Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 05.djvu/16

viii satisfied with his reception. 'Often enough with these abrupt utterances thrown out isolated, unexplained, has your tolerance been put to the trial. Tolerance, patient candour, all-hoping favour and kindness, which I will not speak of at present. The accomplished and distinguished, the beautiful, the wise, something of what is best in England, have listened patiently to my rude words. With many feelings I heartily thank you all, and say. Good be with you all!'

There is no denying that their tolerance must have been 'put to the trial.' The very first lecture was, in fact, the very last with which any lecturer anxious to 'draw' would have opened a series. No doubt it was congenial with Carlyle's mystical turn of mind, and not unimportant to his argument, to connect the line of heroes with the family of the gods; and for that purpose Odin, to be sure, will serve as well as another. But no judicious lecturer would have given this semi-mythical shadow a lecture all to himself in Albemarle Street. His very name as it appears in the contents-list of the republished discourses, 'The Hero as Divinity—Odin,' rubbing a phantasmal shoulder against such very solid and definite figures as Mahomet, Dante, and Luther, to say nothing of later worthies, has an almost ludicrous effect. 'The Hero as Divinity—Hercules' would have been scarcely more grotesque.

The first lecture, therefore, suffers unavoidably and grievously from its subject. As we really know nothing of Odin, except as a force, to discourse of him to the length of some thirty-five pages naturally compelled Carlyle to lay increased stress on that side of his own teaching which least needed additional emphasis. Odin is not really the 'Hero as Divinity,' or does not really emerge as such from the mists of legend, even after Carlyle's most industrious efforts so to body him forth. He remains merely 'The Hero as Strong Man' to the last, and the father of all such as are strong and brave, just as the Norse Sea Kings themselves were, as Carlyle puts it, 'progenitors of our own Blakes and Nelsons.' This is,