Heroes and Hero Worship

T >> Thomas Carlyle >> Heroes and Hero Worship

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Really, it seems to me the one reason which could justify revolting, this
of the Puritans. It has been the soul of all just revolts among men. Not
_Hunger_ alone produced even the French Revolution; no, but the feeling of
the insupportable all-pervading _Falsehood_ which had now embodied itself
in Hunger, in universal material Scarcity and Nonentity, and thereby become
_indisputably_ false in the eyes of all! We will leave the Eighteenth
century with its "liberty to tax itself." We will not astonish ourselves
that the meaning of such men as the Puritans remained dim to it. To men
who believe in no reality at all, how shall a _real_ human soul, the
intensest of all realities, as it were the Voice of this world's Maker
still speaking to us,--be intelligible? What it cannot reduce into
constitutional doctrines relative to "taxing," or other the like material
interest, gross, palpable to the sense, such a century will needs reject as
an amorphous heap of rubbish. Hampdens, Pyms and Ship-money will be the
theme of much constitutional eloquence, striving to be fervid;--which will
glitter, if not as fire does, then as ice does: and the irreducible
Cromwell will remain a chaotic mass of "madness," "hypocrisy," and much
else.

From of old, I will confess, this theory of Cromwell's falsity has been
incredible to me. Nay I cannot believe the like, of any Great Man
whatever. Multitudes of Great Men figure in History as false selfish men;
but if we will consider it, they are but _figures_ for us, unintelligible
shadows; we do not see into them as men that could have existed at all. A
superficial unbelieving generation only, with no eye but for the surfaces
and semblances of things, could form such notions of Great Men. Can a
great soul be possible without a _conscience_ in it, the essence of all
_real_ souls, great or small?--No, we cannot figure Cromwell as a Falsity
and Fatuity; the longer I study him and his career, I believe this the
less. Why should we? There is no evidence of it. Is it not strange that,
after all the mountains of calumny this man has been subject to, after
being represented as the very prince of liars, who never, or hardly ever,
spoke truth, but always some cunning counterfeit of truth, there should not
yet have been one falsehood brought clearly home to him? A prince of
liars, and no lie spoken by him. Not one that I could yet get sight of.
It is like Pococke asking Grotius, Where is your _proof_ of Mahomet's
Pigeon? No proof!--Let us leave all these calumnious chimeras, as chimeras
ought to be left. They are not portraits of the man; they are distracted
phantasms of him, the joint product of hatred and darkness.

Looking at the man's life with our own eyes, it seems to me, a very
different hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of his earlier
obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it not all betoken
an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? His nervous melancholic
temperament indicates rather a seriousness _too_ deep for him. Of those
stories of "Spectres;" of the white Spectre in broad daylight, predicting
that he should be King of England, we are not bound to believe
much;--probably no more than of the other black Spectre, or Devil in
person, to whom the Officer _saw_ him sell himself before Worcester Fight!
But the mournful, oversensitive, hypochondriac humor of Oliver, in his
young years, is otherwise indisputably known. The Huntingdon Physician
told Sir Philip Warwick himself, He had often been sent for at midnight;
Mr. Cromwell was full of hypochondria, thought himself near dying, and "had
fancies about the Town-cross." These things are significant. Such an
excitable deep-feeling nature, in that rugged stubborn strength of his, is
not the symptom of falsehood; it is the symptom and promise of quite other
than falsehood!

The young Oliver is sent to study Law; falls, or is said to have fallen,
for a little period, into some of the dissipations of youth; but if so,
speedily repents, abandons all this: not much above twenty, he is married,
settled as an altogether grave and quiet man. "He pays back what money he
had won at gambling," says the story;--he does not think any gain of that
kind could be really _his_. It is very interesting, very natural, this
"conversion," as they well name it; this awakening of a great true soul
from the worldly slough, to see into the awful _truth_ of things;--to see
that Time and its shows all rested on Eternity, and this poor Earth of ours
was the threshold either of Heaven or of Hell! Oliver's life at St. Ives
and Ely, as a sober industrious Farmer, is it not altogether as that of a
true and devout man? He has renounced the world and its ways; _its_ prizes
are not the thing that can enrich him. He tills the earth; he reads his
Bible; daily assembles his servants round him to worship God. He comforts
persecuted ministers, is fond of preachers; nay can himself
preach,--exhorts his neighbors to be wise, to redeem the time. In all this
what "hypocrisy," "ambition," "cant," or other falsity? The man's hopes, I
do believe, were fixed on the other Higher World; his aim to get well
_thither_, by walking well through his humble course in _this_ world. He
courts no notice: what could notice here do for him? "Ever in his great
Taskmaster's eye."

