Heroes and Hero Worship

T >> Thomas Carlyle >> Heroes and Hero Worship

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Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakspeare may recognize that he too
was a _Prophet_, in his way; of an insight analogous to the Prophetic,
though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to this man also
divine; unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven; "We are such stuff as
Dreams are made of!" That scroll in Westminster Abbey, which few read with
understanding, is of the depth of any seer. But the man sang; did not
preach, except musically. We called Dante the melodious Priest of
Middle-Age Catholicism. May we not call Shakspeare the still more
melodious Priest of a _true_ Catholicism, the "Universal Church" of the
Future and of all times? No narrow superstition, harsh asceticism,
intolerance, fanatical fierceness or perversion: a Revelation, so far as
it goes, that such a thousand-fold hidden beauty and divineness dwells in
all Nature; which let all men worship as they can! We may say without
offence, that there rises a kind of universal Psalm out of this Shakspeare
too; not unfit to make itself heard among the still more sacred Psalms.
Not in disharmony with these, if we understood them, but in harmony!--I
cannot call this Shakspeare a "Sceptic," as some do; his indifference to
the creeds and theological quarrels of his time misleading them. No:
neither unpatriotic, though he says little about his Patriotism; nor
sceptic, though he says little about his Faith. Such "indifference" was
the fruit of his greatness withal: his whole heart was in his own grand
sphere of worship (we may call it such); these other controversies, vitally
important to other men, were not vital to him.

But call it worship, call it what you will, is it not a right glorious
thing, and set of things, this that Shakspeare has brought us? For myself,
I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness in the fact of such a
man being sent into this Earth. Is he not an eye to us all; a blessed
heaven-sent Bringer of Light?--And, at bottom, was it not perhaps far
better that this Shakspeare, every way an unconscious man, was _conscious_
of no Heavenly message? He did not feel, like Mahomet, because he saw into
those internal Splendors, that he specially was the "Prophet of God:" and
was he not greater than Mahomet in that? Greater; and also, if we compute
strictly, as we did in Dante's case, more successful. It was intrinsically
an error that notion of Mahomet's, of his supreme Prophethood; and has come
down to us inextricably involved in error to this day; dragging along with
it such a coil of fables, impurities, intolerances, as makes it a
questionable step for me here and now to say, as I have done, that Mahomet
was a true Speaker at all, and not rather an ambitious charlatan,
perversity and simulacrum; no Speaker, but a Babbler! Even in Arabia, as I
compute, Mahomet will have exhausted himself and become obsolete, while
this Shakspeare, this Dante may still be young;--while this Shakspeare may
still pretend to be a Priest of Mankind, of Arabia as of other places, for
unlimited periods to come!

Compared with any speaker or singer one knows, even with Aeschylus or
Homer, why should he not, for veracity and universality, last like them?
He is _sincere_ as they; reaches deep down like them, to the universal and
perennial. But as for Mahomet, I think it had been better for him _not_ to
be so conscious! Alas, poor Mahomet; all that he was _conscious_ of was a
mere error; a futility and triviality,--as indeed such ever is. The truly
great in him too was the unconscious: that he was a wild Arab lion of the
desert, and did speak out with that great thunder-voice of his, not by
words which he _thought_ to be great, but by actions, by feelings, by a
history which _were_ great! His Koran has become a stupid piece of prolix
absurdity; we do not believe, like him, that God wrote that! The Great Man
here too, as always, is a Force of Nature. whatsoever is truly great in
him springs up from the _in_articulate deeps.

Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of a
Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of
Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks to
him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account him a god, like
Odin, while he dwelt with us;--on which point there were much to be said.
But I will say rather, or repeat: In spite of the sad state Hero-worship
now lies in, consider what this Shakspeare has actually become among us.
Which Englishman we ever made, in this land of ours, which million of
Englishmen, would we not give up rather than the Stratford Peasant? There
is no regiment of highest Dignitaries that we would sell him for. He is
the grandest thing we have yet done. For our honor among foreign nations,
as an ornament to our English Household, what item is there that we would
not surrender rather than him? Consider now, if they asked us, Will you
give up your Indian Empire or your Shakspeare, you English; never have had
any Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakspeare? Really it were a
grave question. Official persons would answer doubtless in official
language; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to answer:
Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakspeare!
Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakspeare does not
go, he lasts forever with us; we cannot give up our Shakspeare!

Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him merely as a real,
marketable, tangibly useful possession. England, before long, this Island
of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in America, in New
Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there will be a Saxondom
covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what is it that can keep all
these together into virtually one Nation, so that they do not fall out and
fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike intercourse, helping one another?
This is justly regarded as the greatest practical problem, the thing all
manner of sovereignties and governments are here to accomplish: what is it
that will accomplish this? Acts of Parliament, administrative
prime-ministers cannot. America is parted from us, so far as Parliament
could part it. Call it not fantastic, for there is much reality in it:
Here, I say, is an English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or
combination of Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakspeare, does not
he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest,
yet strongest of rallying-signs; indestructible; really more valuable in
that point of view than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We can
fancy him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a thousand
years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever, under what sort
of Parish-Constable soever, English men and women are, they will say to one
another: "Yes, this Shakspeare is ours; we produced him, we speak and
think by him; we are of one blood and kind with him." The most
common-sense politician, too, if he pleases, may think of that.

Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate
voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the
heart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered,
scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity at
all; yet the noble Italy is actually _one_: Italy produced its Dante;
Italy can speak! The Czar of all the Russias, he is strong with so many
bayonets, Cossacks and cannons; and does a great feat in keeping such a
tract of Earth politically together; but he cannot yet speak. Something
great in him, but it is a dumb greatness. He has had no voice of genius,
to be heard of all men and times. He must learn to speak. He is a great
dumb monster hitherto. His cannons and Cossacks will all have rusted into
nonentity, while that Dante's voice is still audible. The Nation that has
a Dante is bound together as no dumb Russia can be.--We must here end what
we had to say of the _Hero-Poet_.

[May 15, 1840.]
LECTURE IV.
THE HERO AS PRIEST. LUTHER; REFORMATION: KNOX; PURITANISM.

Our present discourse is to be of the Great Man as Priest. We have
repeatedly endeavored to explain that all sorts of Heroes are intrinsically
of the same material; that given a great soul, open to the Divine
Significance of Life, then there is given a man fit to speak of this, to
sing of this, to fight and work for this, in a great, victorious, enduring
manner; there is given a Hero,--the outward shape of whom will depend on
the time and the environment he finds himself in. The Priest too, as I
understand it, is a kind of Prophet; in him too there is required to be a
light of inspiration, as we must name it. He presides over the worship of
the people; is the Uniter of them with the Unseen Holy. He is the
spiritual Captain of the people; as the Prophet is their spiritual King
with many captains: he guides them heavenward, by wise guidance through
this Earth and its work. The ideal of him is, that he too be what we can
call a voice from the unseen Heaven; interpreting, even as the Prophet did,
and in a more familiar manner unfolding the same to men. The unseen
Heaven,--the "open secret of the Universe,"--which so few have an eye for!
He is the Prophet shorn of his more awful splendor; burning with mild
equable radiance, as the enlightener of daily life. This, I say, is the
ideal of a Priest. So in old times; so in these, and in all times. One
knows very well that, in reducing ideals to practice, great latitude of
tolerance is needful; very great. But a Priest who is not this at all, who
does not any longer aim or try to be this, is a character--of whom we had
rather not speak in this place.

Luther and Knox were by express vocation Priests, and did faithfully
perform that function in its common sense. Yet it will suit us better here
to consider them chiefly in their historical character, rather as Reformers
than Priests. There have been other Priests perhaps equally notable, in
calmer times, for doing faithfully the office of a Leader of Worship;
bringing down, by faithful heroism in that kind, a light from Heaven into
the daily life of their people; leading them forward, as under God's
guidance, in the way wherein they were to go. But when this same _way_ was
a rough one, of battle, confusion and danger, the spiritual Captain, who
led through that, becomes, especially to us who live under the fruit of his
leading, more notable than any other. He is the warfaring and battling
Priest; who led his people, not to quiet faithful labor as in smooth times,
but to faithful valorous conflict, in times all violent, dismembered: a
more perilous service, and a more memorable one, be it higher or not.
These two men we will account our best Priests, inasmuch as they were our
best Reformers. Nay I may ask, Is not every true Reformer, by the nature
of him, a _Priest_ first of all? He appeals to Heaven's invisible justice
against Earth's visible force; knows that it, the invisible, is strong and
alone strong. He is a believer in the divine truth of things; a _seer_,
seeing through the shows of things; a worshipper, in one way or the other,
of the divine truth of things; a Priest, that is. If he be not first a
Priest, he will never be good for much as a Reformer.

