Ch. 6 - Hero as King - Page 2

Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale
of perfection the meagre product of reality" in this poor world of ours.
We will esteem him no wise man; we will esteem him a sickly, discontented,
foolish man. And yet, on the other hand, it is never to be forgotten that
Ideals do exist; that if they be not approximated to at all, the whole
matter goes to wreck! Infallibly. No bricklayer builds a wall _perfectly_
perpendicular, mathematically this is not possible; a certain degree of
perpendicularity suffices him; and he, like a good bricklayer, who must
have done with his job, leaves it so. And yet if he sway _too much_ from
the perpendicular; above all, if he throw plummet and level quite away from
him, and pile brick on brick heedless, just as it comes to hand--! Such
bricklayer, I think, is in a bad way. He has forgotten himself: but the
Law of Gravitation does not forget to act on him; he and his wall rush down
into confused welter of ruin!--

This is the history of all rebellions, French Revolutions, social
explosions in ancient or modern times. You have put the too _Un_able Man
at the head of affairs! The too ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man. You have
forgotten that there is any rule, or natural necessity whatever, of putting
the Able Man there. Brick must lie on brick as it may and can. Unable
Simulacrum of Ability, _quack_, in a word, must adjust himself with quack,
in all manner of administration of human things;--which accordingly lie
unadministered, fermenting into unmeasured masses of failure, of indigent
misery: in the outward, and in the inward or spiritual, miserable millions
stretch out the hand for their due supply, and it is not there. The "law
of gravitation" acts; Nature's laws do none of them forget to act. The
miserable millions burst forth into Sansculottism, or some other sort of
madness: bricks and bricklayer lie as a fatal chaos!--

Much sorry stuff, written some hundred years ago or more, about the "Divine
right of Kings," moulders unread now in the Public Libraries of this
country. Far be it from us to disturb the calm process by which it is
disappearing harmlessly from the earth, in those repositories! At the same
time, not to let the immense rubbish go without leaving us, as it ought,
some soul of it behind--I will say that it did mean something; something
true, which it is important for us and all men to keep in mind. To assert
that in whatever man you chose to lay hold of (by this or the other plan of
clutching at him); and claps a round piece of metal on the head of, and
called King,--there straightway came to reside a divine virtue, so that
_he_ became a kind of god, and a Divinity inspired him with faculty and
right to rule over you to all lengths: