Heroes and Hero Worship
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Thomas Carlyle >> Heroes and Hero Worship
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For if we will think of it, no Time need have gone to ruin, could it have
_found_ a man great enough, a man wise and good enough: wisdom to discern
truly what the Time wanted, valor to lead it on the right road thither;
these are the salvation of any Time. But I liken common languid Times,
with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting
characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into
ever worse distress towards final ruin;--all this I liken to dry dead fuel,
waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great
man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning.
His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes
round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own. The
dry mouldering sticks are thought to have called him forth. They did want
him greatly; but as to calling him forth--! Those are critics of small
vision, I think, who cry: "See, is it not the sticks that made the fire?"
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief
in great men. There is no sadder symptom of a generation than such general
blindness to the spiritual lightning, with faith only in the heap of barren
dead fuel. It is the last consummation of unbelief. In all epochs of the
world's history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable
savior of his epoch;--the lightning, without which the fuel never would
have burnt. The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of
Great Men.
Such small critics do what they can to promote unbelief and universal
spiritual paralysis: but happily they cannot always completely succeed.
In all times it is possible for a man to arise great enough to feel that
they and their doctrines are chimeras and cobwebs. And what is notable, in
no time whatever can they entirely eradicate out of living men's hearts a
certain altogether peculiar reverence for Great Men; genuine admiration,
loyalty, adoration, however dim and perverted it may be. Hero-worship
endures forever while man endures. Boswell venerates his Johnson, right
truly even in the Eighteenth century. The unbelieving French believe in
their Voltaire; and burst out round him into very curious Hero-worship, in
that last act of his life when they "stifle him under roses." It has
always seemed to me extremely curious this of Voltaire. Truly, if
Christianity be the highest instance of Hero-worship, then we may find here
in Voltaireism one of the lowest! He whose life was that of a kind of
Antichrist, does again on this side exhibit a curious contrast. No people
ever were so little prone to admire at all as those French of Voltaire.
_Persiflage_ was the character of their whole mind; adoration had nowhere a
place in it. Yet see! The old man of Ferney comes up to Paris; an old,
tottering, infirm man of eighty-four years. They feel that he too is a
kind of Hero; that he has spent his life in opposing error and injustice,
delivering Calases, unmasking hypocrites in high places;--in short that
_he_ too, though in a strange way, has fought like a valiant man. They
feel withal that, if _persiflage_ be the great thing, there never was such
a _persifleur_. He is the realized ideal of every one of them; the thing
they are all wanting to be; of all Frenchmen the most French. He is
properly their god,--such god as they are fit for. Accordingly all
persons, from the Queen Antoinette to the Douanier at the Porte St. Denis,
do they not worship him? People of quality disguise themselves as
tavern-waiters. The Maitre de Poste, with a broad oath, orders his
Postilion, "_Va bon train_; thou art driving M. de Voltaire." At Paris his
carriage is "the nucleus of a comet, whose train fills whole streets." The
ladies pluck a hair or two from his fur, to keep it as a sacred relic.
There was nothing highest, beautifulest, noblest in all France, that did
not feel this man to be higher, beautifuler, nobler.
Yes, from Norse Odin to English Samuel Johnson, from the divine Founder of
Christianity to the withered Pontiff of Encyclopedism, in all times and
places, the Hero has been worshipped. It will ever be so. We all love
great men; love, venerate and bow down submissive before great men: nay
can we honestly bow down to anything else? Ah, does not every true man
feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really
above him? No nobler or more blessed feeling dwells in man's heart. And
to me it is very cheering to consider that no sceptical logic, or general
triviality, insincerity and aridity of any Time and its influences can
destroy this noble inborn loyalty and worship that is in man. In times of
unbelief, which soon have to become times of revolution, much down-rushing,
sorrowful decay and ruin is visible to everybody. For myself in these
days, I seem to see in this indestructibility of Hero-worship the
everlasting adamant lower than which the confused wreck of revolutionary
things cannot fall. The confused wreck of things crumbling and even
crashing and tumbling all round us in these revolutionary ages, will get
down so far; _no_ farther. It is an eternal corner-stone, from which they
can begin to build themselves up again. That man, in some sense or other,
worships Heroes; that we all of us reverence and must ever reverence Great
Men: this is, to me, the living rock amid all rushings-down
whatsoever;--the one fixed point in modern revolutionary history, otherwise
as if bottomless and shoreless.
