On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History

Rethinking the Western Tradition The volumes in this series seek to address the present debate over the Western tradition by reprinting key works of that tradition along with essays that evaluate each text from di√erent perspectives. EDITORIAL COMMITTEE FOR Rethinking the Western Tradition David Bromwich Yale University Gerald Graff University of Illinois at Chicago Gary Saul Morson Northwestern University Ian Shapiro Yale University Steven B. Smith Yale University On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History THOMAS CARLYLE Edited by David R. Sorensen and Brent E. Kinser with essays by Sara Atwood Owen Dudley Edwards Christopher Harvie Brent E. Kinser Terence James Reed David R. Sorensen Beverly Taylor New Haven and London Copyright © 2013 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Times Roman type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history / Thomas Carlyle ; edited by David R. Sorensen and Brent E. Kinser ; with essays by Sara Atwood, Owen Dudley Edwards, Christopher Harvie, Brent E. Kinser, Terence James Reed, David R. Sorensen, Beverly Taylor. Pages cm — (Rethinking the Western tradition) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-300-14860-2 (pbk.) 1. Heroes. 2. Hero worship. I. Sorensen, David R., 1953– editor of compilation. II. Kinser, Brent E., editor of compilation. III. Carlyle, Thomas, 1795–1881. On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history. pr4426.a2s67 2013 824%.8—dc23 2012045115 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Fielding, DeLaura, and apRoberts ‘‘Flowing Light-Fountains’’ This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction, by David R. Sorensen 1 A Note on the Text 17 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History Lecture 1. The Hero as Divinity 21 Lecture 2. The Hero as Prophet 51 Lecture 3. The Hero as Poet 77 Lecture 4. The Hero as Priest 104 Lecture 5. The Hero as Man of Letters 132 Lecture 6. The Hero as King 162 Essays ‘‘The Tone of the Preacher’’: Carlyle as Public Lecturer in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Owen Dudley Edwards 199 In Defense of ‘‘Religiosity’’: Carlyle, Mahomet, and the Force of Faith in History by David R. Sorensen 209 ‘‘The First of the Moderns’’: Carlyle’s Goethe and the Consequences by Terence James Reed 222 Carlyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the Hero as Victorian Poet by Beverly Taylor 235 ‘‘Leading human souls to what is best’’: Carlyle, Ruskin, and Hero- Worship by Sara Atwood 247 ‘‘Wild Annandale Grapeshot’’: Carlyle, Scotland, and the Heroic by Christopher Harvie 260 Thomas Carlyle, Social Media, and the Digital Age of Revolution by Brent E. Kinser 272 Glossary 283 Works Cited 321 List of Contributors 331 Index 333 This page intentionally left blank Introduction DAVID R. SORENSEN The other sect (to which I belong) . look upon hero-worship as no better than any other idolatry, and upon the attitude of mind of the hero-worshipper as essentially immoral. —T. H. Huxley to Charles Kingsley, 8 Nov. 1866, concerning charges of criminality against Governor John Eyre of Jamaica; Life and Letters 1:304 ‘‘My dear young friend,’’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘‘civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symp- toms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic.’’ —Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) 161 In a striking example of what Thomas Carlyle called a ‘‘conflux of two Eternities’’ (‘‘Signs of the Times’’ [1829], Works 27:59), the fate of On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) has closely paral- leled that of his own reputation in the twenty-first century. Today neither Carlyle nor his book is widely known among students of English literature. However unfairly, both have been tarnished by their association with the authoritarian and totalitarian personality cults that brought European civilization to the brink of destruction in World War II and that left what Michael Burleigh has called a ‘‘dystopian stain’’ (xi) on the historical record. Re- nowned in the early Victorian period as the indomitable opponent of mecha- nistic social engineering, Carlyle later became implicated in its worst ex- cesses. Significantly, in Culture and Society (1958)—the boldest and most successful attempt to revive Carlyle’s standing as a prophet—Raymond Williams referred to Heroes and Hero-Worship as a turning point in the author’s career, signaling his ‘‘steady withdrawal from genuinely social thinking into the preoccupations with personal power’’ (83). Carlyle’s contemporaries themselves were equally dismayed by the di- rection his thinking took in the wake of this ‘‘withdrawal.’’ His notorious 2 David R. Sorensen slurs on Africans, Jews, Irish Catholics, and Poles, his equivocal support of the Confederacy in the American Civil War, his adulation of Prussian mili- tarism, and his defense of Governor John Eyre’s brutal suppression of the Jamaican revolt in 1866 offended those who had been moved by his earlier polemics against laissez-faire economics and his tenacious prosecution of the ‘‘Condition of England’’ question. His reputation reached its nadir in early 1945, when in his diary Joseph Goebbels cited Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great (1858–65) as Adolf Hitler’s chief source of solace during his final months in the Berlin bunker. Never again was the ‘‘Sage of Chelsea’’ readily identified with the cause of common humanity. Like the Prussian state that he revered, Carlyle, the prophet recognized by Williams as ‘‘qualified to become the most important social thinker of his century’’ (76), effectively ceased to exist as an intellectual force in the years after the war. Hero-worship itself has followed a similar downward trajectory. The trend began in the period following the ‘‘Great War’’—the war that was to have prevented World War II and all other wars—when what Paul Fussell called the ‘‘static world’’ of Victorian morality, with its seemingly ‘‘perma- nent and reliable’’ (21) abstractions, began to unravel as the enormity of the conflict became apparent. Later in the century, in the wake of the cata- strophic experiments in human transformation that traumatized societies as politically and culturally diverse as China, Cambodia, Germany, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Romania, and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century— experiments conducted to exalt the supreme wisdom of transcendent lead- ers—skepticism toward heroic avatars became more deeply entrenched in Western thought. Summarizing this consensus at the outset of a new millen- nium, Lucy Hughes-Hallett argued that the ‘‘notion of the hero—that some men are born special—is radically inegalitarian. It can open the way for tyranny.’’ She goes on to point out that hero-worship ‘‘allows worshippers to abnegate responsibility, looking to the great man for salvation or for fulfil- ment that they should more properly be working to accomplish for themselves’’ (3). To those who complained about the triviality of modern life, Hughes-Hallett bluntly responded that the dominance of popular culture was a necessary consequence of a more democratic society. Modern ‘‘triviality,’’ however dispiriting, was far less hazardous to the body politic than the ‘‘desperation that prompts people to crave a champion, a protector, or a redeemer and, having identified one, to offer him their worship’’ (2). Despite the influential efforts of philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and John Rawls to enshrine equality as the highest social good by arguing for the inherent dignity of all human beings, dissenters continue to press the Introduction 3 case for heroic distinction. Robert Faulkner, a shrewd proponent of Aristo- telian ‘‘magnanimity,’’ has recently contended that ‘‘the new liberalism’s antipathy to superior statesmen and to human excellence is peculiarly zeal- ous, parochial, and antiphilosophic’’ (210). But his argument is unlikely to gain much traction in the digital age. To a younger generation obsessively attuned to the Internet, blogging, Facebook, and Twitter, heroes are in- creasingly defined by extrinsic rather than intrinsic factors. In his essay ‘‘From Hero to Celebrity’’ (1987), Daniel Boorstin traced the origins of this shift to the period of what he termed the ‘‘Graphic Revolution’’ in the 1850s, when technological changes began to privilege image over print and accelerated ‘‘the means of fabricating well-knownness’’ (285). Heroes could be created instantly for the sake of a mass market that conflated distinction and popularity. Boorstin cautioned, ‘‘Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We come closer to degrading all fame into notoriety’’ (ix). This personalization of heroes has coincided with the postmodernist urge to ‘‘interrogate’’ the lives of exceptional individuals and to unmask the as- sumptions of power and hierarchy concealed by their apparent altruism and self-sacrifice. Biographers and historians are encouraged to unearth secrets that will compromise grand narratives and alert the public to the slipperi- ness of all heroic discourse. As one exasperated advocate of heroes, Peter Gibbon, has complained, ‘‘What role is left for the hero when the culture would rather be titillated than inspired and prefers gossip to gospel?’’ (xviii) Always alive to the ironies of history, Carlyle would have responded to this debate by reminding his audience that too much can be made of the novelty of the present.

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