When the Spirit of God came upon Saul, so that he prophesied among the company of prophets that met him, all that knew him beforetime asked one another what was this that was come to the son of Kish? was Saul also among the prophets? Insomuch that it became a proverb, “Is Saul also among the prophets?” No prophet is accepted in his own country; that is become a proverb too. And as with Saul, a young man among the prophets, so with youthful David among the men of war from their youth. Eliab, his eldest brother, knew, as he thought, the pride and the naughtiness of his heart in coming down to the camp to see the battle; but he knew not what sterling stuff there was in the stripling. Why had Jesse’s youngest son come down hither? and with whom had he left those few sheep in the wilderness? Eliab’s anger was kindled against David for his presumptuous and idle curiosity. His scorn was well-nigh as supreme as that of Goliath himself for the youth,—for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance. Quit his proper rusticities and retirement for the valley of Elah, that bristled with spear-heads and resounded with the din of battle! a boy like him, that should be feeding his father’s sheep at Bethlehem! Was there not a cause? None that Eliab knew of, for one. He had never seen anything in the lad to warrant this forwardness. Not to Eliab or his brethren was it given to foresee in that fresh-coloured shepherd boy the present slayer of Goliath of Gath, and the bosom friend of princely Jonathan, and the paulo-post-future king of Israel, Israel’s sweetest singer, and the man after God’s own heart.

The adage about unrecognised worth, on the part of kinsfolk and neighbours, the proverb of the prophet without honour in his own country and in his father’s house—has its parallel passage in the Hercules Furens of Euripides—

Plutarch adopts it in his treatise on Exile, where he says that you very rarely find a wise man taken for such in his own country: “τῶν φρονιμωτάτων καὶ σοφωτάτων ὀλίγους ἂν εὕροις ἐν ταῖς ἑαυτῶν πατρίσι κεκηδευμένους.”

The tradition that Pythagoras borrowed all his learning and philosophy from the East is rejected by modern scholars: could not so great a man, they ask, dispense with foreign teachers? And the answer is, that assuredly he could and did; but his countrymen, it is to be observed, by a very natural process of thought, looked upon his greatness as the result of his Eastern education. “No man is a prophet in his own country, and the imaginative Greeks were peculiarly prone to invest the distant and the foreign with striking attributes;” unable to believe in wisdom springing up from among themselves, they turned to the East as to a vast and unknown region, whence all novelty, even of thought, must come. “Πᾶσι τοῖς φιλοσόφοις,” says a Greek philosopher, “ἔδοξε χαλεπὸς ἐν τῇ πατρίδι ὁ βίος.”

As the first, so the most arduous conquests of Mohammed were, says Gibbon, those of his wife, his servant, his pupil, and his friend; since he presented himself as a prophet to those who were most conversant with his infirmities as a man. “Thus was Mohammed,” writes Dean Milman, after recording the conversion of the child Ali, “the prophet of his household. Slowly however did he win proselytes, even among his own kindred. Three years elapsed before the faith received the accession of Abubeker and of Othman, the future caliphs. Mohammed at length is accepted as the prophet of his family, of the noble and priestly house of Hashem. Abu Talib, his uncle, remains almost alone an unbeliever. And now Mohammed aspires to be the prophet of his tribe.” But in effect the “false” prophet is an exception to the rule of no prophet accepted in his own house and country. An American commentator on Shakspeare incidentally expounds that rule, in remarking on the degree to which our sense of truth is impeded or impaired by the pressure on our minds of what is actual and visible and present. A faithful painter may, he observes, portray a human face with all its characteristic expression, and in all its true individuality; and yet the nearest relatives are not only the hardest to satisfy, but, by the very nature of their familiarity with the subject, will often be the worst judges of the likeness. We are all of us, he adds, “very apt to fail in appreciating the best and noblest parts in the characters of those whom we know familiarly, for the thousand familiarities of common life interpose; and it is sad to think that often it is not until death has hallowed and idealized the character, that we can do it justice.” Envy and jealousy, remarks David Hume in treating of the recognition of real genius, have too much place in a narrow circle, and even familiar acquaintance with the person of one thus gifted may diminish the applause due to his performance—that is, among those of his own age and country. Pindar and Æschylus, we are told, left their country because those who were born their equals could not endure to see them rise their superiors. “What a war against the gods is this!” a heathen admirer is made to exclaim: “it seems as if it were decreed by a public edict that no one shall receive from them any gift beyond a certain value; and that if they do receive it they shall be permitted to return the gods no thanks for it in their native city.” There are towns so barbarous, remarks Boccaccio, in Landor’s “Pentameron,” that they must be informed by strangers of their own great man when they happen to have produced one; and would then detract from his merits, that they might not exhibit their awkwardness in doing him honour, or their shame in withholding it.

Charles IX., on a progress through Provence, sent for Nostradamus, and finding in what slight respect he was held by his countrymen, made a point of publicly declaring, with right royal emphasis, that he should take as a slight to himself the slighting of that philosopher.

In the Journal to Stella, Swift hails with cordiality—for the Dean could be cordial on occasion—the appreciation in polite English circles, by ministers and scholars, of Parnell the poet: “Lord Bolingbroke likes Parnell mightily; and it is pleasant to see that one who hardly passed for anything in Ireland makes his way here with a little friendly forwarding.” In no unlike spirit and style writes Horace Walpole to Marshal Conway, then travelling abroad: “The honours you have received, though I have so little taste for such things myself, gave me great satisfaction; and I do not know whether there is not more pleasure in not being a prophet in one’s own country, when one is almost received like Mohammed in every other. To be an idol at home is no assured touchstone of merit. Stocks and stones have been adored in fifty regions, but do not bear transplanting. The Apollo Belvedere and the Hercules Farnese may lose their temples, but never lose their estimation, by travelling.” In another letter we have Walpole exclaiming, “But adieu, retrospect! it is as idle as prophecy, the characteristic of which is never to be believed where alone it could be useful, i.e., in its own country.” And once more, in a later epistle, commenting on the darksome aspect of the times: “That the scene grows very serious there is no doubt; nor do I assume vanity from having possessed the spirit of prophecy—a most useless talent, as predictions never serve as warnings. We know prophets are not honoured in their own country: where then should they be honoured? where they are not known? where probably they never are heard of?” But such notes of interrogation might be multiplied ad libitum.

It is to a professedly common-place philosopher we owe the remark, that while there are families in which there exists a preposterous over-estimate of the talents and acquirements of their several members, there are other families in which there exists a depressing and unreasonable under-estimate of the same. He speaks to his knowledge of such a thing as a family in which certain boys during their early education had it ceaselessly drilled into them that they were the idlest, stupidest, and most ignorant boys in the world; which boys had no sooner gone to a great public school than like rockets they went up forthwith to the top of their classes, and never lost their places there, and afterwards at the university distinguished themselves pre-eminently in honours: “It will not surprise people who know much of human nature, to be told that through this brilliant career of school and college work the home belief in their idleness and ignorance continued unchanged, and that hardly at its end was the toil-worn senior wrangler regarded as other than an idle and useless blockhead.” The writer adds an example of his knowledge of a successful author—to be identified of course by some readers, whose relatives never believed, till the reviews assured them of it, that his writings were anything but “contemptible and discreditable trash.”

The subject is renewed in the ensuing section, on the text of a prophet’s non-acceptance in his own country.