So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of
it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still
divine, the revelation of the workings of God; the Hero is still
worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan
religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth. I think
Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It
is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in these regions of Europe till
the eleventh century: eight hundred years ago the Norwegians were still
worshippers of Odin. It is interesting also as the creed of our fathers;
the men whose blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still
resemble in so many ways. Strange: they did believe that, while we
believe so differently. Let us look a little at this poor Norse creed, for
many reasons. We have tolerable means to do it; for there is another point
of interest in these Scandinavian mythologies: that they have been
preserved so well.
In that strange island Iceland,--burst up, the geologists say, by fire from
the bottom of the sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava; swallowed many
months of every year in black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in
summertime; towering up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean with its
snow jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid volcanic chasms,
like the waste chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;--where of all places
we least looked for Literature or written memorials, the record of these
things was written down. On the seabord of this wild land is a rim of
grassy country, where cattle can subsist, and men by means of them and of
what the sea yields; and it seems they were poetic men these, men who had
deep thoughts in them, and uttered musically their thoughts. Much would be
lost, had Iceland not been burst up from the sea, not been discovered by
the Northmen! The old Norse Poets were many of them natives of Iceland.
Saemund, one of the early Christian Priests there, who perhaps had a
lingering fondness for Paganism, collected certain of their old Pagan
songs, just about becoming obsolete then,--Poems or Chants of a mythic,
prophetic, mostly all of a religious character: that is what Norse critics
call the _Elder_ or Poetic _Edda_. _Edda_, a word of uncertain etymology,
is thought to signify _Ancestress_. Snorro Sturleson, an Iceland
gentleman, an extremely notable personage, educated by this Saemund's
grandson, took in hand next, near a century afterwards, to put together,
among several other books he wrote, a kind of Prose Synopsis of the whole
Mythology; elucidated by new fragments of traditionary verse. A work
constructed really with great ingenuity, native talent, what one might call
unconscious art; altogether a perspicuous clear work, pleasant reading
still: this is the _Younger_ or Prose _Edda_. By these and the numerous
other _Sagas_, mostly Icelandic, with the commentaries, Icelandic or not,
which go on zealously in the North to this day, it is possible to gain some
direct insight even yet; and see that old Norse system of Belief, as it
were, face to face. Let us forget that it is erroneous Religion; let us
look at it as old Thought, and try if we cannot sympathize with it
somewhat.
The primary characteristic of this old Northland Mythology I find to be
Impersonation of the visible workings of Nature. Earnest simple
recognition of the workings of Physical Nature, as a thing wholly
miraculous, stupendous and divine. What we now lecture of as Science, they
wondered at, and fell down in awe before, as Religion The dark hostile
Powers of Nature they figure to themselves as "_Jotuns_," Giants, huge
shaggy beings of a demonic character. Frost, Fire, Sea-tempest; these are
Jotuns. The friendly Powers again, as Summer-heat, the Sun, are Gods. The
empire of this Universe is divided between these two; they dwell apart, in
perennial internecine feud. The Gods dwell above in Asgard, the Garden of
the Asen, or Divinities; Jotunheim, a distant dark chaotic land, is the
home of the Jotuns.
Curious all this; and not idle or inane, if we will look at the foundation
of it! The power of _Fire_, or _Flame_, for instance, which we designate
by some trivial chemical name, thereby hiding from ourselves the essential
character of wonder that dwells in it as in all things, is with these old
Northmen, Loke, a most swift subtle _Demon_, of the brood of the Jotuns.
