Heroes and Hero Worship
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Thomas Carlyle >> Heroes and Hero Worship
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Here however, in reference to much that there is in Mahomet and his
success, we are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness,
composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast
into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw,
barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it
into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat,--the whole rubbish she
silently absorbs, shrouds _it_ in, says nothing of the rubbish. The yellow
wheat is growing there; the good Earth is silent about all the rest,--has
silently turned all the rest to some benefit too, and makes no complaint
about it! So everywhere in Nature! She is true and not a lie; and yet so
great, and just, and motherly in her truth. She requires of a thing only
that it _be_ genuine of heart; she will protect it if so; will not, if not
so. There is a soul of truth in all the things she ever gave harbor to.
Alas, is not this the history of all highest Truth that comes or ever came
into the world? The _body_ of them all is imperfection, an element of
light in darkness: to us they have to come embodied in mere Logic, in some
merely _scientific_ Theorem of the Universe; which _cannot_ be complete;
which cannot but be found, one day, incomplete, erroneous, and so die and
disappear. The body of all Truth dies; and yet in all, I say, there is a
soul which never dies; which in new and ever-nobler embodiment lives
immortal as man himself! It is the way with Nature. The genuine essence
of Truth never dies. That it be genuine, a voice from the great Deep of
Nature, there is the point at Nature's judgment-seat. What _we_ call pure
or impure, is not with her the final question. Not how much chaff is in
you; but whether you have any wheat. Pure? I might say to many a man:
Yes, you are pure; pure enough; but you are chaff,--insincere hypothesis,
hearsay, formality; you never were in contact with the great heart of the
Universe at all; you are properly neither pure nor impure; you _are_
nothing, Nature has no business with you.
Mahomet's Creed we called a kind of Christianity; and really, if we look at
the wild rapt earnestness with which it was believed and laid to heart, I
should say a better kind than that of those miserable Syrian Sects, with
their vain janglings about _Homoiousion_ and _Homoousion_, the head full of
worthless noise, the heart empty and dead! The truth of it is embedded in
portentous error and falsehood; but the truth of it makes it be believed,
not the falsehood: it succeeded by its truth. A bastard kind of
Christianity, but a living kind; with a heart-life in it; not dead,
chopping barren logic merely! Out of all that rubbish of Arab idolatries,
argumentative theologies, traditions, subtleties, rumors and hypotheses of
Greeks and Jews, with their idle wire-drawings, this wild man of the
Desert, with his wild sincere heart, earnest as death and life, with his
great flashing natural eyesight, had seen into the kernel of the matter.
Idolatry is nothing: these Wooden Idols of yours, "ye rub them with oil
and wax, and the flies stick on them,"--these are wood, I tell you! They
can do nothing for you; they are an impotent blasphemous presence; a horror
and abomination, if ye knew them. God alone is; God alone has power; He
made us, He can kill us and keep us alive: "_Allah akbar_, God is great."
Understand that His will is the best for you; that howsoever sore to flesh
and blood, you will find it the wisest, best: you are bound to take it so;
in this world and in the next, you have no other thing that you can do!
And now if the wild idolatrous men did believe this, and with their fiery
hearts lay hold of it to do it, in what form soever it came to them, I say
it was well worthy of being believed. In one form or the other, I say it
is still the one thing worthy of being believed by all men. Man does
hereby become the high-priest of this Temple of a World. He is in harmony
with the Decrees of the Author of this World; cooperating with them, not
vainly withstanding them: I know, to this day, no better definition of
Duty than that same. All that is _right_ includes itself in this of
co-operating with the real Tendency of the World: you succeed by this (the
World's Tendency will succeed), you are good, and in the right course
there. _Homoiousion_, _Homoousion_, vain logical jangle, then or before or
at any time, may jangle itself out, and go whither and how it likes: this
is the _thing_ it all struggles to mean, if it would mean anything. If it
do not succeed in meaning this, it means nothing. Not that Abstractions,
logical Propositions, be correctly worded or incorrectly; but that living
concrete Sons of Adam do lay this to heart: that is the important point.
