On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (Rethinking the Western Tradition)

In his 1906 edition of Carlyle’s history, John Holland Rose cogently defined Carlyle’s achievement: “[He] asserted that no visible and finite object had ever spurred men on to truly great and far-reaching movements. Only the invisible and the infinite could do that” (1:xiv).

The essence of the Scandinavian, as indeed of all Pagan Mythologies, we found to be recognition of the divineness of Nature; sincere communion of man with the mysterious invisible Powers visibly seen at work in the world round him.

Dante has given us the Faith or soul; Shakspeare, in a not less noble way, has given us the Practice or body.

No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul

Creative, we said: poetic creation, what is this too but seeing the thing sufficiently?

He proves it by etymology. The word Wuotan, which is the original form of Odin, a word spread, as name of their chief Divinity, over all the Teutonic Nations everywhere; this word, which connects itself, according to Grimm, with the Latin vadere, with the English wade and such like,—means primarily Movement, Source of Movement, Power; and is the fi

What the prophets were to morality, so too were the poets to beauty.

What defined this group of premodern heroes was their ability to awaken heroic instincts in others, and to channel these toward the comprehension and the realization of order, hierarchy, harmony, beauty, and justice.

All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!