The savages of the Ladrones Islands too (say some Spanish voyagers) thought
Fire, which they never had seen before, was a devil or god, that bit you
sharply when you touched it, and that lived upon dry wood. From us too no
Chemistry, if it had not Stupidity to help it, would hide that Flame is a
wonder. What _is_ Flame?--_Frost_ the old Norse Seer discerns to be a
monstrous hoary Jotun, the Giant _Thrym_, _Hrym_; or _Rime_, the old word
now nearly obsolete here, but still used in Scotland to signify hoar-frost.
_Rime_ was not then as now a dead chemical thing, but a living Jotun or
Devil; the monstrous Jotun _Rime_ drove home his Horses at night, sat
"combing their manes,"--which Horses were _Hail-Clouds_, or fleet
_Frost-Winds_. His Cows--No, not his, but a kinsman's, the Giant Hymir's
Cows are _Icebergs_: this Hymir "looks at the rocks" with his devil-eye,
and they _split_ in the glance of it.
Thunder was not then mere Electricity, vitreous or resinous; it was the God
Donner (Thunder) or Thor,--God also of beneficent Summer-heat. The thunder
was his wrath: the gathering of the black clouds is the drawing down of
Thor's angry brows; the fire-bolt bursting out of Heaven is the all-rending
Hammer flung from the hand of Thor: he urges his loud chariot over the
mountain-tops,--that is the peal; wrathful he "blows in his red
beard,"--that is the rustling storm-blast before the thunder begins.
Balder again, the White God, the beautiful, the just and benignant (whom
the early Christian Missionaries found to resemble Christ), is the Sun,
beautifullest of visible things; wondrous too, and divine still, after all
our Astronomies and Almanacs! But perhaps the notablest god we hear tell
of is one of whom Grimm the German Etymologist finds trace: the God
_Wunsch_, or Wish. The God _Wish_; who could give us all that we _wished_!
Is not this the sincerest and yet rudest voice of the spirit of man? The
_rudest_ ideal that man ever formed; which still shows itself in the latest
forms of our spiritual culture. Higher considerations have to teach us
that the God _Wish_ is not the true God.
Of the other Gods or Jotuns I will mention only for etymology's sake, that
Sea-tempest is the Jotun _Aegir_, a very dangerous Jotun;--and now to this
day, on our river Trent, as I learn, the Nottingham bargemen, when the
River is in a certain flooded state (a kind of backwater, or eddying swirl
it has, very dangerous to them), call it Eager; they cry out, "Have a care,
there is the _Eager_ coming!" Curious; that word surviving, like the peak
of a submerged world! The _oldest_ Nottingham bargemen had believed in the
God Aegir. Indeed our English blood too in good part is Danish, Norse; or
rather, at bottom, Danish and Norse and Saxon have no distinction, except a
superficial one,--as of Heathen and Christian, or the like. But all over
our Island we are mingled largely with Danes proper,--from the incessant
invasions there were: and this, of course, in a greater proportion along
the east coast; and greatest of all, as I find, in the North Country. From
the Humber upwards, all over Scotland, the Speech of the common people is
still in a singular degree Icelandic; its Germanism has still a peculiar
Norse tinge. They too are "Normans," Northmen,--if that be any great
beauty!--
Of the chief god, Odin, we shall speak by and by. Mark at present so much;
what the essence of Scandinavian and indeed of all Paganism is: a
recognition of the forces of Nature as godlike, stupendous, personal
Agencies,--as Gods and Demons. Not inconceivable to us. It is the infant
Thought of man opening itself, with awe and wonder, on this ever-stupendous
Universe. To me there is in the Norse system something very genuine, very
great and manlike. A broad simplicity, rusticity, so very different from
the light gracefulness of the old Greek Paganism, distinguishes this
Scandinavian System. It is Thought; the genuine Thought of deep, rude,
earnest minds, fairly opened to the things about them; a face-to-face and
heart-to-heart inspection of the things,--the first characteristic of all
good Thought in all times. Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as in the
Greek Paganism; a certain homely truthfulness and rustic strength, a great
rude sincerity, discloses itself here. It is strange, after our beautiful
Apollo statues and clear smiling mythuses, to come down upon the Norse Gods
"brewing ale" to hold their feast with Aegir, the Sea-Jotun; sending out
Thor to get the caldron for them in the Jotun country; Thor, after many
adventures, clapping the Pot on his head, like a huge hat, and walking off
with it,--quite lost in it, the ears of the Pot reaching down to his heels!
