Sir Walter Raleigh and His Times | Page 4

caring to
believe them; and prove to our own melancholy satisfaction that
Alexander conquered the world with a pin, in his sleep, by accident.
And yet in this mood, as in most, there is a sort of left-handed truth
involved. These heroes are not so far removed from us after all. They
were men of like passions with ourselves, with the same flesh about
them, the same spirit within them, the same world outside, the same
devil beneath, the same God above. They and their deeds were not so
very wonderful. Every child who is born into the world is just as
wonderful, and, for aught we know, might, 'mutatis mutandis, do just as
wonderful deeds. If accident and circumstance helped them, the same
may help us: have helped us, if we will look back down our years, far
more than we have made use of.
They were men, certainly, very much of our own level: but may we not
put that level somewhat too low? They were certainly not what we are;
for if they had been, they would have done no more 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 doubt they were compact of good and evil, just as we:
but so was David, no man more; though a more heroical personage
(save One) appears not in all human records but may not the secret of
their success have been that, on the whole (though they found it a sore
battle), they refused the evil and chose the good? It is true, again, that
their great deeds may be more or less explained, attributed to laws,
rationalised: but is explaining always explaining away? Is it to degrade
a thing to attribute it to a law? And do you do anything more by
'rationalising' men's deeds than prove that they were rational men; men
who saw certain fixed laws, and obeyed them, and succeeded thereby,
according to the Baconian apophthegm, that nature is conquered by
obeying her?
But what laws?

To that question, perhaps, the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the
Hebrews will give the best answer, where it says, that by faith were
done all the truly great deeds, and by faith lived all the 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 the belief in certain
unseen eternal facts, by keeping true to which a man must in the long
run succeed. Must; because he is more or less in harmony with heaven,
and earth, and the Maker thereof, and has therefore fighting on his side
a great portion of the universe; perhaps the whole; for as he who breaks
one commandment of the law is guilty of the whole, because he denies
the fount of all law, so he who with his whole soul keeps one
commandment 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 a man of like
passions with ourselves; of one who had the most intense and awful
sense of the unseen laws, and succeeded mightily thereby; of one who
had hard struggles with a flesh and blood which made him at times
forget those laws, and failed mightily thereby; of one whom God so
loved that He caused each slightest sin, as with David, to bring its own
punishment with it, that while the flesh was delivered over to Satan, the
man himself might be saved in the Day of the Lord; of one, finally, of
whom nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand may say, 'I
have done worse deeds than he: but I have never done as good ones.'
In a poor farm-house among the pleasant valleys of South Devon,
among the white apple-orchards and the rich water-meadows, and the
red fallows and red kine, in the year of grace 1552, a boy was born, as
beautiful as day, and christened Walter Raleigh. His father was a
gentleman of ancient blood: few older in the land: but, impoverished,
he had settled down upon the wreck of his estate, in that poor
farm-house. No record of him now remains; but he must have been a
man worth knowing and worth loving, or he would not have won the
wife he did. She was a Champernoun, proudest of Norman squires, and
could probably boast of having in her veins the blood of Courtneys,
Emperors of Byzant. She had been the wife of the famous knight Sir
Otho Gilbert, and lady of