on heroes and anti-hero-worship
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Trustees of Boston University
On Heroes and Anti-Hero-WorshipAuthor(s): Christopher RicksSource: Arion, Third Series, Vol. 2, No. 2/3 (Spring, 1992 - Fall, 1993), pp. 19-26Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163526 .
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On Heroes and Anti-Hero-Worship
CHRISTOPHER RICKS
T A HERE must be many of us who, though not
owing our acquaintanceship with John Jay Chapman to William
Arrowsmith (for Jacques Barzun had effected an introduction, with his Selected Writings of Chapman), do owe to our friend
ship with Arrowsmith, whether private or public, our friendship with Chapman. Both men were bonny fighters, and good haters, and impassioned critical creators. I even fancy some likeness not
just of temperaments but of lineaments, there in those strongly
physical, teasingly quizzical phizes. The splendor of candor.
What Arrowsmith swooped upon in Chapman is itself an
embodiment of pouncing power. The praise of Chapman as hav
ing "a vocation for heroism" is at once enlightening and sparky, for the word vocation more often suggests a choice of life other
than the heroic ? a calling, yes, but not the voices of Joan of Arc,
say, which were adverting her to something even greater than a
vocation: a mission. The priestly profession has its own servi
tudes and grandeurs, not necessarily heroic, albeit none the worse for being skeptical of heroism as it is commonly or secu
larly understood. The greatest heroic poem in our language
aspired to precipitate a truer understanding of what it is to be
heroic, given the Fall of Man:
argument
Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued Thrice fugitive about Troy wall.
One way perhaps to bring out Chapman's heroic quality, and
the principled magnanimity of Arrowsmith's response to it, may be by adducing Carlyle, about whom Chapman cared. In youth, his feelings about Carlyle had been insufficiently mixed, though
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20 ON HEROES AND ANTI-HERO-WORSHIP
less merely aggrieved than those of his grandparents. He wrote
to Minna Timmins on 22 April 1889:
Mentioning C. to my grandfather last night, rather sur
prised at his acrimony. That Carlyle was a thoroughly bad
fellow. The explanation is that Carlyle was rude to him ?
the only time he saw him in '48.
My Grandmother Chapman's reason for disliking him
was a better one. She and the rest of the antislavery agitators in 1835 and '40 ?Carlyle being one of the prophets of the
times and writing all sorts of pamphlets about free thinking and being and high things generally?went to him for sup
port, but they got only sneers. He was a man of words, whose profession was snarling. They ought to have known
better.
Ye-es, they ought_And as to "went to him for support," there is that punchy apophthegm of Chapman's, about new
President Lowell of Harvard: "what Lowell will need is support. As so often happens, the support he needs can best begin by
punching his head."
Later in life Chapman was more concerned to clear his own
mind than to punch someone else's head. By one of life's little
ironies, and death's, the terms of Chapman's letter of 1923
about Carlyle might these days be retorted upon Chapman him
self, no longer a name to conjure with, to adjure with, or to
injure with:
This summer I wrote quite a ponderous essay upon Car
lyle?to clear my mind. He's a rabid chimera, bombinans
in vacuo ? and I can't be sure that I've got him snap-shot ted. He was once a popular writer, a being regarded by con
temporaries as a classic ?that's the key to him somehow.
Of course no one cares a rap for him today ?except per
haps a few gnarled veterans who can't get over their youth. One would have to dig them out in order to knock them on
the head and say "Ho! you there! I'm going to write about
Carlyle."
This knocks the veterans ?and hits the nail ?on the head.
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Christopher Ricks 21
Chapman never published his forty-page essay on Carlyle, but some shrewd sense of it may be gained from three pages in the
study of Chapman which Arrowsmith so much, and so rightly, admired: Richard Hovey's John Jay Chapman?An American
Mind. Hovey starts from the consanguinity:
A person with Chapman's interests, temperament, and
vocation could hardly ignore Thomas Carlyle. However the
Scotsman differed from the American, their points of
affinity were unmistakable: both were wits and humor some characters; both were of a puritan heritage; both were
self-tormentors; both denounced their times with the rage of a Hebrew prophet; both employed a style of unusual
force.
The account which Hovey gives of the Carlyle essay suggests that it matters less as criticism than "as disguised autobiography. For unconsciously Chapman identified himself with Carlyle,
whose inner conflicts he probed as if to throw light on his own."
