on heroes and anti-hero-worship

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



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.



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}




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.




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":




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.




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:




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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