Ch. 3 - Hero as Poet

[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 compose stanzas, 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 fundamental character 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 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