Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History | Page 5

On the one hand, men may try to ignore the growth of knowledge and the expansion of thought, and to cling to the outgrown symbols as things having in themselves some mysterious sanctity and power. On the other hand, they may recklessly endeavour to cast aside the reality symbolised along with the discredited symbol itself. Given such a condition of things, and we shall find religion degenerating into formalism and the worship of the dead letter, and, side by side with this, the impatient rejection of all religion, and the spread of a crude and debasing materialism. Religious symbols, then, must be renewed. But their renewal can come only from within. Form, to have any real value, must grow out of life and be fed by it.
The revolutionary quality in the philosophy of "Sartor Resartus" cannot, of course, be overlooked. Everything that man has woven for himself must in time become merely "old clothes"; the work of his thought, like that of his hands, is perishable; his very highest symbols have no permanence or finality. Carlyle cuts down to the essential reality beneath all shows and forms and emblems: witness his amazing vision of a naked House of Lords. Under his penetrating gaze the "earthly hulls and garnitures" of existence melt away. Men's habit is to rest in symbols. But to rest in symbols is fatal, since they are at best but the "adventitious wrappages" of life. Clothes "have made men of us"--true; but now, so great has their influence become that "they are threatening to make clothes-screens of us." Hence "the beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes ... till they become transparent." The logical tendency of such teaching may seem to be towards utter nihilism. But that tendency is checked and qualified by the strong conservative element which is everywhere prominent in Carlyle's thought. Upon the absolute need of "clothes" the stress is again and again thrown. They "have made men of us." By symbols alone man lives and works. By symbols alone can he make life and work effective. Thus even the world's "old clothes"--its discarded forms and creeds--should be treated with the reverence due to whatever has once played a part in human development. Thus, moreover, we must be on our guard against the impetuosity of the revolutionary spirit and all rash rupture with the past. To cast old clothes aside before new clothes are ready--this does not mean progress, but sansculottism, or a lapse into nakedness and anarchy.
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The lectures "On Heroes and Hero-Worship," here printed with "Sartor Resartus," contain little more than an amplification, through a series of brilliant character-studies, of those fundamental ideas of history which had already figured among Teufelsdr?ckh's social speculations. Simple in statement and clear in doctrine, this second work needs no formal introduction. It may, however, be of service just to indicate one or two points at which, apart from its set theses, it expresses or implies certain underlying principles of all Carlyle's thought.
In the first place, his philosophy of history rests entirely on "the great man theory." "Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in the world," is for him "at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here." This conception, of course, brings him into sharp conflict with that scientific view of history which was already gaining ground when "Heroes and Hero-Worship" was written, and which since then has become even more popular under the powerful influence of the modern doctrine of evolution. A scientific historian, like Buckle or Taine, seeks to explain all changes in thought, all movements in politics and society, in terms of general laws; his habit is, therefore, to subordinate, if not quite to eliminate, the individual; the greatest man is treated as in a large measure the product and expression of the "spirit of the time." For Carlyle, individuality is everything. While, as he is bound to admit, "no one works save under conditions," external circumstances and influences count little. The Great Man is supreme. He is not the creature of his age, but its creator; not its servant, but its master. "The History of the World is but the Biography of Great Men."
Anti-scientific in his reading of history, Carlyle is also anti-democratic in the practical lessons he deduces from it. He teaches that our right relations with the Hero are discipular relations; that we should honestly acknowledge his superiority, look up to him, reverence him. Thus on the personal side he challenges that tendency to "level down" which he believed to be one alarming result of the fast-spreading spirit of the new democracy. But more than this. He insists that the one hope for our distracted world of to-day lies in the strength and wisdom of the few, not in