It is striking, too, how he comes out once into public view; he, since no
other is willing to come: in resistance to a public grievance. I mean, in
that matter of the Bedford Fens. No one else will go to law with
Authority; therefore he will. That matter once settled, he returns back
into obscurity, to his Bible and his Plough. "Gain influence"? His
influence is the most legitimate; derived from personal knowledge of him,
as a just, religious, reasonable and determined man. In this way he has
lived till past forty; old age is now in view of him, and the earnest
portal of Death and Eternity; it was at this point that he suddenly became
"ambitious"! I do not interpret his Parliamentary mission in that way!

His successes in Parliament, his successes through the war, are honest
successes of a brave man; who has more resolution in the heart of him, more
light in the head of him than other men. His prayers to God; his spoken
thanks to the God of Victory, who had preserved him safe, and carried him
forward so far, through the furious clash of a world all set in conflict,
through desperate-looking envelopments at Dunbar; through the death-hail of
so many battles; mercy after mercy; to the "crowning mercy" of Worcester
Fight: all this is good and genuine for a deep-hearted Calvinistic
Cromwell. Only to vain unbelieving Cavaliers, worshipping not God but
their own "love-locks," frivolities and formalities, living quite apart
from contemplations of God, living _without_ God in the world, need it seem
hypocritical.

Nor will his participation in the King's death involve him in condemnation
with us. It is a stern business killing of a King! But if you once go to
war with him, it lies _there_; this and all else lies there. Once at war,
you have made wager of battle with him: it is he to die, or else you.
Reconciliation is problematic; may be possible, or, far more likely, is
impossible. It is now pretty generally admitted that the Parliament,
having vanquished Charles First, had no way of making any tenable
arrangement with him. The large Presbyterian party, apprehensive now of
the Independents, were most anxious to do so; anxious indeed as for their
own existence; but it could not be. The unhappy Charles, in those final
Hampton-Court negotiations, shows himself as a man fatally incapable of
being dealt with. A man who, once for all, could not and would not
_understand_:--whose thought did not in any measure represent to him the
real fact of the matter; nay worse, whose _word_ did not at all represent
his thought. We may say this of him without cruelty, with deep pity
rather: but it is true and undeniable. Forsaken there of all but the
_name_ of Kingship, he still, finding himself treated with outward respect
as a King, fancied that he might play off party against party, and smuggle
himself into his old power by deceiving both. Alas, they both _discovered_
that he was deceiving them. A man whose _word_ will not inform you at all
what he means or will do, is not a man you can bargain with. You must get
out of that man's way, or put him out of yours! The Presbyterians, in
their despair, were still for believing Charles, though found false,
unbelievable again and again. Not so Cromwell: "For all our fighting,"
says he, "we are to have a little bit of paper?" No!--

In fact, everywhere we have to note the decisive practical _eye_ of this
man; how he drives towards the practical and practicable; has a genuine
insight into what _is_ fact. Such an intellect, I maintain, does not
belong to a false man: the false man sees false shows, plausibilities,
expediences: the true man is needed to discern even practical truth.
Cromwell's advice about the Parliament's Army, early in the contest, How
they were to dismiss their city-tapsters, flimsy riotous persons, and
choose substantial yeomen, whose heart was in the work, to be soldiers for
them: this is advice by a man who _saw_. Fact answers, if you see into
Fact! Cromwell's _Ironsides_ were the embodiment of this insight of his;
men fearing God; and without any other fear. No more conclusively genuine
set of fighters ever trod the soil of England, or of any other land.

