Heroes and Hero Worship
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Thomas Carlyle >> Heroes and Hero Worship
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To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a notable, respectable
product of the modern ages. Their existence too is modified, to the very
basis of it, by the existence of Books. Universities arose while there
were yet no Books procurable; while a man, for a single Book, had to give
an estate of land. That, in those circumstances, when a man had some
knowledge to communicate, he should do it by gathering the learners round
him, face to face, was a necessity for him. If you wanted to know what
Abelard knew, you must go and listen to Abelard. Thousands, as many as
thirty thousand, went to hear Abelard and that metaphysical theology of
his. And now for any other teacher who had also something of his own to
teach, there was a great convenience opened: so many thousands eager to
learn were already assembled yonder; of all places the best place for him
was that. For any third teacher it was better still; and grew ever the
better, the more teachers there came. It only needed now that the King
took notice of this new phenomenon; combined or agglomerated the various
schools into one school; gave it edifices, privileges, encouragements, and
named it _Universitas_, or School of all Sciences: the University of
Paris, in its essential characters, was there. The model of all subsequent
Universities; which down even to these days, for six centuries now, have
gone on to found themselves. Such, I conceive, was the origin of
Universities.
It is clear, however, that with this simple circumstance, facility of
getting Books, the whole conditions of the business from top to bottom were
changed. Once invent Printing, you metamorphosed all Universities, or
superseded them! The Teacher needed not now to gather men personally round
him, that he might _speak_ to them what he knew: print it in a Book, and
all learners far and wide, for a trifle, had it each at his own fireside,
much more effectually to learn it!--Doubtless there is still peculiar
virtue in Speech; even writers of Books may still, in some circumstances,
find it convenient to speak also,--witness our present meeting here! There
is, one would say, and must ever remain while man has a tongue, a distinct
province for Speech as well as for Writing and Printing. In regard to all
things this must remain; to Universities among others. But the limits of
the two have nowhere yet been pointed out, ascertained; much less put in
practice: the University which would completely take in that great new
fact, of the existence of Printed Books, and stand on a clear footing for
the Nineteenth Century as the Paris one did for the Thirteenth, has not yet
come into existence. If we think of it, all that a University, or final
highest School can do for us, is still but what the first School began
doing,--teach us to _read_. We learn to _read_, in various languages, in
various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of Books.
But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is
the Books themselves! It depends on what we read, after all manner of
Professors have done their best for us. The true University of these days
is a Collection of Books.
But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, all is changed, in its
preaching, in its working, by the introduction of Books. The Church is the
working recognized Union of our Priests or Prophets, of those who by wise
teaching guide the souls of men. While there was no Writing, even while
there was no Easy-writing, or _Printing_, the preaching of the voice was
the natural sole method of performing this. But now with Books! --He that
can write a true Book, to persuade England, is not he the Bishop and
Archbishop, the Primate of England and of All England? I many a time say,
the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these _are_ the real
working effective Church of a modern country. Nay not only our preaching,
but even our worship, is not it too accomplished by means of Printed Books?
The noble sentiment which a gifted soul has clothed for us in melodious
words, which brings melody into our hearts,--is not this essentially, if we
will understand it, of the nature of worship? There are many, in all
countries, who, in this confused time, have no other method of worship. He
who, in any way, shows us better than we knew before that a lily of the
fields is beautiful, does he not show it us as an effluence of the Fountain
of all Beauty; as the _handwriting_, made visible there, of the great Maker
of the Universe? He has sung for us, made us sing with him, a little verse
of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How much more he who sings, who says,
or in any way brings home to our heart the noble doings, feelings, darings
and endurances of a brother man! He has verily touched our hearts as with
a live coal _from the altar_. Perhaps there is no worship more authentic.
Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an "apocalypse of Nature," a
revealing of the "open secret." It may well enough be named, in Fichte's
style, a "continuous revelation" of the Godlike in the Terrestrial and
Common. The Godlike does ever, in very truth, endure there; is brought
out, now in this dialect, now in that, with various degrees of clearness:
all true gifted Singers and Speakers are, consciously or unconsciously,
doing so. The dark stormful indignation of a Byron, so wayward and
perverse, may have touches of it; nay the withered mockery of a French
sceptic,--his mockery of the False, a love and worship of the True. How
much more the sphere-harmony of a Shakspeare, of a Goethe; the cathedral
music of a Milton! They are something too, those humble genuine lark-notes
of a Burns,--skylark, starting from the humble furrow, far overhead into
the blue depths, and singing to us so genuinely there! For all true
singing is of the nature of worship; as indeed all true _working_ may be
said to be,--whereof such _singing_ is but the record, and fit melodious
representation, to us. Fragments of a real "Church Liturgy" and "Body of
Homilies," strangely disguised from the common eye, are to be found
weltering in that huge froth-ocean of Printed Speech we loosely call
Literature! Books are our Church too.
Or turning now to the Government of men. Witenagemote, old Parliament, was
a great thing. The affairs of the nation were there deliberated and
decided; what we were to _do_ as a nation. But does not, though the name
Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now, everywhere and at
all times, in a far more comprehensive way, _out_ of Parliament altogether?
Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters'
Gallery yonder, there sat a _Fourth Estate_ more important far than they
all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal
fact,--very momentous to us in these times. Literature is our Parliament
too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is
equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing
brings Printing; brings universal everyday extempore Printing, as we see at
present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a
power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in
all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or
garnitures. the requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which others
will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite. The nation is governed
by all that has tongue in the nation: Democracy is virtually _there_. Add
only, that whatsoever power exists will have itself, by and by, organized;
working secretly under bandages, obscurations, obstructions, it will never
rest till it get to work free, unencumbered, visible to all. Democracy
virtually extant will insist on becoming palpably extant.--
On all sides, are we not driven to the conclusion that, of the things which
man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful and
worthy are the things we call Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper with
black ink on them;--from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew BOOK,
what have they not done, what are they not doing!--For indeed, whatever be
the outward form of the thing (bits of paper, as we say, and black ink), is
it not verily, at bottom, the highest act of man's faculty that produces a
Book? It is the _Thought_ of man; the true thaumaturgic virtue; by which
man works all things whatsoever. All that he does, and brings to pass, is
the vesture of a Thought. This London City, with all its houses, palaces,
steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what
is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One;--a huge
immeasurable Spirit of a THOUGHT, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust,
Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it!
Not a brick was made but some man had to _think_ of the making of that
brick.--The thing we called "bits of paper with traces of black ink," is
the _purest_ embodiment a Thought of man can have. No wonder it is, in all
ways, the activest and noblest.
All this, of the importance and supreme importance of the Man of Letters in
modern Society, and how the Press is to such a degree superseding the
Pulpit, the Senate, the _Senatus Academicus_ and much else, has been
admitted for a good while; and recognized often enough, in late times, with
a sort of sentimental triumph and wonderment. It seems to me, the
Sentimental by and by will have to give place to the Practical. If Men of
Letters _are_ so incalculably influential, actually performing such work
for us from age to age, and even from day to day, then I think we may
conclude that Men of Letters will not always wander like unrecognized
unregulated Ishmaelites among us! Whatsoever thing, as I said above, has
virtual unnoticed power will cast off its wrappages, bandages, and step
forth one day with palpably articulated, universally visible power. That
one man wear the clothes, and take the wages, of a function which is done
by quite another: there can be no profit in this; this is not right, it is
wrong. And yet, alas, the _making_ of it right,--what a business, for long
times to come! Sure enough, this that we call Organization of the Literary
Guild is still a great way off, encumbered with all manner of complexities.
If you asked me what were the best possible organization for the Men of
Letters in modern society; the arrangement of furtherance and regulation,
grounded the most accurately on the actual facts of their position and of
the world's position,--I should beg to say that the problem far exceeded my
faculty! It is not one man's faculty; it is that of many successive men
turned earnestly upon it, that will bring out even an approximate solution.
