A Hero and Some Other Folks | Page 3

in Greek
civilization. What Greek patriot, whether Themistocles or Demosthenes,
applied conscience to patriotism? They were as devoid of practical
conscience as a Metope of the Parthenon was devoid of life. Patriotism
was a transient sentiment. Demosthenes could become dumb in the
presence of Philip's gold; and in a fit of pique over mistreatment at the
hands of his brother-citizens, Themistocles became a traitor, and,
expatriated, dwelt a guest at the Persian court. Strangely enough--and it
is passing strange--the most heroic personality in Homer's Iliad, the
Greek's "Bible of heroisms," was not the Atridae, whether Agamemnon
or Menelaus; not Ajax nor Achilles, nor yet Ulysses; but was Hector,
the Trojan, who appears to greater advantage as hero than all the
Grecian host. And Homer was a Greek! This is strange and
unaccountable irony. Say once more, the old hero's lack was conscience.
He, like his gods and goddesses, who were deified infamies, was a
studied impurity. Jean Valjean is a hero, but a hero of a new type.
Literature is a sure index of a civilization. Who cares to settle in his
mind whether the world grows better, may do so by comparing
contemporaneous literature with the reading of other days. "The
Heptameron," of Margaret of Navarre, is a book so filthy as to be
nauseating. That people could read it from inclination is unthinkable;
and to believe that a woman could read it, much less write it, taxes too
sorely our credulity. In truth, this work did not, in the days of its origin,
shock the people's sensibilities. A woman wrote it, and she a sister of
Francis I of France, and herself Queen of Navarre, and a pure woman.
And her contemporaries, both men and women, read it with delight,
because they had parted company with blushes and modesty. Zola is
less voluptuous and filthy than these old tales. Some things even Zola
curtains. Margaret of Navarre tears the garments from the bodies of

men and women, and looks at their nude sensuality smilingly. Of
Boccaccio's "Decameron," the same general observations hold; save
that they are less filthy, though no less sensual. In the era producing
these tales, witness this fact: The stories are represented as told by a
company of gentlemen and ladies, the reciter being sometimes a man,
sometimes a woman; the place, a country villa, whither they had fled to
escape a plague then raging in Florence. The people, so solacing
themselves in retreat from a plague they should have striven to alleviate
by their presence and ministries, were the gentility of those days,
representing the better order of society, and told stories which would
now be venal if told by vulgar men in some tavern of ill-repute. That
Boccaccio should have reported these tales as emanating from such a
company is proof positive of the immodesty of those days, whose story
is rehearsed in the "Decameron." Rousseau's "Confessions" is another
book showing the absence of current morality in his age.
Notwithstanding George Eliot's panegyric, these memoirs are the
production of unlimited conceit, of a practical absence of any moral
sensitiveness; and while Rousseau could not be accused of being
sensual, nor amorous and heartless as Goethe, he yet shows so crude a
moral state as to render him unwholesome to any person of ordinary
morals in the present day. His "Confessions," instead of being naive,
strike me as being distinctly and continuously coarse. A man and
woman who could give their children deliberately to be farmed out,
deserting them as an animal would not, and this with no sense of loss or
compunction, nor even with a sense of the inhumanity of such
procedure--such a man and woman tell us how free-love can degrade a
natively virtuous mind. Such was Rousseau; and his "Confessions" are
like himself, unblushing, because shameless. These books reflect their
respective ages, and are happily obsolete now. Such memoirs and
fictions in our day are unthinkable as emanating from respectable
sources; and if written would be located in vile haunts in the purlieus of
civilization. Gauged by such a test, the world is seen to be better, and
immensely better. We have sailed out of sight of the old continent of
coarse thinking, and are sailing a sea where purity of thought and
expression impregnate the air like odors. The old hero, with his
lewdness and rhodomontade, is excused from the stage. We have had
enough of him. Even Cyrano de Bergerac is so out of keeping with the

new notion of the heroic, that the translator of the drama must
apologize for his hero's swagger. We love his worth, though despising
his theatrical air and acts. We are done with the actor, and want the
man. And this new hero is proof of a new life in the soul, and, therefore,