It is open to question whether one man exactly identifies him
self ? even (biographer's recourse) "unconsciously" ? with
another whom he sums up as a "frenzied theologian, ambitious
revivalist, tortured artist," but Hovey must be right about the
kinship, and he quotes a magnificent image of Chapman's for
Carlyle's nonmovement of mind, an image which is not only
fraught with reluctant admiration (there is felt to be a kind of
genius in Carlyle's effecting this grinding of the teeth of the
cogs) but is sometimes true of Chapman's own impacted wisdom:
We can understand from his own description why his
thought shows no progression. He turns on the high power and at the same time throws all the brakes. The machine
emits a most terrible racket, but, so far as the thought goes, it is standing still.
What is characteristic of Chapman there is not only the invoking of (for Carlyle, of all people) the machine, but the tacit com
edy ? it looks like a flat idiom ? of "so far as the thought goes, it
is standing still" ?goes} far}
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22 ON HEROES AND ANTI-HERO-WORSHIP
In Hovey's summary of the Carlyle essay, nothing is said of
the masterpiece which in any case always receives mention more
than attention, the great book of which the title is often abbrevi
ated to On Heroes andHero-Worship. Rather, On Heroes, Hero
Worship and the Heroic in History, a work in some ways luridly maladroit but in every way lividly profound.
Yet it is Carlyle who makes clear what it is about Chapman's sense of heroes, of hero-worship and of the heroic in history,
which most entitles him to the respect of Arrowsmith and of
those of us who have learnt from Arrowsmith's conviction. For
it is Carlyle who gives unignorable expression to the nobility of
mind without which there will always be a want of central dig
nity. "I am well aware that in these days," he said in 1840 ? mer
cifully not beginning to imagine what the world would come to
in our days ?
Hero-worship, the thing I call Hero-worship, professes to
have gone out, and finally ceased. This, for reasons which it
will be worth while some time to inquire into, is an age that as it were denies the existence of great men; denies the desirableness of great men. Show our critics a great man, a
Luther for example, they begin to what they call "account"
for him; not to worship him, but to take the dimensions of
him, ? and bring him out to be a little kind of man!
Luther, whose movement of more-than-mind has been elimi
nated to bowel movements? Luther, a little kind of man? Erik
son, or Little by Little?
Carlyle knows very well what our own age bears out, that any central human impulse which is thrown out of the door will
always have a way of coming back in through the window.
"Essentialism" is essential. Those in our day who have most vili
fied the belief in great men, as, you know, a hegemonic bourgeois
patriarchal construction, are the very same who have been only too happy to hero-worship Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault?
three persons who may not constitute a Gallic Satanic Trinity but are not the Holy Trinity either. The impulse which Carlyle honors will insist on being satisfied, whatever the protesticules; the only thing which can save this from self-satisfaction is our all
owning the fact, even if nowadays this does for some people feel
like owning up.
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Christopher Ricks 23
It is a thing for ever changing, this of Hero-worship: different in each age, difficult to do well in any age. Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the age, one may say, is to
do it well.
Chapman was more than a critic, while never being less than
one, not only because of his belief in practical agitation but
because of his practice of it. He risked violence, and even death, in his courageous prayer-meeting in Coatesville, the town which
in 1911 had witnessed not only the burning alive of a black man
but the witnessing of the torture by gloating or glazed
bystanders. It is a strength of Chapman's conception of heroism that it
stands in such affinity with action. In this matter, the Victorian
Guesses at Truth, by the brothers Hare, had retrieved something much more enduring (they thank the Greeks) and more precise
than a guess:
Heroism is active genius; genius, contemplative heroism.
Heroism is the self-devotion of genius manifesting itself in
action.
Carlyle had seen the truth of heroes because he understood
that though there are other choices of life deserving of our
respect and even of our worship ? the martyr, the sage, the saint,
the explorer, the inventor ? and though all of these may be truly seen under the aspect of heroism, the idea of the hero will dry out if it moves too far from a direct faith in physical courage, in
valor, in the willingness to bear arms.
As always, with any idea or ideal, the strict sense (with its
danger of becoming narrow) must be held in tension with the
wide sense (with its danger of becoming slack). The faith in her
oism must resist both the hardening which would speak as if
heroism can take one form and one form only, and the relaxing which would speak as if greatness, or even any abstention from
pusillanimity, constituted heroism.
Carlyle's genius, then, was in his limning six classes: the Hero as Divinity, as Prophet, as Poet, as Priest, finally as King?and,
most penetratingly along his way, the Hero as Man of Letters.
"Few shapes of Heroism can be more unexpected":
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24 ON HEROES AND ANTI-HERO-WORSHIP
The Hero as Man of Letters ... is altogether a product of
these new ages; and so long as the wondrous art of Writing, or of Ready-writing which we call Printing, subsists, he
may be expected to continue, as one of the main forms of
Heroism for all future ages. He is, in various respects, a
very singular phenomenon.
And Carlyle's was a singular but cogent exemplification, much
more than a self-serving one from a Man of Letters.
