hness (or decadence) of much of the rest of
mankind, is a signal example of how my plan should not be carried out.
Carlyle's heroes are mostly supermen; individuals, not types.

Now, I suggest to you that we agree to classify my colleagues,
the masters of the mighty vapour, the beings who are the real
cloud-compellers of our day, as heroes. If I mistake not, I have a
prior claim to the word, too, in that Hero's engine is the type of all
our modern prime movers, the supreme type to which we are ever
striving to approximate. Masters of the vapour-driven sphere! Not men,
but heroes, having their own thoughts, their own joys and sorrows,
their own gods; more than men, in that they need less than men, less
than gods, in that they owe allegiance to them.

Well, then, here is your dramatic problem. Until you recognise the
fact that such beings as I have indicated do actually inhabit the
earth and cover the sea with their handiwork, until you consider the
tremendous fact that your world's work is done by heroes, and not
by politicians and commercial travellers, that, in short, your
intellectual Frankensteins have made a million-brained monster whom
you cannot, dare not destroy, your drama will not be a living force. I
hold out no hope that the problem is easy of solution; I only know it
exists. You will first of all become as little children, and learn, as
best you may, what makes the wheels go round. Learn, that you may
teach, by your creative art. Above all, remember, when you rise to
protest that I am forgetting Nature, that together with "the way of
an eagle in the air, and the way of a serpent upon a rock," the Hebrew
poet has joined "the way of a ship in the midst of the sea, and the
way of a man with a maid."

XXXIII

I have been up town "to meeting," as my father used to say. The air
was clear and warm when my friend the Mate appeared on deck in all the
splendour of "shore gear." He affects a material which never wears
out. "Mr. McAlnwick, these here are the pants I was married in!" He
reserves his serious thoughts for underwear, of which he carries a
portentous quantity to last a voyage. Smart young cadets, who never
wear the same collar twice, and sport white shirts and soiled souls in
seamen's missions, are the Mate's aversion. He has severe censures for
"gallivantin'" and "dressin' for show." He approves of my own staid
habits of life, after the fashion of those elderly folk who admire in
others what th