Thus then, as we have seen Great Men, in various situations, building up
Religions, heroic Forms of human Existence in this world, Theories of Life
worthy to be sung by a Dante, Practices of Life by a Shakspeare,--we are
now to see the reverse process; which also is necessary, which also may be
carried on in the Heroic manner. Curious how this should be necessary:
yet necessary it is. The mild shining of the Poet's light has to give
place to the fierce lightning of the Reformer: unfortunately the Reformer
too is a personage that cannot fail in History! The Poet indeed, with his
mildness, what is he but the product and ultimate adjustment of Reform, or
Prophecy, with its fierceness? No wild Saint Dominics and Thebaid
Eremites, there had been no melodious Dante; rough Practical Endeavor,
Scandinavian and other, from Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila to
Cranmer, enabled Shakspeare to speak. Nay the finished Poet, I remark
sometimes, is a symptom that his epoch itself has reached perfection and is
finished; that before long there will be a new epoch, new Reformers needed.

Doubtless it were finer, could we go along always in the way of _music_; be
tamed and taught by our Poets, as the rude creatures were by their Orpheus
of old. Or failing this rhythmic _musical_ way, how good were it could we
get so much as into the _equable_ way; I mean, if _peaceable_ Priests,
reforming from day to day, would always suffice us! But it is not so; even
this latter has not yet been realized. Alas, the battling Reformer too is,
from time to time, a needful and inevitable phenomenon. Obstructions are
never wanting: the very things that were once indispensable furtherances
become obstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us,--a
business often of enormous difficulty. It is notable enough, surely, how a
Theorem or spiritual Representation, so we may call it, which once took in
the whole Universe, and was completely satisfactory in all parts of it to
the highly discursive acute intellect of Dante, one of the greatest in the
world,--had in the course of another century become dubitable to common
intellects; become deniable; and is now, to every one of us, flatly
incredible, obsolete as Odin's Theorem! To Dante, human Existence, and
God's ways with men, were all well represented by those _Malebolges_,
_Purgatorios_; to Luther not well. How was this? Why could not Dante's
Catholicism continue; but Luther's Protestantism must needs follow? Alas,
nothing will _continue_.

I do not make much of "Progress of the Species," as handled in these times
of ours; nor do I think you would care to hear much about it. The talk on
that subject is too often of the most extravagant, confused sort. Yet I
may say, the fact itself seems certain enough; nay we can trace out the
inevitable necessity of it in the nature of things. Every man, as I have
stated somewhere, is not only a learner but a doer: he learns with the
mind given him what has been; but with the same mind he discovers farther,
he invents and devises somewhat of his own. Absolutely without originality
there is no man. No man whatever believes, or can believe, exactly what
his grandfather believed: he enlarges somewhat, by fresh discovery, his
view of the Universe, and consequently his Theorem of the Universe,--which
is an _infinite_ Universe, and can never be embraced wholly or finally by
any view or Theorem, in any conceivable enlargement: he enlarges somewhat,
I say; finds somewhat that was credible to his grandfather incredible to
him, false to him, inconsistent with some new thing he has discovered or
observed. It is the history of every man; and in the history of Mankind we
see it summed up into great historical amounts,--revolutions, new epochs.
Dante's Mountain of Purgatory does _not_ stand "in the ocean of the other
Hemisphere," when Columbus has once sailed thither! Men find no such thing
extant in the other Hemisphere. It is not there. It must cease to be
believed to be there. So with all beliefs whatsoever in this world,--all
Systems of Belief, and Systems of Practice that spring from these.

