Heroes and Hero Worship

T >> Thomas Carlyle >> Heroes and Hero Worship

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Cromwell's third Parliament split on the same rock as his second. Ever the
constitutional Formula: How came you there? Show us some Notary
parchment! Blind pedants:--"Why, surely the same power which makes you a
Parliament, that, and something more, made me a Protector!" If my
Protectorship is nothing, what in the name of wonder is your
Parliamenteership, a reflex and creation of that?--

Parliaments having failed, there remained nothing but the way of Despotism.
Military Dictators, each with his district, to _coerce_ the Royalist and
other gainsayers, to govern them, if not by act of Parliament, then by the
sword. Formula shall _not_ carry it, while the Reality is here! I will go
on, protecting oppressed Protestants abroad, appointing just judges, wise
managers, at home, cherishing true Gospel ministers; doing the best I can
to make England a Christian England, greater than old Rome, the Queen of
Protestant Christianity; I, since you will not help me; I while God leaves
me life!--Why did he not give it up; retire into obscurity again, since the
Law would not acknowledge him? cry several. That is where they mistake.
For him there was no giving of it up! Prime ministers have governed
countries, Pitt, Pombal, Choiseul; and their word was a law while it held:
but this Prime Minister was one that _could not get resigned_. Let him
once resign, Charles Stuart and the Cavaliers waited to kill him; to kill
the Cause _and_ him. Once embarked, there is no retreat, no return. This
Prime Minister could _retire_ no-whither except into his tomb.

One is sorry for Cromwell in his old days. His complaint is incessant of
the heavy burden Providence has laid on him. Heavy; which he must bear
till death. Old Colonel Hutchinson, as his wife relates it, Hutchinson,
his old battle-mate, coming to see him on some indispensable business, much
against his will,--Cromwell "follows him to the door," in a most fraternal,
domestic, conciliatory style; begs that he would be reconciled to him, his
old brother in arms; says how much it grieves him to be misunderstood,
deserted by true fellow-soldiers, dear to him from of old: the rigorous
Hutchinson, cased in his Republican formula, sullenly goes his way.--And
the man's head now white; his strong arm growing weary with its long work!
I think always too of his poor Mother, now very old, living in that Palace
of his; a right brave woman; as indeed they lived all an honest God-fearing
Household there: if she heard a shot go off, she thought it was her son
killed. He had to come to her at least once a day, that she might see with
her own eyes that he was yet living. The poor old Mother!--What had this
man gained; what had he gained? He had a life of sore strife and toil, to
his last day. Fame, ambition, place in History? His dead body was hung in
chains, his "place in History,"--place in History forsooth!--has been a
place of ignominy, accusation, blackness and disgrace; and here, this day,
who knows if it is not rash in me to be among the first that ever ventured
to pronounce him not a knave and liar, but a genuinely honest man! Peace
to him. Did he not, in spite of all, accomplish much for us? _We_ walk
smoothly over his great rough heroic life; step over his body sunk in the
ditch there. We need not _spurn_ it, as we step on it!--Let the Hero rest.
It was not to _men's_ judgment that he appealed; nor have men judged him
very well.

Precisely a century and a year after this of Puritanism had got itself
hushed up into decent composure, and its results made smooth, in 1688,
there broke out a far deeper explosion, much more difficult to hush up,
known to all mortals, and like to be long known, by the name of French
Revolution. It is properly the third and final act of Protestantism; the
explosive confused return of mankind to Reality and Fact, now that they
were perishing of Semblance and Sham. We call our English Puritanism the
second act: "Well then, the Bible is true; let us go by the Bible!" "In
Church," said Luther; "In Church and State," said Cromwell, "let us go by
what actually _is_ God's Truth." Men have to return to reality; they
cannot live on semblance. The French Revolution, or third act, we may well
call the final one; for lower than that savage _Sansculottism_ men cannot
go. They stand there on the nakedest haggard Fact, undeniable in all
seasons and circumstances; and may and must begin again confidently to
build up from that. The French explosion, like the English one, got its
King,--who had no Notary parchment to show for himself. We have still to
glance for a moment at Napoleon, our second modern King.

