Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History Part 19

But now if all things whatsoever that we look upon are emblems to us of the Highest G.o.d, I add that more so than any of them is man such an emblem. You have heard of St. Chrysostom's celebrated saying in reference to the Shekinah, or Ark of Testimony, visible Revelation of G.o.d, among the Hebrews: "The true Shekinah is Man!" Yes, it is even so: this is no vain phrase; it is veritably so. The essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself "I,"--ah, what words have we for such things?--is a breath of Heaven; the Highest Being reveals himself in _man_. This body, these faculties, this life of ours, is it not all as a vesture for that Unnamed? 'There is but one Temple in the Universe,' says the devout Novalis, 'and that is the Body of Man.

Nothing is holier than that high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven when we lay our hand on a human body!' This sounds much like a mere flourish of rhetoric; but it is not so. If well meditated, it will turn out to be a scientific fact; the expression, in such words as can be had, of the actual truth of the thing. _We_ are the miracle of miracles,--the great inscrutable mystery of G.o.d. We cannot understand it, we know not how to speak of it; but we may feel and know, if we like, that it is verily so.

Well; these truths were once more readily felt than now. The young generations of the world, who had in them the freshness of young children, and yet the depth of earnest men, who did not think that they had finished-off all things in Heaven and Earth by merely giving them scientific names, but had to gaze direct at them there, with awe and wonder: they felt better what of divinity is in man and Nature;--they, without being mad, could _wors.h.i.+p_ Nature, and man more than anything else in Nature. Wors.h.i.+p, that is, as I said above, admire without limit: this, in the full use of their faculties, with all sincerity of heart, they could do. I consider Hero-wors.h.i.+p to be the grand modifying element in that ancient system of thought. What I called the perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may say, out of many roots: every admiration, adoration of a star or natural object, was a root or fibre of a root; but Hero-wors.h.i.+p is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown.

And now if wors.h.i.+p even of a star had some meaning in it, how much more might that of a Hero! Wors.h.i.+p of a Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No n.o.bler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life. Religion I find stand upon it; not Paganism only, but far higher and truer religions,--all religion hitherto known.

Hero-wors.h.i.+p, heartfelt prostrate admiration, submission, burning, boundless, for a n.o.blest G.o.dlike Form of Man,--is not that the germ of Christianity itself? The greatest of all Heroes is One--whom we do not name here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find it the ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout man's whole history on earth.

Or coming into lower, less _un_speakable provinces, is not all Loyalty akin to religious Faith also? Faith is loyalty to some inspired Teacher, some spiritual Hero. And what therefore is loyalty proper, the life-breath of all society, but an effluence of Hero-wors.h.i.+p, submissive admiration for the truly great? Society is founded on Hero-wors.h.i.+p. All dignities of rank, on which human a.s.sociation rests, are what we may call a _Hero_archy (Government of Heroes),--or a Hierarchy, for it is 'sacred' enough withal! The Duke means _Dux_, Leader; King is _Kon-ning_, _Kan-ning_, Man that _knows_ or _cans_.

Society everywhere is some representation, not _in_supportably inaccurate, of a graduated Wors.h.i.+p of Heroes;--reverence and obedience done to men really great and wise. Not _in_supportably inaccurate, I say! They are all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries, all representing gold;--and several of them, alas, always are _forged_ notes. We can do with some forged false notes; with a good many even; but not with all, or the most of them forged! No: there have to come revolutions then; cries of Democracy, Liberty, and Equality, and I know not what:--the notes being all false, and no gold to be had for _them_, people take to crying in their despair that there is no gold, that there never was any!--'Gold,' Hero-wors.h.i.+p, _is_ nevertheless, as it was always and everywhere, and cannot cease till man himself ceases.

I am well aware that in these days Hero-wors.h.i.+p, the thing I call Hero-wors.h.i.+p, professes to have gone out, and finally ceased. This, for reasons which it will be worth while some time to inquire into, is an age that as it were denies the existence of great men; denies the desirableness of great men. Show our critics a great man, a Luther for example, they begin to what they call 'account' for him; not to wors.h.i.+p him, but take the dimensions of him,--and bring him out to be a little kind of man! He was the 'creature of the Time,' they say; the Time called him forth, the Time did everything, he nothing--but what we the little critic could have done too! This seems to me but melancholy work. The Time call forth? Alas, we have known Times _call_ loudly enough for their great man; but not find him when they called!

