Heroes and Hero Worship
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Thomas Carlyle >> Heroes and Hero Worship
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Mahomet's Paradise is sensual, his Hell sensual: true; in the one and the
other there is enough that shocks all spiritual feeling in us. But we are
to recollect that the Arabs already had it so; that Mahomet, in whatever he
changed of it, softened and diminished all this. The worst sensualities,
too, are the work of doctors, followers of his, not his work. In the Koran
there is really very little said about the joys of Paradise; they are
intimated rather than insisted on. Nor is it forgotten that the highest
joys even there shall be spiritual; the pure Presence of the Highest, this
shall infinitely transcend all other joys. He says, "Your salutation shall
be, Peace." _Salam_, Have Peace!--the thing that all rational souls long
for, and seek, vainly here below, as the one blessing. "Ye shall sit on
seats, facing one another: all grudges shall be taken away out of your
hearts." All grudges! Ye shall love one another freely; for each of you,
in the eyes of his brothers, there will be Heaven enough!
In reference to this of the sensual Paradise and Mahomet's sensuality, the
sorest chapter of all for us, there were many things to be said; which it
is not convenient to enter upon here. Two remarks only I shall make, and
therewith leave it to your candor. The first is furnished me by Goethe; it
is a casual hint of his which seems well worth taking note of. In one of
his Delineations, in _Meister's Travels_ it is, the hero comes upon a
Society of men with very strange ways, one of which was this: "We
require," says the Master, "that each of our people shall restrict himself
in one direction," shall go right against his desire in one matter, and
_make_ himself do the thing he does not wish, "should we allow him the
greater latitude on all other sides." There seems to me a great justness
in this. Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is
the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is. Let a man
assert withal that he is king over his habitudes; that he could and would
shake them off, on cause shown: this is an excellent law. The Month
Ramadhan for the Moslem, much in Mahomet's Religion, much in his own Life,
bears in that direction; if not by forethought, or clear purpose of moral
improvement on his part, then by a certain healthy manful instinct, which
is as good.
But there is another thing to be said about the Mahometan Heaven and Hell.
This namely, that, however gross and material they may be, they are an
emblem of an everlasting truth, not always so well remembered elsewhere.
That gross sensual Paradise of his; that horrible flaming Hell; the great
enormous Day of Judgment he perpetually insists on: what is all this but a
rude shadow, in the rude Bedouin imagination, of that grand spiritual Fact,
and Beginning of Facts, which it is ill for us too if we do not all know
and feel: the Infinite Nature of Duty? That man's actions here are of
_infinite_ moment to him, and never die or end at all; that man, with his
little life, reaches upwards high as Heaven, downwards low as Hell, and in
his threescore years of Time holds an Eternity fearfully and wonderfully
hidden: all this had burnt itself, as in flame-characters, into the wild
Arab soul. As in flame and lightning, it stands written there; awful,
unspeakable, ever present to him. With bursting earnestness, with a fierce
savage sincerity, half-articulating, not able to articulate, he strives to
speak it, bodies it forth in that Heaven and that Hell. Bodied forth in
what way you will, it is the first of all truths. It is venerable under
all embodiments. What is the chief end of man here below? Mahomet has
answered this question, in a way that might put some of us to shame! He
does not, like a Bentham, a Paley, take Right and Wrong, and calculate the
profit and loss, ultimate pleasure of the one and of the other; and summing
all up by addition and subtraction into a net result, ask you, Whether on
the whole the Right does not preponderate considerably? No; it is not
_better_ to do the one than the other; the one is to the other as life is
to death,--as Heaven is to Hell. The one must in nowise be done, the other
in nowise left undone. You shall not measure them; they are
incommensurable: the one is death eternal to a man, the other is life
eternal. Benthamee Utility, virtue by Profit and Loss; reducing this
God's-world to a dead brute Steam-engine, the infinite celestial Soul of
Man to a kind of Hay-balance for weighing hay and thistles on, pleasures
and pains on:--If you ask me which gives, Mahomet or they, the beggarlier
and falser view of Man and his Destinies in this Universe, I will answer,
it is not Mahomet!--
On the whole, we will repeat that this Religion of Mahomet's is a kind of
Christianity; has a genuine element of what is spiritually highest looking
through it, not to be hidden by all its imperfections. The Scandinavian
God _Wish_, the god of all rude men,--this has been enlarged into a Heaven
by Mahomet; but a Heaven symbolical of sacred Duty, and to be earned by
faith and well-doing, by valiant action, and a divine patience which is
still more valiant. It is Scandinavian Paganism, and a truly celestial
element superadded to that. Call it not false; look not at the falsehood
of it, look at the truth of it. For these twelve centuries, it has been
the religion and life-guidance of the fifth part of the whole kindred of
Mankind. Above all things, it has been a religion heartily _believed_.
