SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME {1}

by Charles Kingsley




'Truth is stranger than fiction.' A trite remark. We all say it
again and again: but how few of us believe it! How few of us, when
we read the history of heroical times and heroical men, take the
story simply as it stands! On the contrary, we try to explain it
away; to prove it all not to have been so very wonderful; to impute
accident, circumstance, mean and commonplace motives; to lower every
story down to the level of our own littleness, or what we (unjustly
to ourselves and to the God who is near us all) choose to consider
our level; to rationalise away all the wonders, till we make them at
last impossible, and give up 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.