Ch. 3 - Hero as Poet - Page 2

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 sacred mystery 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 divine mystery _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;