God _Wish_, the god of all rude men,--this has been enlarged into a Heaven
by Mahomet; but a Heaven symbolical of sacred Duty, and to be earned by

faith and well-doing, by valiant action, and a divinepatience which is
still more valiant. It is Scandinavian Paganism, and a truly celestial

element superadded to that. Call it not false; look not at the falsehood
of it, look at the truth of it. For these twelve centuries, it has been

the religion and life-guidance of the fifth part of the whole kindred of
Mankind. Above all things, it has been a religion heartily _believed_.

These Arabs believe their religion, and try to live by it! No Christians,
since the early ages, or only perhaps the English Puritans in modern times,

have ever stood by their Faith as the Moslem do by theirs,--believing it
wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it. This night the

watchman on the streets of Cairo when he cries, "Who goes? " will hear from
the passenger, along with his answer, "There is no God but God." _Allah

akbar_, _Islam_, sounds through the souls, and whole daily existence, of
these dusky millions. Zealous missionaries preach it abroad among Malays,

black Papuans, brutal Idolaters;--displacing what is worse, nothing that is
better or good.

To the Arab Nation it was as a birth from darkness into light; Arabia first
became alive by means of it. A poor shepherd people, roaming unnoticed in

its deserts since the creation of the world: a Hero-Prophet was sent down
to them with a word they could believe: see, the unnoticed becomes

world-notable, the small has grown world-great; within one century
afterwards, Arabia is at Grenada on this hand, at Delhi on that;--glancing

in valor and splendor and the light of genius, Arabia shines through long
ages over a great section of the world. Belief is great, life-giving. The

history of a Nation becomes fruitful, soul-elevating, great, so soon as it
believes. These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century,--is it not

as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed black
unnoticeable sand; but lo, the sand proves explosive powder, blazes

heaven-high from Delhi to Grenada! I said, the Great Man was always as
lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then

they too would flame.
[May 12, 1840.]

LECTURE III.
THE HERO AS POET. DANTE: SHAKSPEARE.

The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old ages; not
to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain rudeness of

conception, which the progress of mere scientific knowledge puts an end to.
There needs to be, as it were, a world vacant, or almost vacant of

scientific forms, if men in their loving wonder are to fancy their
fellow-man either a god or one speaking with the voice of a god. Divinity

and Prophet are past. We are now to see our Hero in the less ambitious,
but also less questionable, character of Poet; a character which does not

pass. The Poet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages; whom all ages
possess, when once he is produced, whom the newest age as the oldest may

produce;--and will produce, always when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a
Hero-soul; in no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a

Poet.
Hero, Prophet, Poet,--many different names, in different times, and places,

do we give to Great Men; according to varieties we note in them, according
to the sphere in which they have displayed themselves! We might give many

more names, on this same principle. I will remark again, however, as a
fact not unimportant to be understood, that the different _sphere_

constitutes the grand origin of such distinction; that the Hero can be
Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, according to the kind of

world he finds himself born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly
great man that could not be _all_ sorts of men. The Poet who could merely

sit on a chair, and composestanzas, would never make a stanza worth much.
He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a

Heroic warrior too. I fancy there is in him the Politician, the Thinker,
Legislator, Philosopher;--in one or the other degree, he could have been,

he is all these. So too I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that
great glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears

that were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and
touched all hearts in that way, had his course of life and education led

him thitherward. The grand fundamentalcharacter is that of Great Man;
that the man be great. Napoleon has words in him which are like Austerlitz

Battles. Louis Fourteenth's Marshals are a kind of poetical" target="_blank" title="a.理想化了的">poetical men withal;
the things Turenne says are full of sagacity and geniality, like sayings of

Samuel Johnson. The great heart, the clear deep-seeing eye: there it
lies; no man whatever, in what province soever, can prosper at all without

these. Petrarch and Boccaccio did diplomatic messages, it seems, quite
well: one can easily believe it; they had done things a little harder than

these! Burns, a gifted song-writer, might have made a still better
Mirabeau. Shakspeare,--one knows not what _he_ could not have made, in the

supreme degree.
True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not make all great

men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. Varieties of
aptitude doubtless; but infinitely more of circumstance; and far oftenest

it is the _latter_ only that are looked to. But it is as with common men
in the learning of trades. You take any man, as yet a vague capability of

a man, who could be any kind of craftsman; and make him into a smith, a
carpenter, a mason: he is then and thenceforth that and nothing else. And

if, as Addison complains, you sometimes see a street-porter, staggering
under his load on spindle-shanks, and near at hand a tailor with the frame

of a Samson handling a bit of cloth and small Whitechapel needle,--it
cannot be considered that aptitude of Nature alone has been consulted here

either!--The Great Man also, to what shall he be bound apprentice? Given
your Hero, is he to become Conqueror, King, Philosopher, Poet? It is an

inexplicably complex controversial-calculation between the world and him!
He will read the world and its laws; the world with its laws will be there

to be read. What the world, on _this_ matter, shall permit and bid is, as
we said, the most important fact about the world.--

Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them. In
some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; _Vates_ means both

Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well
understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they are

still the same; in this most important respect especially, That they have
penetrated both of them into the sacredmystery of the Universe; what

Goethe calls "the open secret." "Which is the great secret?" asks
one.--"The _open_ secret,"--open to all, seen by almost none! That divine

mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, "the Divine Idea of the
World, that which lies at the bottom of Appearance," as Fichte styles it;

of which all Appearance, from the starry sky to the grass of the field, but
especially the Appearance of Man and his work, is but the _vesture_, the

embodiment that renders it visible. This divinemystery _is_ in all times
and in all places; veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly

overlooked; and the Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect,
as the realized Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace

matter,--as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some
upholsterer had put together! It could do no good, at present, to _speak_

much about this; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do not know it,
live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful pity;--a failure

to live at all, if we live otherwise!
But now, I say, whoever may forget this divinemystery, the _Vates_,

whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hither to
make it more impressively known to us. That always is his message; he is

to reveal that to us,--that sacredmystery which he more than others lives
ever present with. While others forget it, he knows it;--I might say, he

has been driven to know it; without consent asked of him, he finds himself
living in it, bound to live in it. Once more, here is no Hearsay, but a

direct Insight and Belief; this man too could not help being a sincere man!
Whosoever may live in the shows of things, it is for him a necessity of

nature to live in the very fact of things. A man once more, in earnest
with the Universe, though all others were but toying with it. He is a

_Vates_, first of all, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and
Prophet, participators in the "open secret," are one.

With respect to their distinction again: The _Vates_ Prophet, we might
say, has seized that sacredmystery rather on the moral side, as Good and

Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the _Vates_ Poet on what the Germans call the
aesthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we may call a revealer

of what we are to do, the other of what we are to love. But indeed these
two provinces run into one another, and cannot be disjoined. The Prophet

too has his eye on what we are to love: how else shall he know what it is
we are to do? The highest Voice ever heard on this earth said withal,

"Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin:
yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." A glance,