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CHAPTER VI.

HIS HERO-WORSHIP.

HAVE pledged myself to avoid deep discussion in these after-dinner talks, and taken leave to indulge my admiration rather than to assume the strut and sneer of censorship; but we have now arrived at a stage in the literary history of Carlyle at which it is impossible for me to avoid saying that there is much in his teaching on heroworship to which I cannot assent. To the best of my recollection I never, at the time of my hottest youthful enthusiasm for Carlyle, had any doubt that on this point he was in serious error; and the first thing in shape of a book that I published contained reasonings against Carlylian hero-worship, the soundness of which has seemed to me to be attested by the observation and experience of every year I have lived since then.

I beg the reader to note that, in objecting to heroworship, I not only do not disparage great men—I not only admit the supreme importance, in all practical undertakings, of getting the right man into the right place-I not only believe that, unless institutions are souled by earnest and capable men, they have no more chance of prosperous and beneficent activity than dead bodies have of climbing mountains-but I specify, as one essential and weighty part of my contention, that hero-worship obscures and neutralises the value of the heroes who are worshipped.

Hero-worship a poet, and you make him a fantastic fool. Hero-worship a warrior, and he becomes, in the old Greek sense, a tyrant. Of course I am not imagining that Carlyle proposes actual worship to be rendered by man to man; but it is no imagination that he attaches a mystical sacredness to the heroic character; and it is this attachment of mystical sacredness which I hold to be demonstrably and intensely mischievous. That the tools. should be put into the hands of him who can use them —that every appointment should be made on grounds of fitness, not of favouritism-that the foolish have a God-given claim to be ruled by the wise, and the wise a God-enjoined duty to rule the foolish-this is not only true, but is of that order of truth which, to the body politic, is what good bread and pure water are to the corporeal frame. To ascertain how these ends may be attained is the object of all political science. Constitutional freedom, electoral privilege, Parliamentary representation, have their raison d'être in the vital necessity of sifting out а nation's best practical capacity and highest worth, in order that thus there may be provided a national brain, to do, for the nation, what the head does for the man. Of "hero-worship" thus understood, no one could have a higher appreciation than I have. But the other kind of hero-worship-that which assigns to the hero a character entitling him to reverence and adoration from common men-issues naturally in the consecration of despotism. Mr. Carlyle speaks of the man who is to be thus worshipped, sometimes as a hero, sometimes as a man of genius, but he always commands ordinary men to bow the knee before him. "He is above thee, like a god."

Such are Carlyle's words in one of the concluding chapters of Past and Present. "He is thy born king, thy conqueror and supreme lawgiver." He is apart from the community into which he is born. "He walks among men; loves men

with inexpressible soft pity-as they cannot love him; but his soul dwells in solitude, in the uttermost parts of creation. In green oases by the palm-tree wells, he rests a space; but anon he has to journey forward, escorted by the Terrors and Splendours, the archdemons and archangels. All Heaven, all Pandemonium, are his escort. The stars, keen-glancing, from the immensities, send tidings to him; the graves, silent with their dead, from the eternities. Deep calls for him unto deep."

I am perfectly alive to the difficulty of drawing the line between legitimate, nay, imperative and indispensable, respect for great men, and that respect which is idolatrous; but I can precisely state that, when I am required to say of any man, be he a Shakespeare or a Newton, a Julius Cæsar or a Cromwell, that he is above me "like a god," I decline such hero-worship. It is practically and intensely pernicious. In politics it leads, as I said, to the consecration of despotism, to inhuman scorn for the multitude. In ethics it is subtly perversive of equity and righteousness. Ask reason, ask conscience, and they clearly tell you that there is no more merit in being born with the most powerful brain in the planet than there is in being born with the weakest. The sole title to respect is moral excellence; and the sole tenable definition of moral excellence is exertion of the will in unselfish goodness. But the irresistible tendency of heroworship is to do injustice to the nobleness of common men, to the honest efforts of weak men, to virtues that have no brilliancy in them though they are of sterling quality, and to slur over and make light of the vices or crimes of the gifted. The course pursued ought to be exactly the reverse. The weak ought to be excused rather than the strong. The failings of men of genius-of a Mirabeau, a Danton, a Burns -are more blame-worthy on account of their gifts. Because a man has been splendidly endowed, the more sacredly incumbent upon him is it to make good use of his gifts, to

guard against temptation, to control passion. Mental power is the natural ally of virtue, and ought to reinforce instead of betraying it; and the man of splendid endowment is a light set on a hill, and therefore more responsible than the crowd.

Under the influence of hero-worship these obvious but infinitely important considerations have been flagrantly set at nought. Every shortcoming of glittering spirits has been wept over, pitied, condoned, and the comparatively ungifted, unenlightened crowd have been fiercely reviled because those bright ones sinned and suffered. Mr. Carlyle, though in his essay on Burns he justly laid the blame of his misfortunes on the poet himself, has spoken many times since, and does partly even in that essay speak, as if Burns had been in some sense the victim of a generation that did not understand hero-worship; and in his delineations of Mirabeau, of Camille Desmoulins, of Danton, and most perhaps of all in his delineation of Frederick of Prussia, he makes genius cover, or at least palliate, a multitude of sins. Throughout all his later works, Mr. Carlyle has inveighed against the great body of his countrymen, and in this he has been accurately followed by Mr. Ruskin. On the highest authority, Divine and human, I affirm that in this they do wrong. "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do," said Jesus Christ, dying upon the cross, the utterance being no less miraculous and Divine in its exact intellectual apprehension of the nature and extent of the culpability of the crowd, than in its infinite benevolence. Shakespeare, beyond all comparison the most clear-seeing and sagacious of mere men, discerns with nice precision that the people, if the Coriolanus will but condescend, in seeking their leadership, to "ask it kindly,"-if the Brutus will but use rational precautions to prevent their being led away by the gleam of some counterfeit nobleness shown to them by an Antony-prefer capacity to charlatanism, virtue to vice.

Deification of Genius.

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But Carlyle and Ruskin accuse the many and adore the few.

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So far as in it lay," says Mr. Ruskin, "this century has caused every one of its great men, whose hearts were kindest, and whose spirits most perceptive of the work of God, to die without hope:-Scott, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Turner. Great England, of the Iron-heart now, not of the Lionheart; for these souls of her children an account may perhaps be one day required of her." I know not any

true sense in which Walter Scott can be said to have died without hope, nor any conceivable sense in which the author of Waverley and the Lady of the Lake experienced iron-hearted treatment from his contemporaries; but it is quite in accordance with the doctrine and practice of heroworship, to lay the blame of Byron's frantic profligacy and Turner's avarice and sensuality upon "England." Mr. Ruskin explains that these great men "fell among fiends— took to making bread out of stones at their bidding, and then died, torn and famished; careful England, in her pure, priestly dress, passing by on the other side." The plain fact is, that England all but adored Byron until he infamously treated his wife, and that Turner was not only hailed with acclamation by the constituted art authorities of England, but welcomed with the most considerate friendship to their homes by the English landed gentry. No better illustration than Mr. Ruskin's passage could be found of the saturation of our atmosphere in these times by hero-worship. The brilliant souls are never to be told that they are to blame e; sunt superis sua jura; the laws of honesty, of continence, of simple respect for God and man, are, it seems, for ordinary mortals; and if men of magnificent genius kick against the pricks of God Almighty's buckler, the blame is to be laid not upon them, but upon those who did not sufficiently hero-worship them. It is of course consistent with all that has been said, to add that scrupulous note should be taken of every allowance which can fairly be