Napoleon does by no means seem to me so great a man as Cromwell. His
enormous victories which reached over all Europe, while Cromwell abode
mainly in our little England, are but as the high _stilts_ on which the man
is seen standing; the stature of the man is not altered thereby. I find in
him no such _sincerity_ as in Cromwell; only a far inferior sort. No
silent walking, through long years, with the Awful Unnamable of this
Universe; "walking with God," as he called it; and faith and strength in
that alone: _latent_ thought and valor, content to lie latent, then burst
out as in blaze of Heaven's lightning! Napoleon lived in an age when God
was no longer believed; the meaning of all Silence, Latency, was thought to
be Nonentity: he had to begin not out of the Puritan Bible, but out of
poor Sceptical _Encyclopedies_. This was the length the man carried it.
Meritorious to get so far. His compact, prompt, every way articulate
character is in itself perhaps small, compared with our great chaotic
inarticulate Cromwell's. Instead of "dumb Prophet struggling to speak," we
have a portentous mixture of the Quack withal! Hume's notion of the
Fanatic-Hypocrite, with such truth as it has, will apply much better to
Napoleon than it did to Cromwell, to Mahomet or the like,--where indeed
taken strictly it has hardly any truth at all. An element of blamable
ambition shows itself, from the first, in this man; gets the victory over
him at last, and involves him and his work in ruin.

"False as a bulletin" became a proverb in Napoleon's time. He makes what
excuse he could for it: that it was necessary to mislead the enemy, to
keep up his own men's courage, and so forth. On the whole, there are no
excuses. A man in no case has liberty to tell lies. It had been, in the
long-run, _better_ for Napoleon too if he had not told any. In fact, if a
man have any purpose reaching beyond the hour and day, meant to be found
extant _next_ day, what good can it ever be to promulgate lies? The lies
are found out; ruinous penalty is exacted for them. No man will believe
the liar next time even when he speaks truth, when it is of the last
importance that he be believed. The old cry of wolf!--A Lie is no-thing;
you cannot of nothing make something; you make _nothing_ at last, and lose
your labor into the bargain.

Yet Napoleon _had_ a sincerity: we are to distinguish between what is
superficial and what is fundamental in insincerity. Across these outer
manoeuverings and quackeries of his, which were many and most blamable, let
us discern withal that the man had a certain instinctive ineradicable
feeling for reality; and did base himself upon fact, so long as he had any
basis. He has an instinct of Nature better than his culture was. His
_savans_, Bourrienne tells us, in that voyage to Egypt were one evening
busily occupied arguing that there could be no God. They had proved it, to
their satisfaction, by all manner of logic. Napoleon looking up into the
stars, answers, "Very ingenious, Messieurs: but _who made_ all that?" The
Atheistic logic runs off from him like water; the great Fact stares him in
the face: "Who made all that?" So too in Practice: he, as every man that
can be great, or have victory in this world, sees, through all
entanglements, the practical heart of the matter; drives straight towards
that. When the steward of his Tuileries Palace was exhibiting the new
upholstery, with praises, and demonstration how glorious it was, and how
cheap withal, Napoleon, making little answer, asked for a pair of scissors,
clips one of the gold tassels from a window-curtain, put it in his pocket,
and walked on. Some days afterwards, he produced it at the right moment,
to the horror of his upholstery functionary; it was not gold but tinsel!
In St. Helena, it is notable how he still, to his last days, insists on the
practical, the real. "Why talk and complain; above all, why quarrel with
one another? There is no _result_ in it; it comes to nothing that one can
_do_. Say nothing, if one can do nothing!" He speaks often so, to his
poor discontented followers; he is like a piece of silent strength in the
middle of their morbid querulousness there.

