Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual's character. 2423 Emerson Essays. Heroism. Heroism, in which I include courage, fortitude, and selfdenial, is an essential element of a great character; courage, which leads a man forth to meet danger whenever thereto called by duty; fortitude, the power and practice of endurance, which renders him superior to pain, and makes him accept with cheerfulness whatever fate comes; and self-denial, the subordination of the material to the spiritual, of the lower to the higher nature of man, which renders his will master of his appetites and passions, and causes him to forego every personal benefit for the sake of honor and conscience. 2424 David Dudley Field: Speeches, Arguments, and A noble life, crowned with heroic death, rises above and outlives the pride and pomp and glory of the mightiest empire of the earth. 2425 Garfield: The Works of James Abram Garfield. Oration, Arlington, Va., May 30, 1868. Heroism is active genius; genius, contemplative heroism. Heroism is the self-devotion of genius manifesting itself in action. 2426 J. C. and A. W. Hare: Guesses at Truth. The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt, and the profoundest wisdom to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed. 2427 Hawthorne: The Blithedale Romance. Ch. 2. There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion. This makes nothing in their favor, but is a proud compliment to man's nature. Whatever he is or does, he cannot entirely efface the stamp of the divinity on him. Let him strive ever so, he cannot divest himself of his natural sublimity of thought and affection, however he may pervert or deprave it to ill. 2428 Hazlitt: Characteristics. No. 354. In a truly heroic life there is no peradventure. It is always either doing or dying. 2429 Roswell D. Hitchcock: Eternal Atonement. Life Through Death. VIII. A man does not toil for himself alone, but for those dearest to his heart; this for his father, that for his child; and there are those who, out of the small pittance of their daily earnings, Contribute to support the needy, print Bibles for the ignorant, and preach the gospel to the poor. Here the meanest work becomes heroism. The man wlio toils for a principle ennobles himself by the act. 2430 Theodore Parker: Critical and Miscellaneous HERO-WORSHIP see Heroes, Heroism. Hero worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist universally among mankind. 2431 Carlyle Sartor Resartus. Organic Filaments. Society is founded on hero worship. 2432 Carlyle: Heroes and Hero Worship. The Hero as Divinity. Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man. 2433 Carlyle: Heroes and Hero Worship. The Hero as Divinity. Fortunate men! your country lives because you died. Your fame is placed where the breath of calumny can never reach it, where the mistakes of a weary life can never dim its brightness! Coming generations will rise up and call you blessed. 2434 Garfield: The Works of James Abram Garfield. Oration, Arlington, Va., May 30, 1868. If silence is ever golden, it must be beside the graves of... men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung. 2435 Garfield: The Works of James Abram Garfield. Oration, Arlington, Va., May 30, 1868. These heroes are dead. They died for liberty, they died for us. They are at rest. They sleep in the land they made free, under the flag they rendered stainless, under the solemn pines, the sad hemlocks, the tearful willows, and the embracing vines. They sleep beneath the shadows of the clouds, careless alike of sunshine or of storm, each in the windowless palace of rest. Earth may run red with other wars: they are at peace. In the midst of battle, in the roar of conflict, they found the serenity of death. I have one sentiment for soldiers living and dead: cheers for the living; tears for the dead. 2436 Robert G. Ingersoll: Speech, Indianapolis, Sept. 21, 1876. Soldiers' Re-Union. They summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue. 2437 Garfield: The Works of James Abram Garfield. Oration, Arlington, Va., May 30, 1868. 244 HERO WORSHIP — HISTORIANS. Pure hero-worship is healthy. It stimulates the young to deeds of heroism, stirs the old to unselfish efforts, and gives the masses models of mankind that tend to lift humanity above the commonplace meanness of ordinary life. 2438 Donn Piatt: Memories of the Men who Saved the Union. Preface. HIND-SIGHT. An you had any eye behind you, you might see more detraction at your heels than fortunes before you. 2439 Shakespeare: Twelfth Night. Act ii. Sc. 5. HISTORIANS - The true historian, therefore, seeking to compose a true picture of the thing acted, must collect facts and combine facts. Methods will differ, styles will differ. Nobody ever does anything like anybody else; but the end in view generally the same, and the historian's end is truthful narration. Maxims he will have, if he is wise, never a one; and as for a moral, if he tell his story well, it will need none; if he tell it ill, it will deserve none. 2440 Augustine Birrell: Obiter Dicta. Second Series. The Muse of History. What have we a right to demand of an historian? First, surely, stern veracity, which implies not merely knowledge but honesty. An historian stands in a fiduciary position towards his readers, and if he withholds from them important facts likely to influence their judgment, he is guilty of fraud, and, when justice is done in this world, will be condemned to refund all moneys he has made by his false professions, with compound interest. This sort of fraud is unknown to the law, but to nobody else. Secondly, comes a catholic temper and way of looking at things. The historian should be a gentleman, and possess a moral breath of temperament. There should be no bitter protesting spirit about him. He should remember the world he has taken to write about is a large place, and that nobody set him up over us. Thirdly, he should be a born story-teller. If he is not this, he has mistaken his vocation. He may be a great philosopher, a useful editor, a profound scholar, and anything else his friends like to call him, except a great historian. 