On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History | Page 9

Heaven that shall
kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own
hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can
believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it,
into fire like his own. The dry mouldering sticks are thought to have
called him forth. They did want him greatly; but as to calling him
forth--! Those are critics of small vision, I think, who cry: "See, is it not

the sticks that made the fire?" No sadder proof can be given by a man
of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. There is no sadder
symptom of a generation than such general blindness to the spiritual
lightning, with faith only in the heap of barren dead fuel. It is the last
consummation of unbelief. In all epochs of the world's history, we shall
find the Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his
epoch;--the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt.
The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great
Men.
Such small critics do what they can to promote unbelief and universal
spiritual paralysis: but happily they cannot always completely succeed.
In all times it is possible for a man to arise great enough to feel that
they and their doctrines are chimeras and cobwebs. And what is notable,
in no time whatever can they entirely eradicate out of living men's
hearts a certain altogether peculiar reverence for Great Men; genuine
admiration, loyalty, adoration, however dim and perverted it may be.
Hero-worship endures forever while man endures. Boswell venerates
his Johnson, right truly even in the Eighteenth century. The unbelieving
French believe in their Voltaire; and burst out round him into very
curious Hero-worship, in that last act of his life when they "stifle him
under roses." It has always seemed to me extremely curious this of
Voltaire. Truly, if Christianity be the highest instance of Hero-worship,
then we may find here in Voltaireism one of the lowest! He whose life
was that of a kind of Antichrist, does again on this side exhibit a
curious contrast. No people ever were so little prone to admire at all as
those French of Voltaire. Persiflage was the character of their whole
mind; adoration had nowhere a place in it. Yet see! The old man of
Ferney comes up to Paris; an old, tottering, infirm man of eighty-four
years. They feel that he too is a kind of Hero; that he has spent his life
in opposing error and injustice, delivering Calases, unmasking
hypocrites in high places;--in short that he too, though in a strange way,
has fought like a valiant man. They feel withal that, if persiflage be the
great thing, there never was such a persifleur. He is the realized ideal of
every one of them; the thing they are all wanting to be; of all
Frenchmen the most French. He is properly their god,--such god as
they are fit for. Accordingly all persons, from the Queen Antoinette to

the Douanier at the Porte St. Denis, do they not worship him? People of
quality disguise themselves as tavern-waiters. The Maitre de Poste,
with a broad oath, orders his Postilion, "Va bon train; thou art driving
M. de Voltaire." At Paris his carriage is "the nucleus of a comet, whose
train fills whole streets." The ladies pluck a hair or two from his fur, to
keep it as a sacred relic. There was nothing highest, beautifulest,
noblest in all France, that did not feel this man to be higher, beautifuler,
nobler.
Yes, from Norse Odin to English Samuel Johnson, from the divine
Founder of Christianity to the withered Pontiff of Encyclopedism, in all
times and places, the Hero has been worshipped. It will ever be so. We
all love great men; love, venerate and bow down submissive before
great men: nay can we honestly bow down to anything else? Ah, does
not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing
reverence to what is really above him? No nobler or more blessed
feeling dwells in man's heart. And to me it is very cheering to consider
that no sceptical logic, or general triviality, insincerity and aridity of
any Time and its influences can destroy this noble inborn loyalty and
worship that is in man. In times of unbelief, which soon have to
become times of revolution, much down-rushing, sorrowful decay and
ruin is visible to everybody. For myself in these days, I seem to see in
this indestructibility of Hero-worship the everlasting adamant lower
than which the confused wreck of revolutionary things cannot fall. The
confused wreck of things crumbling and even crashing and tumbling all
round us in these revolutionary