Islam devoured all these vain jangling Sects; and I think had right to do
so. It was a Reality, direct from the great Heart of Nature once more.
Arab idolatries, Syrian formulas, whatsoever was not equally real, had to
go up in flame,--mere dead _fuel_, in various senses, for this which was
_fire_.
It was during these wild warfarings and strugglings, especially after the
Flight to Mecca, that Mahomet dictated at intervals his Sacred Book, which
they name _Koran_, or _Reading_, "Thing to be read." This is the Work he
and his disciples made so much of, asking all the world, Is not that a
miracle? The Mahometans regard their Koran with a reverence which few
Christians pay even to their Bible. It is admitted every where as the
standard of all law and all practice; the thing to be gone upon in
speculation and life; the message sent direct out of Heaven, which this
Earth has to conform to, and walk by; the thing to be read. Their Judges
decide by it; all Moslem are bound to study it, seek in it for the light of
their life. They have mosques where it is all read daily; thirty relays of
priests take it up in succession, get through the whole each day. There,
for twelve hundred years, has the voice of this Book, at all moments, kept
sounding through the ears and the hearts of so many men. We hear of
Mahometan Doctors that had read it seventy thousand times!
Very curious: if one sought for "discrepancies of national taste," here
surely were the most eminent instance of that! We also can read the Koran;
our Translation of it, by Sale, is known to be a very fair one. I must
say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused
jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness,
entanglement; most crude, incondite;--insupportable stupidity, in short!
Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran. We
read in it, as we might in the State-Paper Office, unreadable masses of
lumber, that perhaps we may get some glimpses of a remarkable man. It is
true we have it under disadvantages: the Arabs see more method in it than
we. Mahomet's followers found the Koran lying all in fractions, as it had
been written down at first promulgation; much of it, they say, on
shoulder-blades of mutton, flung pell-mell into a chest: and they
published it, without any discoverable order as to time or
otherwise;--merely trying, as would seem, and this not very strictly, to
put the longest chapters first. The real beginning of it, in that way,
lies almost at the end: for the earliest portions were the shortest. Read
in its historical sequence it perhaps would not be so bad. Much of it,
too, they say, is rhythmic; a kind of wild chanting song, in the original.
This may be a great point; much perhaps has been lost in the Translation
here. Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any
mortal ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in Heaven, too good
for the Earth; as a well-written book, or indeed as a _book_ at all; and
not a bewildered rhapsody; _written_, so far as writing goes, as badly as
almost any book ever was! So much for national discrepancies, and the
standard of taste.
Yet I should say, it was not unintelligible how the Arabs might so love it.
When once you get this confused coil of a Koran fairly off your hands, and
have it behind you at a distance, the essential type of it begins to
disclose itself; and in this there is a merit quite other than the literary
one. If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other
hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that. One would
say the primary character of the Koran is this of its _genuineness_, of its
being a _bona-fide_ book. Prideaux, I know, and others have represented it
as a mere bundle of juggleries; chapter after chapter got up to excuse and
varnish the author's successive sins, forward his ambitions and quackeries:
but really it is time to dismiss all that. I do not assert Mahomet's
continual sincerity: who is continually sincere? But I confess I can make
nothing of the critic, in these times, who would accuse him of deceit
_prepense_; of conscious deceit generally, or perhaps at all;--still more,
of living in a mere element of conscious deceit, and writing this Koran as
a forger and juggler would have done! Every candid eye, I think, will read
the Koran far otherwise than so. It is the confused ferment of a great
rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent,
earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words. With a kind of
breathless intensity he strives to utter himself; the thoughts crowd on him
pell-mell: for very multitude of things to say, he can get nothing said.
The meaning that is in him shapes itself into no form of composition, is
stated in no sequence, method, or coherence;--they are not _shaped_ at all,
these thoughts of his; flung out unshaped, as they struggle and tumble
there, in their chaotic inarticulate state. We said "stupid:" yet natural
stupidity is by no means the character of Mahomet's Book; it is natural
uncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking; in the haste and
pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himself into fit
speech. The panting breathless haste and vehemence of a man struggling in
the thick of battle for life and salvation; this is the mood he is in! A
headlong haste; for very magnitude of meaning, he cannot get himself
articulated into words. The successive utterances of a soul in that mood,
colored by the various vicissitudes of three-and-twenty years; now well
uttered, now worse: this is the Koran.