2441 Augustine Birrell: Obiter Dicta. First Series. Histories are as perfect as the historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul. 2442 Carlyle: Cromwell's Letters and Speeches. To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intel lectual distinctions. 2443 Macaulay: Essays. History. (Edinburgh The historian cannot bring all his troops on the ground at once and strike the mind by a wide and magnificent display: he is reduced to a march past in narrow file. The danger, therefore, is that the effect of the whole will be feeble or lost. In the hands of a weak man a thin stream of narrative meanders on, but a broad view is nowhere obtained. The lowest form of historical writing is the chronicle, or mere annals, in which a broad view is not so much as aimed at. In great historical work the immediate portion of the narrative passing before the reader's eye is always kept in subordinate relation to the whole drama of which it forms a part. And this is the problem, to keep the whole suggestively before the reader while only a part is being shown. Only a strong imagination is equal to this task. The mind of the writer must hold the entire picture suspended in his fancy while he is painting each separate portion of it. And he paints each separate portion of it with a view to its fitness and relation to the whole. 2444 J. Cotter Morrison: Macaulay. Ch. 2. (English Men of Letters.) It is to me a peculiarly noble work rescuing from oblivion those who deserve immortality, and extending their renown at the same time that we advance our own. 2445 Pliny the Younger: Letters. Bk. v. Letter viii. (Melmoth and Bosanquet, Translators.) The historian must be a poet; not to find, but to find again; not to breathe life into beings, into imaginary deeds, but in order to re-animate and revive that which has been; to represent what time and space have placed at a distance from us. 2446 Joseph Roux: Meditations of a Parish Priest. History, Historians. No. 23. (Hapgood, Trans.) Historians ought to be precise, faithful, and unprejudiced; and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should make them swerve from the way of truth. 2447 Cervantes: Don Quixote. Pt. I. Bk. ii. Ch. 9. (Jarvis, Translator.) Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may. 2448 Landor: Imaginary Conversations. Diogenes and Plato. The true historical genius, to our thinking, is that which can see the nobler meaning of events that are near him, as the true poet is he who detects the divine in the casual; and we somewhat suspect the depth of his insight into the past, who cannot recognize the godlike of to-day under that disguise in which it always visits us. 2449 Lowell: My Study Windows, Carlyle. A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque; yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supply ing deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and ingenious reasoner; yet he must possess sufficient self-command to abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis. 2450 Macaulay: Essays. History. (Edinburgh Review, May, 1828.) HISTORY — see Archæology, Biography, Conscience, Historians, Poetry, Truth, War. History that is good, faithful, and true, will survive for ages; but should it have none of these qualities, its passage will be short between the cradle and the grave. 2451 Cervantes: Don Quixote. Pt. ii. Ch. 70. (Jarvis, Translator.) There is nothing that solidifies and strengthens a nation like reading of the nation's own history, whether that history is recorded in books, or embodied in customs, institutions, and monuments. 2452 Joseph Anderson: History of the Soldiers' Monument, Waterbury, Conn. The mystery of history is an insoluble problem. 2453 Henry Ward Beecher: Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit. Miscellaneous. History is a pageant and not a philosopher. 2454 Augustine Birrell: Obiter Dicta. Second Series. Biography is the only true history. 2455 Carlyle: Thomas Carlyle, First Forty Years, by Froude. Vol. ii. Ch. 10. Journal, Jan. 13, 1832. History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man's spiritual nature: his earliest expression of what can be called thought. 2456 Carlyle: Essays. On History. (Fraser's Magazine, Vol. ii. No. x. 1830.) What is all knowledge, too, but recorded experience, and a product of history; of which, therefore, reasoning and belief, no less than action and passion, are essential materials. 2457 Carlyle Essay. On History. (Fraser's Magazine, Vol. ii. No. x. 1830.) History is like sacred writing, because truth is essential to it; and where there is truth, the Deity himself is present; nevertheless, there are many who think that books may be written and tossed out into the world like fritters. 2458 Cervantes: Don Quixote. Pt. ii. Ch. 3. (Jarvis, Translator.) |