Health and Education Part 8

"Ah, could you crush that ever craving l.u.s.t For bliss, which kills all bliss, and lose your life, Your barren unit life, to find again A thousand times in those for whom you die-- So were you men and women, and should hold Your rightful rank in G.o.d's great universe, Wherein, in heaven or earth, by will or nature, Naught lives for self. All, all, from crown to base-- The Lamb, before the world's foundation slain-- The angels, ministers to G.o.d's elect-- The sun, who only shines to light the worlds-- The clouds, whose glory is to die in showers-- The fleeting streams, who in their ocean graves Flee the decay of stagnant self-content-- The oak, enn.o.bled by the shipwright's axe-- The soil, which yields its marrow to the flower-- The flower, which feeds a thousand velvet worms Born only to be prey to every bird-- All spend themselves on others: and shall man, Whose two-fold being is the mystic knot Which couples earth with heaven, doubly bound, As being both worm and angel, to that service By which both worms and angels hold their life, Shall he, whose every breath is debt on debt, Refuse, forsooth, to be what G.o.d has made him?

No; let him show himself the creatures' Lord By free-will gift of that self-sacrifice Which they, perforce, by Nature's laws endure."

My friends, scientific and others, if the study of bio-geology shall help to teach you this, or anything like this; I think that though it may not make you more happy, it may yet make you more wise; and, therefore, what is better than being more happy, namely, more blessed.

HEROISM

It is an open question whether the policeman is not demoralizing us; and that in proportion as he does his duty well; whether the perfection of justice and safety, the complete "preservation of body and goods," may not reduce the educated and comfortable cla.s.ses into that lap-dog condition in which not conscience, but comfort, doth make cowards of us all. Our forefathers had, on the whole, to take care of themselves; we find it more convenient to hire people to take care of us. So much the better for us, in some respects: but, it may be, so much the worse in others. So much the better; because, as usually results from the division of labour, these people, having little or nothing to do save to take care of us, do so far better than we could; and so prevent a vast amount of violence and wrong, and therefore of misery, especially to the weak: for which last reason we will acquiesce in the existence of policemen and lawyers, as we do in the results of arbitration, as the lesser of two evils. The odds in war are in favour of the bigger bully; in arbitration, in favour of the bigger rogue; and it is a question whether the lion or the fox be the safer guardian of human interests. But arbitration prevents war: and that, in three cases out of four, is full reason for employing it.

On the other hand, the lap-dog condition, whether in dogs or in men, is certainly unfavourable to the growth of the higher virtues. Safety and comfort are good, indeed, for the good; for the brave, the self-originating, the earnest. They give to such a clear stage and no favour wherein to work unhindered for their fellow-men. But for the majority, who are neither brave, self-originating, nor earnest, but the mere puppets of circ.u.mstance, safety and comfort may, and actually do, merely make their lives mean and petty, effeminate and dull. Therefore their hearts must be awakened, as often as possible, to take exercise enough for health; and they must be reminded, perpetually and importunately, of what a certain great philosopher called "whatsoever things are true, honourable, just, pure, lovely, and of good report;" "if there be any manhood, and any just praise, to think of such things."

This pettiness and dulness of our modern life is just what keeps alive our stage, to which people go to see something a little less petty, a little less dull, than what they see at home. It is, too, the cause of--I had almost said the excuse for--the modern rage for sensational novels.

Those who read them so greedily are conscious, poor souls, of capacities in themselves of pa.s.sion and action, for good and evil, for which their frivolous humdrum daily life gives no room, no vent. They know too well that human nature can be more fertile, whether in weeds and poisons, or in flowers and fruits, than it is usually in the streets and houses of a well-ordered and tolerably sober city. And because the study of human nature is, after all, that which is nearest to every one and most interesting to every one, therefore they go to fiction, since they cannot go to fact, to see what they themselves might be had they the chance; to see what fantastic tricks before high heaven men and women like themselves can play; and how they play them.

