest about it. Sincerity is the great characteristic of all men in any way heroic.

The Arabs are a notable people; their country itself is notable. Consider that wide, waste horizon of sand, empty, silent like a sea; you are all alone there, left alone with the universe; by day a fierce sun blazing down with intolerable radiance; by night the great deep heaven, with its stars--a fit country for a swift-handed, deep-hearted race of men. The Arab character is agile, active, yet most meditative, enthusiastic. Hospitable, taciturn, earnest, truthful, deeply religious, the Arabs were a people of great qualities, waiting for the day when they should become notable to all the world.

Here, in the year 570 of our era, the man Mohammed was born, and grew up in the bosom of the wilderness, alone with Nature and his own thoughts. From an early age he had been remarked as a thoughtful man, and his companions named him "The Faithful." He was forty before he talked of any mission from Heaven. All this time living a peaceful life, he was looking through the shows of things into things themselves.

Then, having withdrawn to a cavern near Mecca for a month of prayer and meditation, he told his wife Kadijah that, by the unspeakable favour of Heaven, he was in doubt and darkness no longer, but saw it all. That all these idols and formulas were nothing; that there was one God in and over all; that God is great and is the reality. _Allah akbar_, "God is great"; and then _Islam_, "we must submit to Him."

This is yet the only true morality known. A man is right and invincible, while he joins himself to the great deep law of the world, in spite of all superficial laws, temporary appearances, profit-and-loss calculations. This is the soul of Islam, and is properly also the soul of Christianity. We are to receive whatever befalls us as sent from God above. Islam means in its way the denial of self, annihilation of self. This is yet the highest wisdom that Heaven has revealed to our earth. In Mohammed, and in his Koran, I find first of all sincerity, the total freedom from cant. For these twelve centuries his religion has been the guidance of a fifth part of mankind, and, above all, it has been a religion heartily believed.

The Arab nation was a poor shepherd people; a hero-prophet was sent down to them; within one century afterwards Arabia is at Grenada on this hand, at Delhi on that!

_III.--The Hero as Poet_

The hero as divinity and as prophet are productions of old ages, not to be repeated in the new. We are now to see our hero in the less ambitious, but also less questionable, character of poet. For the hero can be poet, prophet, king, priest, or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men.

Indeed, the poet and prophet, participators in the open secret of the universe, are one; though the prophet has seized the sacred mystery rather on its moral side, and the poet on the æsthetic side. Poetry is essentially a song; its thoughts are musical not in word only, but in heart and in substance.

Shakespeare and Dante are our two canonised poets; they dwell apart, none equal, none second to them. Dante's book was written, in banishment, with his heart's blood. His great soul, homeless on earth, made its home more and more in that awful other world. The three kingdoms--_Inferno_, _Purgatorio_, _Paradiso_--are like compartments of a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern, solemn, awful; Dante's world of souls. It is the sincerest of all poems. Sincerity here, too, we find to be the measure of worth. Intensity is the prevailing character of his genius; his greatness lies in fiery emphasis and depth; it is seen even in the graphic vividness of his painting. Dante burns as a pure star, fixed in the firmament, at which the great and high of all ages kindle themselves.

As Dante embodies musically the inner life of the Middle Ages, so Shakespeare embodies for us its outer life, its chivalries, courtesies, humours, ambitions. Dante gave us the soul of Europe; Shakespeare gave us its body. Of this Shakespeare of ours, the best judgment of Europe is slowly pointing to the conclusion that he is the chief of all poets, the greatest intellect who has left record of himself in the way of literature.

It is in portrait-painting, the delineation of men, that the greatness of Shakespeare comes out most decisively. His calm, creative perspicacity is unexampled. The word that will describe the thing follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. He takes in all kinds of men--a Falstaff, Othello, Juliet, Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their rounded completeness, loving, just, the equal brother of all.

The degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man, and Shakespeare's is the greatest of intellects. Novalis beautifully remarks of him that those dramas of his are products of nature, too, deep as nature herself. Shakespeare's art is not artifice; the noblest worth of it is not there by plan or pre-contrivance. The latest generations of men will find new meanings in Shakespeare, new elucidations of their own human being.

Shakespeare, too, was a prophet, in his way, of an insight analogous to the prophetic, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to this man also divine, unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as heaven. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of." There rises a kind of universal psalm out of Shakespeare, not unfit to make itself heard among the still more sacred psalms.

England, before long, this island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English; east and west to the antipodes there will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the globe. What is it that can keep all these together into virtually one nation, so that they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace? Here, I say, is an English king whom no time or chance can dethrone! King Shakespeare shines over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs; we can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. Truly it is a great thing for a nation that it gets an articulate voice.

_IV.--The Hero as Priest_