These Arabs believe their religion, and try to live by it! No Christians,
since the early ages, or only perhaps the English Puritans in modern times,
have ever stood by their Faith as the Moslem do by theirs,--believing it
wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it. This night the
watchman on the streets of Cairo when he cries, "Who goes? " will hear from
the passenger, along with his answer, "There is no God but God." _Allah
akbar_, _Islam_, sounds through the souls, and whole daily existence, of
these dusky millions. Zealous missionaries preach it abroad among Malays,
black Papuans, brutal Idolaters;--displacing what is worse, nothing that is
better or good.
To the Arab Nation it was as a birth from darkness into light; Arabia first
became alive by means of it. A poor shepherd people, roaming unnoticed in
its deserts since the creation of the world: a Hero-Prophet was sent down
to them with a word they could believe: see, the unnoticed becomes
world-notable, the small has grown world-great; within one century
afterwards, Arabia is at Grenada on this hand, at Delhi on that;--glancing
in valor and splendor and the light of genius, Arabia shines through long
ages over a great section of the world. Belief is great, life-giving. The
history of a Nation becomes fruitful, soul-elevating, great, so soon as it
believes. These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century,--is it not
as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed black
unnoticeable sand; but lo, the sand proves explosive powder, blazes
heaven-high from Delhi to Grenada! I said, the Great Man was always as
lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then
they too would flame.
[May 12, 1840.]
LECTURE III.
THE HERO AS POET. DANTE: SHAKSPEARE.
The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old ages; not
to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain rudeness of
conception, which the progress of mere scientific knowledge puts an end to.
There needs to be, as it were, a world vacant, or almost vacant of
scientific forms, if men in their loving wonder are to fancy their
fellow-man either a god or one speaking with the voice of a god. Divinity
and Prophet are past. We are now to see our Hero in the less ambitious,
but also less questionable, character of Poet; a character which does not
pass. The Poet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages; whom all ages
possess, when once he is produced, whom the newest age as the oldest may
produce;--and will produce, always when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a
Hero-soul; in no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a
Poet.
Hero, Prophet, Poet,--many different names, in different times, and places,
do we give to Great Men; according to varieties we note in them, according
to the sphere in which they have displayed themselves! We might give many
more names, on this same principle. I will remark again, however, as a
fact not unimportant to be understood, that the different _sphere_
constitutes the grand origin of such distinction; that the Hero can be
Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, according to the kind of
world he finds himself born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly
great man that could not be _all_ sorts of men. The Poet who could merely
sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much.
He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a
Heroic warrior too. I fancy there is in him the Politician, the Thinker,
Legislator, Philosopher;--in one or the other degree, he could have been,
he is all these. So too I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that
great glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears
that were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and
touched all hearts in that way, had his course of life and education led
him thitherward. The grand fundamental character is that of Great Man;
that the man be great. Napoleon has words in him which are like Austerlitz
Battles. Louis Fourteenth's Marshals are a kind of poetical men withal;
the things Turenne says are full of sagacity and geniality, like sayings of
Samuel Johnson. The great heart, the clear deep-seeing eye: there it
lies; no man whatever, in what province soever, can prosper at all without
these. Petrarch and Boccaccio did diplomatic messages, it seems, quite
well: one can easily believe it; they had done things a little harder than
these! Burns, a gifted song-writer, might have made a still better
Mirabeau. Shakspeare,--one knows not what _he_ could not have made, in the
supreme degree.
True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not make all great
men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. Varieties of
aptitude doubtless; but infinitely more of circumstance; and far oftenest
it is the _latter_ only that are looked to. But it is as with common men
in the learning of trades. You take any man, as yet a vague capability of
a man, who could be any kind of craftsman; and make him into a smith, a
carpenter, a mason: he is then and thenceforth that and nothing else. And
if, as Addison complains, you sometimes see a street-porter, staggering
under his load on spindle-shanks, and near at hand a tailor with the frame
of a Samson handling a bit of cloth and small Whitechapel needle,--it
cannot be considered that aptitude of Nature alone has been consulted here
either!--The Great Man also, to what shall he be bound apprentice? Given
your Hero, is he to become Conqueror, King, Philosopher, Poet? It is an
inexplicably complex controversial-calculation between the world and him!
