Heroes and Hero Worship
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Thomas Carlyle >> Heroes and Hero Worship
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This is the history of all rebellions, French Revolutions, social
explosions in ancient or modern times. You have put the too _Un_able Man
at the head of affairs! The too ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man. You have
forgotten that there is any rule, or natural necessity whatever, of putting
the Able Man there. Brick must lie on brick as it may and can. Unable
Simulacrum of Ability, _quack_, in a word, must adjust himself with quack,
in all manner of administration of human things;--which accordingly lie
unadministered, fermenting into unmeasured masses of failure, of indigent
misery: in the outward, and in the inward or spiritual, miserable millions
stretch out the hand for their due supply, and it is not there. The "law
of gravitation" acts; Nature's laws do none of them forget to act. The
miserable millions burst forth into Sansculottism, or some other sort of
madness: bricks and bricklayer lie as a fatal chaos!--
Much sorry stuff, written some hundred years ago or more, about the "Divine
right of Kings," moulders unread now in the Public Libraries of this
country. Far be it from us to disturb the calm process by which it is
disappearing harmlessly from the earth, in those repositories! At the same
time, not to let the immense rubbish go without leaving us, as it ought,
some soul of it behind--I will say that it did mean something; something
true, which it is important for us and all men to keep in mind. To assert
that in whatever man you chose to lay hold of (by this or the other plan of
clutching at him); and claps a round piece of metal on the head of, and
called King,--there straightway came to reside a divine virtue, so that
_he_ became a kind of god, and a Divinity inspired him with faculty and
right to rule over you to all lengths: this,--what can we do with this but
leave it to rot silently in the Public Libraries? But I will say withal,
and that is what these Divine-right men meant, That in Kings, and in all
human Authorities, and relations that men god-created can form among each
other, there is verily either a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong; one
or the other of these two! For it is false altogether, what the last
Sceptical Century taught us, that this world is a steam-engine. There is a
God in this world; and a God's-sanction, or else the violation of such,
does look out from all ruling and obedience, from all moral acts of men.
There is no act more moral between men than that of rule and obedience.
Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that
refuses it when it is! God's law is in that, I say, however the
Parchment-laws may run: there is a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong
at the heart of every claim that one man makes upon another.
It can do none of us harm to reflect on this: in all the relations of life
it will concern us; in Loyalty and Royalty, the highest of these. I esteem
the modern error, That all goes by self-interest and the checking and
balancing of greedy knaveries, and that in short, there is nothing divine
whatever in the association of men, a still more despicable error, natural
as it is to an unbelieving century, than that of a "divine right" in people
_called_ Kings. I say, Find me the true _Konning_, King, or Able-man, and
he _has_ a divine right over me. That we knew in some tolerable measure
how to find him, and that all men were ready to acknowledge his divine
right when found: this is precisely the healing which a sick world is
everywhere, in these ages, seeking after! The true King, as guide of the
practical, has ever something of the Pontiff in him,--guide of the
spiritual, from which all practice has its rise. This too is a true
saying, That the _King_ is head of the _Church_.--But we will leave the
Polemic stuff of a dead century to lie quiet on its bookshelves.
Certainly it is a fearful business, that of having your Ableman to _seek_,
and not knowing in what manner to proceed about it! That is the world's
sad predicament in these times of ours. They are times of revolution, and
have long been. The bricklayer with his bricks, no longer heedful of
plummet or the law of gravitation, have toppled, tumbled, and it all
welters as we see! But the beginning of it was not the French Revolution;
that is rather the _end_, we can hope. It were truer to say, the
_beginning_ was three centuries farther back: in the Reformation of
Luther. That the thing which still called itself Christian Church had
become a Falsehood, and brazenly went about pretending to pardon men's sins
for metallic coined money, and to do much else which in the everlasting
truth of Nature it did _not_ now do: here lay the vital malady. The
inward being wrong, all outward went ever more and more wrong. Belief died
away; all was Doubt, Disbelief. The builder cast _away_ his plummet; said
to himself, "What is gravitation? Brick lies on brick there!" Alas, does
it not still sound strange to many of us, the assertion that there _is_ a
God's-truth in the business of god-created men; that all is not a kind of
grimace, an "expediency," diplomacy, one knows not what!--
From that first necessary assertion of Luther's, "You, self-styled _Papa_,
you are no Father in God at all; you are--a Chimera, whom I know not how to
name in polite language!"--from that onwards to the shout which rose round
Camille Desmoulins in the Palais-Royal, "_Aux armes_!" when the people had
burst up against _all_ manner of Chimeras,--I find a natural historical
sequence. That shout too, so frightful, half-infernal, was a great matter.
