Heroes and Hero Worship

T >> Thomas Carlyle >> Heroes and Hero Worship

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Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be "noticed" by noisy crowds of
people? God his Maker already noticed him. He, Cromwell, was already
there; no notice would make _him_ other than he already was. Till his hair
was grown gray; and Life from the down-hill slope was all seen to be
limited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurable matter _how_ it
went,--he had been content to plough the ground, and read his Bible. He in
his old days could not support it any longer, without selling himself to
Falsehood, that he might ride in gilt carriages to Whitehall, and have
clerks with bundles of papers haunting him, "Decide this, decide that,"
which in utmost sorrow of heart no man can perfectly decide! What could
gilt carriages do for this man? From of old, was there not in his life a
weight of meaning, a terror and a splendor as of Heaven itself? His
existence there as man set him beyond the need of gilding. Death, Judgment
and Eternity: these already lay as the background of whatsoever he thought
or did. All his life lay begirt as in a sea of nameless Thoughts, which no
speech of a mortal could name. God's Word, as the Puritan prophets of that
time had read it: this was great, and all else was little to him. To call
such a man "ambitious," to figure him as the prurient wind-bag described
above, seems to me the poorest solecism. Such a man will say: "Keep your
gilt carriages and huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tape clerks, your
influentialities, your important businesses. Leave me alone, leave me
alone; there is _too much of life_ in me already!" Old Samuel Johnson, the
greatest soul in England in his day, was not ambitious. "Corsica Boswell"
flaunted at public shows with printed ribbons round his hat; but the great
old Samuel stayed at home. The world-wide soul wrapt up in its thoughts,
in its sorrows;--what could paradings, and ribbons in the hat, do for it?

Ah yes, I will say again: The great _silent_ men! Looking round on the
noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with little
worth, one loves to reflect on the great Empire of _Silence_. The noble
silent men, scattered here and there, each in his department; silently
thinking, silently working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention of!
They are the salt of the Earth. A country that has none or few of these is
in a bad way. Like a forest which had no _roots_; which had all turned
into leaves and boughs;--which must soon wither and be no forest. Woe for
us if we had nothing but what we can _show_, or speak. Silence, the great
Empire of Silence: higher than the stars; deeper than the Kingdoms of
Death! It alone is great; all else is small.--I hope we English will long
maintain our _grand talent pour le silence_. Let others that cannot do
without standing on barrel-heads, to spout, and be seen of all the
market-place, cultivate speech exclusively,--become a most green forest
without roots! Solomon says, There is a time to speak; but also a time to
keep silence. Of some great silent Samuel, not urged to writing, as old
Samuel Johnson says he was, by _want of money_, and nothing other, one
might ask, "Why do not you too get up and speak; promulgate your system,
found your sect?" "Truly," he will answer, "I am _continent_ of my thought
hitherto; happily I have yet had the ability to keep it in me, no
compulsion strong enough to speak it. My 'system' is not for promulgation
first of all; it is for serving myself to live by. That is the great
purpose of it to me. And then the 'honor'? Alas, yes;--but as Cato said
of the statue: So many statues in that Forum of yours, may it not be
better if they ask, Where is Cato's statue?"--

But now, by way of counterpoise to this of Silence, let me say that there
are two kinds of ambition; one wholly blamable, the other laudable and
inevitable. Nature has provided that the great silent Samuel shall not be
silent too long. The selfish wish to shine over others, let it be
accounted altogether poor and miserable. "Seekest thou great things, seek
them not:" this is most true. And yet, I say, there is an irrepressible
tendency in every man to develop himself according to the magnitude which
Nature has made him of; to speak out, to act out, what nature has laid in
him. This is proper, fit, inevitable; nay it is a duty, and even the
summary of duties for a man. The meaning of life here on earth might be
defined as consisting in this: To unfold your _self_, to work what thing
you have the faculty for. It is a necessity for the human being, the first
law of our existence. Coleridge beautifully remarks that the infant learns
to _speak_ by this necessity it feels.--We will say therefore: To decide
about ambition, whether it is bad or not, you have two things to take into
view. Not the coveting of the place alone, but the fitness of the man for
the place withal: that is the question. Perhaps the place was _his_;
perhaps he had a natural right, and even obligation, to seek the place!
Mirabeau's ambition to be Prime Minister, how shall we blame it, if he were
"the only man in France that could have done any good there"? Hopefuler
perhaps had he not so clearly _felt_ how much good he could do! But a poor
Necker, who could do no good, and had even felt that he could do none, yet
sitting broken-hearted because they had flung him out, and he was now quit
of it, well might Gibbon mourn over him.--Nature, I say, has provided amply
that the silent great man shall strive to speak withal; _too_ amply,
rather!