Well: it is not for me to judge, for me to blame. I will only say that there are those who cannot read sensational novels, or, indeed, any novels at all, just because they see so many sensational novels being enacted round them in painful facts of sinful flesh and blood. There are those, too, who have looked in the mirror too often to wish to see their own disfigured visage in it any more; who are too tired of themselves and ashamed of themselves to want to hear of people like themselves; who want to hear of people utterly unlike themselves, more n.o.ble, and able, and just, and sweet, and pure; who long to hear of heroism and to converse with heroes; and who, if by chance they meet with an heroic act, bathe their spirits in that, as in May-dew, and feel themselves thereby, if but for an hour, more fair.

If any such shall chance to see these words, let me ask them to consider with me that one word Hero, and what it means.

Hero; Heroic; Heroism. These words point to a phase of human nature, the capacity for which we all have in ourselves, which is as startling and as interesting in its manifestations as any, and which is always beautiful, always enn.o.bling, and therefore always attractive to those whose hearts are not yet seared by the world or brutalized by self-indulgence.

But let us first be sure what the words mean. There is no use talking about a word till we have got at its meaning. We may use it as a cant phrase, as a party cry on platforms; we may even hate and persecute our fellow-men for the sake of it: but till we have clearly settled in our own minds what a word means, it will do for fighting with, but not for working with. Socrates of old used to tell the young Athenians that the ground of all sound knowledge was--to understand the true meaning of the words which were in their mouths all day long; and Socrates was a wiser man than we shall ever see. So, instead of beginning an oration in praise of heroism, I shall ask my readers to think with me what heroism is.

Now, we shall always get most surely at the meaning of a word by getting at its etymology--that is, at what it meant at first. And if heroism means behaving like a hero, we must find out, it seems to me, not merely what a hero may happen to mean just now, but what it meant in the earliest human speech in which we find it.

A hero or a heroine, then, among the old Homeric Greeks, meant a man or woman who was like the G.o.ds; and who, from that likeness, stood superior to his or her fellow-creatures. G.o.ds, heroes, and men, is a threefold division of rational beings, with which we meet more than once or twice.

Those grand old Greeks felt deeply the truth of the poet's saying--

"Unless above himself he can Exalt himself, how poor a thing is man."

But more: the Greeks supposed these heroes to be, in some way or other, partakers of a divine nature; akin to the G.o.ds; usually, either they, or some ancestor of theirs, descended from a G.o.d or G.o.ddess. Those who have read Mr. Gladstone's 'Juventus Mundi' will remember the section (cap. ix.

section 6) on the modes of the approximation between the divine and the human natures; and whether or not they agree with the author altogether, all will agree, I think, that the first idea of a hero or a heroine was a G.o.dlike man or G.o.dlike woman.

A G.o.dlike man. What varied, what infinite forms of n.o.bleness that word might include, ever increasing, as men's notions of the G.o.ds became purer and loftier, or, alas! decreasing, as their notions became degraded. The old Greeks, with that intense admiration of beauty which made them, in after ages, the master sculptors and draughtsmen of their own, and, indeed, of any age, would, of course, require in their hero, their G.o.dlike man, beauty and strength, manners, too, and eloquence, and all outward perfections of humanity, and neglect his moral qualities.

Neglect, I say, but not ignore. The hero, by virtue of his kindred with the G.o.ds, was always expected to be a better man than common men, as virtue was then understood. And how better? Let us see.

The hero was at least expected to be more reverent than other men to those divine beings of whose nature he partook, whose society he might enjoy even here on earth. He might be unfaithful to his own high lineage; he might misuse his gifts by selfishness and self-will; he might, like Ajax, rage with mere jealousy and wounded pride till his rage ended in shameful madness and suicide. He might rebel against the very G.o.ds, and all laws of right and wrong, till he perished in his [Greek text],

"Smitten down, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to mortals."