Once more the voice of awakened nations;--starting confusedly, as out of
nightmare, as out of death-sleep, into some dim feeling that Life was real;
that God's-world was not an expediency and diplomacy! Infernal;--yes,
since they would not have it otherwise. Infernal, since not celestial or
terrestrial! Hollowness, insincerity _has_ to cease; sincerity of some
sort has to begin. Cost what it may, reigns of terror, horrors of French
Revolution or what else, we have to return to truth. Here is a Truth, as I
said: a Truth clad in hell-fire, since they would not but have it so!--
A common theory among considerable parties of men in England and elsewhere
used to be, that the French Nation had, in those days, as it were gone
_mad_; that the French Revolution was a general act of insanity, a
temporary conversion of France and large sections of the world into a kind
of Bedlam. The Event had risen and raged; but was a madness and
nonentity,--gone now happily into the region of Dreams and the
Picturesque!--To such comfortable philosophers, the Three Days of July,
183O, must have been a surprising phenomenon. Here is the French Nation
risen again, in musketry and death-struggle, out shooting and being shot,
to make that same mad French Revolution good! The sons and grandsons of
those men, it would seem, persist in the enterprise: they do not disown
it; they will have it made good; will have themselves shot, if it be not
made good. To philosophers who had made up their life-system, on that
"madness" quietus, no phenomenon could be more alarming. Poor Niebuhr,
they say, the Prussian Professor and Historian, fell broken-hearted in
consequence; sickened, if we can believe it, and died of the Three Days!
It was surely not a very heroic death;--little better than Racine's, dying
because Louis Fourteenth looked sternly on him once. The world had stood
some considerable shocks, in its time; might have been expected to survive
the Three Days too, and be found turning on its axis after even them! The
Three Days told all mortals that the old French Revolution, mad as it might
look, was not a transitory ebullition of Bedlam, but a genuine product of
this Earth where we all live; that it was verily a Fact, and that the world
in general would do well everywhere to regard it as such.
Truly, without the French Revolution, one would not know what to make of an
age like this at all. We will hail the French Revolution, as shipwrecked
mariners might the sternest rock, in a world otherwise all of baseless sea
and waves. A true Apocalypse, though a terrible one, to this false
withered artificial time; testifying once more that Nature is
_preter_natural; if not divine, then diabolic; that Semblance is not
Reality; that it has to become Reality, or the world will take fire under
it,--burn _it_ into what it is, namely Nothing! Plausibility has ended;
empty Routine has ended; much has ended. This, as with a Trump of Doom,
has been proclaimed to all men. They are the wisest who will learn it
soonest. Long confused generations before it be learned; peace impossible
till it be! The earnest man, surrounded, as ever, with a world of
inconsistencies, can await patiently, patiently strive to do _his_ work, in
the midst of that. Sentence of Death is written down in Heaven against all
that; sentence of Death is now proclaimed on the Earth against it: this he
with his eyes may see. And surely, I should say, considering the other
side of the matter, what enormous difficulties lie there, and how fast,
fearfully fast, in all countries, the inexorable demand for solution of
them is pressing on,--he may easily find other work to do than laboring in
the Sansculottic province at this time of day!
To me, in these circumstances, that of "Hero-worship" becomes a fact
inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world at
present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management of the
world. Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that men ever
instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of Heroes being
sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence Heroes when sent: it
shines like a polestar through smoke-clouds, dust-clouds, and all manner of
down-rushing and conflagration.
Hero-worship would have sounded very strange to those workers and fighters
in the French Revolution. Not reverence for Great Men; not any hope or
belief, or even wish, that Great Men could again appear in the world!
Nature, turned into a "Machine," was as if effete now; could not any longer
produce Great Men:--I can tell her, she may give up the trade altogether,
then; we cannot do without Great Men!--But neither have I any quarrel with
that of "Liberty and Equality;" with the faith that, wise great men being
impossible, a level immensity of foolish small men would suffice. It was a
natural faith then and there. "Liberty and Equality; no Authority needed
any longer. Hero-worship, reverence for _such_ Authorities, has proved
false, is itself a falsehood; no more of it! We have had such _forgeries_,
we will now trust nothing. So many base plated coins passing in the
market, the belief has now become common that no gold any longer
exists,--and even that we can do very well without gold!" I find this,
among other things, in that universal cry of Liberty and Equality; and find
it very natural, as matters then stood.