He was not there; Providence had not sent him; the Time, _calling_ its loudest, had to go down to confusion and wreck because he would not come when called.

For if we will think of it, no Time need have gone to ruin, could it have _found_ a man great enough, a man wise and good enough: wisdom to discern truly what the Time wanted, valour to lead it on the right road thither; these are the salvation of any Time. But I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarra.s.sed circ.u.mstances, impotently crumbling-down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;--all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of G.o.d's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own. The dry mouldering sticks are thought to have called him forth. They did want him greatly; but as to calling him forth--!--Those are critics of small vision, I think, who cry: "See, is it not the sticks that made the fire?" No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. There is no sadder symptom of a generation than such general blindness to the spiritual lightning, with faith only in the heap of barren dead fuel. It is the last consummation of unbelief. In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable saviour of his epoch;--the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt. The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men.

Such small critics do what they can to promote unbelief and universal spiritual paralysis; but happily they cannot always completely succeed. In all times it is possible for a man to arise great enough to feel that they and their doctrines are chimeras and cobwebs. And what is notable, in no time whatever can they entirely eradicate out of living men's hearts a certain altogether peculiar reverence for Great Men; genuine admiration, loyalty, adoration, however dim and perverted it may be. Hero-wors.h.i.+p endures for ever while man endures.

Boswell venerates his Johnson, right truly even in the Eighteenth century. The unbelieving French believe in their Voltaire; and burst-out round him into very curious Hero-wors.h.i.+p, in that last act of his life when they 'stifle him under roses.' It has always seemed to me extremely curious this of Voltaire. Truly, if Christianity be the highest instance of Hero-wors.h.i.+p, then we may find here in Voltaireism one of the lowest! He whose life was that of a kind of Antichrist, does again on this side exhibit a curious contrast. No people ever were so little p.r.o.ne to admire at all as those French of Voltaire. _Persiflage_ was the character of their whole mind; adoration had nowhere a place in it. Yet see! The old man of Ferney comes up to Paris; an old, tottering, infirm man of eighty-four years.

They feel that he too is a kind of Hero; that he has spent his life in opposing error and injustice, delivering Calases, unmasking hypocrites in high places;--in short that _he_ too, though in a strange way, has fought like a valiant man. They feel withal that, if _persiflage_ be the great thing, there never was such a _persifleur_. He is the realised ideal of every one of them; the thing they are all wanting to be; of all Frenchmen the most French. _He_ is properly their G.o.d,--such G.o.d as they are fit for. Accordingly all persons, from the Queen Antoinette to the Douanier at the Porte St. Denis, do they not wors.h.i.+p him? People of quality disguise themselves as tavern-waiters.

The Maitre de Poste, with a broad oath, orders his Postillion, "_Va bon train_; thou art driving M. de Voltaire." At Paris his carriage is 'the nucleus of a comet, whose train fills whole streets.' The ladies pluck a hair or two from his fur, to keep it as a sacred relic. There was nothing highest, beautifulest, n.o.blest in all France, that did not feel this man to be higher, beautifuler, n.o.bler.

Yes, from Norse Odin to English Samuel Johnson, from the divine Founder of Christianity to the withered Pontiff of Encyclopedism, in all times and places, the Hero has been wors.h.i.+pped. It will ever be so. We all love great men; love, venerate, and bow down submissive before great men: nay can we honestly bow down to anything else? Ah, does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him? No n.o.bler or more blessed feeling dwells in man's heart. And to me it is very cheering to consider that no sceptical logic, or general triviality, insincerity and aridity of any Time and its influences can destroy this n.o.ble inborn loyalty and wors.h.i.+p that is in man. In times of unbelief, which soon have to become times of revolution, much down-rus.h.i.+ng, sorrowful decay and ruin is visible to everybody. For myself in these days, I seem to see in this indestructibility of Hero-wors.h.i.+p the everlasting adamant lower than which the confused wreck of revolutionary things cannot fall. The confused wreck of things crumbling and even cras.h.i.+ng and tumbling all round us in these revolutionary ages, will get down so far; _no_ farther. It is an eternal corner-stone, from which they can begin to build themselves up again. That man, in some sense or other, wors.h.i.+ps Heroes; that we all of us reverence and must ever reverence Great Men: this is, to me, the living rock amid all rus.h.i.+ngs-down whatsoever;--the one fixed point in modern revolutionary history, otherwise as if bottomless and sh.o.r.eless.

So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations.

Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of G.o.d; the Hero is still wors.h.i.+pable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth. I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in these regions of Europe till the eleventh century: eight-hundred years ago the Norwegians were still wors.h.i.+ppers of Odin. It is interesting also as the creed of our fathers; the men whose blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways. Strange: they did believe that, while we believe so differently. Let us look a little at this poor Norse creed, for many reasons. We have tolerable means to do it; for there is another point of interest in these Scandinavian mythologies: that they have been preserved so well.

In that strange island Iceland,--burst-up, the geologists say, by fire from the bottom of the sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava; swallowed many months of every year in black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in summer-time; towering up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean; with its snow jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid volcanic chasms, like the waste chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;--where of all places we least looked for Literature or written memorials, the record of these things was written down. On the seaboard of this wild land is a rim of gra.s.sy country, where cattle can subsist, and men by means of them and of what the sea yields; and it seems they were poetic men these, men who had deep thoughts in them, and uttered musically their thoughts. Much would be lost, had Iceland not been burst-up from the sea, not been discovered by the Northmen! The old Norse Poets were many of them natives of Iceland.

Saemund, one of the early Christian Priests there, who perhaps had a lingering fondness for Paganism, collected certain of their old Pagan songs, just about becoming obsolete then,--Poems or Chants of a mythic, prophetic, mostly all of a religious character: that is what Norse critics call the _Elder_ or Poetic _Edda_. _Edda_, a word of uncertain etymology, is thought to signify _Ancestress_. Snorro Sturleson, an Iceland gentleman, an extremely notable personage, educated by this Saemund's grandson, took in hand next, near a century afterwards, to put together, among several other books he wrote, a kind of Prose Synopsis of the whole Mythology; elucidated by new fragments of traditionary verse. A work constructed really with great ingenuity, native talent, what one might call unconscious art; altogether a perspicuous clear work, pleasant reading still: this is the _Younger_ or Prose _Edda_. By these and the numerous other _Sagas_, mostly Icelandic, with the commentaries, Icelandic or not, which go on zealously in the North to this day, it is possible to gain some direct insight even yet; and see that old Norse system of Belief, as it were, face to face. Let us forget that it is erroneous Religion; let us look at it as old Thought, and try if we cannot sympathise with it somewhat.

The primary characteristic of this old Northland Mythology I find to be Impersonation of the visible workings of Nature. Earnest simple recognition of the workings of Physical Nature, as a thing wholly miraculous, stupendous and divine. What we now lecture of as Science, they wondered at, and fell down in awe before, as Religion. The dark hostile powers of Nature they figure to themselves as '_Jotuns_,'

Giants, huge s.h.a.ggy beings of a demonic character. Frost, Fire, Sea-tempest; these are Jotuns. The friendly powers again, as Summer-heat, the Sun, are G.o.ds. The empire of this Universe is divided between these two; they dwell apart, in perennial internecine feud.

The G.o.ds dwell above in Asgard, the Garden of the Asen, or Divinities; Jotunheim, a distant dark chaotic land, is the home of the Jotuns.

Curious all this; and not idle or inane, if we will look at the foundation of it! The power of _Fire_, or _Flame_, for instance, which we designate by some trivial chemical name, thereby hiding from ourselves the essential character of wonder that dwells in it as in all things, is with these old Northmen, Loke, a most swift subtle _Demon_, of the brood of the Jotuns. The savages of the Ladrones Islands too (say some Spanish voyagers) thought Fire, which they never had seen before, was a devil or G.o.d, that bit you sharply when you touched it, and that lived upon dry wood. From us too no Chemistry, if it had not Stupidity to help it, would hide that Flame is a wonder.

What _is_ Flame?--_Frost_ the old Norse Seer discerns to be a monstrous h.o.a.ry Jotun, the Giant _Thrym_, _Hrym_: or _Rime_, the old word now nearly obsolete here, but still used in Scotland to signify h.o.a.r-frost. _Rime_ was not then as now a dead chemical thing, but a living Jotun or Devil; the monstrous Jotun _Rime_ drove home his Horses at night, sat 'combing their manes,'--which Horses were _Hail-Clouds_, or fleet _Frost-Winds_. His Cows--No, not his, but a kinsman's, the Giant Hymir's Cows are _Icebergs_: this Hymir 'looks at the rocks' with his devil-eye, and they _split_ in the glance of it.

Thunder was not then mere Electricity, vitreous or resinous; it was the G.o.d Donner (Thunder) or Thor,--G.o.d also of beneficent Summer-heat.

