Heroes and Hero Worship
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Thomas Carlyle >> Heroes and Hero Worship
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Poor Rousseau's face is to me expressive of him. A high but narrow
contracted intensity in it: bony brows; deep, strait-set eyes, in which
there is something bewildered-looking,--bewildered, peering with
lynx-eagerness. A face full of misery, even ignoble misery, and also of
the antagonism against that; something mean, plebeian there, redeemed only
by _intensity_: the face of what is called a Fanatic,--a sadly
_contracted_ Hero! We name him here because, with all his drawbacks, and
they are many, he has the first and chief characteristic of a Hero: he is
heartily _in earnest_. In earnest, if ever man was; as none of these
French Philosophers were. Nay, one would say, of an earnestness too great
for his otherwise sensitive, rather feeble nature; and which indeed in the
end drove him into the strangest incoherences, almost delirations. There
had come, at last, to be a kind of madness in him: his Ideas _possessed_
him like demons; hurried him so about, drove him over steep places!--
The fault and misery of Rousseau was what we easily name by a single word,
_Egoism_; which is indeed the source and summary of all faults and miseries
whatsoever. He had not perfected himself into victory over mere Desire; a
mean Hunger, in many sorts, was still the motive principle of him. I am
afraid he was a very vain man; hungry for the praises of men. You remember
Genlis's experience of him. She took Jean Jacques to the Theatre; he
bargaining for a strict incognito,--"He would not be seen there for the
world!" The curtain did happen nevertheless to be drawn aside: the Pit
recognized Jean Jacques, but took no great notice of him! He expressed the
bitterest indignation; gloomed all evening, spake no other than surly
words. The glib Countess remained entirely convinced that his anger was
not at being seen, but at not being applauded when seen. How the whole
nature of the man is poisoned; nothing but suspicion, self-isolation,
fierce moody ways! He could not live with anybody. A man of some rank
from the country, who visited him often, and used to sit with him,
expressing all reverence and affection for him, comes one day; finds Jean
Jacques full of the sourest unintelligible humor. "Monsieur," said Jean
Jacques, with flaming eyes, "I know why you come here. You come to see
what a poor life I lead; how little is in my poor pot that is boiling
there. Well, look into the pot! There is half a pound of meat, one carrot
and three onions; that is all: go and tell the whole world that, if you
like, Monsieur!"--A man of this sort was far gone. The whole world got
itself supplied with anecdotes, for light laughter, for a certain
theatrical interest, from these perversions and contortions of poor Jean
Jacques. Alas, to him they were not laughing or theatrical; too real to
him! The contortions of a dying gladiator: the crowded amphitheatre looks
on with entertainment; but the gladiator is in agonies and dying.
And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passionate appeals to Mothers,
with his _contrat-social_, with his celebrations of Nature, even of savage
life in Nature, did once more touch upon Reality, struggle towards Reality;
was doing the function of a Prophet to his Time. As he could, and as the
Time could! Strangely through all that defacement, degradation and almost
madness, there is in the inmost heart of poor Rousseau a spark of real
heavenly fire. Once more, out of the element of that withered mocking
Philosophism, Scepticism and Persiflage, there has arisen in this man the
ineradicable feeling and knowledge that this Life of ours is true: not a
Scepticism, Theorem, or Persiflage, but a Fact, an awful Reality. Nature
had made that revelation to him; had ordered him to speak it out. He got
it spoken out; if not well and clearly, then ill and dimly,--as clearly as
he could. Nay what are all errors and perversities of his, even those
stealings of ribbons, aimless confused miseries and vagabondisms, if we
will interpret them kindly, but the blinkard dazzlement and staggerings to
and fro of a man sent on an errand he is too weak for, by a path he cannot
yet find? Men are led by strange ways. One should have tolerance for a
man, hope of him; leave him to try yet what he will do. While life lasts,
hope lasts for every man.
Of Rousseau's literary talents, greatly celebrated still among his
countrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like himself, are what I call
unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. There is a sensuality in Rousseau.
