



Produced by Al Haines










The Orpheus Series                              No. 1





THE

HERO IN MAN


BY

A. E.

[Transcriber's note: "A.E." is a pseudonym of George William Russell]




The Orpheus Press, 1910




First Edition (1,000 copies), May, 1909.

Second Edition (1,000 copies), September, 1910.




PRELUDE.

[Greek: _lampadia echontes diadosousin allelois_.]--PLATO.


We who live in the great cities could not altogether avoid, even if we
would, a certain association with the interests of our time.  Wherever
we go the minds of men are feverishly debating some new political
measure or some new scheme for the reconstruction of society.  Now, as
in olden times, the rumours of an impending war will engulf the subtler
interests of men, and unless we are willing to forego all intercourse
we find ourselves involved in a hundred sympathies.  A friendly group
will gather one evening and open their thoughts concerning the
experiences of the soul; they will often declare that only these
matters are of profound interest, and yet on the morrow the most of
them regard the enthusiasms of the mind as far away, unpractical, not
of immediate account.  But even at noon the stars are above us and
because a man in material difficulties cannot evoke the highest
experiences that he has known they have not become less real.  They
pertain to his immortal nature and if in the circumstance of life he
loses memory of them it is because he is likewise mortal.  In the
measure that we develop our interior selves philosophy becomes the most
permanent of our interests and it may well be that the whole aim of Man
is to acquire an unbroken and ever-broadening realisation of the
Supreme Spirit so that in a far-off day he may become the master of all
imaginable conditions.  He, therefore, who brings us back to our
central selves and shows us that however far we may wander it is these
high thoughts which are truly the most real--he is of all men our
greatest benefactor.

Now those who thus care for the spiritual aspect of life are of two
kinds,--the intellectual and the imaginative.  There are men of keen
intellect who comprehend some philosophic system, who will defend it
with elaborate reasonings and proclaim themselves its adherents, but
the earth at their feet, the stars in the firmament, man himself and
their own souls have undergone no transfiguration.  Their philosophies
are lifeless, for imagination is to the intellect what breath is to the
body.  Thoughts that never glow with imagination, that are never
applied to all that the sense perceives or the mind remembers--thoughts
that remain quite abstract, are as empty husks of no value.

But there are those who have studied by the light of imagination and
these know well that the inner life of thought, of experiment, and of
wonder, though it may often be over-clouded, is the only life which can
henceforth give them content.  They know that it was not when they were
most immersed in the affairs of the day but rather when the whole world
appeared for a little while to be pulsating with an almost
uncontainable splendour, that they were most alive.  For the best mood
we have ever known, though it be lost for long, is yet the clearest
revelation of our true selves, and it is then that we learn most nearly
what marvels life may hold.

If we read with imagination the Dialogues of Plato we dwell for a while
among those ardent Greeks for whom the universe was changed by the
words of the poet-philosopher.  So too when we read the letter that was
written by Plotinus to Flaccus, perhaps the serenest height the human
soul has ever attained, we become ourselves the recipients.  In either
case we feel that we have lived in the presence of a princely soul.  It
is an inspiration to realise that we are of the one race with these and
may look out on the same beauty of earth and heaven.

Yet the magic of the mind is not enduring and to dream overlong of a
bygone beauty is to make sorrowful the present.  What imaginative
reader of Plato but has desired with a fruitless ardour that he might
in truth have been numbered with those who walked on the daisied lawns
of the Academy, might in truth have heard the voice of the hardly human
initiate, have seen him face to face, have responded to the influence
of his presence? who but would willingly translate his life to another
century if he could but hear Plotinus endeavouring to describe in human
language an ecstasy which makes of man a god?