If we add now the melancholy fact, that when Belief waxes uncertain,
Practice too becomes unsound, and errors, injustices and miseries
everywhere more and more prevail, we shall see material enough for
revolution. At all turns, a man who will _do_ faithfully, needs to believe
firmly. If he have to ask at every turn the world's suffrage; if he cannot
dispense with the world's suffrage, and make his own suffrage serve, he is
a poor eye-servant; the work committed to him will be _mis_done. Every
such man is a daily contributor to the inevitable downfall. Whatsoever
work he does, dishonestly, with an eye to the outward look of it, is a new
offence, parent of new misery to somebody or other. Offences accumulate
till they become insupportable; and are then violently burst through,
cleared off as by explosion. Dante's sublime Catholicism, incredible now
in theory, and defaced still worse by faithless, doubting and dishonest
practice, has to be torn asunder by a Luther, Shakspeare's noble Feudalism,
as beautiful as it once looked and was, has to end in a French Revolution.
The accumulation of offences is, as we say, too literally _exploded_,
blasted asunder volcanically; and there are long troublous periods, before
matters come to a settlement again.

Surely it were mournful enough to look only at this face of the matter, and
find in all human opinions and arrangements merely the fact that they were
uncertain, temporary, subject to the law of death! At bottom, it is not
so: all death, here too we find, is but of the body, not of the essence or
soul; all destruction, by violent revolution or howsoever it be, is but new
creation on a wider scale. Odinism was _Valor_; Christianism was
_Humility_, a nobler kind of Valor. No thought that ever dwelt honestly as
true in the heart of man but _was_ an honest insight into God's truth on
man's part, and _has_ an essential truth in it which endures through all
changes, an everlasting possession for us all. And, on the other hand,
what a melancholy notion is that, which has to represent all men, in all
countries and times except our own, as having spent their life in blind
condemnable error, mere lost Pagans, Scandinavians, Mahometans, only that
we might have the true ultimate knowledge! All generations of men were
lost and wrong, only that this present little section of a generation might
be saved and right. They all marched forward there, all generations since
the beginning of the world, like the Russian soldiers into the ditch of
Schweidnitz Fort, only to fill up the ditch with their dead bodies, that we
might march over and take the place! It is an incredible hypothesis.

Such incredible hypothesis we have seen maintained with fierce emphasis;
and this or the other poor individual man, with his sect of individual men,
marching as over the dead bodies of all men, towards sure victory but when
he too, with his hypothesis and ultimate infallible credo, sank into the
ditch, and became a dead body, what was to be said?--Withal, it is an
important fact in the nature of man, that he tends to reckon his own
insight as final, and goes upon it as such. He will always do it, I
suppose, in one or the other way; but it must be in some wider, wiser way
than this. Are not all true men that live, or that ever lived, soldiers of
the same army, enlisted, under Heaven's captaincy, to do battle against the
same enemy, the empire of Darkness and Wrong? Why should we misknow one
another, fight not against the enemy but against ourselves, from mere
difference of uniform? All uniforms shall be good, so they hold in them
true valiant men. All fashions of arms, the Arab turban and swift
scimetar, Thor's strong hammer smiting down _Jotuns_, shall be welcome.
Luther's battle-voice, Dante's march-melody, all genuine things are with
us, not against us. We are all under one Captain. soldiers of the same
host.--Let us now look a little at this Luther's fighting; what kind of
battle it was, and how he comported himself in it. Luther too was of our
spiritual Heroes; a Prophet to his country and time.

As introductory to the whole, a remark about Idolatry will perhaps be in
place here. One of Mahomet's characteristics, which indeed belongs to all
Prophets, is unlimited implacable zeal against Idolatry. It is the grand
theme of Prophets: Idolatry, the worshipping of dead Idols as the
Divinity, is a thing they cannot away with, but have to denounce
continually, and brand with inexpiable reprobation; it is the chief of all
the sins they see done under the sun. This is worth noting. We will not
enter here into the theological question about Idolatry. Idol is
_Eidolon_, a thing seen, a symbol. It is not God, but a Symbol of God; and
perhaps one may question whether any the most benighted mortal ever took it
for more than a Symbol. I fancy, he did not think that the poor image his
own hands had made _was_ God; but that God was emblemed by it, that God was
in it some way or other. And now in this sense, one may ask, Is not all
worship whatsoever a worship by Symbols, by _eidola_, or things seen?
Whether _seen_, rendered visible as an image or picture to the bodily eye;
or visible only to the inward eye, to the imagination, to the intellect:
this makes a superficial, but no substantial difference. It is still a
Thing Seen, significant of Godhead; an Idol. The most rigorous Puritan has
his Confession of Faith, and intellectual Representation of Divine things,
and worships thereby; thereby is worship first made possible for him. All
creeds, liturgies, religious forms, conceptions that fitly invest religious
feelings, are in this sense _eidola_, things seen. All worship whatsoever
must proceed by Symbols, by Idols:--we may say, all Idolatry is
comparative, and the worst Idolatry is only _more_ idolatrous.