And yet surely it is but the _transition_ from false to true. Considered
as the whole truth, it is false altogether;--the product of entire
sceptical blindness, as yet only _struggling_ to see. Hero-worship exists
forever, and everywhere: not Loyalty alone; it extends from divine
adoration down to the lowest practical regions of life. "Bending before
men," if it is not to be a mere empty grimace, better dispensed with than
practiced, is Hero-worship,--a recognition that there does dwell in that
presence of our brother something divine; that every created man, as
Novalis said, is a "revelation in the Flesh." They were Poets too, that
devised all those graceful courtesies which make life noble! Courtesy is
not a falsehood or grimace; it need not be such. And Loyalty, religious
Worship itself, are still possible; nay still inevitable.
May we not say, moreover, while so many of our late Heroes have worked
rather as revolutionary men, that nevertheless every Great Man, every
genuine man, is by the nature of him a son of Order, not of Disorder? It
is a tragical position for a true man to work in revolutions. He seems an
anarchist; and indeed a painful element of anarchy does encumber him at
every step,--him to whose whole soul anarchy is hostile, hateful. His
mission is Order; every man's is. He is here to make what was disorderly,
chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary of Order. Is
not all work of man in this world a _making of Order_? The carpenter finds
rough trees; shapes them, constrains them into square fitness, into purpose
and use. We are all born enemies of Disorder: it is tragical for us all
to be concerned in image-breaking and down-pulling; for the Great Man,
_more_ a man than we, it is doubly tragical.
Thus too all human things, maddest French Sansculottisms, do and must work
towards Order. I say, there is not a _man_ in them, raging in the thickest
of the madness, but is impelled withal, at all moments, towards Order. His
very life means that; Disorder is dissolution, death. No chaos but it
seeks a _centre_ to revolve round. While man is man, some Cromwell or
Napoleon is the necessary finish of a Sansculottism.--Curious: in those
days when Hero-worship was the most incredible thing to every one, how it
does come out nevertheless, and assert itself practically, in a way which
all have to credit. Divine _right_, take it on the great scale, is found
to mean divine _might_ withal! While old false Formulas are getting
trampled everywhere into destruction, new genuine Substances unexpectedly
unfold themselves indestructible. In rebellious ages, when Kingship itself
seems dead and abolished, Cromwell, Napoleon step forth again as Kings.
The history of these men is what we have now to look at, as our last phasis
of Heroism. The old ages are brought back to us; the manner in which Kings
were made, and Kingship itself first took rise, is again exhibited in the
history of these Two.
We have had many civil wars in England; wars of Red and White Roses, wars
of Simon de Montfort; wars enough, which are not very memorable. But that
war of the Puritans has a significance which belongs to no one of the
others. Trusting to your candor, which will suggest on the other side what
I have not room to say, I will call it a section once more of that great
universal war which alone makes up the true History of the World,--the war
of Belief against Unbelief! The struggle of men intent on the real essence
of things, against men intent on the semblances and forms of things. The
Puritans, to many, seem mere savage Iconoclasts, fierce destroyers of
Forms; but it were more just to call them haters of _untrue_ Forms. I hope
we know how to respect Laud and his King as well as them. Poor Laud seems
to me to have been weak and ill-starred, not dishonest an unfortunate
Pedant rather than anything worse. His "Dreams" and superstitions, at
which they laugh so, have an affectionate, lovable kind of character. He
is like a College-Tutor, whose whole world is forms, College-rules; whose
notion is that these are the life and safety of the world. He is placed
suddenly, with that unalterable luckless notion of his, at the head not of
a College but of a Nation, to regulate the most complex deep-reaching
interests of men. He thinks they ought to go by the old decent
regulations; nay that their salvation will lie in extending and improving
these. Like a weak man, he drives with spasmodic vehemence towards his
purpose; cramps himself to it, heeding no voice of prudence, no cry of
pity: He will have his College-rules obeyed by his Collegians; that first;
and till that, nothing. He is an ill-starred Pedant, as I said. He would
have it the world was a College of that kind, and the world was _not_ that.
Alas, was not his doom stern enough? Whatever wrongs he did, were they not
all frightfully avenged on him?
It is meritorious to insist on forms; Religion and all else naturally
clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the _formed_ world is the only
habitable one. The naked formlessness of Puritanism is not the thing I
praise in the Puritans; it is the thing I pity,--praising only the spirit
which had rendered that inevitable! All substances clothe themselves in
forms: but there are suitable true forms, and then there are untrue
unsuitable. As the briefest definition, one might say, Forms which _grow_
round a substance, if we rightly understand that, will correspond to the
real nature and purport of it, will be true, good; forms which are
consciously _put_ round a substance, bad. I invite you to reflect on this.