Combined with such an intellectual gift as his, it makes pictures of a
certain gorgeous attractiveness: but they are not genuinely poetical. Not
white sunlight: something _operatic_; a kind of rose-pink, artificial
bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it is universal, among the French
since his time. Madame de Stael has something of it; St. Pierre; and down
onwards to the present astonishing convulsionary "Literature of
Desperation," it is everywhere abundant. That same _rose-pink_ is not the
right hue. Look at a Shakspeare, at a Goethe, even at a Walter Scott! He
who has once seen into this, has seen the difference of the True from the
Sham-True, and will discriminate them ever afterwards.
We had to observe in Johnson how much good a Prophet, under all
disadvantages and disorganizations, can accomplish for the world. In
Rousseau we are called to look rather at the fearful amount of evil which,
under such disorganization, may accompany the good. Historically it is a
most pregnant spectacle, that of Rousseau. Banished into Paris garrets, in
the gloomy company of his own Thoughts and Necessities there; driven from
post to pillar; fretted, exasperated till the heart of him went mad, he had
grown to feel deeply that the world was not his friend nor the world's law.
It was expedient, if any way possible, that such a man should _not_ have
been set in flat hostility with the world. He could be cooped into
garrets, laughed at as a maniac, left to starve like a wild beast in his
cage;--but he could not be hindered from setting the world on fire. The
French Revolution found its Evangelist in Rousseau. His semi-delirious
speculations on the miseries of civilized life, the preferability of the
savage to the civilized, and such like, helped well to produce a whole
delirium in France generally. True, you may well ask, What could the
world, the governors of the world, do with such a man? Difficult to say
what the governors of the world could do with him! What he could do with
them is unhappily clear enough,--_guillotine_ a great many of them! Enough
now of Rousseau.
It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbelieving second-hand
Eighteenth Century, that of a Hero starting up, among the artificial
pasteboard figures and productions, in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like a
little well in the rocky desert places,--like a sudden splendor of Heaven
in the artificial Vauxhall! People knew not what to make of it. They took
it for a piece of the Vauxhall fire-work; alas, it _let_ itself be so
taken, though struggling half-blindly, as in bitterness of death, against
that! Perhaps no man had such a false reception from his fellow-men. Once
more a very wasteful life-drama was enacted under the sun.
The tragedy of Burns's life is known to all of you. Surely we may say, if
discrepancy between place held and place merited constitute perverseness of
lot for a man, no lot could be more perverse then Burns's. Among those
second-hand acting-figures, _mimes_ for most part, of the Eighteenth
Century, once more a giant Original Man; one of those men who reach down to
the perennial Deeps, who take rank with the Heroic among men: and he was
born in a poor Ayrshire hut. The largest soul of all the British lands
came among us in the shape of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant.
His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things; did not succeed in
any; was involved in continual difficulties. The Steward, Factor as the
Scotch call him, used to send letters and threatenings, Burns says, "which
threw us all into tears." The brave, hard-toiling, hard-suffering Father,
his brave heroine of a wife; and those children, of whom Robert was one!
In this Earth, so wide otherwise, no shelter for _them_. The letters
"threw us all into tears:" figure it. The brave Father, I say always;--a
_silent_ Hero and Poet; without whom the son had never been a speaking one!
Burns's Schoolmaster came afterwards to London, learnt what good society
was; but declares that in no meeting of men did he ever enjoy better
discourse than at the hearth of this peasant. And his poor "seven acres of
nursery-ground,"--not that, nor the miserable patch of clay-farm, nor
anything he tried to get a living by, would prosper with him; he had a sore
unequal battle all his days. But he stood to it valiantly; a wise,
faithful, unconquerable man;--swallowing down how many sore sufferings
daily into silence; fighting like an unseen Hero,--nobody publishing
newspaper paragraphs about his nobleness; voting pieces of plate to him!
However, he was not lost; nothing is lost. Robert is there the outcome of
him,--and indeed of many generations of such as him.
This Burns appeared under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor, born
only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that, in a rustic
special dialect, known only to a small province of the country he lived in.
