On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

Summary

On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History prints six lectures that Thomas Carlyle gave to a fashionable London audience between 5 and 22 May 1840 and published, revised, in 1841. The opening lecture announces the thesis for which the book is still known: that universal history is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked in the world, and that reverence for such men, which Carlyle calls hero-worship, is the root of religion, loyalty and social order. Against what he regards as the shallow scepticism of the eighteenth century, which explained great men away as products of their time, he insists that the hero is a gift sent into the world, the lightning that kindles dry fuel. The hero's mark in every age is sincerity: an earnest, almost involuntary grasp of reality behind appearances. The series then follows the hero through six shapes, each fitted to the world he is born into. Odin, a Norse chief remembered as a god, represents the hero as divinity, and Carlyle reads Scandinavian myth as a primitive but honest wonder at nature. Mahomet, the hero as prophet, is defended against the European charge of imposture as a sincere man, though Carlyle finds the Koran itself toilsome reading. Dante and Shakespeare, the hero as poet, give voice to the medieval Catholic world and to the Protestant England that followed it. Luther and Knox, the hero as priest, are reformers who stood on conscience and Scripture against falsehood, Luther above all at Worms. Johnson, Rousseau and Burns, the hero as man of letters, are men of genius cast into an age of disbelief and a disorganized literary trade, struggling against poverty, sickness and the market. Finally Cromwell and Napoleon, the hero as king, stand for the ablest man as ruler: Carlyle rescues Cromwell from the charge of insincere ambition and treats Napoleon as a great but finally false figure whose sincerity decayed into ambition. The lectures fuse history, biography, sermon and prophecy in an exclamatory spoken style. Their argument has been debated ever since: Victorian readers found in it a call to earnestness and reverence, later critics charged it with justifying strong men and with confusing sincerity with truth, and Christian readers must notice that Carlyle honours belief as such while leaving the truth of what is believed curiously open. Read carefully, the book remains a classic statement of the conviction that persons, not impersonal forces, make history.

Plot or Argument

• Lecture I: the hero as divinity (Odin)

  The thesis that history is the biography of great men, and that hero-worship underlies all religion. Carlyle reads Norse paganism, the tree Igdrasil, Thor and the giants, as the sincere first attempt of a people to recognize the divine in nature, and imagines Odin as a gifted man deified by his followers.

• Lecture II: the hero as prophet (Mahomet)

  Rejecting the European tradition of Mahomet as impostor, Carlyle argues that no false man could found a lasting faith; sincerity, not imposture, explains him. He narrates the call in the cave, the flight from Mecca and the spread of Islam, while confessing he finds the Koran a confused and wearisome book.

• Lecture III: the hero as poet (Dante, Shakespeare)

  The poet is a seer whose song reveals the inward harmony of things. Dante gives voice to ten silent Christian centuries; Shakespeare, the greatest intellect in English, gathers the whole of Elizabethan England and is worth more to the English nation than an Indian Empire.

• Lecture IV: the hero as priest (Luther, Knox)

  The reformer priest attacks idols that have become falsehoods. Luther's burning of the papal bull and his stand at the Diet of Worms are called the greatest moment in modern history; Knox, a brave and unpretentious man, founded the faith that became, in Carlyle's phrase, Scotland's, New England's and Oliver Cromwell's.

• Lecture V: the hero as man of letters (Johnson, Rousseau, Burns)

  Writing and printing have made literature a new priesthood and parliament, the Fourth Estate, yet the man of letters lives in an unorganized trade and a sceptical century. Johnson, sick and poor but earnest, Rousseau, sincere but driven to frenzy, and Burns, wasted in the excise, show greatness hampered by its age.

• Lecture VI: the hero as king (Cromwell, Napoleon)

  The king is the able man, the one who can. Carlyle defends Cromwell as a sincere, God-fearing man, nervous and melancholic, wrongly called a hypocrite, and judges Napoleon a lesser and finally false hero whose message of careers open to talent decayed into ambition and quackery.

Characters

• Odin, Lecture I: hero as divinity

  Norse god whom Carlyle imagines as a historical chief and thinker deified by his people's admiration.

• Mahomet (Muhammad), Lecture II: hero as prophet

  Founder of Islam, defended against the charge of imposture as a sincere if rude man of the desert.

• Dante Alighieri, Lecture III: hero as poet

  The voice of the Christian Middle Ages, a man of deep sorrow and intensity.

• William Shakespeare, Lecture III: hero as poet

  The supreme intellect of England, whose calm seeing makes him a kind of unconscious prophet.

• Martin Luther, Lecture IV: hero as priest

  The monk who stood on Scripture at Worms; brave, tender and plain, the central figure of the series.