He will read the world and its laws; the world with its laws will be there
to be read. What the world, on _this_ matter, shall permit and bid is, as
we said, the most important fact about the world.--
Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them. In
some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; _Vates_ means both
Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well
understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they are
still the same; in this most important respect especially, That they have
penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the Universe; what
Goethe calls "the open secret." "Which is the great secret?" asks
one.--"The _open_ secret,"--open to all, seen by almost none! That divine
mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, "the Divine Idea of the
World, that which lies at the bottom of Appearance," as Fichte styles it;
of which all Appearance, from the starry sky to the grass of the field, but
especially the Appearance of Man and his work, is but the _vesture_, the
embodiment that renders it visible. This divine mystery _is_ in all times
and in all places; veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly
overlooked; and the Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect,
as the realized Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace
matter,--as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some
upholsterer had put together! It could do no good, at present, to _speak_
much about this; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do not know it,
live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful pity;--a failure
to live at all, if we live otherwise!
But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the _Vates_,
whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hither to
make it more impressively known to us. That always is his message; he is
to reveal that to us,--that sacred mystery which he more than others lives
ever present with. While others forget it, he knows it;--I might say, he
has been driven to know it; without consent asked of him, he finds himself
living in it, bound to live in it. Once more, here is no Hearsay, but a
direct Insight and Belief; this man too could not help being a sincere man!
Whosoever may live in the shows of things, it is for him a necessity of
nature to live in the very fact of things. A man once more, in earnest
with the Universe, though all others were but toying with it. He is a
_Vates_, first of all, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and
Prophet, participators in the "open secret," are one.
With respect to their distinction again: The _Vates_ Prophet, we might
say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Good and
Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the _Vates_ Poet on what the Germans call the
aesthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we may call a revealer
of what we are to do, the other of what we are to love. But indeed these
two provinces run into one another, and cannot be disjoined. The Prophet
too has his eye on what we are to love: how else shall he know what it is
we are to do? The highest Voice ever heard on this earth said withal,
"Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin:
yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." A glance,
that, into the deepest deep of Beauty. "The lilies of the field,"--dressed
finer than earthly princes, springing up there in the humble furrow-field;
a beautiful _eye_ looking out on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty!
How could the rude Earth make these, if her Essence, rugged as she looks
and is, were not inwardly Beauty? In this point of view, too, a saying of
Goethe's, which has staggered several, may have meaning: "The Beautiful,"
he intimates, "is higher than the Good; the Beautiful includes in it the
Good." The _true_ Beautiful; which however, I have said somewhere,
"differs from the _false_ as Heaven does from Vauxhall!" So much for the
distinction and identity of Poet and Prophet.--
In ancient and also in modern periods we find a few Poets who are accounted
perfect; whom it were a kind of treason to find fault with. This is
noteworthy; this is right: yet in strictness it is only an illusion. At
bottom, clearly enough, there is no perfect Poet! A vein of Poetry exists
in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether of Poetry. We are all
poets when we _read_ a poem well. The "imagination that shudders at the
Hell of Dante," is not that the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's
own? No one but Shakspeare can embody, out of _Saxo Grammaticus_, the
story of _Hamlet_ as Shakspeare did: but every one models some kind of
story out of it; every one embodies it better or worse. We need not spend
time in defining. Where there is no specific difference, as between round
and square, all definition must be more or less arbitrary. A man that has
_so_ much more of the poetic element developed in him as to have become
noticeable, will be called Poet by his neighbors. World-Poets too, those
whom we are to take for perfect Poets, are settled by critics in the same
way. One who rises _so_ far above the general level of Poets will, to such
and such critics, seem a Universal Poet; as he ought to do. And yet it is,
and must be, an arbitrary distinction. All Poets, all men, have some
touches of the Universal; no man is wholly made of that. Most Poets are
very soon forgotten: but not the noblest Shakspeare or Homer of them can
be remembered _forever_;--a day comes when he too is not!
Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a difference between true Poetry
and true Speech not poetical: what is the difference? On this point many
things have been written, especially by late German Critics, some of which
are not very intelligible at first. They say, for example, that the Poet
has an _infinitude_ in him; communicates an _Unendlichkeit_, a certain
character of "infinitude," to whatsoever he delineates. This, though not
very precise, yet on so vague a matter is worth remembering: if well
meditated, some meaning will gradually be found in it. For my own part, I
find considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction of Poetry being
_metrical_, having music in it, being a Song. Truly, if pressed to give a
definition, one might say this as soon as anything else: If your
delineation be authentically _musical_, musical not in word only, but in
heart and substance, in all the thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole
conception of it, then it will be poetical; if not, not.--Musical: how
much lies in that! A _musical_ thought is one spoken by a mind that has
penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery
of it, namely the _melody_ that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of
coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here
in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious; naturally
utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who is there
that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us? A kind of
inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the
Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!
Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has something of song in it:
not a parish in the world but has its parish-accent;--the rhythm or _tune_
to which the people there _sing_ what they have to say! Accent is a kind
of chanting; all men have accent of their own,--though they only _notice_
that of others. Observe too how all passionate language does of itself
become musical,--with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a
man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are
Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the
rest were but wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of
all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling
they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices
and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call _musical
Thought_. The Poet is he who _thinks_ in that manner. At bottom, it turns
still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision
that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart
of Nature _being_ everywhere music, if you can only reach it.
