the "gift of Nature herself." The hero's own understanding of them as gifts was an important constituent of heroism. The sense of having been called to a given task, of having been "sent hither" to make the "sacred mystery" of things "more impressively known to us," underlay the hero's actions. The "Heroic Gift"—"sincerity and depth of vision," "Power of Insight," the "vital Force" that "enables him to discern the inner heart of things"—derived from the same creative force that revealed itself in nature. It was virtuous in the fullest sense; wherefore Carlyle could insist that "to know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathise with it: that is, be virtuously related to it." The virtue of loving insight overrode "selfishness"; that is, it gave those endowed with it the "courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn." ^*

Carlyle's tribute to the fox—an animal that provided Machiavelli with the prototype of crafty political leadership—unexpectedly emphasized the animal's moral superiority to his human counterpart. Both knew where to find their prey, but what the human predator, bent only on his own advantage, knew by craft and cunning, the fox knew by virtue of the kind of gratuitous, unreflective, and uncalculating understanding that Carlyle associated with heroism. ^† Machiavelli's fox, in contrast to Carlyle's, lacked "vulpine gifts and graces," just as his lion lacked the unconscious delight in its own powers that made it impossible for an animal to misuse them. The Machiavellian hero, like Milton's Satan a rebel against

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*

"Selfishness," in this context, refers to caution and timidity, excessive prudence, or simple cowardice, not to the inclination to favor one's own interests above those of others. The Christian and republican traditions agree in identifying virtue with a kind of dauntless good cheer, not at all with altruism or self-abnegation. That much they share; what divides them is suggested by Carlyle's coupling of "virtues" with "graces."

†

"Does not the very Fox know something of Nature? Exactly so: it knows where the geese lodge! The human Reynard, very frequent everywhere in the world, what more does he know but this and the like of this? Nay, it should be considered too, that if the Fox had not a certain vulpine morality, he could not even know where the geese were, or get at the geese! If he spent his time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his own misery, his ill usage by Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and so forth; and had not courage, promptitude, practicality, and other suitable vulpine gifts and graces, he would catch no geese. We may say of the Fox too, that his morality and insight are of the same dimensions; different faces of the same internal unity of vulpine life!"

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