Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 05.djvu/18

x of them had not the slightest inclination to pose as a propagandist, a man 'with a mission,' or even, except in conversation, as a 'leader' of any kind; the other, though he occasionally figures as a preacher of somewhat vague democratic doctrines, is not at his best, or his most characteristically poetic, when he is doing so. The truth is, that both the 'man of letters' and the poet have, as such, no natural place in a Walhalla of such heroes as Carlyle's exhortations to hero-worship must be assumed to postulate. As a definite creed, as a religion of practical life, it presupposes a hero who is, before all things, a man of action, one of the Mahomets, Luthers, Knoxes, Cromwells, Napoleons of the world. If the attitude of their followers, or of those who in later generations find these great men's lives reminding them, with Longfellow, that 'they can make their lives sublime'—if this attitude, I say, is rightly called hero-worship, we are clearly using the same word in a radically different sense when we apply it to the admiration which we feel for Dante as the author of the Divina Commedia, or for the Shakespeare of the Midsummer Night's Dream, or for the Burns of Tam o' Shanter and the matchless lyrics. Worship in the latter case begins and ends with a state of the emotions; in the former case it aims at, and is only completed by, the adoption of a rule of conduct.

And in effect this distinction accurately divides what is vital and permanent in Carlyle's teaching, from what was perishable and has passed away. Hero-worship, in so far as it 'drives at practice,' hero-worship considered as the attempt to escape from political and social difficulties by deliberate choice of, and pledge of unquestioning submission and obedience to, an autocratic leader was early perceived to be a hopelessly unpractical creed. And later on Carlyle himself delivered a serious blow at it in adopting Frederick the Great as his second King-hero, and dismissing Napoleon not without contumely to the limbo of swaggering quacks. But these six lectures, considered not as enforcing any specific creed, but simply as so many sermons on the text that 'reverence is good for the soul,' possess a lasting though, it is true, a diminished value.