I know that one may easily injure whatever one most loves by speaking
of it in superlative praise to those who as yet remain aloof with
interest unaroused, but for me it is hard to refrain from an expression
of that admiration, and I would fain say also that affection, which
burns up within me when I read the writings of A.E.  For they cause me
to think of him as one of those rare spirits who bring to men the
realisation of their own divinity, who make the spiritual life seem
adventurous, attractive, and vivid, so that we go forth into the world
with a new interest and a new joy at heart.  That, as I have sought to
show in the opening of this note, is the greatest of all things that
anyone can do.  The life of such a man makes beautiful the generation
with which it coincides.  If we penetrate the human words and inhabit,
so far as we are able, the mood which was passing in the soul as it
shaped them, we may learn from the reveries that are here reprinted how
to the mystic of this material age the world remains equally wonderful
and human life equally holy as either seemed in the far-off days when
beauty was more greatly desired.  For of deeper value at all times than
any particular thought is the pervading mood.  Perhaps the reader will
remember here the following passage by Robert Louis Stevenson:--"Such
are the best teachers; a dogma learned is only a new error--the old one
was perhaps as good; but a spirit communicated is a perpetual
possession.  These best teachers climb beyond teaching to the plane of
art; it is themselves, and what is best in themselves, that they
communicate."  To read the essays that follow, or the three volumes of
poetry that A.E. has published, is to recognise one who has endeavoured
always to communicate the "best in himself," and the mood which they
induce is a mood from which we may see the world once more in its
primal beauty, may recover a sense of the long-forgotten but
inextinguishable grandeur of the soul.

CLIFFORD BAX.

_April_, 1909.




THE HERO IN MAN.

I.

There sometimes comes on us a mood of strange reverence for people and
things which in less contemplative hours we hold to be unworthy; and in
such moments we may set side by side the head of Christ and the head of
an outcast, and there is an equal radiance around each, which makes of
the darker face a shadow and is itself a shadow around the head of
light.  We feel a fundamental unity of purpose in their presence here,
and would as willingly pay homage to the one who has fallen as to him
who has become a master of life.  I know that immemorial order decrees
that the laurel and the crown be given only to the victor, but in those
moments I speak of a profound intuition changes the decree and sets the
aureole on both alike.

We feel such deep pity for the fallen that there must needs be a
justice in it, for these diviner feelings are wise in themselves and do
not vaguely arise.  They are lights from the Father.  A justice lies in
uttermost pity and forgiveness, even when we seem to ourselves to be
most deeply wronged; or why is it that the awakening of resentment or
hate brings such swift contrition?  We are ever self-condemned; and the
dark thought which went forth in us brooding revenge, when suddenly
smitten by the light, withdraws and hides within itself in awful
penitence.  In asking myself why it is that the meanest are safe from
our condemnation when we sit on the true seat of judgment in the heart,
it seemed to me that their shield was the sense we have of a nobility
hidden in them under the cover of ignoble things; that their present
darkness was the result of some too weighty heroic labour undertaken
long ago by the human spirit; that it was the consecration of past
purpose which played with such a tender light about their ruined lives,
and it was more pathetic because this nobleness was all unknown to the
fallen and the heroic cause of so much pain was forgotten in life's
prison-house.

While feeling the service to us of the great ethical ideals which have
been formulated by men, I think that the idea of justice intellectually
conceived tends to beget a certain hardness of the heart.  It is true
that men have done wrong--hence their pain: but back of all this there
is something infinitely soothing, a light which does not wound, which
says no harsh thing, even although the darkest of spirits turns to it
in its agony, for the darkest of human spirits has still around him
this first glory which shines from a deeper being within, whose history
may be told as the legend of the Hero in Man.

Among the many immortals with whom ancient myth peopled the spiritual
sphere of humanity are some figures which draw to themselves a more
profound tenderness than the rest.  Not Aphrodite rising in beauty from
the faery foam of the first seas, not Apollo with sweetest singing,
laughter, and youth, not the wielder of the lightning, could exact the
reverence accorded to the lonely Titan chained on the mountain, or to
that bowed figure heavy with the burden of the sins of the world; for
the brighter divinities had no part in the labour of man, no such
intimate relation with the wherefore of his own existence so full of
struggle.  The more radiant figures are prophecies to him of his
destiny,