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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.