• John Knox, Lecture IV: hero as priest

  Scottish reformer, defended as honest and humorous against his reputation for harshness.

• Samuel Johnson, Lecture V: hero as man of letters

  Poor, sick and hypochondriac but heartily in earnest; a hero contracted by his age.

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lecture V: hero as man of letters

  Sincere but egotistic and driven nearly to madness; his paradoxes help kindle the Revolution.

• Robert Burns, Lecture V: hero as man of letters

  Ayrshire poet of gigantic natural gifts, spent as an exciseman and dead at thirty-seven.

• Oliver Cromwell, Lecture VI: hero as king

  The Puritan general and Lord Protector, rescued from the charge of insincere ambition as a believing, melancholic, practical man.

• Napoleon Bonaparte, Lecture VI: hero as king

  A genuine force who began in a true insight and ended in falsehood and self-seeking.

Lessons

• Sincerity is not the same as truth

  Carlyle's test for a hero is sincerity, a deep earnestness about reality. It lets him admire Odin, Mahomet, Luther and Cromwell alike, since all believed what they said. Students should ask whether sincerity can be the final test: the lectures praise conviction while leaving open whether what was believed was true.

  • Carlyle says sincerity is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic. Can a person be sincere and gravely wrong?
  • How does Carlyle's defence of Mahomet depend on separating the man's sincerity from the truth of his teaching?
  • Would Luther himself have accepted sincerity as the decisive test?

• Admiration as an education

  Carlyle claims that no nobler feeling dwells in man than admiration for one higher than himself, and that the disbelief in great men is itself a littleness. Classical education has long used exemplary lives in this way, from Plutarch onward. The lectures press students to admire well, which means learning both whom and why to admire.

  • What does Carlyle mean by worship when he applies it to human beings? Where does his language go too far?
  • Is a sneering disbelief in greatness a sign of smallness, as Carlyle claims, or sometimes a defence against idols?
  • Choose a person you admire. Which of Carlyle's tests would he or she pass?

• Persons or forces in history

  Carlyle opposes the view that great men are mere products of their circumstances; the age is dry fuel, the hero the lightning. Later writers such as Herbert Spencer answered that great men are themselves made by their societies. The book is a starting point for weighing personal agency against impersonal causes.

  • Pick one of Carlyle's heroes. How much of his achievement does Carlyle credit to him, and how much does he admit came from his age?
  • Does Carlyle's own Lecture V, where the age cramps Johnson and Burns, weaken his thesis?
  • What is gained and lost by teaching history as biography?

• Reformer at Worms, ruler at Whitehall

  The fourth and sixth lectures pair a priest who refuses to recant against conscience with a ruler who seizes power to impose order. Carlyle admires both, but their cases differ: Luther stands alone and suffers; Cromwell commands armies and dissolves parliaments. Comparing them tests where courage ends and domination begins.

  • Why does Carlyle call Luther's stand at Worms the greatest moment in the modern history of men?
  • Carlyle defends Cromwell's dismissal of the Rump Parliament in 1653. Are his reasons persuasive?
  • What would Carlyle's argument need in order to tell a true king from a tyrant?

Context

Carlyle lectured in the year after the Chartist petition and the Newport rising, in a Britain anxious about industrial poverty and democratic agitation, and only three years into Victoria's reign. Intellectually he was reacting against both Benthamite utilitarianism and eighteenth-century scepticism, which he believed had reduced religion to mechanism and man to appetite. His reverence was formed by his Scottish Calvinist upbringing, which he no longer held as doctrine, and by Goethe, Fichte and German idealism. The lectures show early-Victorian Protestant assumptions throughout, in the treatment of Catholicism, Islam and paganism, as well as genuine efforts at sympathy for figures his audience despised.

Composition

Delivered extempore from notes at Willis's Rooms, London, in six sessions dated in the text from 5 to 22 May 1840, before an audience of the fashionable and the literary. Carlyle wrote them out afterward and James Fraser published them in 1841. It was his fourth and last annual lecture course, and the only one he published; the others survive in reports and notes. The material on Cromwell grew into his edition Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845), and the Burns and Johnson portraits draw on his earlier essays on both men.

Reception

The book became one of the most widely read of Carlyle's works in Britain and America and gave a phrase to the English language; the term great man theory later attached itself to its thesis. Emerson, Carlyle's friend and American publisher, answered it with Representative Men (1850). Herbert Spencer criticized the thesis in The Study of Sociology (1873), and twentieth-century writers sometimes linked Carlyle's hero-worship to later cults of dictators, a reading that his defenders consider anachronistic. The lectures on Mahomet were notable in their day as a sympathetic hearing from a Christian-educated writer.