The thunder was his wrath; the gathering of the black clouds is the drawing down of Thor's angry brows; the fire-bolt bursting out of Heaven is the all-rending Hammer flung from the hand of Thor: he urges his loud chariot over the mountain-tops,--that is the peal: wrathful he 'blows in his red beard,'--that is the rustling storm-blast before the thunder begin. Balder again, the White G.o.d, the beautiful, the just and benignant (whom the early Christian Missionaries found to resemble Christ), is the Sun--beautifulest of visible things; wondrous too, and divine still, after all our Astronomies and Almanacs! But perhaps the notablest G.o.d we hear tell-of is one of whom Grimm the German Etymologist finds trace: the G.o.d _Wunsch_, or Wish. The G.o.d _Wish_; who could give us all that we _wished_! Is not this the sincerest yet rudest voice of the spirit of man? The _rudest_ ideal that man ever formed; which still shows itself in the latest forms of our spiritual culture. Higher considerations have to teach us that the G.o.d _Wish_ is not the true G.o.d.

Of the other G.o.ds or Jotuns I will mention only for etymology's sake, that Sea-tempest is the Jotun _Aegir_, a very dangerous Jotun;--and now to this day, on our river Trent, as I learn, the Nottingham bargemen, when the River is in a certain flooded state (a kind of back-water, or eddying swirl it has, very dangerous to them), call it _Eager_; they cry out, "Have a care, there is the _Eager_ coming!"

Curious; that word surviving, like the peak of a submerged world! The _oldest_ Nottingham bargemen had believed in the G.o.d Aegir. Indeed, our English blood too in good part is Danish, Norse; or rather, at bottom, Danish and Norse and Saxon have no distinction, except a superficial one,--as of Heathen and Christian, or the like. But all over our Island we are mingled largely with Danes proper,--from the incessant invasions there were: and this, of course, in a greater proportion along the east coast; and greatest of all, as I find, in the North Country. From the Humber upwards, all over Scotland, the Speech of the common people is still in a singular degree Icelandic; its Germanism has still a peculiar Norse tinge. They too are 'Normans,' Northmen,--if that be any great beauty!--

Of the chief G.o.d, Odin, we shall speak by and by. Mark at present so much; what the essence of Scandinavian and indeed of all Paganism is: a recognition of the forces of Nature as G.o.dlike, stupendous, personal Agencies,--as G.o.ds and Demons. Not inconceivable to us. It is the infant Thought of man opening itself, with awe and wonder, on this ever-stupendous Universe. To me there is in the Norse System something very genuine, very great and manlike. A broad simplicity, rusticity, so very different from the light gracefulness of the old Greek Paganism, distinguishes this Scandinavian System. It is Thought; the genuine Thought of deep, rude, earnest minds, fairly opened to the things about them; a face-to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of the things,--the first characteristic of all good Thought in all times.

Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as in the Greek Paganism; a certain homely truthfulness and rustic strength, a great rude sincerity, discloses itself here. It is strange, after our beautiful Apollo statues and clear smiling mythuses, to come down upon the Norse G.o.ds 'brewing ale' to hold their feast with Aegir, the Sea-Jotun; sending out Thor to get the caldron for them in the Jotun country; Thor, after many adventures, clapping the Pot on his head, like a huge hat, and walking off with it,--quite lost in it, the ears of the Pot reaching down to his heels! A kind of vacant hugeness, large awkward gianthood, characterises that Norse System; enormous force, as yet altogether untutored, stalking helpless with large uncertain strides.

Consider only their primary mythus of the Creation. The G.o.ds, having got the Giant Ymer slain, a Giant made by 'warm wind,' and much confused work, out of the conflict of Frost and Fire,--determined on constructing a world with him. His blood made the sea; his flesh was the Land, the Rocks his bones; of his eyebrows they formed Asgard their G.o.ds'-dwelling; his skull was the great blue vault of Immensity, and the brains of it became the Clouds. What a Hyper-Brobdignagian business! Untamed Thought, great, giantlike, enormous;--to be tamed in due time into the compact greatness, not giant-like, but G.o.dlike and stronger than gianthood, of the Shakspeares, the Goethes!--Spiritually as well as bodily these men are our progenitors.