And accordingly was there not what we can call a _faith_ in him, genuine so
far as it went? That this new enormous Democracy asserting itself here in
the French Revolution is an unsuppressible Fact, which the whole world,
with its old forces and institutions, cannot put down; this was a true
insight of his, and took his conscience and enthusiasm along with it,--a
_faith_. And did he not interpret the dim purport of it well? "_La
carriere ouverte aux talens_, The implements to him who can handle them:"
this actually is the truth, and even the whole truth; it includes whatever
the French Revolution or any Revolution, could mean. Napoleon, in his
first period, was a true Democrat. And yet by the nature of him, fostered
too by his military trade, he knew that Democracy, if it were a true thing
at all, could not be an anarchy: the man had a heart-hatred for anarchy.
On that Twentieth of June (1792), Bourrienne and he sat in a coffee-house,
as the mob rolled by: Napoleon expresses the deepest contempt for persons
in authority that they do not restrain this rabble. On the Tenth of August
he wonders why there is no man to command these poor Swiss; they would
conquer if there were. Such a faith in Democracy, yet hatred of anarchy,
it is that carries Napoleon through all his great work. Through his
brilliant Italian Campaigns, onwards to the Peace of Leoben, one would say,
his inspiration is: "Triumph to the French Revolution; assertion of it
against these Austrian Simulacra that pretend to call it a Simulacrum!"
Withal, however, he feels, and has a right to feel, how necessary a strong
Authority is; how the Revolution cannot prosper or last without such. To
bridle in that great devouring, self-devouring French Revolution; to _tame_
it, so that its intrinsic purpose can be made good, that it may become
_organic_, and be able to live among other organisms and _formed_ things,
not as a wasting destruction alone: is not this still what he partly aimed
at, as the true purport of his life; nay what he actually managed to do?
Through Wagrams, Austerlitzes; triumph after triumph,--he triumphed so far.
There was an eye to see in this man, a soul to dare and do. He rose
naturally to be the King. All men saw that he _was_ such. The common
soldiers used to say on the march: "These babbling _Avocats_, up at Paris;
all talk and no work! What wonder it runs all wrong? We shall have to go
and put our _Petit Caporal_ there!" They went, and put him there; they and
France at large. Chief-consulship, Emperorship, victory over Europe;--till
the poor Lieutenant of _La Fere_, not unnaturally, might seem to himself
the greatest of all men that had been in the world for some ages.

But at this point, I think, the fatal charlatan-element got the upper hand.
He apostatized from his old faith in Facts, took to believing in
Semblances; strove to connect himself with Austrian Dynasties, Popedoms,
with the old false Feudalities which he once saw clearly to be
false;--considered that _he_ would found "his Dynasty" and so forth; that
the enormous French Revolution meant only that! The man was "given up to
strong delusion, that he should believe a lie;" a fearful but most sure
thing. He did not know true from false now when he looked at them,--the
fearfulest penalty a man pays for yielding to untruth of heart. _Self_ and
false ambition had now become his god: self-deception once yielded to,
_all_ other deceptions follow naturally more and more. What a paltry
patchwork of theatrical paper-mantles, tinsel and mummery, had this man
wrapt his own great reality in, thinking to make it more real thereby! His
hollow _Pope's-Concordat_, pretending to be a re-establishment of
Catholicism, felt by himself to be the method of extirpating it, "_la
vaccine de la religion_:" his ceremonial Coronations, consecrations by the
old Italian Chimera in Notre-Dame,--"wanting nothing to complete the pomp
of it," as Augereau said, "nothing but the half-million of men who had died
to put an end to all that"! Cromwell's Inauguration was by the Sword and
Bible; what we must call a genuinely _true_ one. Sword and Bible were
borne before him, without any chimera: were not these the _real_ emblems
of Puritanism; its true decoration and insignia? It had used them both in
a very real manner, and pretended to stand by them now! But this poor
Napoleon mistook: he believed too much in the _Dupability_ of men; saw no
fact deeper in man than Hunger and this! He was mistaken. Like a man that
should build upon cloud; his house and he fall down in confused wreck, and
depart out of the world.