The _Vates_ Poet, with his melodious Apocalypse of Nature, seems to hold a
poor rank among us, in comparison with the _Vates_ Prophet; his function,
and our esteem of him for his function, alike slight. The Hero taken as
Divinity; the Hero taken as Prophet; then next the Hero taken only as Poet:
does it not look as if our estimate of the Great Man, epoch after epoch,
were continually diminishing? We take him first for a god, then for one
god-inspired; and now in the next stage of it, his most miraculous word
gains from us only the recognition that he is a Poet, beautiful
verse-maker, man of genius, or such like!--It looks so; but I persuade
myself that intrinsically it is not so. If we consider well, it will
perhaps appear that in man still there is the _same_ altogether peculiar
admiration for the Heroic Gift, by what name soever called, that there at
any time was.
I should say, if we do not now reckon a Great Man literally divine, it is
that our notions of God, of the supreme unattainable Fountain of Splendor,
Wisdom and Heroism, are ever rising _higher_; not altogether that our
reverence for these qualities, as manifested in our like, is getting lower.
This is worth taking thought of. Sceptical Dilettantism, the curse of
these ages, a curse which will not last forever, does indeed in this the
highest province of human things, as in all provinces, make sad work; and
our reverence for great men, all crippled, blinded, paralytic as it is,
comes out in poor plight, hardly recognizable. Men worship the shows of
great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to
worship. The dreariest, fatalest faith; believing which, one would
literally despair of human things. Nevertheless look, for example, at
Napoleon! A Corsican lieutenant of artillery; that is the show of _him_:
yet is he not obeyed, worshipped after his sort, as all the Tiaraed and
Diademed of the world put together could not be? High Duchesses, and
ostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish rustic, Burns;--a strange
feeling dwelling in each that they never heard a man like this; that, on
the whole, this is the man! In the secret heart of these people it still
dimly reveals itself, though there is no accredited way of uttering it at
present, that this rustic, with his black brows and flashing sun-eyes, and
strange words moving laughter and tears, is of a dignity far beyond all
others, incommensurable with all others. Do not we feel it so? But now,
were Dilettantism, Scepticism, Triviality, and all that sorrowful brood,
cast out of us,--as, by God's blessing, they shall one day be; were faith
in the shows of things entirely swept out, replaced by clear faith in the
_things_, so that a man acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the
other non-extant; what a new livelier feeling towards this Burns were it!
Nay here in these ages, such as they are, have we not two mere Poets, if
not deified, yet we may say beatified? Shakspeare and Dante are Saints of
Poetry; really, if we will think of it, _canonized_, so that it is impiety
to meddle with them. The unguided instinct of the world, working across
all these perverse impediments, has arrived at such result. Dante and
Shakspeare are a peculiar Two. They dwell apart, in a kind of royal
solitude; none equal, none second to them: in the general feeling of the
world, a certain transcendentalism, a glory as of complete perfection,
invests these two. They _are_ canonized, though no Pope or Cardinals took
hand in doing it! Such, in spite of every perverting influence, in the
most unheroic times, is still our indestructible reverence for heroism.--We
will look a little at these Two, the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakspeare:
what little it is permitted us to say here of the Hero as Poet will most
fitly arrange itself in that fashion.
Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and his Book;
yet, on the whole, with no great result. His Biography is, as it were,
irrecoverably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering, sorrow-stricken man,
not much note was taken of him while he lived; and the most of that has
vanished, in the long space that now intervenes. It is five centuries
since he ceased writing and living here. After all commentaries, the Book
itself is mainly what we know of him. The Book;--and one might add that
Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, you cannot
help inclining to think genuine, whoever did it. To me it is a most
touching face; perhaps of all faces that I know, the most so. Lonely
there, painted as on vacancy, with the simple laurel wound round it; the
deathless sorrow and pain, the known victory which is also
deathless;--significant of the whole history of Dante! I think it is the
mournfulest face that ever was painted from reality; an altogether tragic,
heart-affecting face. There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness,
tenderness, gentle affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed
into sharp contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain.
A soft ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as
from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain too, a
silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of godlike disdain of the
thing that is eating out his heart,--as if it were withal a mean
insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and strangle
were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and lifelong
unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection all converted into
indignation: an implacable indignation; slow, equable, silent, like that
of a god! The eye too, it looks out as in a kind of _surprise_, a kind of
inquiry, Why the world was of such a sort? This is Dante: so he looks,
this "voice of ten silent centuries," and sings us "his mystic unfathomable
song."
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