Page:The Hero in History.djvu/48

48 been Napoleon it would have been someone else who would have carried out the dictates of “the cunning of reason”—and if not on horseback, then on foot.

The expression of dissent to the generic view of heroic determinism was not always a specific reply to the doctrine and its proponents. The Hegelian position, which was the most influential of all social determinisms, had already been crystallized before Carlyle acquired vogue. Hegel himself aimed his doctrines at the eighteenth-century rationalists who explained history in terms of personal psychology and good or bad luck. The Marxist position was presented as a corollary from a comprehensive philosophy of history. And although Spencer edged his criticism with a contemptuous eye on Carlyle (as did Buckle and Taine), there was nothing he wrote which did not flow naturally from his dogmas about the iron laws of social evolution.

It will be instructive to consider in some detail these three variations on the determinist theme in respect to the place of the hero.

For Hegel, as for Oswald Spengler who follows him in this respect, the great man is not the product of material conditions, social or biological, but primarily an expression of “the spirit” of his times or “the soul” of his culture. As a culture develops, certain objective needs arise which fulfil themselves through the subjective decisions of men. Men gratify their errant wishes, carry out their urgent duties, pit their intelligence and courage against the obstacles of nature and society—but all the time they are building something different from what they intend. In the dim fight of his understanding, each one weaves a strand in the web of destiny which is the Meaning or Reason of history. The great man is the one who is aware that the Reason of things speaks through his words and deeds. He has historical and divine justification in overriding other individuals, even entire peoples, who remain on the level of everyday understanding.

For Hegel every age gets “the great man” it deserves, but what it deserves depends not on its responsible choice between alternatives but on a predetermined pattern laid up in heaven, existing out of time and yet in some mysterious way pervading events in time. The tasks that confront an age, and to which the great man is called, do not arise from the daily problems of winning bread, peace, and freedom from oppression. They are