I like, too, that representation they have of the Tree Igdrasil. All Life is figured by them as a Tree. Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of Existence, has its roots deep-down in the kingdoms of Hela or Death; its trunk reaches up heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe: it is the Tree of Existence. At the foot of it, in the Death-kingdom, sit three _Nornas_, Fates,--the Past, Present, Future; watering its roots from the Sacred Well. Its 'boughs,' with their buddings and disleafings,--events, things suffered, things done, catastrophes,--stretch through all lands and times. Is not every leaf of it a biography, every fibre there an act or word? Its boughs are Histories of Nations. The rustle of it is the noise of Human Existence, onwards from of old. It grows there, the breath of Human Pa.s.sion rustling through it;--or stormtost, the stormwind howling through it like the voice of all the G.o.ds. It is Igdrasil, the Tree of Existence. It is the past, the present, and the future; what was done, what is doing, what will be done; 'the infinite conjugation of the verb _To do_.' Considering how human things circulate, each inextricably in communion with all,--how the word I speak to you to-day is borrowed, not from Ulfila the Moesogoth only, but from all men since the first man began to speak,--I find no similitude so true as this of a Tree. Beautiful; altogether beautiful and great. The '_Machine_ of the Universe,'--alas, do but think of that in contrast!

Well, it is strange enough this old Norse view of Nature; different enough from what we believe of Nature. Whence it specially came, one would not like to be compelled to say very minutely! One thing we may say: It came from the thoughts of Norse men;--from the thought, above all, of the _first_ Norse man who had an original power of thinking.

The First Norse 'man of genius,' as we should call him! Innumerable men had pa.s.sed by, across this Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals may feel; or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men only feel;--till the great Thinker came, the _original_ man, the Seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capability of all into Thought. It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even so! Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night; _is_ it not, indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from death into life? We still honour such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth: but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker of miraculous unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a G.o.d!--Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation,--till its full stature is reached, and _such_ System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse G.o.d, we fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero, of worth _im_measurable; admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate Thinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless grat.i.tude, would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given a.s.surance to them of their own destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do here, what to look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he first has made Life alive!--We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men. His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there. In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world!--

One other thing we must not forget; it will explain, a little, the confusion of these Norse Eddas. They are not one coherent System of Thought; but properly the _summation_ of several successive systems.

All this of the old Norse Belief which is flung-out for us, in one level of distance in the Edda, like a picture painted on the same canvas, does not at all stand so in the reality. It stands rather at all manner of distances and depths, of successive generations since the Belief first began. All Scandinavian thinkers, since the first of them, contributed to the Scandinavian System of Thought; in ever-new elaboration and addition, it is the combined work of them all. What history it had, how it changed from shape to shape, by one thinker's contribution after another, till it got to the full final shape we see it under in the _Edda_, no man will now ever know: _its_ Councils of Trebisond, Councils of Trent, Athanasiuses, Dantes, Luthers, are sunk without echo in the dark night! Only that it had such a history we can all know. Wheresoever a thinker appeared, there in the thing he thought-of was a contribution, accession, a change or revolution made.

Alas, the grandest 'revolution' of all, the one made by the man Odin himself, is not this too sunk for us like the rest! Of Odin what history? Strange rather to reflect that he _had_ a history! That this Odin, in his wild Norse vesture, with his wild beard and eyes, his rude Norse speech and ways, was a man like us; with our sorrows, joys, with our limbs, features;--intrinsically all one as we: and did such a work! But the work, much of it, has perished; the worker, all to the name. "_Wednes_day," men will say to-morrow; Odin's day! Of Odin there exists no history; no doc.u.ment of it; no guess about it worth repeating.

Snorro indeed, in the quietest manner, almost in a brief business style, writes down, in his _Heimskringla_, how Odin was a heroic Prince, in the Black-Sea region, with Twelve Peers, and a great people straitened for room. How he led these _Asen_ (Asiatics) of his out of Asia; settled them in the North parts of Europe, by warlike conquest; invented Letters, Poetry and so forth,--and came by and by to be wors.h.i.+pped as Chief G.o.d by these Scandinavians, his Twelve Peers made into Twelve Sons of his own, G.o.ds like himself: Snorro has no doubt of this. Saxo Grammaticus, a very curious Northman of that same century, is still more unhesitating; scruples not to find out a historical fact in every individual mythus, and writes it down as a terrestrial event in Denmark or elsewhere. Torfaeus, learned and cautious, some centuries later, a.s.signs by calculation a _date_ for it: Odin, he says, came into Europe about the Year 70 before Christ. Of all which, as grounded on mere uncertainties, found to be untenable now, I need say nothing.