Had he written, even what he did write, in the general language of England,
I doubt not he had already become universally recognized as being, or
capable to be, one of our greatest men. That he should have tempted so
many to penetrate through the rough husk of that dialect of his, is proof
that there lay something far from common within it. He has gained a
certain recognition, and is continuing to do so over all quarters of our
wide Saxon world: wheresoever a Saxon dialect is spoken, it begins to be
understood, by personal inspection of this and the other, that one of the
most considerable Saxon men of the Eighteenth Century was an Ayrshire
Peasant named Robert Burns. Yes, I will say, here too was a piece of the
right Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the
world;--rock, yet with wells of living softness in it! A wild impetuous
whirlwind of passion and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly
_melody_ dwelling in the heart of it. A noble rough genuineness; homely,
rustic, honest; true simplicity of strength; with its lightning-fire, with
its soft dewy pity;--like the old Norse Thor, the Peasant-god!
Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and worth, has told me that
Robert, in his young days, in spite of their hardship, was usually the
gayest of speech; a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter, sense and heart;
far pleasanter to hear there, stript cutting peats in the bog, or such
like, than he ever afterwards knew him. I can well believe it. This basis
of mirth ("_fond gaillard_," as old Marquis Mirabeau calls it), a primal
element of sunshine and joyfulness, coupled with his other deep and earnest
qualities, is one of the most attractive characteristics of Burns. A large
fund of Hope dwells in him; spite of his tragical history, he is not a
mourning man. He shakes his sorrows gallantly aside; bounds forth
victorious over them. It is as the lion shaking "dew-drops from his mane;"
as the swift-bounding horse, that _laughs_ at the shaking of the
spear.--But indeed, Hope, Mirth, of the sort like Burns's, are they not the
outcome properly of warm generous affection,--such as is the beginning of
all to every man?
You would think it strange if I called Burns the most gifted British soul
we had in all that century of his: and yet I believe the day is coming
when there will be little danger in saying so. His writings, all that he
_did_ under such obstructions, are only a poor fragment of him. Professor
Stewart remarked very justly, what indeed is true of all Poets good for
much, that his poetry was not any particular faculty; but the general
result of a naturally vigorous original mind expressing itself in that way.
Burns's gifts, expressed in conversation, are the theme of all that ever
heard him. All kinds of gifts: from the gracefulest utterances of
courtesy, to the highest fire of passionate speech; loud floods of mirth,
soft wailings of affection, laconic emphasis, clear piercing insight; all
was in him. Witty duchesses celebrate him as a man whose speech "led them
off their feet." This is beautiful: but still more beautiful that which
Mr. Lockhart has recorded, which I have more than once alluded to, How the
waiters and ostlers at inns would get out of bed, and come crowding to hear
this man speak! Waiters and ostlers:--they too were men, and here was a
man! I have heard much about his speech; but one of the best things I ever
heard of it was, last year, from a venerable gentleman long familiar with
him. That it was speech distinguished by always _having something in it_.
"He spoke rather little than much," this old man told me; "sat rather
silent in those early days, as in the company of persons above him; and
always when he did speak, it was to throw new light on the matter." I know
not why any one should ever speak otherwise!--But if we look at his general
force of soul, his healthy _robustness_ every way, the rugged
downrightness, penetration, generous valor and manfulness that was in
him,--where shall we readily find a better-gifted man?
Among the great men of the Eighteenth Century, I sometimes feel as if Burns
might be found to resemble Mirabeau more than any other. They differ
widely in vesture; yet look at them intrinsically. There is the same burly
thick-necked strength of body as of soul;--built, in both cases, on what
the old Marquis calls a _fond gaillard_. By nature, by course of breeding,
indeed by nation, Mirabeau has much more of bluster; a noisy, forward,
unresting man. But the characteristic of Mirabeau too is veracity and
sense, power of true _insight_, superiority of vision. The thing that he
says is worth remembering. It is a flash of insight into some object or
other: so do both these men speak. The same raging passions; capable too
in both of manifesting themselves as the tenderest noble affections. Wit;
wild laughter, energy, directness, sincerity: these were in both. The
types of the two men are not dissimilar. Burns too could have governed,
debated in National Assemblies; politicized, as few could. Alas, the
courage which had to exhibit itself in capture of smuggling schooners in
the Solway Frith; in keeping _silence_ over so much, where no good speech,
but only inarticulate rage was possible: this might have bellowed forth
Ushers de Breze and the like; and made itself visible to all men, in
managing of kingdoms, in ruling of great ever-memorable epochs! But they
said to him reprovingly, his Official Superiors said, and wrote: "You are
to work, not think." Of your _thinking-faculty_, the greatest in this
land, we have no need; you are to gauge beer there; for that only are you
wanted. Very notable;--and worth mentioning, though we know what is to be
said and answered! As if Thought, Power of Thinking, were not, at all
times, in all places and situations of the world, precisely the thing that
was wanted. The fatal man, is he not always the unthinking man, the man
who cannot think and _see_; but only grope, and hallucinate, and _mis_see
the nature of the thing he works with? He mis-sees it, mis_takes_ it as we
say; takes it for one thing, and it _is_ another thing,--and leaves him
standing like a Futility there! He is the fatal man; unutterably fatal,
put in the high places of men.--"Why complain of this?" say some:
"Strength is mournfully denied its arena; that was true from of old."