What the best arrangement were, none of us could say. But if you ask,
Which is the worst? I answer: This which we now have, that Chaos should
sit umpire in it; this is the worst. To the best, or any good one, there
is yet a long way.
One remark I must not omit, That royal or parliamentary grants of money are
by no means the chief thing wanted! To give our Men of Letters stipends,
endowments and all furtherance of cash, will do little towards the
business. On the whole, one is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of
money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is no evil to be
poor; that there ought to be Literary Men poor,--to show whether they are
genuine or not! Mendicant Orders, bodies of good men doomed to beg, were
instituted in the Christian Church; a most natural and even necessary
development of the spirit of Christianity. It was itself founded on
Poverty, on Sorrow, Contradiction, Crucifixion, every species of worldly
Distress and Degradation. We may say, that he who has not known those
things, and learned from them the priceless lessons they have to teach, has
missed a good opportunity of schooling. To beg, and go barefoot, in coarse
woollen cloak with a rope round your loins, and be despised of all the
world, was no beautiful business;--nor an honorable one in any eye, till
the nobleness of those who did so had made it honored of some!
Begging is not in our course at the present time: but for the rest of it,
who will say that a Johnson is not perhaps the better for being poor? It
is needful for him, at all rates, to know that outward profit, that success
of any kind is _not_ the goal he has to aim at. Pride, vanity,
ill-conditioned egoism of all sorts, are bred in his heart, as in every
heart; need, above all, to be cast out of his heart,--to be, with whatever
pangs, torn out of it, cast forth from it, as a thing worthless. Byron,
born rich and noble, made out even less than Burns, poor and plebeian. Who
knows but, in that same "best possible organization" as yet far off,
Poverty may still enter as an important element? What if our Men of
Letters, men setting up to be Spiritual Heroes, were still _then_, as they
now are, a kind of "involuntary monastic order;" bound still to this same
ugly Poverty,--till they had tried what was in it too, till they had
learned to make it too do for them! Money, in truth, can do much, but it
cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there; and
even spurn it back, when it wishes to get farther.
Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season for them, the fit
assigner of them, all settled,--how is the Burns to be recognized that
merits these? He must pass through the ordeal, and prove himself. _This_
ordeal; this wild welter of a chaos which is called Literary Life: this
too is a kind of ordeal! There is clear truth in the idea that a struggle
from the lower classes of society, towards the upper regions and rewards of
society, must ever continue. Strong men are born there, who ought to stand
elsewhere than there. The manifold, inextricably complex, universal
struggle of these constitutes, and must constitute, what is called the
progress of society. For Men of Letters, as for all other sorts of men.
How to regulate that struggle? There is the whole question. To leave it
as it is, at the mercy of blind Chance; a whirl of distracted atoms, one
cancelling the other; one of the thousand arriving saved, nine hundred and
ninety-nine lost by the way; your royal Johnson languishing inactive in
garrets, or harnessed to the yoke of Printer Cave; your Burns dying
broken-hearted as a Gauger; your Rousseau driven into mad exasperation,
kindling French Revolutions by his paradoxes: this, as we said, is clearly
enough the _worst_ regulation. The _best_, alas, is far from us!
And yet there can be no doubt but it is coming; advancing on us, as yet
hidden in the bosom of centuries: this is a prophecy one can risk. For so
soon as men get to discern the importance of a thing, they do infallibly
set about arranging it, facilitating, forwarding it; and rest not till, in
some approximate degree, they have accomplished that. I say, of all
Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes at present extant in the
world, there is no class comparable for importance to that Priesthood of
the Writers of Books. This is a fact which he who runs may read,--and draw
inferences from. "Literature will take care of itself," answered Mr. Pitt,
when applied to for some help for Burns. "Yes," adds Mr. Southey, "it will
take care of itself; _and of you too_, if you do not look to it!"