Far, very far beyond the Year 70! Odin's date, adventures, whole terrestrial history, figure and environment are sunk from us forever into unknown thousands of years.

Nay Grimm, the German Antiquary, goes so far as to deny that any man Odin ever existed. He proves it by etymology. The word _Wuotan_, which is the original form of _Odin_, a word spread, as name of their chief Divinity, over all the Teutonic Nations everywhere; this word, which connects itself, according to Grimm, with the Latin _vadere_, with the English _wade_ and suchlike,--means primarily _Movement_, Source of Movement, Power; and is the fit name of the highest G.o.d, not of any man. The word signifies Divinity, he says, among the old Saxon, German and all Teutonic Nations; the adjectives formed from it all signify _divine_, _supreme_, or something pertaining to the chief G.o.d. Like enough! We must bow to Grimm in matters etymological. Let us consider it fixed that _Wuotan_ means _Wading_, force of _Movement_. And now still, what hinders it from being the name of a Heroic Man and _Mover_, as well as of a G.o.d? As for the adjectives, and words formed from it,--did not the Spaniards in their universal admiration for Lope, get into the habit of saying 'a Lope flower,' a 'Lope _dama_,'

if the flower or woman were of surpa.s.sing beauty? Had this lasted, _Lope_ would have grown, in Spain, to be an adjective signifying _G.o.dlike_ also. Indeed, Adam Smith, in his _Essay on Language_, surmises that all adjectives whatsoever were formed precisely in that way: some very green thing chiefly notable for its greenness, got the appellative name _Green_, and then the next thing remarkable for that quality, a tree for instance, was named the _green_ tree,--as we still say 'the _steam coach_,' 'four-horse coach,' or the like. All primary adjectives, according to Smith, were formed in this way; were at first substantives and things. We cannot annihilate a man for etymologies like that! Surely there was a First Teacher and Captain; surely there must have been an Odin, palpable to the sense at one time; no adjective, but a real Hero of flesh and blood! The voice of all tradition, history or echo of history, agrees with all that thought will teach one about it, to a.s.sure us of this.

How the man Odin came to be considered a _G.o.d_, the chief G.o.d?--that surely is a question which n.o.body would wish to dogmatise upon. I have said, his people knew no _limits_ to their admiration of him; they had as yet no scale to measure admiration by. Fancy your own generous heart's-love of some greatest man expanding till it _transcended_ all bounds, till it filled and overflowed the whole field of your thought!

Or what if this man Odin,--since a great deep soul, with the afflatus and mysterious tide of vision and impulse rus.h.i.+ng on him he knows not whence, is ever an enigma, a kind of terror and wonder to himself,--should have felt that perhaps _he_ was divine; that _he_ was some effluence of the 'Wuotan,' '_Movement_,' Supreme Power and Divinity, of whom to his rapt vision all Nature was the awful Flame-image; that some effluence of _Wuotan_ dwelt here in him! He was not necessarily false; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest he knew. A great soul, any sincere soul, knows not _what_ he is,--alternates between the highest height and the lowest depth; can, of all things, the least measure--Himself! What others take him for, and what he guesses that he may be; these two items strangely act on one another, help to determine one another. With all men reverently admiring him; with his own wild soul full of n.o.ble ardours and affections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious new light; a divine Universe bursting all into G.o.dlike beauty round him, and no man to whom the like ever had befallen, what could he think himself to be?

"Wuotan?" All men answered, "Wuotan!"--

And then consider what mere Time will do in such cases; how if a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead. What an enormous _camera-obscura_ magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the human Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, wors.h.i.+p and all that lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage it. And in the darkness, in the entire ignorance; without date or doc.u.ment, no book, no Arundel-marble; only here and there some dumb monumental cairn.

Why, in thirty or forty years, were there no books, any great man would grow _mythic_, the contemporaries who had once seen him, being all dead. And in three-hundred years, and three-thousand years--!--To attempt _theorising_ on such matters would profit little: they are matters which refuse to be _theoremed_ and diagramed; which Logic ought to know that she _cannot_ speak of. Enough for us to discern, far in the uttermost distance, some gleam as of a small real light s.h.i.+ning in the centre of that enormous camera-obscura image; to discern that the centre of it all was not a madness and nothing, but a sanity and something.