Neither will we blame greatly that word of Cromwell's to them; which was so
blamed: "If the King should meet me in battle, I would kill the King."
Why not? These words were spoken to men who stood as before a Higher than
Kings. They had set more than their own lives on the cast. The Parliament
may call it, in official language, a fighting "_for_ the King;" but we, for
our share, cannot understand that. To us it is no dilettante work, no
sleek officiality; it is sheer rough death and earnest. They have brought
it to the calling-forth of War; horrid internecine fight, man grappling
with man in fire-eyed rage,--the _infernal_ element in man called forth, to
try it by that! _Do_ that therefore; since that is the thing to be
done.--The successes of Cromwell seem to me a very natural thing! Since he
was not shot in battle, they were an inevitable thing. That such a man,
with the eye to see, with the heart to dare, should advance, from post to
post, from victory to victory, till the Huntingdon Farmer became, by
whatever name you might call him, the acknowledged Strongest Man in
England, virtually the King of England, requires no magic to explain it!--

Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a man, to fall into
Scepticism, into dilettantism, insincerity; not to know Sincerity when they
see it. For this world, and for all worlds, what curse is so fatal? The
heart lying dead, the eye cannot see. What intellect remains is merely the
_vulpine_ intellect. That a true _King_ be sent them is of small use; they
do not know him when sent. They say scornfully, Is this your King? The
Hero wastes his heroic faculty in bootless contradiction from the unworthy;
and can accomplish little. For himself he does accomplish a heroic life,
which is much, which is all; but for the world he accomplishes
comparatively nothing. The wild rude Sincerity, direct from Nature, is not
glib in answering from the witness-box: in your small-debt _pie-powder_
court, he is scouted as a counterfeit. The vulpine intellect "detects"
him. For being a man worth any thousand men, the response your Knox, your
Cromwell gets, is an argument for two centuries whether he was a man at
all. God's greatest gift to this Earth is sneeringly flung away. The
miraculous talisman is a paltry plated coin, not fit to pass in the shops
as a common guinea.

Lamentable this! I say, this must be remedied. Till this be remedied in
some measure, there is nothing remedied. "Detect quacks"? Yes do, for
Heaven's sake; but know withal the men that are to be trusted! Till we
know that, what is all our knowledge; how shall we even so much as
"detect"? For the vulpine sharpness, which considers itself to be
knowledge, and "detects" in that fashion, is far mistaken. Dupes indeed
are many: but, of all _dupes_, there is none so fatally situated as he who
lives in undue terror of being duped. The world does exist; the world has
truth in it, or it would not exist! First recognize what is true, we shall
_then_ discern what is false; and properly never till then.

"Know the men that are to be trusted:" alas, this is yet, in these days,
very far from us. The sincere alone can recognize sincerity. Not a Hero
only is needed, but a world fit for him; a world not of _Valets_;--the Hero
comes almost in vain to it otherwise! Yes, it is far from us: but it must
come; thank God, it is visibly coming. Till it do come, what have we?
Ballot-boxes, suffrages, French Revolutions:--if we are as Valets, and do
not know the Hero when we see him, what good are all these? A heroic
Cromwell comes; and for a hundred and fifty years he cannot have a vote
from us. Why, the insincere, unbelieving world is the _natural property_
of the Quack, and of the Father of quacks and quackeries! Misery,
confusion, unveracity are alone possible there. By ballot-boxes we alter
the _figure_ of our Quack; but the substance of him continues. The
Valet-World _has_ to be governed by the Sham-Hero, by the King merely
_dressed_ in King-gear. It is his; he is its! In brief, one of two
things: We shall either learn to know a Hero, a true Governor and Captain,
somewhat better, when we see him; or else go on to be forever governed by
the Unheroic;--had we ballot-boxes clattering at every street-corner, there
were no remedy in these.

Poor Cromwell,--great Cromwell! The inarticulate Prophet; Prophet who
could not _speak_. Rude, confused, struggling to utter himself, with his
savage depth, with his wild sincerity; and he looked so strange, among the
elegant Euphemisms, dainty little Falklands, didactic Chillingworths,
diplomatic Clarendons! Consider him. An outer hull of chaotic confusion,
visions of the Devil, nervous dreams, almost semi-madness; and yet such a
clear determinate man's-energy working in the heart of that. A kind of
chaotic man. The ray as of pure starlight and fire, working in such an
element of boundless hypochondria, unformed black of darkness! And yet
withal this hypochondria, what was it but the very greatness of the man?
The depth and tenderness of his wild affections: the quantity of
_sympathy_ he had with things,--the quantity of insight he would yet get
into the heart of things, the mastery he would yet get over things: this
was his hypochondria. The man's misery, as man's misery always does, came
of his greatness. Samuel Johnson too is that kind of man.
Sorrow-stricken, half-distracted; the wide element of mournful _black_
enveloping him,--wide as the world. It is the character of a prophetic
man; a man with his whole soul _seeing_, and struggling to see.

