Ch. 5 - Hero as Man of Letters - Page 2

which we ourselves live and work.

There are genuine Men of Letters, and not genuine; as in every kind there
is a genuine and a spurious. If _hero_ be taken to mean genuine, then I
say the Hero as Man of Letters will be found discharging a function for us
which is ever honorable, ever the highest; and was once well known to be
the highest. He is uttering forth, in such way as he has, the inspired
soul of him; all that a man, in any case, can do. I say _inspired_; for
what we call "originality," "sincerity," "genius," the heroic quality we
have no good name for, signifies that. The Hero is he who lives in the
inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists
always, unseen to most, under the Temporary, Trivial: his being is in
that; he declares that abroad, by act or speech as it may be in declaring
himself abroad. His life, as we said before, is a piece of the everlasting
heart of Nature herself: all men's life is,--but the weak many know not
the fact, and are untrue to it, in most times; the strong few are strong,
heroic, perennial, because it cannot be hidden from them. The Man of
Letters, like every Hero, is there to proclaim this in such sort as he can.
Intrinsically it is the same function which the old generations named a man
Prophet, Priest, Divinity for doing; which all manner of Heroes, by speech
or by act, are sent into the world to do.

Fichte the German Philosopher delivered, some forty years ago at Erlangen,
a highly remarkable Course of Lectures on this subject: "_Ueber das Wesen
des Gelehrten_, On the Nature of the Literary Man." Fichte, in conformity
with the Transcendental Philosophy, of which he was a distinguished
teacher, declares first: That all things which we see or work with in this
Earth, especially we ourselves and all persons, are as a kind of vesture or
sensuous Appearance: that under all there lies, as the essence of them,
what he calls the "Divine Idea of the World;" this is the Reality which
"lies at the bottom of all Appearance." To the mass of men no such Divine
Idea is recognizable in the world; they live merely, says Fichte, among the
superficialities, practicalities and shows of the world, not dreaming that
there is anything divine under them. But the Man of Letters is sent hither
specially that he may discern for himself, and make manifest to us, this
same Divine Idea: in every new generation it will manifest itself in a new
dialect; and he is there for the purpose of doing that. Such is Fichte's
phraseology; with which we need not quarrel. It is his way of naming what
I here, by other words, am striving imperfectly to name; what there is at
present no name for: The unspeakable Divine Significance, full