But he ought to have, he must have, to be true to his name of Hero, justice, self-restraint, and [Greek text]--that highest form of modesty, for which we have, alas! no name in the English tongue; that perfect respect for the feelings of others which springs out of perfect self-respect. And he must have, too--if he were to be a hero of the highest type--the instinct of helpfulness; the instinct that, if he were a kinsman of the G.o.ds, he must fight on their side, through toil and danger, against all that was unlike them, and therefore hateful to them.

Who loves not the old legends, unsurpa.s.sed for beauty in the literature of any race, in which the hero stands out as the deliverer, the destroyer of evil? Theseus ridding the land of robbers, and delivering it from the yearly tribute of boys and maidens to be devoured by the Minotaur; Perseus slaying the Gorgon, and rescuing Andromeda from the sea-beast; Heracles with his twelve famous labours against giants and monsters; and all the rest--

"Who dared, in the G.o.d-given might of their manhood Greatly to do and to suffer, and far in the fens and the forests Smite the devourers of men, heaven-hated, brood of the giants; Transformed, strange, without like, who obey not the golden-haired rulers"--

These are figures whose divine moral beauty has sunk into the hearts, not merely of poets or of artists, but of men and women who suffered and who feared; the memory of them, fables though they may have been, enn.o.bled the old Greek heart; they enn.o.bled the heart of Europe in the fifteenth century, at the rediscovery of Greek literature. So far from contradicting the Christian ideal, they harmonised with--I had almost said they supplemented--that more tender and saintly ideal of heroism which had sprung up during the earlier Middle Ages. They justified, and actually gave a new life to, the old n.o.blenesses of chivalry, which had grown up in the later Middle Ages as a necessary supplement of active and manly virtue to the pa.s.sive and feminine virtue of the cloister. They inspired, mingling with these two other elements, a literature, both in England, France, and Italy, in which the three elements, the saintly, the chivalrous, and the Greek heroic, have become one and undistinguishable, because all three are human, and all three divine; a literature which developed itself in Ariosto, in Ta.s.so, in the Hypnerotomachia, the Arcadia, the Euphues, and other forms, sometimes fantastic, sometimes questionable, but which reached its perfection in our own Spenser's 'Fairy Queen'--perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever been penned by mortal man.

And why? What has made these old Greek myths live, myths though they be, and fables, and fair dreams? What, though they have no body, and, perhaps, never had, has given them an immortal soul, which can speak to the immortal souls of all generations to come?

What but this, that in them--dim it may be and undeveloped, but still there--lies the divine idea of self-sacrifice as the perfection of heroism; of self-sacrifice, as the highest duty and the highest joy of him who claims a kindred with the G.o.ds?

Let us say, then, that true heroism must involve self-sacrifice. Those stories certainly involve it, whether ancient or modern, which the hearts, not of philosophers merely, or poets, but of the poorest and the most ignorant, have accepted instinctively as the highest form of moral beauty--the highest form, and yet one possible to all.

Grace Darling rowing out into the storm toward the wreck.--The "drunken private of the Buffs," who, prisoner among the Chinese, and commanded to prostrate himself and kotoo, refused in the name of his country's honour--"He would not bow to any Chinaman on earth:" and so was knocked on the head, and died surely a hero's death.--Those soldiers of the 'Birkenhead,' keeping their ranks to let the women and children escape, while they watched the sharks who in a few minutes would be tearing them limb from limb.--Or, to go across the Atlantic--for there are heroes in the Far West--Mr. Bret Harte's "Flynn of Virginia," on the Central Pacific Railway--the place is shown to travellers--who sacrificed his life for his married comrade,--

"There, in the drift, Back to the wall, He held the timbers Ready to fall.

Then in the darkness I heard him call,-- 'Run for your life, Jake!

Run for your wife's sake!

Don't wait for me.'

"And that was all Heard in the din-- Heard of Tom Flynn, Flynn of Virginia."