A kind of vacant hugeness, large awkward gianthood, characterizes that
Norse system; enormous force, as yet altogether untutored, stalking
helpless with large uncertain strides. Consider only their primary mythus
of the Creation. The Gods, having got the Giant Ymer slain, a Giant made
by "warm wind," and much confused work, out of the conflict of Frost and
Fire,--determined on constructing a world with him. His blood made the
Sea; his flesh was the Land, the Rocks his bones; of his eyebrows they
formed Asgard their Gods'-dwelling; his skull was the great blue vault of
Immensity, and the brains of it became the Clouds. What a
Hyper-Brobdignagian business! Untamed Thought, great, giantlike,
enormous;--to be tamed in due time into the compact greatness, not
giantlike, but godlike and stronger than gianthood, of the Shakspeares, the
Goethes!--Spiritually as well as bodily these men are our progenitors.
I like, too, that representation they have of the tree Igdrasil. All Life
is figured by them as a Tree. Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of Existence, has its
roots deep down in the kingdoms of Hela or Death; its trunk reaches up
heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe: it is the Tree of
Existence. At the foot of it, in the Death-kingdom, sit Three _Nornas_,
Fates,--the Past, Present, Future; watering its roots from the Sacred Well.
Its "boughs," with their buddings and disleafings?--events, things
suffered, things done, catastrophes,--stretch through all lands and times.
Is not every leaf of it a biography, every fibre there an act or word? Its
boughs are Histories of Nations. The rustle of it is the noise of Human
Existence, onwards from of old. It grows there, the breath of Human
Passion rustling through it;--or storm tost, the storm-wind howling through
it like the voice of all the gods. It is Igdrasil, the Tree of Existence.
It is the past, the present, and the future; what was done, what is doing,
what will be done; "the infinite conjugation of the verb _To do_."
Considering how human things circulate, each inextricably in communion with
all,--how the word I speak to you to-day is borrowed, not from Ulfila the
Moesogoth only, but from all men since the first man began to speak,--I
find no similitude so true as this of a Tree. Beautiful; altogether
beautiful and great. The "_Machine_ of the Universe,"--alas, do but think
of that in contrast!
Well, it is strange enough this old Norse view of Nature; different enough
from what we believe of Nature. Whence it specially came, one would not
like to be compelled to say very minutely! One thing we may say: It came
from the thoughts of Norse men;--from the thought, above all, of the
_first_ Norse man who had an original power of thinking. The First Norse
"man of genius," as we should call him! Innumerable men had passed by,
across this Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals
may feel; or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men only
feel;--till the great Thinker came, the _original_ man, the Seer; whose
shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capability of all into Thought.
It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all
men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all
start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to
it, Yes, even so! Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night;--_is_ it
not, indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from death
into life? We still honor such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth:
but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker of miraculous
unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God!--Thought once awakened does
not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man
after man, generation after generation,--till its full stature is reached,
and _such_ System of Thought can grow no farther; but must give place to
another.
For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, we
fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero,
of worth immeasurable; admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds,
became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate Thinking; and many
other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless gratitude, would the
rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of
this Universe; given assurance to them of their own destiny there? By him
they know now what they have to do here, what to look for hereafter.
Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he first has made Life
alive!--We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or
whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men.
His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being in
all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there.