It distinguishes true from false in Ceremonial Form, earnest solemnity from
empty pageant, in all human things.
There must be a veracity, a natural spontaneity in forms. In the commonest
meeting of men, a person making, what we call, "set speeches," is not he an
offence? In the mere drawing-room, whatsoever courtesies you see to be
grimaces, prompted by no spontaneous reality within, are a thing you wish
to get away from. But suppose now it were some matter of vital
concernment, some transcendent matter (as Divine Worship is), about which
your whole soul, struck dumb with its excess of feeling, knew not how to
_form_ itself into utterance at all, and preferred formless silence to any
utterance there possible,--what should we say of a man coming forward to
represent or utter it for you in the way of upholsterer-mummery? Such a
man,--let him depart swiftly, if he love himself! You have lost your only
son; are mute, struck down, without even tears: an importunate man
importunately offers to celebrate Funeral Games for him in the manner of
the Greeks! Such mummery is not only not to be accepted,--it is hateful,
unendurable. It is what the old Prophets called "Idolatry," worshipping of
hollow _shows_; what all earnest men do and will reject. We can partly
understand what those poor Puritans meant. Laud dedicating that St.
Catherine Creed's Church, in the manner we have it described; with his
multiplied ceremonial bowings, gesticulations, exclamations: surely it is
rather the rigorous formal Pedant, intent on his "College-rules," than the
earnest Prophet intent on the essence of the matter!
Puritanism found _such_ forms insupportable; trampled on such forms;--we
have to excuse it for saying, No form at all rather than such! It stood
preaching in its bare pulpit, with nothing but the Bible in its hand. Nay,
a man preaching from his earnest _soul_ into the earnest _souls_ of men:
is not this virtually the essence of all Churches whatsoever? The
nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any semblance, however
dignified. Besides, it will clothe itself with _due_ semblance by and by,
if it be real. No fear of that; actually no fear at all. Given the living
_man_, there will be found _clothes_ for him; he will find himself clothes.
But the suit-of-clothes pretending that _it_ is both clothes and man--! We
cannot "fight the French" by three hundred thousand red uniforms; there
must be _men_ in the inside of them! Semblance, I assert, must actually
_not_ divorce itself from Reality. If Semblance do,--why then there must
be men found to rebel against Semblance, for it has become a lie! These
two Antagonisms at war here, in the case of Laud and the Puritans, are as
old nearly as the world. They went to fierce battle over England in that
age; and fought out their confused controversy to a certain length, with
many results for all of us.
In the age which directly followed that of the Puritans, their cause or
themselves were little likely to have justice done them. Charles Second
and his Rochesters were not the kind of men you would set to judge what the
worth or meaning of such men might have been. That there could be any
faith or truth in the life of a man, was what these poor Rochesters, and
the age they ushered in, had forgotten. Puritanism was hung on
gibbets,--like the bones of the leading Puritans. Its work nevertheless
went on accomplishing itself. All true work of a man, hang the author of
it on what gibbet you like, must and will accomplish itself. We have our
_Habeas-Corpus_, our free Representation of the People; acknowledgment,
wide as the world, that all men are, or else must, shall, and will become,
what we call _free_ men;--men with their life grounded on reality and
justice, not on tradition, which has become unjust and a chimera! This in
part, and much besides this, was the work of the Puritans.
And indeed, as these things became gradually manifest, the character of the
Puritans began to clear itself. Their memories were, one after another,
taken _down_ from the gibbet; nay a certain portion of them are now, in
these days, as good as canonized. Eliot, Hampden, Pym, nay Ludlow,
Hutchinson, Vane himself, are admitted to be a kind of Heroes; political
Conscript Fathers, to whom in no small degree we owe what makes us a free
England: it would not be safe for anybody to designate these men as wicked
now. Few Puritans of note but find their apologists somewhere, and have a
certain reverence paid them by earnest men. One Puritan, I think, and
almost he alone, our poor Cromwell, seems to hang yet on the gibbet, and
find no hearty apologist anywhere. Him neither saint nor sinner will
acquit of great wickedness. A man of ability, infinite talent, courage,
and so forth: but he betrayed the Cause. Selfish ambition, dishonesty,
duplicity; a fierce, coarse, hypocritical _Tartuffe_; turning all that
noble Struggle for constitutional Liberty into a sorry farce played for his
own benefit: this and worse is the character they give of Cromwell. And
then there come contrasts with Washington and others; above all, with these
noble Pyms and Hampdens, whose noble work he stole for himself, and ruined
into a futility and deformity.