Where, then, lies the evil of it? Some fatal evil must lie in it, or
earnest prophetic men would not on all hands so reprobate it. Why is
Idolatry so hateful to Prophets? It seems to me as if, in the worship of
those poor wooden symbols, the thing that had chiefly provoked the Prophet,
and filled his inmost soul with indignation and aversion, was not exactly
what suggested itself to his own thought, and came out of him in words to
others, as the thing. The rudest heathen that worshipped Canopus, or the
Caabah Black-Stone, he, as we saw, was superior to the horse that
worshipped nothing at all! Nay there was a kind of lasting merit in that
poor act of his; analogous to what is still meritorious in Poets:
recognition of a certain endless _divine_ beauty and significance in stars
and all natural objects whatsoever. Why should the Prophet so mercilessly
condemn him? The poorest mortal worshipping his Fetish, while his heart is
full of it, may be an object of pity, of contempt and avoidance, if you
will; but cannot surely be an object of hatred. Let his heart _be_
honestly full of it, the whole space of his dark narrow mind illuminated
thereby; in one word, let him entirely _believe_ in his Fetish,--it will
then be, I should say, if not well with him, yet as well as it can readily
be made to be, and you will leave him alone, unmolested there.

But here enters the fatal circumstance of Idolatry, that, in the era of the
Prophets, no man's mind _is_ any longer honestly filled with his Idol or
Symbol. Before the Prophet can arise who, seeing through it, knows it to
be mere wood, many men must have begun dimly to doubt that it was little
more. Condemnable Idolatry is _insincere_ Idolatry. Doubt has eaten out
the heart of it: a human soul is seen clinging spasmodically to an Ark of
the Covenant, which it half feels now to have become a Phantasm. This is
one of the balefulest sights. Souls are no longer filled with their
Fetish; but only pretend to be filled, and would fain make themselves feel
that they are filled. "You do not believe," said Coleridge; "you only
believe that you believe." It is the final scene in all kinds of Worship
and Symbolism; the sure symptom that death is now nigh. It is equivalent
to what we call Formulism, and Worship of Formulas, in these days of ours.
No more immoral act can be done by a human creature; for it is the
beginning of all immorality, or rather it is the impossibility henceforth
of any morality whatsoever: the innermost moral soul is paralyzed thereby,
cast into fatal magnetic sleep! Men are no longer _sincere_ men. I do not
wonder that the earnest man denounces this, brands it, prosecutes it with
inextinguishable aversion. He and it, all good and it, are at death-feud.
Blamable Idolatry is _Cant_, and even what one may call Sincere-Cant.
Sincere-Cant: that is worth thinking of! Every sort of Worship ends with
this phasis.

I find Luther to have been a Breaker of Idols, no less than any other
Prophet. The wooden gods of the Koreish, made of timber and bees-wax, were
not more hateful to Mahomet than Tetzel's Pardons of Sin, made of sheepskin
and ink, were to Luther. It is the property of every Hero, in every time,
in every place and situation, that he come back to reality; that he stand
upon things, and not shows of things. According as he loves, and
venerates, articulately or with deep speechless thought, the awful
realities of things, so will the hollow shows of things, however regular,
decorous, accredited by Koreishes or Conclaves, be intolerable and
detestable to him. Protestantism, too, is the work of a Prophet: the
prophet-work of that sixteenth century. The first stroke of honest
demolition to an ancient thing grown false and idolatrous; preparatory afar
off to a new thing, which shall be true, and authentically divine!

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