Doubtless; and the worse for the _arena_, answer I! _Complaining_ profits
little; stating of the truth may profit. That a Europe, with its French
Revolution just breaking out, finds no need of a Burns except for gauging
beer,--is a thing I, for one, cannot _rejoice_ at!--
Once more we have to say here, that the chief quality of Burns is the
_sincerity_ of him. So in his Poetry, so in his Life. The song he sings
is not of fantasticalities; it is of a thing felt, really there; the prime
merit of this, as of all in him, and of his Life generally, is truth. The
Life of Burns is what we may call a great tragic sincerity. A sort of
savage sincerity,--not cruel, far from that; but wild, wrestling naked with
the truth of things. In that sense, there is something of the savage in
all great men.
Hero-worship,--Odin, Burns? Well; these Men of Letters too were not
without a kind of Hero-worship: but what a strange condition has that got
into now! The waiters and ostlers of Scotch inns, prying about the door,
eager to catch any word that fell from Burns, were doing unconscious
reverence to the Heroic. Johnson had his Boswell for worshipper. Rousseau
had worshippers enough; princes calling on him in his mean garret; the
great, the beautiful doing reverence to the poor moon-struck man. For
himself a most portentous contradiction; the two ends of his life not to be
brought into harmony. He sits at the tables of grandees; and has to copy
music for his own living. He cannot even get his music copied: "By dint
of dining out," says he, "I run the risk of dying by starvation at home."
For his worshippers too a most questionable thing! If doing Hero-worship
well or badly be the test of vital well-being or ill-being to a generation,
can we say that _these_ generations are very first-rate?--And yet our
heroic Men of Letters do teach, govern, are kings, priests, or what you
like to call them; intrinsically there is no preventing it by any means
whatever. The world has to obey him who thinks and sees in the world. The
world can alter the manner of that; can either have it as blessed
continuous summer sunshine, or as unblessed black thunder and
tornado,--with unspeakable difference of profit for the world! The manner
of it is very alterable; the matter and fact of it is not alterable by any
power under the sky. Light; or, failing that, lightning: the world can
take its choice. Not whether we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, or what
we call him; but whether we believe the word he tells us: there it all
lies. If it be a true word, we shall have to believe it; believing it, we
shall have to do it. What _name_ or welcome we give him or it, is a point
that concerns ourselves mainly. _It_, the new Truth, new deeper revealing
of the Secret of this Universe, is verily of the nature of a message from
on high; and must and will have itself obeyed.--
My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns's history,--his visit
to Edinburgh. Often it seems to me as if his demeanor there were the
highest proof he gave of what a fund of worth and genuine manhood was in
him. If we think of it, few heavier burdens could be laid on the strength
of a man. So sudden; all common _Lionism_. which ruins innumerable men,
was as nothing to this. It is as if Napoleon had been made a King of, not
gradually, but at once from the Artillery Lieutenancy in the Regiment La
Fere. Burns, still only in his twenty-seventh year, is no longer even a
ploughman; he is flying to the West Indies to escape disgrace and a jail.
This month he is a ruined peasant, his wages seven pounds a year, and these
gone from him: next month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing
down jewelled Duchesses to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes! Adversity is
sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there
are a hundred that will stand adversity. I admire much the way in which
Burns met all this. Perhaps no man one could point out, was ever so sorely
tried, and so little forgot himself. Tranquil, unastonished; not abashed,
not inflated, neither awkwardness nor affectation: he feels that _he_
there is the man Robert Burns; that the "rank is but the guinea-stamp;"
that the celebrity is but the candle-light, which will show _what_ man, not
in the least make him a better or other man! Alas, it may readily, unless
he look to it, make him a _worse_ man; a wretched inflated
wind-bag,--inflated till he _burst_, and become a _dead_ lion; for whom, as
some one has said, "there is no resurrection of the body;" worse than a
living dog!--Burns is admirable here.