This view of Cromwell seems to me the not unnatural product of a century
like the Eighteenth. As we said of the Valet, so of the Sceptic: He does
not know a Hero when he sees him! The Valet expected purple mantles, gilt
sceptres, bodyguards and flourishes of trumpets: the Sceptic of the
Eighteenth century looks for regulated respectable Formulas, "Principles,"
or what else he may call them; a style of speech and conduct which has got
to seem "respectable," which can plead for itself in a handsome articulate
manner, and gain the suffrages of an enlightened sceptical Eighteenth
century! It is, at bottom, the same thing that both the Valet and he
expect: the garnitures of some _acknowledged_ royalty, which _then_ they
will acknowledge! The King coming to them in the rugged _un_formulistic
state shall be no King.
For my own share, far be it from me to say or insinuate a word of
disparagement against such characters as Hampden, Elliot, Pym; whom I
believe to have been right worthy and useful men. I have read diligently
what books and documents about them I could come at;--with the honestest
wish to admire, to love and worship them like Heroes; but I am sorry to
say, if the real truth must be told, with very indifferent success! At
bottom, I found that it would not do. They are very noble men, these; step
along in their stately way, with their measured euphemisms, philosophies,
parliamentary eloquences, Ship-moneys, _Monarchies of Man_; a most
constitutional, unblamable, dignified set of men. But the heart remains
cold before them; the fancy alone endeavors to get up some worship of them.
What man's heart does, in reality, break forth into any fire of brotherly
love for these men? They are become dreadfully dull men! One breaks down
often enough in the constitutional eloquence of the admirable Pym, with his
"seventhly and lastly." You find that it may be the admirablest thing in
the world, but that it is heavy,--heavy as lead, barren as brick-clay;
that, in a word, for you there is little or nothing now surviving there!
One leaves all these Nobilities standing in their niches of honor: the
rugged outcast Cromwell, he is the man of them all in whom one still finds
human stuff. The great savage _Baresark_: he could write no euphemistic
_Monarchy of Man_; did not speak, did not work with glib regularity; had no
straight story to tell for himself anywhere. But he stood bare, not cased
in euphemistic coat-of-mail; he grappled like a giant, face to face, heart
to heart, with the naked truth of things! That, after all, is the sort of
man for one. I plead guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other sorts
of men. Smooth-shaven Respectabilities not a few one finds, that are not
good for much. Small thanks to a man for keeping his hands clean, who
would not touch the work but with gloves on!
Neither, on the whole, does this constitutional tolerance of the Eighteenth
century for the other happier Puritans seem to be a very great matter. One
might say, it is but a piece of Formulism and Scepticism, like the rest.
They tell us, It was a sorrowful thing to consider that the foundation of
our English Liberties should have been laid by "Superstition." These
Puritans came forward with Calvinistic incredible Creeds, Anti-Laudisms,
Westminster Confessions; demanding, chiefly of all, that they should have
liberty to _worship_ in their own way. Liberty to _tax_ themselves: that
was the thing they should have demanded! It was Superstition, Fanaticism,
disgraceful ignorance of Constitutional Philosophy to insist on the other
thing!--Liberty to _tax_ oneself? Not to pay out money from your pocket
except on reason shown? No century, I think, but a rather barren one would
have fixed on that as the first right of man! I should say, on the
contrary, A just man will generally have better cause than _money_ in what
shape soever, before deciding to revolt against his Government. Ours is a
most confused world; in which a good man will be thankful to see any kind
of Government maintain itself in a not insupportable manner: and here in
England, to this hour, if he is not ready to pay a great many taxes which
he can see very small reason in, it will not go well with him, I think! He
must try some other climate than this. Tax-gatherer? Money? He will say:
"Take my money, since you _can_, and it is so desirable to you; take
it,--and take yourself away with it; and leave me alone to my work here. I
am still here; can still work, after all the money you have taken from me!"
But if they come to him, and say, "Acknowledge a Lie; pretend to say you
are worshipping God, when you are not doing it: believe not the thing that
you find true, but the thing that I find, or pretend to find true!" He
will answer: "No; by God's help, no! You may take my purse; but I cannot
have my moral Self annihilated. The purse is any Highwayman's who might
meet me with a loaded pistol: but the Self is mine and God my Maker's; it
is not yours; and I will resist you to the death, and revolt against you,
and, on the whole, front all manner of extremities, accusations and
confusions, in defence of that!"--
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