ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY
By Thomas Carlyle

CONTENTS.

I.   THE HERO AS DIVINITY.  ODIN.  PAGANISM:  SCANDINAVIAN MYTHOLOGY.
II.  THE HERO AS PROPHET.  MAHOMET:  ISLAM.
III. THE HERO AS POET.  DANTE:  SHAKSPEARE.
IV.  THE HERO AS PRIEST.  LUTHER; REFORMATION:  KNOX; PURITANISM.
V.   THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS.  JOHNSON, ROUSSEAU, BURNS.
VI.  THE HERO AS KING.  CROMWELL, NAPOLEON:  MODERN REVOLUTIONISM.

LECTURES ON HEROES.

[May 5, 1840.]
LECTURE I.
THE HERO AS DIVINITY.  ODIN.  PAGANISM:  SCANDINAVIAN MYTHOLOGY.

We have undertaken to discourse here for a little on Great Men, their
manner of appearance in our world's business, how they have shaped
themselves in the world's history, what ideas men formed of them, what work
they did;--on Heroes, namely, and on their reception and performance; what
I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs.  Too evidently this is
a large topic; deserving quite other treatment than we can expect to give
it at present.  A large topic; indeed, an illimitable one; wide as
Universal History itself.  For, as I take it, Universal History, the
history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the
History of the Great Men who have worked here.  They were the leaders of
men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense
creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to
attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are
properly the outer material result, the practical realization and
embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world:
the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, were
the history of these.  Too clearly it is a topic we shall do no justice to
in this place!

One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable
company.  We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without
gaining something by him.  He is the living light-fountain, which it is
good and pleasant to be near.  The light which enlightens, which has
enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp only,
but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing
light-fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic
nobleness;--in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them.  On
any terms whatsoever, you will not grudge to wander in such neighborhood
for a while.  These Six classes of Heroes, chosen out of widely distant
countries and epochs, and in mere external figure differing altogether,
ought, if we look faithfully at them, to illustrate several things for us.
Could we see them well, we should get some glimpses into the very marrow of
the world's history.  How happy, could I but, in any measure, in such times
as these, make manifest to you the meanings of Heroism; the divine relation
(for I may well call it such) which in all times unites a Great Man to
other men; and thus, as it were, not exhaust my subject, but so much as
break ground on it!  At all events, I must make the attempt.

It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chief fact
with regard to him.  A man's, or a nation of men's.  By religion I do not
mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which
he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many
cases not this at all.  We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain
to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them.
This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is
often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from
the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that.  But the
thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough _without_
asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does
practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital
relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that
is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all
the rest.  That is his _religion_; or, it may be, his mere scepticism and
_no-religion_:  the manner it is in which he feels himself to be
spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell
me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what
the kind of things he will do is.  Of a man or of a nation we inquire,
therefore, first of all, What religion they had?  Was it
Heathenism,--plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation of this
Mystery of Life, and for chief recognized element therein Physical Force?
Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the
only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on
Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of
Holiness?  Was it Scepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an
Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one;--doubt as to all this,
or perhaps unbelief and flat denial?  Answering of this question is giving
us the soul of the history of the man or nation.  The thoughts they had
were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of
their thoughts:  it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined
the outward and actual;--their religion, as I say, was the great fact about
them.  In these Discourses, limited as we are, it will be good to direct
our survey chiefly to that religious phasis of the matter.  That once known
well, all is known.  We have chosen as the first Hero in our series Odin
the central figure of Scandinavian Paganism; an emblem to us of a most
extensive province of things.  Let us look for a little at the Hero as
Divinity, the oldest primary form of Heroism.

Surely it seems a very strange-looking thing this Paganism; almost
inconceivable to us in these days.  A bewildering, inextricable jungle of
delusions, confusions, falsehoods, and absurdities, covering the whole
field of Life!  A thing that fills us with astonishment, almost, if it were
possible, with incredulity,--for truly it is not easy to understand that
sane men could ever calmly, with their eyes open, believe and live by such
a set of doctrines.  That men should have worshipped their poor fellow-man
as a God, and not him only, but stocks and stones, and all manner of
animate and inanimate objects; and fashioned for themselves such a
distracted chaos of hallucinations by way of Theory of the Universe:  all
this looks like an incredible fable.  Nevertheless it is a clear fact that
they did it.  Such hideous inextricable jungle of misworships, misbeliefs,
men, made as we are, did actually hold by, and live at home in.  This is
strange.  Yes, we may pause in sorrow and silence over the depths of
darkness that are in man; if we rejoice in the heights of purer vision he
has attained to.  Such things were and are in man; in all men; in us too.