Or the engineer, again, on the Mississippi, who, when the steamer caught fire, held, as he had sworn he would, her bow against the bank till every soul save he got safe on sh.o.r.e,--

"Through the hot black breath of the burning boat Jim Bludso's voice was heard; And they all had trust in his cussedness, And knew he would keep his word.

And sure's you're born, they all got off Afore the smokestacks fell,-- And Bludso's ghost went up alone In the smoke of the 'Prairie Belle.'

"He weren't no saint--but at judgment I'd run my chance with Jim 'Longside of some pious gentlemen That wouldn't shake hands with him.

He'd seen his duty--a dead sure thing-- And went for it there and then; And Christ is not going to be too hard On a man that died for men."

To which gallant poem of Colonel John Hay's--and he has written many gallant and beautiful poems--I have but one demurrer: Jim Bludso did not merely do his duty, but more than his duty. He did a voluntary deed, to which he was bound by no code or contract, civil or moral; just as he who introduced me to that poem won his Victoria Cross--as many a cross, Victoria and other, has been won--by volunteering for a deed to which he, too, was bound by no code or contract, military or moral. And it is of the essence of self-sacrifice, and, therefore, of heroism, that it should be voluntary; a work of supererogation, at least towards society and man: an act to which the hero or heroine is not bound by duty, but which is above though not against duty.

Nay, on the strength of that same element of self-sacrifice, I will not grudge the epithet heroic, which my revered friend Mr. Darwin justly applies to the poor little monkey, who once in his life did that which was above his duty; who lived in continual terror of the great baboon, and yet, when the brute had sprung upon his friend the keeper, and was tearing out his throat, conquered his fear by love, and, at the risk of instant death, sprang in turn upon his dreaded enemy, and bit and shrieked till help arrived.

Some would now-a-days use that story merely to prove that the monkey's nature and the man's nature are, after all, one and the same. Well: I, at least, have never denied that there is a monkey-nature in man as there is a peac.o.c.k-nature, and a swine-nature, and a wolf-nature--of all which four I see every day too much. The sharp and stern distinction between men and animals, as far as their natures are concerned, is of a more modern origin than people fancy. Of old the a.s.syrian took the eagle, the ox, and the lion--and not unwisely--as the three highest types of human capacity. The horses of Homer might be immortal, and weep for their master's death. The animals and monsters of Greek myth--like the Ananzi spider of Negro fable--glide insensibly into speech and reason. Birds--the most wonderful of all animals in the eyes of a man of science or a poet--are sometimes looked on as wiser, and nearer to the G.o.ds, than man.

The Norseman--the n.o.blest and ablest human being, save the Greek, of whom history can tell us--was not ashamed to say of the bear of his native forests that he had "ten men's strength and eleven men's wisdom." How could Reinecke Fuchs have gained immortality, in the Middle Ages and since, save by the truth of its too solid and humiliating theorem--that the actions of the world of men were, on the whole, guided by pa.s.sions but too exactly like those of the lower animals? I have said, and say again, with good old Vaughan--

"Unless above himself he can Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man."

But I cannot forget that many an old Greek poet or sage, and many a sixteenth and seventeenth century one, would have interpreted the monkey's heroism from quite a different point of view; and would have said that the poor little creature had been visited suddenly by some "divine afflatus"--an expression quite as philosophical and quite as intelligible as most philosophic formulas which I read now-a-days--and had been thus raised for the moment above his abject selfish monkey-nature, just as man requires to be raised above his. But that theory belongs to a philosophy which is out of date and out of fashion, and which will have to wait a century or two before it comes into fashion again.

And now: if self-sacrifice and heroism be, as I believe, identical, I must protest against a use of the word sacrifice which is growing too common in newspaper-columns, in which we are told of an "enormous sacrifice of life;" an expression which means merely that a great many poor wretches have been killed, quite against their own will, and for no purpose whatsoever: no sacrifice at all, unless it be one to the demons of ignorance, cupidity or mismanagement.