The result to individual Men of Letters is not the momentous one; they are
but individuals, an infinitesimal fraction of the great body; they can
struggle on, and live or else die, as they have been wont. But it deeply
concerns the whole society, whether it will set its _light_ on high places,
to walk thereby; or trample it under foot, and scatter it in all ways of
wild waste (not without conflagration), as heretofore! Light is the one
thing wanted for the world. Put wisdom in the head of the world, the world
will fight its battle victoriously, and be the best world man can make it.
I called this anomaly of a disorganic Literary Class the heart of all other
anomalies, at once product and parent; some good arrangement for that would
be as the _punctum saliens_ of a new vitality and just arrangement for all.
Already, in some European countries, in France, in Prussia, one traces some
beginnings of an arrangement for the Literary Class; indicating the gradual
possibility of such. I believe that it is possible; that it will have to
be possible.
By far the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese is one on which
we cannot arrive at clearness, but which excites endless curiosity even in
the dim state: this namely, that they do attempt to make their Men of
Letters their Governors! It would be rash to say, one understood how this
was done, or with what degree of success it was done. All such things must
be very unsuccessful; yet a small degree of success is precious; the very
attempt how precious! There does seem to be, all over China, a more or
less active search everywhere to discover the men of talent that grow up in
the young generation. Schools there are for every one: a foolish sort of
training, yet still a sort. The youths who distinguish themselves in the
lower school are promoted into favorable stations in the higher, that they
may still more distinguish themselves,--forward and forward: it appears to
be out of these that the Official Persons, and incipient Governors, are
taken. These are they whom they _try_ first, whether they can govern or
not. And surely with the best hope: for they are the men that have
already shown intellect. Try them: they have not governed or administered
as yet; perhaps they cannot; but there is no doubt they _have_ some
Understanding,--without which no man can! Neither is Understanding a
_tool_, as we are too apt to figure; "it is a _hand_ which can handle any
tool." Try these men: they are of all others the best worth
trying.--Surely there is no kind of government, constitution, revolution,
social apparatus or arrangement, that I know of in this world, so promising
to one's scientific curiosity as this. The man of intellect at the top of
affairs: this is the aim of all constitutions and revolutions, if they
have any aim. For the man of true intellect, as I assert and believe
always, is the noble-hearted man withal, the true, just, humane and valiant
man. Get him for governor, all is got; fail to get him, though you had
Constitutions plentiful as blackberries, and a Parliament in every village,
there is nothing yet got!--
These things look strange, truly; and are not such as we commonly speculate
upon. But we are fallen into strange times; these things will require to
be speculated upon; to be rendered practicable, to be in some way put in
practice. These, and many others. On all hands of us, there is the
announcement, audible enough, that the old Empire of Routine has ended;
that to say a thing has long been, is no reason for its continuing to be.
The things which have been are fallen into decay, are fallen into
incompetence; large masses of mankind, in every society of our Europe, are
no longer capable of living at all by the things which have been. When
millions of men can no longer by their utmost exertion gain food for
themselves, and "the third man for thirty-six weeks each year is short of
third-rate potatoes," the things which have been must decidedly prepare to
alter themselves!--I will now quit this of the organization of Men of
Letters.
Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest on those Literary Heroes of ours was
not the want of organization for Men of Letters, but a far deeper one; out
of which, indeed, this and so many other evils for the Literary Man, and
for all men, had, as from their fountain, taken rise. That our Hero as Man
of Letters had to travel without highway, companionless, through an
inorganic chaos,--and to leave his own life and faculty lying there, as a
partial contribution towards _pushing_ some highway through it: this, had
not his faculty itself been so perverted and paralyzed, he might have put
up with, might have considered to be but the common lot of Heroes. His
fatal misery was the _spiritual paralysis_, so we may name it, of the Age
in which his life lay; whereby his life too, do what he might, was half
paralyzed! The Eighteenth was a _Sceptical_ Century; in which little word
there is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries. Scepticism means not
intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of infidelity,
insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, in few centuries that one could
specify since the world began, was a life of Heroism more difficult for a
man. That was not an age of Faith,--an age of Heroes! The very
possibility of Heroism had been, as it were, formally abnegated in the
minds of all. Heroism was gone forever; Triviality, Formulism and
Commonplace were come forever. The "age of miracles" had been, or perhaps
had not been; but it was not any longer. An effete world; wherein Wonder,
Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell;--in one word, a godless world!