On this ground, too, I explain to myself Cromwell's reputed confusion of
speech. To himself the internal meaning was sun-clear; but the material
with which he was to clothe it in utterance was not there. He had _lived_
silent; a great unnamed sea of Thought round him all his days; and in his
way of life little call to attempt _naming_ or uttering that. With his
sharp power of vision, resolute power of action, I doubt not he could have
learned to write Books withal, and speak fluently enough;--he did harder
things than writing of Books. This kind of man is precisely he who is fit
for doing manfully all things you will set him on doing. Intellect is not
speaking and logicizing; it is seeing and ascertaining. Virtue, Virtues,
manhood, _hero_hood, is not fair-spoken immaculate regularity; it is first
of all, what the Germans well name it, _Tugend_ (_Taugend_, _dow_-ing or
_Dough_-tinesS), Courage and the Faculty to _do_. This basis of the matter
Cromwell had in him.

One understands moreover how, though he could not speak in Parliament, he
might _preach_, rhapsodic preaching; above all, how he might be great in
extempore prayer. These are the free outpouring utterances of what is in
the heart: method is not required in them; warmth, depth, sincerity are
all that is required. Cromwell's habit of prayer is a notable feature of
him. All his great enterprises were commenced with prayer. In dark
inextricable-looking difficulties, his Officers and he used to assemble,
and pray alternately, for hours, for days, till some definite resolution
rose among them, some "door of hope," as they would name it, disclosed
itself. Consider that. In tears, in fervent prayers, and cries to the
great God, to have pity on them, to make His light shine before them.
They, armed Soldiers of Christ, as they felt themselves to be; a little
band of Christian Brothers, who had drawn the sword against a great black
devouring world not Christian, but Mammonish, Devilish,--they cried to God
in their straits, in their extreme need, not to forsake the Cause that was
His. The light which now rose upon them,--how could a human soul, by any
means at all, get better light? Was not the purpose so formed like to be
precisely the best, wisest, the one to be followed without hesitation any
more? To them it was as the shining of Heaven's own Splendor in the
waste-howling darkness; the Pillar of Fire by night, that was to guide them
on their desolate perilous way. _Was_ it not such? Can a man's soul, to
this hour, get guidance by any other method than intrinsically by that
same,--devout prostration of the earnest struggling soul before the
Highest, the Giver of all Light; be such _prayer_ a spoken, articulate, or
be it a voiceless, inarticulate one? There is no other method.
"Hypocrisy"? One begins to be weary of all that. They who call it so,
have no right to speak on such matters. They never formed a purpose, what
one can call a purpose. They went about balancing expediencies,
plausibilities; gathering votes, advices; they never were alone with the
_truth_ of a thing at all.--Cromwell's prayers were likely to be
"eloquent," and much more than that. His was the heart of a man who
_could_ pray.

But indeed his actual Speeches, I apprehend, were not nearly so ineloquent,
incondite, as they look. We find he was, what all speakers aim to be, an
impressive speaker, even in Parliament; one who, from the first, had
weight. With that rude passionate voice of his, he was always understood
to _mean_ something, and men wished to know what. He disregarded
eloquence, nay despised and disliked it; spoke always without premeditation
of the words he was to use. The Reporters, too, in those days seem to have
been singularly candid; and to have given the Printer precisely what they
found on their own note-paper. And withal, what a strange proof is it of
Cromwell's being the premeditative ever-calculating hypocrite, acting a
play before the world, That to the last he took no more charge of his
Speeches! How came he not to study his words a little, before flinging
them out to the public? If the words were true words, they could be left
to shift for themselves.

But with regard to Cromwell's "lying," we will make one remark. This, I
suppose, or something like this, to have been the nature of it. All
parties found themselves deceived in him; each party understood him to be
meaning _this_, heard him even say so, and behold he turns out to have been
meaning _that_! He was, cry they, the chief of liars. But now,
intrinsically, is not all this the inevitable fortune, not of a false man
in such times, but simply of a superior man? Such a man must have
_reticences_ in him. If he walk wearing his heart upon his sleeve for daws
to peck at, his journey will not extend far! There is no use for any man's
taking up his abode in a house built of glass. A man always is to be
himself the judge how much of his mind he will show to other men; even to
those he would have work along with him. There are impertinent inquiries
made: your rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on that matter; not,
if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he was! This,
could one hit the right phrase of response, is what the wise and faithful
man would aim to answer in such a case.