Some speculators have a short way of accounting for the Pagan religion:
mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say they; no sane man ever did
believe it,--merely contrived to persuade other men, not worthy of the name
of sane, to believe it!  It will be often our duty to protest against this
sort of hypothesis about men's doings and history; and I here, on the very
threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other
_isms_ by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this
world.  They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them
up.  Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more
advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded:  but
quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the
health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of
their being about to die!  Let us never forget this.  It seems to me a most
mournful hypothesis, that of quackery giving birth to any faith even in
savage men.  Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things.
We shall not see into the true heart of anything, if we look merely at the
quackeries of it; if we do not reject the quackeries altogether; as mere
diseases, corruptions, with which our and all men's sole duty is to have
done with them, to sweep them out of our thoughts as out of our practice.
Man everywhere is the born enemy of lies.  I find Grand Lamaism itself to
have a kind of truth in it.  Read the candid, clear-sighted, rather
sceptical Mr. Turner's _Account of his Embassy_ to that country, and see.
They have their belief, these poor Thibet people, that Providence sends
down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation.  At bottom
some belief in a kind of Pope!  At bottom still better, belief that there
is a _Greatest_ Man; that _he_ is discoverable; that, once discovered, we
ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds!  This is the
truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.  The
Thibet priests have methods of their own of discovering what Man is
Greatest, fit to be supreme over them.  Bad methods:  but are they so much
worse than our methods,--of understanding him to be always the eldest-born
of a certain genealogy?  Alas, it is a difficult thing to find good methods
for!--We shall begin to have a chance of understanding Paganism, when we
first admit that to its followers it was, at one time, earnestly true.  Let
us consider it very certain that men did believe in Paganism; men with open
eyes, sound senses, men made altogether like ourselves; that we, had we
been there, should have believed in it.  Ask now, What Paganism could have
been?

Another theory, somewhat more respectable, attributes such things to
Allegory.  It was a play of poetic minds, say these theorists; a shadowing
forth, in allegorical fable, in personification and visual form, of what
such poetic minds had known and felt of this Universe.  Which agrees, add
they, with a primary law of human nature, still everywhere observably at
work, though in less important things, That what a man feels intensely, he
struggles to speak out of him, to see represented before him in visual
shape, and as if with a kind of life and historical reality in it.  Now
doubtless there is such a law, and it is one of the deepest in human
nature; neither need we doubt that it did operate fundamentally in this
business.  The hypothesis which ascribes Paganism wholly or mostly to this
agency, I call a little more respectable; but I cannot yet call it the true
hypothesis.  Think, would _we_ believe, and take with us as our
life-guidance, an allegory, a poetic sport?  Not sport but earnest is what
we should require.  It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world;
to die is not sport for a man.  Man's life never was a sport to him; it was
a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!

I find, therefore, that though these Allegory theorists are on the way
towards truth in this matter, they have not reached it either.  Pagan
Religion is indeed an Allegory, a Symbol of what men felt and knew about
the Universe; and all Religions are symbols of that, altering always as
that alters:  but it seems to me a radical perversion, and even inversion,
of the business, to put that forward as the origin and moving cause, when
it was rather the result and termination.  To get beautiful allegories, a
perfect poetic symbol, was not the want of men; but to know what they were
to believe about this Universe, what course they were to steer in it; what,
in this mysterious Life of theirs, they had to hope and to fear, to do and
to forbear doing.  The _Pilgrim's Progress_ is an Allegory, and a
beautiful, just and serious one:  but consider whether Bunyan's Allegory
could have _preceded_ the Faith it symbolizes!  The Faith had to be already
there, standing believed by everybody;--of which the Allegory could _then_
become a shadow; and, with all its seriousness, we may say a _sportful_
shadow, a mere play of the Fancy, in comparison with that awful Fact and
scientific certainty which it poetically strives to emblem.  The Allegory
is the product of the certainty, not the producer of it; not in Bunyan's
nor in any other case.  For Paganism, therefore, we have still to inquire,
Whence came that scientific certainty, the parent of such a bewildered heap
of allegories, errors and confusions?  How was it, what was it?

Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend "explaining," in this place, or
in any place, such a phenomenon as that far-distant distracted cloudy
imbroglio of Paganism,--more like a cloud-field than a distant continent of
firm land and facts!  It is no longer a reality, yet it was one.  We ought
to understand that this seeming cloud-field was once a reality; that not
poetic allegory, least of all that dupery and deception was the origin of
it.  Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's
life on allegories:  men in all times, especially in early earnest times,