How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time,--compared not
with the Christian Shakspeares and Miltons, but with the old Pagan Skalds,
with any species of believing men! The living TREE Igdrasil, with the
melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs, deep-rooted as Hela,
has died out into the clanking of a World-MACHINE. "Tree" and "Machine:"
contrast these two things. I, for my share, declare the world to be no
machine! I say that it does _not_ go by wheel-and-pinion "motives"
self-interests, checks, balances; that there is something far other in it
than the clank of spinning-jennies, and parliamentary majorities; and, on
the whole, that it is not a machine at all!--The old Norse Heathen had a
truer motion of God's-world than these poor Machine-Sceptics: the old
Heathen Norse were _sincere_ men. But for these poor Sceptics there was no
sincerity, no truth. Half-truth and hearsay was called truth. Truth, for
most men, meant plausibility; to be measured by the number of votes you
could get. They had lost any notion that sincerity was possible, or of
what sincerity was. How many Plausibilities asking, with unaffected
surprise and the air of offended virtue, What! am not I sincere? Spiritual
Paralysis, I say, nothing left but a Mechanical life, was the
characteristic of that century. For the common man, unless happily he
stood _below_ his century and belonged to another prior one, it was
impossible to be a Believer, a Hero; he lay buried, unconscious, under
these baleful influences. To the strongest man, only with infinite
struggle and confusion was it possible to work himself half loose; and lead
as it were, in an enchanted, most tragical way, a spiritual death-in-life,
and be a Half-Hero!
Scepticism is the name we give to all this; as the chief symptom, as the
chief origin of all this. Concerning which so much were to be said! It
would take many Discourses, not a small fraction of one Discourse, to state
what one feels about that Eighteenth Century and its ways. As indeed this,
and the like of this, which we now call Scepticism, is precisely the black
malady and life-foe, against which all teaching and discoursing since man's
life began has directed itself: the battle of Belief against Unbelief is
the never-ending battle! Neither is it in the way of crimination that one
would wish to speak. Scepticism, for that century, we must consider as the
decay of old ways of believing, the preparation afar off for new better and
wider ways,--an inevitable thing. We will not blame men for it; we will
lament their hard fate. We will understand that destruction of old _forms_
is not destruction of everlasting _substances_; that Scepticism, as
sorrowful and hateful as we see it, is not an end but a beginning.
The other day speaking, without prior purpose that way, of Bentham's theory
of man and man's life, I chanced to call it a more beggarly one than
Mahomet's. I am bound to say, now when it is once uttered, that such is my
deliberate opinion. Not that one would mean offence against the man Jeremy
Bentham, or those who respect and believe him. Bentham himself, and even
the creed of Bentham, seems to me comparatively worthy of praise. It is a
determinate _being_ what all the world, in a cowardly half-and-half manner,
was tending to be. Let us have the crisis; we shall either have death or
the cure. I call this gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach
towards new Faith. It was a laying-down of cant; a saying to oneself:
"Well then, this world is a dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation
and selfish Hunger; let us see what, by checking and balancing, and good
adjustment of tooth and pinion, can be made of it!" Benthamism has
something complete, manful, in such fearless committal of itself to what it
finds true; you may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its _eyes_ put
out! It is the culminating point, and fearless ultimatum, of what lay in
the half-and-half state, pervading man's whole existence in that Eighteenth
Century. It seems to me, all deniers of Godhood, and all lip-believers of
it, are bound to be Benthamites, if they have courage and honesty.
Benthamism is an _eyeless_ Heroism: the Human Species, like a hapless
blinded Samson grinding in the Philistine Mill, clasps convulsively the
pillars of its Mill; brings huge ruin down, but ultimately deliverance
withal. Of Bentham I meant to say no harm.
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