On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (Rethinking the Western Tradition)
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On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (Rethinking the Western Tradition)
In his first important attempt at social commentary, “Signs of the Times” (1829), Carlyle noticed that society’s drift toward efficiency and uniformity had penetrated to the deepest layers of the human psyche: “For the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in
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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!
Thomas Carlyle • On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (Rethinking the Western Tradition)
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
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What the prophets were to morality, so too were the poets to beauty.
Thomas Carlyle • On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (Rethinking the Western Tradition)
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.
Thomas Carlyle • On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (Rethinking the Western Tradition)
Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation,—till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.
Thomas Carlyle • On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (Rethinking the Western Tradition)
They understood in their heart that it was indispensable to be brave; that Odin would have no favour for them, but despise and thrust them out, if they were not brave. Consider too whether there is not something in this! It is an everlasting duty, valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave. Valour is still value. The first duty for a man
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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).
Thomas Carlyle • On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (Rethinking the Western Tradition)
Creative, we said: poetic creation, what is this too but seeing the thing sufficiently?