For we are to consider Mahomet, through these three-and-twenty years, as
the centre of a world wholly in conflict. Battles with the Koreish and
Heathen, quarrels among his own people, backslidings of his own wild heart;
all this kept him in a perpetual whirl, his soul knowing rest no more. In
wakeful nights, as one may fancy, the wild soul of the man, tossing amid
these vortices, would hail any light of a decision for them as a veritable
light from Heaven; _any_ making-up of his mind, so blessed, indispensable
for him there, would seem the inspiration of a Gabriel. Forger and
juggler? No, no! This great fiery heart, seething, simmering like a great
furnace of thoughts, was not a juggler's. His Life was a Fact to him; this
God's Universe an awful Fact and Reality. He has faults enough. The man
was an uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still
clinging to him: we must take him for that. But for a wretched
Simulacrum, a hungry Impostor without eyes or heart, practicing for a mess
of pottage such blasphemous swindlery, forgery of celestial documents,
continual high-treason against his Maker and Self, we will not and cannot
take him.
Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what had
rendered it precious to the wild Arab men. It is, after all, the first and
last merit in a book; gives rise to merits of all kinds,--nay, at bottom,
it alone can give rise to merit of any kind. Curiously, through these
incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint, ejaculation in the
Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we might almost call poetry,
is found straggling. The body of the Book is made up of mere tradition,
and as it were vehement enthusiastic extempore preaching. He returns
forever to the old stories of the Prophets as they went current in the Arab
memory: how Prophet after Prophet, the Prophet Abraham, the Prophet Hud,
the Prophet Moses, Christian and other real and fabulous Prophets, had come
to this Tribe and to that, warning men of their sin; and been received by
them even as he Mahomet was,--which is a great solace to him. These things
he repeats ten, perhaps twenty times; again and ever again, with wearisome
iteration; has never done repeating them. A brave Samuel Johnson, in his
forlorn garret, might con over the Biographies of Authors in that way!
This is the great staple of the Koran. But curiously, through all this,
comes ever and anon some glance as of the real thinker and seer. He has
actually an eye for the world, this Mahomet: with a certain directness and
rugged vigor, he brings home still, to our heart, the thing his own heart
has been opened to. I make but little of his praises of Allah, which many
praise; they are borrowed I suppose mainly from the Hebrew, at least they
are far surpassed there. But the eye that flashes direct into the heart of
things, and _sees_ the truth of them; this is to me a highly interesting
object. Great Nature's own gift; which she bestows on all; but which only
one in the thousand does not cast sorrowfully away: it is what I call
sincerity of vision; the test of a sincere heart.
Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can work no
miracles. I? "I am a Public Preacher;" appointed to preach this doctrine
to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old
been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is it not
wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly "a sign to you," if your eyes were
open! This Earth, God made it for you; "appointed paths in it;" you can
live in it, go to and fro on it.--The clouds in the dry country of Arabia,
to Mahomet they are very wonderful: Great clouds, he says, born in the
deep bosom of the Upper Immensity, where do they come from! They hang
there, the great black monsters; pour down their rain-deluges "to revive a
dead earth," and grass springs, and "tall leafy palm-trees with their
date-clusters hanging round. Is not that a sign?" Your cattle too,--Allah
made them; serviceable dumb creatures; they change the grass into milk; you
have your clothing from them, very strange creatures; they come ranking
home at evening-time, "and," adds he, "and are a credit to you!" Ships
also,--he talks often about ships: Huge moving mountains, they spread out
their cloth wings, go bounding through the water there, Heaven's wind
driving them; anon they lie motionless, God has withdrawn the wind, they
lie dead, and cannot stir! Miracles? cries he: What miracle would you
have? Are not you yourselves there? God made you, "shaped you out of a
little clay." Ye were small once; a few years ago ye were not at all. Ye
have beauty, strength, thoughts, "ye have compassion on one another." Old
age comes on you, and gray hairs; your strength fades into feebleness; ye
sink down, and again are not. "Ye have compassion on one another:" this
struck me much: Allah might have made you having no compassion on one
another,--how had it been then! This is a great direct thought, a glance
at first-hand into the very fact of things. Rude vestiges of poetic
genius, of whatsoever is best and truest, are visible in this man. A
strong untutored intellect; eyesight, heart: a strong wild man,--might
have shaped himself into Poet, King, Priest, any kind of Hero.
