Ch. 4 - Hero as Priest - Page 2

not.
These two men we will account our best Priests, inasmuch as they were our
best Reformers. Nay I may ask, Is not every true Reformer, by the nature
of him, a _Priest_ first of all? He appeals to Heaven's invisible justice
against Earth's visible force; knows that it, the invisible, is strong and
alone strong. He is a believer in the divine truth of things; a _seer_,
seeing through the shows of things; a worshipper, in one way or the other,
of the divine truth of things; a Priest, that is. If he be not first a
Priest, he will never be good for much as a Reformer.

Thus then, as we have seen Great Men, in various situations, building up
Religions, heroic Forms of human Existence in this world, Theories of Life
worthy to be sung by a Dante, Practices of Life by a Shakspeare,--we are
now to see the reverse process; which also is necessary, which also may be
carried on in the Heroic manner. Curious how this should be necessary:
yet necessary it is. The mild shining of the Poet's light has to give
place to the fierce lightning of the Reformer: unfortunately the Reformer
too is a personage that cannot fail in History! The Poet indeed, with his
mildness, what is he but the product and ultimate adjustment of Reform, or
Prophecy, with its fierceness? No wild Saint Dominics and Thebaid
Eremites, there had been no melodious Dante; rough Practical Endeavor,
Scandinavian and other, from Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila to
Cranmer, enabled Shakspeare to speak. Nay the finished Poet, I remark
sometimes, is a symptom that his epoch itself has reached perfection and is
finished; that before long there will be a new epoch, new Reformers needed.

Doubtless it were finer, could we go along always in the way of _music_; be
tamed and taught by our Poets, as the rude creatures were by their Orpheus
of old. Or failing this rhythmic _musical_ way, how good were it could we
get so much as into the _equable_ way; I mean, if _peaceable_ Priests,
reforming from day to day, would always suffice us! But it is not so; even
this latter has not yet been realized. Alas, the battling Reformer too is,
from time to time, a needful and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are
never wanting: the very things that were once indispensable furtherances
become obstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us,--a
business often of enormous difficulty. It is notable enough, surely, how a
Theorem or spiritual Representation, so we may call it, which once took in
the whole Universe, and was completely satisfactory in all parts of it to
the highly discursive acute intellect of Dante, one of the greatest in the
world,--had in the course of another century become dubitable to common
intellects; become deniable; and is now, to every one of us, flatly