This light, kindled in the great dark vortex of the Norse mind, dark but living, waiting only for light; this is to me the centre of the whole. How such light will then s.h.i.+ne out, and with wondrous thousandfold expansion spread itself, in forms and colours, depends not on _it_, so much as on the National Mind recipient of it. The colours and forms of your light will be those of the _cut-gla.s.s_ it has to s.h.i.+ne through.--Curious to think how, for every man, any the truest fact is modelled by the nature of the man! I said, The earnest man, speaking to his brother men, must always have stated what seemed to him a _fact_, a real Appearance of Nature. But the way in which such Appearance or fact shaped itself,--what sort of _fact_ it became for him,--was and is modified by his own laws of thinking; deep, subtle, but universal, ever-operating laws. The world of Nature, for every man, is the Phantasy of Himself; this world is the multiplex 'Image of his own Dream.' Who knows to what unnameable subtleties of spiritual law all these Pagan Fables owe their shape! The number _Twelve_, divisiblest of all, which could be halved, quartered, parted into three, into six, the most remarkable number,--this was enough to determine the _Signs of the Zodiac_, the number of Odin's _Sons_, and innumerable other Twelves. Any vague rumour of number had a tendency to settle itself into Twelve. So with regard to every other matter.

And quite unconsciously too,--with no notion of building-up 'Allegories'! But the fresh clear glance of those First Ages would be prompt in discerning the secret relations of things, and wholly open to obey these. Schiller finds in the _Cestus of Venus_ an everlasting aesthetic truth as to the nature of all Beauty; curious:--but he is careful not to insinuate that the old Greek Mythists had any notion of lecturing about the 'Philosophy of Criticism'!----On the whole we must leave those boundless regions. Cannot we conceive that Odin was a reality? Error indeed, error enough: but sheer falsehood, idle fables, allegory aforethought,--we will not believe that our Fathers believed in these.

Odin's _Runes_ are a significant feature of him. Runes, and the miracles of 'magic' he worked by them, make a great feature in tradition. Runes are the Scandinavian Alphabet; suppose Odin to have been the inventor of Letters, as well as 'magic,' among that people!

It is the greatest invention man has ever made, this of marking down the unseen thought that is in him by written characters. It is a kind of second speech, almost as miraculous as the first. You remember the astonishment and incredulity of Atahualpa the Peruvian King; how he made the Spanish Soldier who was guarding him scratch _Dios_ on his thumb-nail, that he might try the next soldier with it, to ascertain whether such a miracle was possible. If Odin brought Letters among his people, he might work magic enough!

Writing by Runes has some air of being original among the Nors.e.m.e.n: not a Phoenician Alphabet, but a native Scandinavian one. Snorro tells us farther that Odin invented Poetry; the music of human speech, as well as that miraculous runic marking of it. Transport yourselves into the early childhood of nations; the first beautiful morning-light of our Europe, when all yet lay in fresh young radiance as of a great sunrise, and our Europe was first beginning to think, to be! Wonder, hope; infinite radiance of hope and wonder, as of a young child's thoughts, in the hearts of these strong men! Strong sons of Nature; and here was not only a wild Captain and Fighter; discerning with his wild flas.h.i.+ng eyes what to do, with his wild lion-heart daring and doing it; but a Poet too, all that we mean by a Poet, Prophet, great devout Thinker and Inventor,--as the truly Great Man ever is. A Hero is a Hero at all points; in the soul and thought of him first of all.

This Odin, in his rude semi-articulate way, had a word to speak. A great heart laid open to take in this great Universe, and man's Life here, and utter a great word about it. A Hero, as I say, in his own rude manner; a wise, gifted, n.o.ble-hearted man. And now, if we still admire such a man beyond all others, what must these wild Norse souls, first awakened into thinking, have made of him! To them, as yet without names for it, he was n.o.ble and n.o.blest; Hero, Prophet, G.o.d; _Wuotan_, the greatest of all. Thought is Thought, however it speak or spell itself. Intrinsically, I conjecture, this Odin must have been of the same sort of stuff as the greatest kind of men. A great thought in the wild deep heart of him! The rough words he articulated, are they not the rudimental roots of those English words we still use? He worked so, in that obscure element. But he was as a _light_ kindled in it; a light of Intellect, rude n.o.bleness of heart, the only kind of lights we have yet; a Hero, as I say: and he had to s.h.i.+ne there, and make his obscure element a little lighter,--as is still the task of us all.