To his eyes it is forever clear that this world wholly is miraculous. He
sees what, as we said once before, all great thinkers, the rude
Scandinavians themselves, in one way or other, have contrived to see: That
this so solid-looking material world is, at bottom, in very deed, Nothing;
is a visual and factual Manifestation of God's power and presence,--a
shadow hung out by Him on the bosom of the void Infinite; nothing more.
The mountains, he says, these great rock-mountains, they shall dissipate
themselves "like clouds;" melt into the Blue as clouds do, and not be! He
figures the Earth, in the Arab fashion, Sale tells us, as an immense Plain
or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are set on that to _steady_ it. At
the Last Day they shall disappear "like clouds;" the whole Earth shall go
spinning, whirl itself off into wreck, and as dust and vapor vanish in the
Inane. Allah withdraws his hand from it, and it ceases to be. The
universal empire of Allah, presence everywhere of an unspeakable Power, a
Splendor, and a Terror not to be named, as the true force, essence and
reality, in all things whatsoever, was continually clear to this man. What
a modern talks of by the name, Forces of Nature, Laws of Nature; and does
not figure as a divine thing; not even as one thing at all, but as a set of
things, undivine enough,--salable, curious, good for propelling steamships!
With our Sciences and Cyclopaedias, we are apt to forget the _divineness_,
in those laboratories of ours. We ought not to forget it! That once well
forgotten, I know not what else were worth remembering. Most sciences, I
think were then a very dead thing; withered, contentious, empty;--a thistle
in late autumn. The best science, without this, is but as the dead
_timber_; it is not the growing tree and forest,--which gives ever-new
timber, among other things! Man cannot _know_ either, unless he can
_worship_ in some way. His knowledge is a pedantry, and dead thistle,
otherwise.
Much has been said and written about the sensuality of Mahomet's Religion;
more than was just. The indulgences, criminal to us, which he permitted,
were not of his appointment; he found them practiced, unquestioned from
immemorial time in Arabia; what he did was to curtail them, restrict them,
not on one but on many sides. His Religion is not an easy one: with
rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five times a
day, and abstinence from wine, it did not "succeed by being an easy
religion." As if indeed any religion, or cause holding of religion, could
succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to
heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense,--sugar-plums of any
kind, in this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies
something nobler. The poor swearing soldier, hired to be shot, has his
"honor of a soldier," different from drill-regulations and the shilling a
day. It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and
vindicate himself under God's Heaven as a god-made Man, that the poorest
son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest
day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be
seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the
_allurements_ that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life
of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations. Not
happiness, but something higher: one sees this even in the frivolous
classes, with their "point of honor" and the like. Not by flattering our
appetites; no, by awakening the Heroic that slumbers in every heart, can
any Religion gain followers.
Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual
man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary,
intent mainly on base enjoyments,--nay on enjoyments of any kind. His
household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread and water:
sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They
record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own
cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men
toil for. Not a bad man, I should say; something better in him than
_hunger_ of any sort,--or these wild Arab men, fighting and jostling
three-and-twenty years at his hand, in close contact with him always, would
not have reverenced him so! They were wild men, bursting ever and anon
into quarrel, into all kinds of fierce sincerity; without right worth and
manhood, no man could have commanded them. They called him Prophet, you
say? Why, he stood there face to face with them; bare, not enshrined in
any mystery; visibly clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes;
fighting, counselling, ordering in the midst of them: they must have seen
what kind of a man he _was_, let him be _called_ what you like! No emperor
with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting.
During three-and-twenty years of rough actual trial. I find something of a
veritable Hero necessary for that, of itself.