In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his
word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world,
the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker
in the world!--
One other thing we must not forget; it will explain, a little, the
confusion of these Norse Eddas. They are not one coherent System of
Thought; but properly the _summation_ of several successive systems. All
this of the old Norse Belief which is flung out for us, in one level of
distance in the Edda, like a picture painted on the same canvas, does not
at all stand so in the reality. It stands rather at all manner of
distances and depths, of successive generations since the Belief first
began. All Scandinavian thinkers, since the first of them, contributed to
that Scandinavian System of Thought; in ever-new elaboration and addition,
it is the combined work of them all. What history it had, how it changed
from shape to shape, by one thinker's contribution after another, till it
got to the full final shape we see it under in the Edda, no man will now
ever know: _its_ Councils of Trebizond, Councils of Trent, Athanasiuses,
Dantes, Luthers, are sunk without echo in the dark night! Only that it had
such a history we can all know. Wheresover a thinker appeared, there in
the thing he thought of was a contribution, accession, a change or
revolution made. Alas, the grandest "revolution" of all, the one made by
the man Odin himself, is not this too sunk for us like the rest! Of Odin
what history? Strange rather to reflect that he _had_ a history! That
this Odin, in his wild Norse vesture, with his wild beard and eyes, his
rude Norse speech and ways, was a man like us; with our sorrows, joys, with
our limbs, features;--intrinsically all one as we: and did such a work!
But the work, much of it, has perished; the worker, all to the name.
"_Wednesday_," men will say to-morrow; Odin's day! Of Odin there exists no
history; no document of it; no guess about it worth repeating.
Snorro indeed, in the quietest manner, almost in a brief business style,
writes down, in his _Heimskringla_, how Odin was a heroic Prince, in the
Black-Sea region, with Twelve Peers, and a great people straitened for
room. How he led these _Asen_ (Asiatics) of his out of Asia; settled them
in the North parts of Europe, by warlike conquest; invented Letters, Poetry
and so forth,--and came by and by to be worshipped as Chief God by these
Scandinavians, his Twelve Peers made into Twelve Sons of his own, Gods like
himself: Snorro has no doubt of this. Saxo Grammaticus, a very curious
Northman of that same century, is still more unhesitating; scruples not to
find out a historical fact in every individual mythus, and writes it down
as a terrestrial event in Denmark or elsewhere. Torfaeus, learned and
cautious, some centuries later, assigns by calculation a _date_ for it:
Odin, he says, came into Europe about the Year 70 before Christ. Of all
which, as grounded on mere uncertainties, found to be untenable now, I need
say nothing. Far, very far beyond the Year 70! Odin's date, adventures,
whole terrestrial history, figure and environment are sunk from us forever
into unknown thousands of years.
Nay Grimm, the German Antiquary, goes so far as to deny that any man Odin
ever existed. He proves it by etymology. The word _Wuotan_, which is the
original form of _Odin_, a word spread, as name of their chief Divinity,
over all the Teutonic Nations everywhere; this word, which connects itself,
according to Grimm, with the Latin _vadere_, with the English _wade_ and
such like,--means primarily Movement, Source of Movement, Power; and is the
fit name of the highest god, not of any man. The word signifies Divinity,
he says, among the old Saxon, German and all Teutonic Nations; the
adjectives formed from it all signify divine, supreme, or something
pertaining to the chief god. Like enough! We must bow to Grimm in matters
etymological. Let us consider it fixed that _Wuotan_ means _Wading_, force
of _Movement_. And now still, what hinders it from being the name of a
Heroic Man and _Mover_, as well as of a god? As for the adjectives, and
words formed from it,--did not the Spaniards in their universal admiration
for Lope, get into the habit of saying "a Lope flower," "a Lope _dama_," if
the flower or woman were of surpassing beauty? Had this lasted, _Lope_
would have grown, in Spain, to be an adjective signifying _godlike_ also.
Indeed, Adam Smith, in his Essay on Language, surmises that all adjectives
whatsoever were formed precisely in that way: some very green thing,
chiefly notable for its greenness, got the appellative name _Green_, and
then the next thing remarkable for that quality, a tree for instance, was
named the _green_ tree,--as we still say "the _steam_ coach," "four-horse
coach," or the like. All primary adjectives, according to Smith, were
formed in this way; were at first substantives and things. We cannot
annihilate a man for etymologies like that! Surely there was a First
Teacher and Captain; surely there must have been an Odin, palpable to the
sense at one time; no adjective, but a real Hero of flesh and blood! The
voice of all tradition, history or echo of history, agrees with all that
thought will teach one about it, to assure us of this.
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