Cromwell, no doubt of it, spoke often in the dialect of small subaltern
parties; uttered to them a _part_ of his mind. Each little party thought
him all its own. Hence their rage, one and all, to find him not of their
party, but of his own party. Was it his blame? At all seasons of his
history he must have felt, among such people, how, if he explained to them
the deeper insight he had, they must either have shuddered aghast at it, or
believing it, their own little compact hypothesis must have gone wholly to
wreck. They could not have worked in his province any more; nay perhaps
they could not now have worked in their own province. It is the inevitable
position of a great man among small men. Small men, most active, useful,
are to be seen everywhere, whose whole activity depends on some conviction
which to you is palpably a limited one; imperfect, what we call an _error_.
But would it be a kindness always, is it a duty always or often, to disturb
them in that? Many a man, doing loud work in the world, stands only on
some thin traditionality, conventionality; to him indubitable, to you
incredible: break that beneath him, he sinks to endless depths! "I might
have my hand full of truth," said Fontenelle, "and open only my little
finger."

And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how much more in all
departments of practice! He that cannot withal _keep his mind to himself_
cannot practice any considerable thing whatever. And we call it
"dissimulation," all this? What would you think of calling the general of
an army a dissembler because he did not tell every corporal and private
soldier, who pleased to put the question, what his thoughts were about
everything?--Cromwell, I should rather say, managed all this in a manner we
must admire for its perfection. An endless vortex of such questioning
"corporals" rolled confusedly round him through his whole course; whom he
did answer. It must have been as a great true-seeing man that he managed
this too. Not one proved falsehood, as I said; not one! Of what man that
ever wound himself through such a coil of things will you say so much?--

But in fact there are two errors, widely prevalent, which pervert to the
very basis our judgments formed about such men as Cromwell; about their
"ambition," "falsity," and such like. The first is what I might call
substituting the _goal_ of their career for the course and starting-point
of it. The vulgar Historian of a Cromwell fancies that he had determined
on being Protector of England, at the time when he was ploughing the marsh
lands of Cambridgeshire. His career lay all mapped out: a program of the
whole drama; which he then step by step dramatically unfolded, with all
manner of cunning, deceptive dramaturgy, as he went on,--the hollow,
scheming [Gr.] _Upokrites_, or Play-actor, that he was! This is a radical
perversion; all but universal in such cases. And think for an instant how
different the fact is! How much does one of us foresee of his own life?
Short way ahead of us it is all dim; an unwound skein of possibilities, of
apprehensions, attemptabilities, vague-looming hopes. This Cromwell had
_not_ his life lying all in that fashion of Program, which he needed then,
with that unfathomable cunning of his, only to enact dramatically, scene
after scene! Not so. We see it so; but to him it was in no measure so.
What absurdities would fall away of themselves, were this one undeniable
fact kept honestly in view by History! Historians indeed will tell you
that they do keep it in view;--but look whether such is practically the
fact! Vulgar History, as in this Cromwell's case, omits it altogether;
even the best kinds of History only remember it now and then. To remember
it duly with rigorous perfection, as in the fact it _stood_, requires
indeed a rare faculty; rare, nay impossible. A very Shakspeare for
faculty; or more than Shakspeare; who could _enact_ a brother man's
biography, see with the brother man's eyes at all points of his course what
things _he_ saw; in short, _know_ his course and him, as few "Historians"
are like to do. Half or more of all the thick-plied perversions which
distort our image of Cromwell, will disappear, if we honestly so much as
try to represent them so; in sequence, as they _were_; not in the lump, as
they are thrown down before us.

But a second error, which I think the generality commit, refers to this
same "ambition" itself. We exaggerate the ambition of Great Men; we
mistake what the nature of it is. Great Men are not ambitious in that
sense; he is a small poor man that is ambitious so. Examine the man who
lives in misery because he does not shine above other men; who goes about
producing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims;
struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for God's sake,
to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over the heads of men! Such a
creature is among the wretchedest sights seen under this sun. A _great_
man? A poor morbid prurient empty man; fitter for the ward of a hospital,
than for a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He
cannot walk on quiet paths; unless you will look at him, wonder at him,
write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the _emptiness_ of the
man, not his greatness. Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers
and thirsts that you would find something in him. In good truth, I believe
no great man, not so much as a genuine man who had health and real
substance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented in this
way.

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