The stout Whig undergraduate understood better the meaning of such words, who, when asked, "In what sense might Charles the First be said to be a martyr?" answered, "In the same sense that a man might be said to be a martyr to the gout."

And I must protest, in like wise, against a misuse of the words hero, heroism, heroic, which is becoming too common, namely, applying them to mere courage. We have borrowed the misuse, I believe, as we have more than one beside, from the French press. I trust that we shall neither accept it, nor the temper which inspires it. It may be convenient for those who flatter their nation, and especially the military part of it, into a ruinous self-conceit, to frame some such syllogism as this--"Courage is heroism: every Frenchman is naturally courageous: therefore every Frenchman is a hero." But we, who have been trained at once in a sounder school of morals, and in a greater respect for facts, and for language as the expression of facts, shall be careful, I hope, not to trifle thus with that potent and awful engine--human speech. We shall eschew likewise, I hope, a like abuse of the word moral, which has crept from the French press now and then, not only into our own press, but into the writings of some of our military men, who, as Englishmen, should have known better. We were told again and again, during the late war, that the moral effect of such a success had been great; that the morale of the troops was excellent; or again, that the morale of the troops had suffered, or even that they were somewhat demoralised. But when one came to test what was really meant by these fine words, one discovered that morals had nothing to do with the facts which they expressed; that the troops were in the one case actuated simply by the animal pa.s.sion of hope, in the other simply by the animal pa.s.sion of fear. This abuse of the word moral has crossed, I am sorry to say, the Atlantic; and a witty American, whom we must excuse, though we must not imitate, when some one had been blazing away at him with a revolver, he being unarmed, is said to have described his very natural emotions on the occasion, by saying that he felt dreadfully demoralised. We, I hope, shall confine the word demoralisation, as our generals of the last century would have done, when applied to soldiers, to crime, including, of course, the neglect of duty or of discipline; and we shall mean by the word heroism in like manner, whether applied to a soldier or to any human being, not mere courage; not the mere doing of duty: but the doing of something beyond duty; something which is not in the bond; some spontaneous and unexpected act of self-devotion.

I am glad, but not surprised, to see that Miss Yonge has held to this sound distinction in her golden little book of 'Golden Deeds;' and said, "Obedience, at all costs and risks, is the very essence of a soldier's life. It has the solid material, but it has hardly the exceptional brightness, of a golden deed."

I know that it is very difficult to draw the line between mere obedience to duty and express heroism. I know also that it would be both invidious and impertinent in an utterly unheroic personage like me, to try to draw that line; and to sit at home at ease, a.n.a.lysing and criticising deeds which I could not do myself: but--to give an instance or two of what I mean--

To defend a post as long as it is tenable is not heroic. It is simple duty. To defend it after it has become untenable, and even to die in so doing, is not heroic, but a n.o.ble madness, unless an advantage is to be gained thereby for one's own side. Then, indeed, it rises towards, if not into, the heroism of self-sacrifice.

Who, for example, will not endorse the verdict of all ages on the conduct of those Spartans at Thermopylae, when they sat "combing their yellow hair for death" on the sea-sh.o.r.e? They devoted themselves to hopeless destruction: but why? They felt--I must believe that, for they behaved as if they felt--that on them the destinies of the Western World might hang; that they were in the forefront of the battle between civilisation and barbarism, between freedom and despotism; and that they must teach that vast mob of Persian slaves, whom the officers of the Great King were driving with whips up to their lance-points, that the spirit of the old heroes was not dead; and that the Greek, even in defeat and death, was a mightier and a n.o.bler man than they. And they did their work. They produced, if you will, a "moral" effect, which has lasted even to this very day. They struck terror into the heart, not only of the Persian host, but of the whole Persian empire. They made the event of that war certain, and the victories of Salamis and Plataea comparatively easy.

They made Alexander's conquest of the East, 150 years afterwards, not only possible at all, but permanent when it came; and thus helped to determine the future civilisation of the whole world.