We will fancy him to be the Type Norseman; the finest Teuton whom that race had yet produced. The rude Norse heart burst-up into _boundless_ admiration round him; into adoration. He is as a root of so many great things; the fruit of him is found growing, from deep thousands of years, over the whole field of Teutonic Life. Our own Wednesday, as I said, is it not still Odin's Day? Wednesbury, Wansborough, Wanstead, Wandsworth: Odin grew into England too, these are still leaves from that root! He was the Chief G.o.d to all the Teutonic Peoples; their Pattern Norseman;--in such way did _they_ admire their Pattern Norseman; that was the fortune he had in the world.

Thus if the man Odin himself have vanished utterly, there is this huge Shadow of him which still projects itself over the whole History of his People. For this Odin once admitted to be G.o.d, we can understand well that the whole Scandinavian Scheme of Nature, or dim No-scheme, whatever it might before have been, would now begin to develop itself altogether differently, and grow thenceforth in a new manner. What this Odin saw into, and taught with his runes and his rhymes, the whole Teutonic People laid to heart and carried forward. His way of thought became their way of thought:--such, under new conditions, is the history of every great thinker still. In gigantic confused lineaments, like some enormous camera-obscura shadow thrown upwards from the dead deeps of the Past, and covering the whole Northern Heaven, is not that Scandinavian Mythology in some sort the Portraiture of this man Odin? The gigantic image of _his_ natural face, legible or not legible there, expanded and confused in that manner! Ah, Thought, I say, is always Thought. No great man lives in vain. The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.

To me there is something very touching in this primeval figure of Heroism; in such artless, helpless, but hearty entire reception of a Hero by his fellow-men. Never so helpless in shape, it is the n.o.blest of feelings, and a feeling in some shape or other perennial as man himself. If I could show in any measure, what I feel deeply for a long time now, That it is the vital element of manhood, the soul of man's history here in our world,--it would be the chief use of this discoursing at present. We do not now call our great men G.o.ds, nor admire _without_ limit; ah, no, _with_ limit enough! But if we have no great men, or do not admire at all,--that were a still worse case.

This poor Scandinavian Hero-wors.h.i.+p, that whole Norse way of looking at the Universe, and adjusting oneself there, has an indestructible merit for us. A rude childlike way of recognising the divineness of Nature, the divineness of Man; most rude, yet heartfelt, robust, giantlike; betokening what a giant of a man this child would grow to!--It was a truth, and is none. Is it not as the half-dumb stifled voice of the long-buried generations of our own Fathers, calling out of the depths of ages to us, in whose veins their blood still runs: "This then, this is what _we_ made of the world: this is all the image and notion we could form to ourselves of this great mystery of a Life and Universe. Despise it not. You are raised high above it, to large free scope of vision; but you too are not yet at the top. No, your notion too, so much enlarged, is but a partial, imperfect one: that matter is a thing no man will ever, in time or out of time, comprehend; after thousands of years of ever-new expansion, man will find himself but struggling to comprehend again a part of it: the thing is larger than man, not to be comprehended by him; an Infinite thing!"

The essence of the Scandinavian, as indeed of all Pagan Mythologies, we found to be recognition of the divineness of Nature; sincere communion of man with the mysterious invisible Powers visibly seen at work in the world round him. This, I should say, is more sincerely done in the Scandinavian than in any Mythology I know. Sincerity is the great characteristic of it. Superior sincerity (far superior) consoles us for the total want of old Grecian grace. Sincerity, I think, is better than grace. I feel that these old Northmen were looking into Nature with open eye and soul: most earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a great-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, unfearing way. A right valiant, true old race of men. Such recognition of Nature one finds to be the chief element of Paganism: recognition of Man, and his Moral Duty, though this too is not wanting, comes to be the chief element only in purer forms of religion. Here, indeed, is a great distinction and epoch in Human Beliefs; a great landmark in the religious development of Mankind. Man first puts himself in relation with Nature and her Powers, wonders and wors.h.i.+ps over those; not till a later epoch does he discern that all Power is Moral, that the grand point is the distinction for him of Good and Evil, of _Thou shalt_ and _Thou shalt not_.

With regard to all these fabulous delineations in the _Edda_, I will remark, moreover, as indeed was already hinted, that most probably they must have been of much newer date; most probably, even from the first, were comparatively idle for the old Nors.e.m.e.n, and as it were a kind of Poetic sport. Allegory and Poetic Delineation, as I said above, cannot be religious Faith; the Faith itself must first be there, then Allegory enough will gather round it, as the fit body round its soul. The Norse Faith, I can well suppose, like other Faiths, was most active while it lay mainly in the silent state, and had not yet much to say about itself, still less to sing.