Fancy, for example, you had revealed to the brave old Samuel Johnson, in
his shrouded-up existence, that it was possible for him to do priceless
divine work for his country and the whole world. That the perfect Heavenly
Law might be made Law on this Earth; that the prayer he prayed daily, "Thy
kingdom come," was at length to be fulfilled! If you had convinced his
judgment of this; that it was possible, practicable; that he the mournful
silent Samuel was called to take a part in it! Would not the whole soul of
the man have flamed up into a divine clearness, into noble utterance and
determination to act; casting all sorrows and misgivings under his feet,
counting all affliction and contradiction small,--the whole dark element of
his existence blazing into articulate radiance of light and lightning? It
were a true ambition this! And think now how it actually was with
Cromwell. From of old, the sufferings of God's Church, true zealous
Preachers of the truth flung into dungeons, whips, set on pillories, their
ears crops off, God's Gospel-cause trodden under foot of the unworthy: all
this had lain heavy on his soul. Long years he had looked upon it, in
silence, in prayer; seeing no remedy on Earth; trusting well that a remedy
in Heaven's goodness would come,--that such a course was false, unjust, and
could not last forever. And now behold the dawn of it; after twelve years
silent waiting, all England stirs itself; there is to be once more a
Parliament, the Right will get a voice for itself: inexpressible
well-grounded hope has come again into the Earth. Was not such a
Parliament worth being a member of? Cromwell threw down his ploughs, and
hastened thither.

He spoke there,--rugged bursts of earnestness, of a self-seen truth, where
we get a glimpse of them. He worked there; he fought and strove, like a
strong true giant of a man, through cannon-tumult and all else,--on and on,
till the Cause _triumphed_, its once so formidable enemies all swept from
before it, and the dawn of hope had become clear light of victory and
certainty. That _he_ stood there as the strongest soul of England, the
undisputed Hero of all England,--what of this? It was possible that the
Law of Christ's Gospel could now establish itself in the world! The
Theocracy which John Knox in his pulpit might dream of as a "devout
imagination," this practical man, experienced in the whole chaos of most
rough practice, dared to consider as capable of being _realized_. Those
that were highest in Christ's Church, the devoutest wisest men, were to
rule the land: in some considerable degree, it might be so and should be
so. Was it not _true_, God's truth? And if _true_, was it not then the
very thing to do? The strongest practical intellect in England dared to
answer, Yes! This I call a noble true purpose; is it not, in its own
dialect, the noblest that could enter into the heart of Statesman or man?
For a Knox to take it up was something; but for a Cromwell, with his great
sound sense and experience of what our world _was_,--History, I think,
shows it only this once in such a degree. I account it the culminating
point of Protestantism; the most heroic phasis that "Faith in the Bible"
was appointed to exhibit here below. Fancy it: that it were made manifest
to one of us, how we could make the Right supremely victorious over Wrong,
and all that we had longed and prayed for, as the highest good to England
and all lands, an attainable fact!

Well, I must say, the _vulpine_ intellect, with its knowingness, its
alertness and expertness in "detecting hypocrites," seems to me a rather
sorry business. We have had but one such Statesman in England; one man,
that I can get sight of, who ever had in the heart of him any such purpose
at all. One man, in the course of fifteen hundred years; and this was his
welcome. He had adherents by the hundred or the ten; opponents by the
million. Had England rallied all round him,--why, then, England might have
been a _Christian_ land! As it is, vulpine knowingness sits yet at its
hopeless problem, "Given a world of Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their
united action;"--how cumbrous a problem, you may see in Chancery
Law-Courts, and some other places! Till at length, by Heaven's just anger,
but also by Heaven's great grace, the matter begins to stagnate; and this
problem is becoming to all men a _palpably_ hopeless one.--

