Transcribed from “Plays and Puritans and OtherHistorical Essays” 1890 Macmillan and Co. edition by DavidPrice,
‘Truth is stranger thanfiction.’ A trite remark. We all say it againand again: but how few of us believe it! How few of us,when we read the history of heroical times and heroical men, takethe story simply as it stands! On the contrary, we try toexplain it away; to prove it all not to have been so verywonderful; to impute accident, circumstance, mean and commonplacemotives; to lower every story down to the level of our ownlittleness, or what we (unjustly to ourselves and to the God whois near us all) choose to consider our level; to rationalise awayall the wonders, till we make them at last impossible, and giveup caring to believe them; and prove to our own melancholysatisfaction that Alexander conquered the world with a pin, inhis sleep, by accident.
And yet in this mood, as in most, there is a sort ofleft-handed truth involved. These heroes are not so farremoved from us after all. They were men of like passionswith ourselves, with the same flesh about them, the same spiritwithin them, the same world outside, the same devil beneath, thesame God above. They and their deeds were not so verywonderful. Every child who is born into the world is justas wonderful, and, for aught we know, might, mutatismutandis, do just as wonderful deeds. If accident andcircumstance helped them, the same may help us: have helped us,if we will look back down our years, far more than we have madeuse of.
They were men, certainly, very much of our own level: but maywe not put that level somewhat too low? They were certainlynot what we are; for if they had been, they would have done nomore than we: but is not a man’s real level not what he is,but what he can be, and therefore ought to be? No doubtthey were compact of good and evil, just as we: but so was David,no man more; though a more heroical personage (save One) appearsnot in all human records but may not the secret of their successhave been that, on the whole (though they found it a sorebattle), they refused the evil and chose the good? It istrue, again, that their great deeds may be more or lessexplained, attributed to laws, rationalised: but is explainingalways explaining away? Is it to degrade a thing toattribute it to a law? And do you do anything more by‘rationalising’ men’s deeds than prove thatthey were rational men; men who saw certain fixed laws, andobeyed them, and succeeded thereby, according to the Baconianapophthegm, that nature is conquered by obeying her?
But what laws?
To that question, perhaps, the eleventh chapter of the Epistleto the Hebrews will give the best answer, where it says, that byfaith were done all the truly great deeds, and by faith lived allthe truly great men who have ever appeared on earth.
There are, of course, higher and lower degrees of this faith;its object is one more or less worthy: but it is in all cases thebelief in certain unseen eternal facts, by keeping true to whicha man must in the long run succeed. Must; because he ismore or less in harmony with heaven, and earth, and the Makerthereof, and has therefore fighting on his side a great portionof the universe; perhaps the whole; for as he who breaks onecommandment of the law is guilty of the whole, because he deniesthe fount of all law, so he who with his whole soul keeps onecommandment of it is likely to be in harmony with the whole,because he testifies of the fount of all law.
I shall devote a few pages to the story of an old hero, of aman of like passions with ourselves; of one who had the mostintense and awful sense of the unseen laws, and