This same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our
most important modern person. He, such as he may be, is
the soul of it all. What he teaches, the whole world will do
and make. The world's manner of dealing with him is the
most significant feature of the world's general position.
Whereupon Carlyle turned to his three exemplars, avatars even:
Johnson, Rousseau, Burns. What, apart from their heroism, the
three have in common, though Carlyle wisely never says so, is
their dash of skepticism ? not rash of cynicism ?about heroes,
hero-worship, and the heroic in history.
Many of the most penetrating remarks by Chapman (a Hero as Man of Letters) turn upon heroism ?turn upon it both as
revolving it in mind and as rounding upon it. Generous, he is even able to admit the presence of the heroic in traditions which
he felt bound to warn the world against, and can speak unex
pectedly and unpausingly of "the conservative and heroic spirit in which modern commentators have dealt with the recovery of
Greek literature." He is sufficiently in earnest about heroism to
be able to make acute jokes about it, as when he summarizes "a
masterpiece of the pathetic":
Alcestis begs Admetus not to marry again, for fear lest a
stepmother should maltreat the children. Admetus con
sents, and proceeds to lift a long-drawn tragic wail, pre
cisely as if he were a moral hero.
How fleetingly this establishes the proper limits of our moral
awe, and how floatingly the iambic movement ?"proceeds to
lift a long-drawn tragic wail" ?lifts and draws back not a wail
but a veil.
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Christopher Ricks 25
The play's the thing. But then the great player is a great thing too.
Your bright boy of six is taken to see the great actor in Ham
let. He ought, if you can manage it, to be taken to see every
great man who passes through town.
"How much easier it is to see a hero in the past than in the
present." Of Garrison: "He lived a life of heroism and of practi cal achievement" ?where it is and which effects so much, in
refusing to identify heroism with practical achievement while
nevertheless equally refusing to dislink the one from the other.
Of Emerson: "The only thing we really admire is personal lib
erty. Those who fought for it and those who enjoyed it are our
heroes" ? with enjoyed gathering so much to itself.
"Emerson represents a protest against the tyranny of democ
racy. He is the most recent example of elemental hero-worship." When Chapman sought to make good his judgment that
Emerson was a hero, it was to the memory of Tennyson's King
Arthur, and of the King's valedictory paradox, that he turned:
But the hero may enslave his race by bringing in a system of
tyranny; the battle-cry of freedom may become a dogma which crushes the soul; one good custom may corrupt the
world.
Emerson himself was of the opinion that "every hero becomes a bore at last," and this may be thought true of his own exquisite lassitude?but it was not true of his friend Carlyle, who was
often a boor but seldom a bore. It was Carlyle who appreciated that, in these matters, addition amounts to multiplication:
Thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world,
make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that
will be two heroes to begin with.
The flunkey world: Chapman despised the ways of that world, and it was something quite other which he had in mind and at
heart when he voiced another of his great apophthegms:
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26 ON HEROES AND ANTI-HERO-WORSHIP
I'll tell you my philosophy ? that there's only one real joy in
life ?but fortunately there's likely to be lots of it ?the joy of casting at the world the stone of an unknown world.
Of an unknown non-flunkey world.
Chapman, like Carlyle (and like Arrowsmith), was no flun
key. "Plato is not a hero. He is not the type that goes to the
stake." Which leaves plenty of room for Chapman then to bring out all the admirable things other than a hero which Plato was
free to be ? and was.
In Plato, "a discussion begins by some question about the
meaning of a verse of Homer; it wanders through morals and
politics, medicines, humorous episodes and modern in
stances. ..": on first looking into Chapman's Homer or Plato, it
may seem far from heroic. But look more closely. "I am grateful to this man": what Chapman said of one of his
heroes, I should like to say of Chapman ?and of Arrowsmith,
Chapman's chapman.
I am grateful to this man, George Thompson. He stood for
courage in 1835 in Massachusetts. He typified courage also at a later time during the Civil War when he stood with
John Bright and W. E. Forster as the expounders of the cause of the North before the people of Great Britain.
Fighting slavery, George Thompson showed courage which was
physical and more than physical. The times demanded it, and he
met the demand. When in 1992 General Norman Schwarzkopf decided to give to his "autobiography" ("written with Peter
Petre": anagrammatically perfect, this rock salt, for the ghost of a man petrified with fearlessness) the title It Doesn't Take a
Hero, he surrendered something. This, in the name of the norm
of modesty. "It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It
takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle." This
doubly flatters the age. For it is a bleak truth ?the penalty for
disobeying a military order being what it is?that not every man
who obeys the order to go into battle is a hero; and, conversely, that to order men into battle may ask great heroism of a different
kind.
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