But with regard to Cromwell and his purposes: Hume, and a multitude
following him, come upon me here with an admission that Cromwell _was_
sincere at first; a sincere "Fanatic" at first, but gradually became a
"Hypocrite" as things opened round him. This of the Fanatic-Hypocrite is
Hume's theory of it; extensively applied since,--to Mahomet and many
others. Think of it seriously, you will find something in it; not much,
not all, very far from all. Sincere hero hearts do not sink in this
miserable manner. The Sun flings forth impurities, gets balefully
incrusted with spots; but it does not quench itself, and become no Sun at
all, but a mass of Darkness! I will venture to say that such never befell
a great deep Cromwell; I think, never. Nature's own lionhearted Son;
Antaeus-like, his strength is got by _touching the Earth_, his Mother; lift
him up from the Earth, lift him up into Hypocrisy, Inanity, his strength is
gone. We will not assert that Cromwell was an immaculate man; that he fell
into no faults, no insincerities among the rest. He was no dilettante
professor of "perfections," "immaculate conducts." He was a rugged Orson,
rending his rough way through actual true _work_,--_doubtless_ with many a
_fall_ therein. Insincerities, faults, very many faults daily and hourly:
it was too well known to him; known to God and him! The Sun was dimmed
many a time; but the Sun had not himself grown a Dimness. Cromwell's last
words, as he lay waiting for death, are those of a Christian heroic man.
Broken prayers to God, that He would judge him and this Cause, He since man
could not, in justice yet in pity. They are most touching words. He
breathed out his wild great soul, its toils and sins all ended now, into
the presence of his Maker, in this manner.

I, for one, will not call the man a Hypocrite! Hypocrite, mummer, the life
of him a mere theatricality; empty barren quack, hungry for the shouts of
mobs? The man had made obscurity do very well for him till his head was
gray; and now he _was_, there as he stood recognized unblamed, the virtual
King of England. Cannot a man do without King's Coaches and Cloaks? Is it
such a blessedness to have clerks forever pestering you with bundles of
papers in red tape? A simple Diocletian prefers planting of cabbages; a
George Washington, no very immeasurable man, does the like. One would say,
it is what any genuine man could do; and would do. The instant his real
work were out in the matter of Kingship,--away with it!

Let us remark, meanwhile, how indispensable everywhere a _King_ is, in all
movements of men. It is strikingly shown, in this very War, what becomes
of men when they cannot find a Chief Man, and their enemies can. The
Scotch Nation was all but unanimous in Puritanism; zealous and of one mind
about it, as in this English end of the Island was always far from being
the case. But there was no great Cromwell among them; poor tremulous,
hesitating, diplomatic Argyles and such like: none of them had a heart
true enough for the truth, or durst commit himself to the truth. They had
no leader; and the scattered Cavalier party in that country had one:
Montrose, the noblest of all the Cavaliers; an accomplished,
gallant-hearted, splendid man; what one may call the Hero-Cavalier. Well,
look at it; on the one hand subjects without a King; on the other a King
without subjects! The subjects without King can do nothing; the
subjectless King can do something. This Montrose, with a handful of Irish
or Highland savages, few of them so much as guns in their hands, dashes at
the drilled Puritan armies like a wild whirlwind; sweeps them, time after
time, some five times over, from the field before him. He was at one
period, for a short while, master of all Scotland. One man; but he was a
man; a million zealous men, but without the one; they against him were
powerless! Perhaps of all the persons in that Puritan struggle, from first
to last, the single indispensable one was verily Cromwell. To see and
dare, and decide; to be a fixed pillar in the welter of uncertainty;--a
King among them, whether they called him so or not.

Precisely here, however, lies the rub for Cromwell. His other proceedings
have all found advocates, and stand generally justified; but this dismissal
of the Rump Parliament and assumption of the Protectorship, is what no one
can pardon him. He had fairly grown to be King in England; Chief Man of
the victorious party in England: but it seems he could not do without the
King's Cloak, and sold himself to perdition in order to get it. Let us see
a little how this was.

England, Scotland, Ireland, all lying now subdued at the feet of the
Puritan Parliament, the practical question arose, What was to be done with
it? How will you govern these Nations, which Providence in a wondrous way
has given up to your disposal? Clearly those hundred surviving members of
the Long Parliament, who sit there as supreme authority, cannot continue
forever to sit. What _is_ to be done?--It was a question which theoretical
constitution-builders may find easy to answer; but to Cromwell, looking
there into the real practical facts of it, there could be none more
complicated. He asked of the Parliament, What it was they would decide
upon? It was for the Parliament to say. Yet the Soldiers too, however
contrary to Formula, they who had purchased this victory with their blood,
it seemed to them that they also should have something to say in it! We
will not "for all our fighting have nothing but a little piece of paper."
We understand that the Law of God's Gospel, to which He through us has
given the victory, shall establish itself, or try to establish itself, in
this land!