His last words are a prayer; broken ejaculations of a heart struggling up,
in trembling hope, towards its Maker. We cannot say that his religion made
him _worse_; it made him better; good, not bad. Generous things are
recorded of him: when he lost his Daughter, the thing he answers is, in
his own dialect, every way sincere, and yet equivalent to that of
Christians, "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name
of the Lord." He answered in like manner of Seid, his emancipated
well-beloved Slave, the second of the believers. Seid had fallen in the
War of Tabuc, the first of Mahomet's fightings with the Greeks. Mahomet
said, It was well; Seid had done his Master's work, Seid had now gone to
his Master: it was all well with Seid. Yet Seid's daughter found him
weeping over the body;--the old gray-haired man melting in tears! "What do
I see?" said she.--"You see a friend weeping over his friend."--He went out
for the last time into the mosque, two days before his death; asked, If he
had injured any man? Let his own back bear the stripes. If he owed any
man? A voice answered, "Yes, me three drachms," borrowed on such an
occasion. Mahomet ordered them to be paid: "Better be in shame now," said
he, "than at the Day of Judgment."--You remember Kadijah, and the "No, by
Allah!" Traits of that kind show us the genuine man, the brother of us
all, brought visible through twelve centuries,--the veritable Son of our
common Mother.
Withal I like Mahomet for his total freedom from cant. He is a rough
self-helping son of the wilderness; does not pretend to be what he is not.
There is no ostentatious pride in him; but neither does he go much upon
humility: he is there as he can be, in cloak and shoes of his own
clouting; speaks plainly to all manner of Persian Kings, Greek Emperors,
what it is they are bound to do; knows well enough, about himself, "the
respect due unto thee." In a life-and-death war with Bedouins, cruel
things could not fail; but neither are acts of mercy, of noble natural pity
and generosity wanting. Mahomet makes no apology for the one, no boast of
the other. They were each the free dictate of his heart; each called for,
there and then. Not a mealy-mouthed man! A candid ferocity, if the case
call for it, is in him; he does not mince matters! The War of Tabuc is a
thing he often speaks of: his men refused, many of them, to march on that
occasion; pleaded the heat of the weather, the harvest, and so forth; he
can never forget that. Your harvest? It lasts for a day. What will
become of your harvest through all Eternity? Hot weather? Yes, it was
hot; "but Hell will be hotter!" Sometimes a rough sarcasm turns up: He
says to the unbelievers, Ye shall have the just measure of your deeds at
that Great Day. They will be weighed out to you; ye shall not have short
weight!--Everywhere he fixes the matter in his eye; he _sees_ it: his
heart, now and then, is as if struck dumb by the greatness of it.
"Assuredly," he says: that word, in the Koran, is written down sometimes
as a sentence by itself: "Assuredly."
No _Dilettantism_ in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and
Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about
it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for
Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root
of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man
never having been _open_ to Truth;--"living in a vain show." Such a man
not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The
rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in
quiet paralysis of life-death. The very falsehoods of Mahomet are truer
than the truths of such a man. He is the insincere man: smooth-polished,
respectable in some times and places; inoffensive, says nothing harsh to
anybody; most _cleanly_,--just as carbonic acid is, which is death and
poison.
We will not praise Mahomet's moral precepts as always of the superfinest
sort; yet it can be said that there is always a tendency to good in them;
that they are the true dictates of a heart aiming towards what is just and
true. The sublime forgiveness of Christianity, turning of the other cheek
when the one has been smitten, is not here: you _are_ to revenge yourself,
but it is to be in measure, not overmuch, or beyond justice. On the other
hand, Islam, like any great Faith, and insight into the essence of man, is
a perfect equalizer of men: the soul of one believer outweighs all earthly
kingships; all men, according to Islam too, are equal. Mahomet insists not
on the propriety of giving alms, but on the necessity of it: he marks down
by law how much you are to give, and it is at your peril if you neglect.
The tenth part of a man's annual income, whatever that may be, is the
_property_ of the poor, of those that are afflicted and need help. Good
all this: the natural voice of humanity, of pity and equity dwelling in
the heart of this wild Son of Nature speaks _so_.
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