On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by David R. Sorensen & Brent E. Kinser

Author:David R. Sorensen & Brent E. Kinser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

Essays

“The Tone of the Preacher”

Carlyle as Public Lecturer in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

OWEN DUDLEY EDWARDS

His Lectures on Heroes and Hero-Worship . . . are just his recorded talk—the eloquent droppings of his mind. To them we could refer all who have never met him.

—George Gilfillan, A First Gallery of Literary Portraits (1851) 92

The tone is even more consistently earnest than Sartor; it is the tone of the preacher, who feels that he stands between the living and the dead.

—Archibald MacMechan, Introduction to Carlyle’s Heroes (1901)

Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) holds a unique place among his works, and perhaps in modern literature. The book consolidated his conquest of London, evangelized listeners and readers effectively enough to distance competitors, and thundered literary and historical judgments that won its foremost intellectual responses from the social sciences. Heroes and Hero-Worship preached a doctrine enshrining schoolboy adulation and elevated it to a British creed. One Carlylean “Fact” needs to be kept in the ascendant here: the book originated in a series of public lectures, delivered from 5 to 22 May 1840, and its decisive shape seems to have been achieved a few days before the lectures began, a shape that would transform Carlyle’s literary and philosophical career. It was also the culmination of a four-year period in which he had previously delivered talks on German literature (1 to 26 May 1837), the history of literature (30 April to 11 June 1837), and revolutions of modern Europe (1 to 18 May 1839). To a considerable degree the format of Heroes and Hero-Worship committed its creator to a reactionary logic, but ironically, its two leading male midwives were probably the leading British and American radicals of their generation. It was repudiated by subsequent intellectual generations whose best efforts failed to escape its enchantments. Heroes and Hero-Worship proclaimed its Englishness by ostentatious Scots speech and subjects, and its cosmopolitanism was without peer for its times.

In his biography of Carlyle, James Anthony Froude notes, “In the summer of 1834 [he] left Craigenputtock and its solitary moors and removed to London, there to make a last experiment whether it would be possible for him to abide by literature as a profession, or whether he must seek another employment and perhaps another country” (Life in London 1:8). Froude here struck the economic note that Carlyle preferred to reserve for high denunciation of the literary establishment’s neglect of figures such as Samuel Johnson and Robert Burns, but it was the right note. Carlyle knew that the Johnson and Burns with whom he would identify himself had had long to wait before London and Edinburgh respectively would surrender to provincials, however heroic. Notwithstanding the topicality of the French Revolution, he suspected that writing might not be enough. He was familiar enough with the appeal of public lecturing. He himself had studied speaking from his boyhood Sundays listening to preachers, regurgitating and perhaps even parodying their discourses. As a student, this verbal awareness began

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