For three years, Cromwell says, this question had been sounded in the ears
of the Parliament. They could make no answer; nothing but talk, talk.
Perhaps it lies in the nature of parliamentary bodies; perhaps no
Parliament could in such case make any answer but even that of talk, talk!
Nevertheless the question must and shall be answered. You sixty men there,
becoming fast odious, even despicable, to the whole nation, whom the nation
already calls Rump Parliament, you cannot continue to sit there: who or
what then is to follow? "Free Parliament," right of Election,
Constitutional Formulas of one sort or the other,--the thing is a hungry
Fact coming on us, which we must answer or be devoured by it! And who are
you that prate of Constitutional Formulas, rights of Parliament? You have
had to kill your King, to make Pride's Purges, to expel and banish by the
law of the stronger whosoever would not let your Cause prosper: there are
but fifty or threescore of you left there, debating in these days. Tell us
what we shall do; not in the way of Formula, but of practicable Fact!

How they did finally answer, remains obscure to this day. The diligent
Godwin himself admits that he cannot make it out. The likeliest is, that
this poor Parliament still would not, and indeed could not dissolve and
disperse; that when it came to the point of actually dispersing, they
again, for the tenth or twentieth time, adjourned it,--and Cromwell's
patience failed him. But we will take the favorablest hypothesis ever
started for the Parliament; the favorablest, though I believe it is not the
true one, but too favorable.

According to this version: At the uttermost crisis, when Cromwell and his
Officers were met on the one hand, and the fifty or sixty Rump Members on
the other, it was suddenly told Cromwell that the Rump in its despair _was_
answering in a very singular way; that in their splenetic envious despair,
to keep out the Army at least, these men were hurrying through the House a
kind of Reform Bill,--Parliament to be chosen by the whole of England;
equable electoral division into districts; free suffrage, and the rest of
it! A very questionable, or indeed for _them_ an unquestionable thing.
Reform Bill, free suffrage of Englishmen? Why, the Royalists themselves,
silenced indeed but not exterminated, perhaps _outnumber_ us; the great
numerical majority of England was always indifferent to our Cause, merely
looked at it and submitted to it. It is in weight and force, not by
counting of heads, that we are the majority! And now with your Formulas
and Reform Bills, the whole matter, sorely won by our swords, shall again
launch itself to sea; become a mere hope, and likelihood, _small_ even as a
likelihood? And it is not a likelihood; it is a certainty, which we have
won, by God's strength and our own right hands, and do now hold _here_.
Cromwell walked down to these refractory Members; interrupted them in that
rapid speed of their Reform Bill;--ordered them to begone, and talk there
no more.--Can we not forgive him? Can we not understand him? John Milton,
who looked on it all near at hand, could applaud him. The Reality had
swept the Formulas away before it. I fancy, most men who were realities in
England might see into the necessity of that.

The strong daring man, therefore, has set all manner of Formulas and
logical superficialities against him; has dared appeal to the genuine Fact
of this England, Whether it will support him or not? It is curious to see
how he struggles to govern in some constitutional way; find some Parliament
to support him; but cannot. His first Parliament, the one they call
Barebones's Parliament, is, so to speak, a _Convocation of the Notables_.
From all quarters of England the leading Ministers and chief Puritan
Officials nominate the men most distinguished by religious reputation,
influence and attachment to the true Cause: these are assembled to shape
out a plan. They sanctioned what was past; shaped as they could what was
to come. They were scornfully called _Barebones's Parliament_: the man's
name, it seems, was not _Barebones_, but Barbone,--a good enough man. Nor
was it a jest, their work; it was a most serious reality,--a trial on the
part of these Puritan Notables how far the Law of Christ could become the
Law of this England. There were men of sense among them, men of some
quality; men of deep piety I suppose the most of them were. They failed,
it seems, and broke down, endeavoring to reform the Court of Chancery!
They dissolved themselves, as incompetent; delivered up their power again
into the hands of the Lord General Cromwell, to do with it what he liked
and could.

