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CARLYLE AND THE CLIMATE OF HERO-WORSHIP ROBERT A. DONOVAN On six afternoons in May 1840 the fashionable and literary world of London descended on No. 17 Edward Street, Portman Square, to hear Thomas Carlyle deliver a series of lectures 'On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in Human History' (so the relentlessly aspirated title of the Times notices; the word 'Human' was dropped in the published title). Lady Byron, that eminent bluestocking who, in the words of her late hus· band, 'looked a lecture: came and took notes. Mill and Macready came, and the author of Sardella, not to mention Edward Fitzgerald, Mrs Gaskell , Frederick Denison Maurice, and such notable dignitaries as Dr Whewell and Samuel Wilberforce. Except pOSSibly for Mill, who protested aloud Carlyle's preference for Mahomet's teaching over 'Benthamee Utility: the audience was enchanted. Macready, perhaps judging the performance by theatrical standards, professed himself 'charmed, carried away: Nearly forty years afterward Fitzgerald retained a vivid memory of Carlyle weav:ing his spell: 'He looked very handsome then, with his black hair, fine Eyes, and a sort of crucified Expression:1 The message which emerged from Carlyle's turbulent rhetoric was plain: Worship Great Men. The Great Man, or Hero is 'a messenger ... sent from the Infinite Unknown with tidings to us.... We must listen before all to him:2 He may appear in various guises at different stages of human history. Primitive man took him for a god; more enlightened man saw him as a prophet or a priest; modern man respects him as poet or man of letters, or more pragmatically still, reveres him as the authentic voice of a temporally conceived authority and calls him king. But 'at bottom the Great Man, as he comes from the hand of Nature, is ever the same kind of thing: Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns; I hope to make it appear that these are all originally of one stuff; that only by the world's reception of them, and the shapes they assume, are they so immeasurably diverse' (V, 43). Commentators have been puzzled by Carlyle's choice of heroes, and they have noticed the absence of several types - the scientist, the philosopher , the speculative thinker generally, and even the politician, though given Carlyle's idea of what constitutes heroism, this last deficiency cannot UTQ, Volume XLO, Number 2, Winter 1973 CARLYLE AND CLIMATE OF HBRQ-WORSHJP 123 really be seriously urged.' Carlyle's previous literary preoccupations had no doubt had something to do with the specific choices of subjects. He had written of Bums in the Edinburgh Review, of Johnson in Fraser's, of Rousseau and Napoleon, however briefly, in The French Revolution. Dante, Shakespeare, Luther, Knox, and Cromwell had all figured more or less prominently in earlier lecture series. Finally, Carlyle still nourished a long-held dream of doing a life of Cromwell; long before the 1840 lectures were planned he wrote to his brother that he was reading 'a great many books, in a languid way, about Cromwell and his time:' Even so the choice of heroes is often curious, sometimes perverse. Why, for example, offer Rousseau as a type of the hero? Carlyle cannot really conceal his distaste for Rousseau, 'a morbid, excitable, spasmodic man; at best, intense rather than strong' (V, 184). Carlyle finds even Rousseau's appearance repellent: 'A face full of misery, even ignoble misery, and also of the antagonism against that; something mean, plebeian there, redeemed only by intensity: the face of what is called a Fanatic, a sadly contracted Hero!' (v, 185). Of course Carlyle is quick to add that it is Rousseau's sincerity, his earnestness, which entitles him to be named in the present context, but he goes on to condemn the sensuality of Rousseau 's literary style, and his 'semi-

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