And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these Lion-hunters were the
ruin and death of Burns. It was they that rendered it impossible for him
to live! They gathered round him in his Farm; hindered his industry; no
place was remote enough from them. He could not get his Lionism forgotten,
honestly as he was disposed to do so. He falls into discontents, into
miseries, faults; the world getting ever more desolate for him; health,
character, peace of mind, all gone;--solitary enough now. It is tragical
to think of! These men came but to _see_ him; it was out of no sympathy
with him, nor no hatred to him. They came to get a little amusement; they
got their amusement;--and the Hero's life went for it!
Richter says, in the Island of Sumatra there is a kind of "Light-chafers,"
large Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits, and illuminate the ways
with at night. Persons of condition can thus travel with a pleasant
radiance, which they much admire. Great honor to the Fire-flies! But--!
[May 22, 1840.]
LECTURE VI.
THE HERO AS KING. CROMWELL, NAPOLEON: MODERN REVOLUTIONISM.
We come now to the last form of Heroism; that which we call Kingship. The
Commander over Men; he to whose will our wills are to be subordinated, and
loyally surrender themselves, and find their welfare in doing so, may be
reckoned the most important of Great Men. He is practically the summary
for us of _all_ the various figures of Heroism; Priest, Teacher, whatsoever
of earthly or of spiritual dignity we can fancy to reside in a man,
embodies itself here, to _command_ over us, to furnish us with constant
practical teaching, to tell us for the day and hour what we are to _do_.
He is called _Rex_, Regulator, _Roi_: our own name is still better; King,
_Konning_, which means _Can_-ning, Able-man.
Numerous considerations, pointing towards deep, questionable, and indeed
unfathomable regions, present themselves here: on the most of which we
must resolutely for the present forbear to speak at all. As Burke said
that perhaps fair _Trial by Jury_ was the soul of Government, and that all
legislation, administration, parliamentary debating, and the rest of it,
went on, in "order to bring twelve impartial men into a jury-box;"--so, by
much stronger reason, may I say here, that the finding of your _Ableman_
and getting him invested with the _symbols of ability_, with dignity,
worship (_worth_-ship), royalty, kinghood, or whatever we call it, so that
_he_ may actually have room to guide according to his faculty of doing
it,--is the business, well or ill accomplished, of all social procedure
whatsoever in this world! Hustings-speeches, Parliamentary motions, Reform
Bills, French Revolutions, all mean at heart this; or else nothing. Find
in any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise _him_ to the supreme
place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect government for that
country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting,
constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit.
It is in the perfect state; an ideal country. The Ablest Man; he means
also the truest-hearted, justest, the Noblest Man: what he _tells us to
do_ must be precisely the wisest, fittest, that we could anywhere or anyhow
learn;--the thing which it will in all ways behoove US, with right loyal
thankfulness and nothing doubting, to do! Our _doing_ and life were then,
so far as government could regulate it, well regulated; that were the ideal
of constitutions.
Alas, we know very well that Ideals can never be completely embodied in
practice. Ideals must ever lie a very great way off; and we will right
thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation
thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale
of perfection the meagre product of reality" in this poor world of ours.
We will esteem him no wise man; we will esteem him a sickly, discontented,
foolish man. And yet, on the other hand, it is never to be forgotten that
Ideals do exist; that if they be not approximated to at all, the whole
matter goes to wreck! Infallibly. No bricklayer builds a wall _perfectly_
perpendicular, mathematically this is not possible; a certain degree of
perpendicularity suffices him; and he, like a good bricklayer, who must
have done with his job, leaves it so. And yet if he sway _too much_ from
the perpendicular; above all, if he throw plummet and level quite away from
him, and pile brick on brick heedless, just as it comes to hand--! Such
bricklayer, I think, is in a bad way. He has forgotten himself: but the
Law of Gravitation does not forget to act on him; he and his wall rush down
into confused welter of ruin!--
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