Alas, in all of us this charlatan-element exists; and _might_ be developed,
were the temptation strong enough. "Lead us not into temptation"! But it
is fatal, I say, that it _be_ developed. The thing into which it enters as
a cognizable ingredient is doomed to be altogether transitory; and, however
huge it may _look_, is in itself small. Napoleon's working, accordingly,
what was it with all the noise it made? A flash as of gunpowder
wide-spread; a blazing-up as of dry heath. For an hour the whole Universe
seems wrapt in smoke and flame; but only for an hour. It goes out: the
Universe with its old mountains and streams, its stars above and kind soil
beneath, is still there.

The Duke of Weimar told his friends always, To be of courage; this
Napoleonism was _unjust_, a falsehood, and could not last. It is true
doctrine. The heavier this Napoleon trampled on the world, holding it
tyrannously down, the fiercer would the world's recoil against him be, one
day. Injustice pays itself with frightful compound-interest. I am not
sure but he had better have lost his best park of artillery, or had his
best regiment drowned in the sea, than shot that poor German Bookseller,
Palm! It was a palpable tyrannous murderous injustice, which no man, let
him paint an inch thick, could make out to be other. It burnt deep into
the hearts of men, it and the like of it; suppressed fire flashed in the
eyes of men, as they thought of it,--waiting their day! Which day _came_:
Germany rose round him.--What Napoleon _did_ will in the long-run amount to
what he did justly; what Nature with her laws will sanction. To what of
reality was in him; to that and nothing more. The rest was all smoke and
waste. _La carriere ouverte aux talens_: that great true Message, which
has yet to articulate and fulfil itself everywhere, he left in a most
inarticulate state. He was a great _ebauche_, a rude-draught never
completed; as indeed what great man is other? Left in _too_ rude a state,
alas!

His notions of the world, as he expresses them there at St. Helena, are
almost tragical to consider. He seems to feel the most unaffected surprise
that it has all gone so; that he is flung out on the rock here, and the
World is still moving on its axis. France is great, and all-great: and at
bottom, he is France. England itself, he says, is by Nature only an
appendage of France; "another Isle of Oleron to France." So it was by
_Nature_, by Napoleon-Nature; and yet look how in fact--HERE AM I! He
cannot understand it: inconceivable that the reality has not corresponded
to his program of it; that France was not all-great, that he was not
France. "Strong delusion," that he should believe the thing to be which
_is_ not! The compact, clear-seeing, decisive Italian nature of him,
strong, genuine, which he once had, has enveloped itself, half-dissolved
itself, in a turbid atmosphere of French fanfaronade. The world was not
disposed to be trodden down underfoot; to be bound into masses, and built
together, as _he_ liked, for a pedestal to France and him: the world had
quite other purposes in view! Napoleon's astonishment is extreme. But
alas, what help now? He had gone that way of his; and Nature also had gone
her way. Having once parted with Reality, he tumbles helpless in Vacuity;
no rescue for him. He had to sink there, mournfully as man seldom did; and
break his great heart, and die,--this poor Napoleon: a great implement too
soon wasted, till it was useless: our last Great Man!

Our last, in a double sense. For here finally these wide roamings of ours
through so many times and places, in search and study of Heroes, are to
terminate. I am sorry for it: there was pleasure for me in this business,
if also much pain. It is a great subject, and a most grave and wide one,
this which, not to be too grave about it, I have named _Hero-worship_. It
enters deeply, as I think, into the secret of Mankind's ways and vitalest
interests in this world, and is well worth explaining at present. With six
months, instead of six days, we might have done better. I promised to
break ground on it; I know not whether I have even managed to do that. I
have had to tear it up in the rudest manner in order to get into it at all.
Often enough, with these abrupt utterances thrown out isolated,
unexplained, has your tolerance been put to the trial. Tolerance, patient
candor, all-hoping favor and kindness, which I will not speak of at
present. The accomplished and distinguished, the beautiful, the wise,
something of what is best in England, have listened patiently to my rude
words. With many feelings, I heartily thank you all; and say, Good be with
you all!

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