Comparisons

• Essays: First Series (Self-Reliance and Other Essays)

  Emerson, who arranged Carlyle's American publication, shares his belief in self-reliant greatness, but his Representative Men (1850) answers On Heroes by treating great men as representatives of human powers open to all, not as rulers to be obeyed.

• Sartor Resartus

  Teufelsdröckh's philosophy of clothes, which treats institutions and creeds as garments over a divine reality, is the metaphysics behind the lectures' insistence that every hero sees through appearances to the fact beneath.

• The Life of Samuel Johnson

  Carlyle's Johnson in Lecture V, sick, poor, and earnest, is drawn almost wholly from Boswell, whom Carlyle had praised in an 1832 essay as himself a hero-worshipper of a rare kind.

• The Prose Edda

  Snorri's handbook is a principal source for the Norse myths retold in Lecture I; comparing the two shows how freely Carlyle turned mythology into a parable of sincere wonder.

• The Koran

  Carlyle read the Koran in Sale's English translation and calls it toilsome; reading a few suras beside Lecture II lets students test his claim that the book is sincere though confused.

• The Divine Comedy

  Lecture III praises Dante's intensity and calls the poem the voice of ten silent Christian centuries; students who know the Inferno can judge whether that grand claim fits the poem's precision.

• A Tale of Two Cities

  Dickens drew on Carlyle's French Revolution for his novel; Lecture VI's account of Sansculottism and Napoleon belongs to the same reading of the Revolution as a judgment on falsehood.

• Latter-Day Pamphlets

  Ten years later Carlyle turned the doctrine of the able man into political proposals, and the reverent tone of the lectures became the rage of the pamphlets; reading the two together shows where hero-worship went.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The image of the age as dry fuel and the great man as lightning in Lecture I, and how often the metaphor of fire returns in later lectures.
• Carlyle's handling of the charge that Mahomet was an impostor in Lecture II: what evidence he offers and what he admits about the Koran.
• The comparison of Shakespeare with the Indian Empire in Lecture III, and what it says about how Carlyle values a national poet.
• Luther at Worms and at the Wartburg in Lecture IV: the words Here stand I and the thrown inkstand.
• Carlyle's argument in Lecture VI that Cromwell's melancholy and nervous fancies were signs of depth rather than of a false and scheming heart.

Key terms and names

Hero-worship

Carlyle's name for transcendent admiration of a great man, which he believes underlies religion, loyalty and every lasting social order.

Sincerity

The first mark of a hero in Carlyle's scheme: an earnest, often unconscious grasp of the reality behind appearances, as opposed to performing a part.

Quackery

Carlyle's word for falsehood and imposture in religion, politics or letters; the hero is the enemy of quacks and is often accused of being one.

Igdrasil

The ash-tree of existence in Norse myth, with roots in the realm of death and branches in heaven, which Carlyle admires as an image of all life.

Diet of Worms

The imperial assembly of 1521 at which Luther refused to recant his writings unless refuted from Scripture or plain reason.

Fourth Estate

The press, which Carlyle, crediting Burke, calls more important than the three estates in Parliament; he argues that printing is equivalent to democracy.

Kon-ning

Carlyle's etymology for King: the man who knows or can, so that true kingship belongs to the ablest man.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What are the six forms of the hero, and why does Carlyle say a hero takes a different form in different ages?
2. Comprehension What reasons does Carlyle give for rejecting the idea that Mahomet was a deliberate impostor?
3. Comprehension Why, according to Lecture V, is the man of letters in a worse position than earlier kinds of hero?
4. Interpretation Carlyle praises both Luther's refusal to recant and Cromwell's forceful rule. What do the two have in common in his eyes, and where do they differ?
5. Interpretation Carlyle treats Napoleon as a hero who became false. At what point, and by what signs, does he think the change happened?
6. Interpretation In what sense does Carlyle use the word worship? Is the word chosen carelessly or deliberately?
7. Big Question Should we admire great men, and if so, how do we keep admiration from becoming idolatry or excuse?

Faith Connections

• Exodus 20:3-5 (Scripture)

  Carlyle calls admiration of a great man worship and finds it at the root of religion; the first commandments mark a line between honour given to men and worship owed to God alone that his language blurs.

• Hebrews 11:32-12:2 (Scripture)

  Scripture too has a gallery of heroes, but it presents their faith as trust in God's promise, and it ends by directing attention to Christ, not to the heroes themselves; a useful contrast with Carlyle's gallery.