What _will_ he do with it? The Lord General Cromwell, "Commander-in-chief
of all the Forces raised and to be raised;" he hereby sees himself, at this
unexampled juncture, as it were the one available Authority left in
England, nothing between England and utter Anarchy but him alone. Such is
the undeniable Fact of his position and England's, there and then. What
will he do with it? After deliberation, he decides that he will _accept_
it; will formally, with public solemnity, say and vow before God and men,
"Yes, the Fact is so, and I will do the best I can with it!"
Protectorship, Instrument of Government,--these are the external forms of
the thing; worked out and sanctioned as they could in the circumstances be,
by the Judges, by the leading Official people, "Council of Officers and
Persons of interest in the Nation:" and as for the thing itself,
undeniably enough, at the pass matters had now come to, there _was_ no
alternative but Anarchy or that. Puritan England might accept it or not;
but Puritan England was, in real truth, saved from suicide thereby!--I
believe the Puritan People did, in an inarticulate, grumbling, yet on the
whole grateful and real way, accept this anomalous act of Oliver's; at
least, he and they together made it good, and always better to the last.
But in their Parliamentary _articulate_ way, they had their difficulties,
and never knew fully what to say to it!--

Oliver's second Parliament, properly his _first_ regular Parliament, chosen
by the rule laid down in the Instrument of Government, did assemble, and
worked;--but got, before long, into bottomless questions as to the
Protector's _right_, as to "usurpation," and so forth; and had at the
earliest legal day to be dismissed. Cromwell's concluding Speech to these
men is a remarkable one. So likewise to his third Parliament, in similar
rebuke for their pedantries and obstinacies. Most rude, chaotic, all these
Speeches are; but most earnest-looking. You would say, it was a sincere
helpless man; not used to _speak_ the great inorganic thought of him, but
to act it rather! A helplessness of utterance, in such bursting fulness of
meaning. He talks much about "births of Providence:" All these changes,
so many victories and events, were not forethoughts, and theatrical
contrivances of men, of _me_ or of men; it is blind blasphemers that will
persist in calling them so! He insists with a heavy sulphurous wrathful
emphasis on this. As he well might. As if a Cromwell in that dark huge
game he had been playing, the world wholly thrown into chaos round him, had
_foreseen_ it all, and played it all off like a precontrived puppet-show by
wood and wire! These things were foreseen by no man, he says; no man could
tell what a day would bring forth: they were "births of Providence," God's
finger guided us on, and we came at last to clear height of victory, God's
Cause triumphant in these Nations; and you as a Parliament could assemble
together, and say in what manner all this could be _organized_, reduced
into rational feasibility among the affairs of men. You were to help with
your wise counsel in doing that. "You have had such an opportunity as no
Parliament in England ever had." Christ's Law, the Right and True, was to
be in some measure made the Law of this land. In place of that, you have
got into your idle pedantries, constitutionalities, bottomless cavillings
and questionings about written laws for my coming here;--and would send the
whole matter into Chaos again, because I have no Notary's parchment, but
only God's voice from the battle-whirlwind, for being President among you!
That opportunity is gone; and we know not when it will return. You have
had your constitutional Logic; and Mammon's Law, not Christ's Law, rules
yet in this land. "God be judge between you and me!" These are his final
words to them: Take you your constitution-formulas in your hand; and I my
informal struggles, purposes, realities and acts; and "God be judge between
you and me!"--

We said above what shapeless, involved chaotic things the printed Speeches
of Cromwell are. _Wilfully_ ambiguous, unintelligible, say the most: a
hypocrite shrouding himself in confused Jesuitic jargon! To me they do not
seem so. I will say rather, they afforded the first glimpses I could ever
get into the reality of this Cromwell, nay into the possibility of him.
Try to believe that he means something, search lovingly what that may be:
you will find a real _speech_ lying imprisoned in these broken rude
tortuous utterances; a meaning in the great heart of this inarticulate man!
You will, for thc first time, begin to see that he was a man; not an
enigmatic chimera, unintelligible to you, incredible to you. The Histories
and Biographies written of this Cromwell, written in shallow sceptical
generations that could not know or conceive of a deep believing man, are
far more _obscure_ than Cromwell's Speeches. You look through them only
into the infinite vague of Black and the Inane. "Heats and jealousies,"
says Lord Clarendon himself: "heats and jealousies," mere crabbed whims,
theories and crotchets; these induced slow sober quiet Englishmen to lay
down their ploughs and work; and fly into red fury of confused war against
the best-conditioned of Kings! _Try_ if you can find that true.
Scepticism writing about Belief may have great gifts; but it is really
_ultra vires_ there. It is Blindness laying down the Laws of Optics.--

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