• Plutarch, Parallel Lives (Great Conversation)

  Plutarch also teaches through exemplary lives; compare his habit of weighing virtues and vices in each man with Carlyle's more reverent, less balanced portraits.

• Augustine, City of God V.12-21 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine examines Roman heroes who sought glory and grants them a real but earthly reward; his distinction between glory and true virtue tests Carlyle's admiration for Cromwell and Napoleon.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: History is made by great men sent into the world; their mark in every age is sincerity; and a society's health depends on recognizing and obeying them, so that the scepticism which explains greatness away is the deepest disorder of the modern age.

Rhetorical device: apostrophe and exclamation in spoken periods. The lectures address the audience, the dead and the abstractions directly, breaking off with exclamations such as the cry that England cannot give up its Shakespeare, so that argument advances by emotional crescendo rather than by stated premises.

Debate: Resolved: that Carlyle's test of sincerity is sufficient to tell a true hero from a false one.

Memory Work

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

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose one of Carlyle's heroes and read a short primary source by or about him (a Luther sermon, a Johnson essay, a Burns poem, a Cromwell speech). Does the primary source confirm Carlyle's portrait?

Comparison with Essays: First Series (Self-Reliance and Other Essays): Compare Carlyle's claim that great men are sent to be obeyed with Emerson's view in Self-Reliance that every person must trust his own thought. Can the two be reconciled?

Medical Lens

The lectures are not about medicine, but a recurring strand links greatness to nervous suffering, and Carlyle deliberately refuses to let medical explanation diminish his heroes. Johnson's hypochondria and scrofula, Rousseau's near-madness, Cromwell's youthful melancholy reported by his Huntingdon physician, and Luther's apparition at the Wartburg, which Carlyle allows any apothecary's apprentice could explain physiologically, are all read as the cost or sign of a deep nature. This is a Romantic and moral reading, not a diagnosis; Carlyle himself suffered chronically from dyspepsia and insomnia, which biographers often connect with his sympathy for afflicted genius. Modern labels sometimes applied to these figures (depression in Johnson or Cromwell, paranoia in Rousseau) are retrospective interpretations and should be presented as such. The book is useful to a history-of-psychiatry reader as a classic statement of the melancholy-genius idea in Victorian dress.

• Lecture IV (The Hero as Priest), on Luther at the Wartburg

  Exhausted by labour, sickness and fasting, Luther sees a hideous image he takes for the Devil and throws his inkstand at it; Carlyle grants a physiological explanation but honours the defiance.

  Altered States Mind Body
• Lecture V (The Hero as Man of Letters), on Johnson

  Johnson's scrofulous diseases and continual hypochondria, physical and spiritual, described as an element of diseased sorrow inseparable from his nobleness.

  Hypochondria Melancholia Depression Mind Body
• Lecture V (The Hero as Man of Letters), on Rousseau

  Rousseau's earnestness too great for a feeble, sensitive nature drives him to incoherences and something like madness, his ideas possessing him like demons.

  Madness Psychosis
• Lecture V (The Hero as Man of Letters), on scepticism

  Carlyle calls the scepticism of the eighteenth century a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul, a moral illness in medical metaphor.

  Mind Body
• Lecture VI (The Hero as King), on Cromwell's youth

  The Huntingdon physician's report to Sir Philip Warwick that he was often called at midnight to Cromwell, full of hypochondria and fancies about the town cross; Carlyle reads it as a symptom of depth, not falsehood.

  Hypochondria Melancholia Depression Physicians Doctors

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Carlyle's test of a hero is sincerity. Write an essay arguing whether sincerity is enough, using his treatment of Mahomet and Luther as your two cases.

• Classroom

  Hold a seventh lecture: each student chooses a figure Carlyle omitted (a saint, a scientist, a woman of letters, a missionary) and argues in Carlyle's manner which heroic type he or she fits, then the class critiques the argument.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation in 1850 between Carlyle and Emerson after Emerson has published Representative Men, in which each defends his view of what great men are for.

• Poetry

  Write a short poem on the black spot on the Wartburg wall where Luther's inkstand struck, from the point of view of a visitor who has heard both the pious and the medical explanation.

Further Reading

• Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle

  The philosophical novel behind the lectures' idea of seeing through appearances.

• Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, Thomas Carlyle

  1845 edition that expanded the sixth lecture into a full rehabilitation of Cromwell.

• Representative Men, Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Emerson's 1850 lectures on Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon and Goethe, a friendly answer to Carlyle.

• The Study of Sociology, Herbert Spencer

  Contains Spencer's critique of the great-man view of history.

• Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, J. A. Froude

  The second part of Froude's authorized life, covering the lecture years.