HERO WORSHIP.

"And this man is now become a god!"

Shakespeare, JULIUS CESAR.

Carlyle

HERO worship did not die with the classic mythology. seems at present to be the great high-priest of its pompous service, but he is not alone. We question whether the disposition to exalt great men, and little men too, for that matter, if only dead,—far above all measure of humanity, was ever stronger than at present. To say nothing of the countless poets, statesmen, patriots, and saints, both infant and adult, daily ushered into immortality by the Harpers, or the American Tract Society; to forget-thank Heaven that for once we can forget!--the thousand and one heroes of the Mexican war, we yet find indications of the same taste in books that have gained, for the time at least, a far wider acceptance. It is odd to see the variety of characters to whom this pen-and-ink apotheosis has been granted. A quondam minister of Christ has described with exceeding gusto the warlike exploits of Napoleon and his Marshals: and the quaint pen of infidel Carlyle himself has been employed to vindicate the stern old fanatic Cromwell, and his Marshals. Some German

Headley will give us in the same style before long, "Christ and his apostles;" though we doubt much whether the hero would be painted so inhumanly great as Napoleon, or altogether so sincere as the Puritan.

Now this tendency to deify all notable men is bad: but the principle in human nature from which it springs is good, and ennobling. It is that exercise of the imagination in search of ideal excellence, to which we owe every step of progress that mankind has made. This may seem a bold assumption to those who regard imagination as a dangerous, will-o'-the-wisp faculty, predominant only in Byronic youths and love-lorn maidens. But it is not so: it is in fact the grand guiding power of the universe. Reason may hold the helm, but it is Imagination that peers forward into the dark night before us, conjures up with almost prophetic eye whatever awaits us there, descries the first dim outlines of the coming danger, catches the first beam of the distant beacon, and abandons not its post till the haven is gained. Still its appropriate task is in the future only: with the present and the

past it can meddle only to injure. Woe be to the bark whose pilot loses himself in dreams of the wonders past, or in shaping the features of his beloved from the dashing foam alongside.

When the Imagination enters the domains of the Present, to dethrone their legitimate monarch, Common Sense, its effects justify all the epithets that the wisest and dullest of men have heaped upon it. Yet the influence it has gained even here we may see in a thousand forms. What is the theatre, but a place for its temporary indulgence; a compromise, as it were, with this most seductive foe? What are. state processions and ceremonies, but the theatre carried into real life, to deck the common-places of reality? What are all religious forms and rites, but an effort to enlist on the side of good, this ruling passion? To all these developements of its power an eminent French writer has applied the title of "inclination theatrale”: and shocked as many good people will be to have their innocent love for forms and display stigmatized with such a title, is Vinet far wrong in deeming the principle alike throughout?

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Hero-worship again is the result of an undue intrusion of Imagination into the Past. "History and romance," it has been finely said, are too near akin ever to be lawfully united": or to change the figure, we may say with Charles Lamb that their mixture "is like brandy-and-water ;-two good things spoiled!" True history is not made up of striking scenes, and heroic deeds, and great battles. These are but the foam that plays upon the surface, while the dark flood of time rolls unseen below. The secret springs of action do not lie so often in the throne-room or the cabinet, as in the back-stairs, and blind alleys of the palace. Not one of the Cesars did so much toward the downfall of Rome as a few sweetmeats and dainties from the East. Mirabeau and Robespierre might have been petty lawyers, and Napoleon little more than a "little corporal" to his dying day, had the French government been less in debt, or had a weak and wicked woman meddled less with her husband's ministers. All the British conquerors from Henry V. to the present day have not done so much to make England powerful, as her sheep, and spinning-wheels, and merchant-ships. The destinies of our own nation depend more on the factories and free-schools of New England, than upon Daniel Webster, or Zachary Taylor. The influences we have enumerated are very slow of operation, and scarcely perceptible at any time, while men's eyes are dazzled by the halo of glory around some conqueror's head. But the hero shines, and goes out the dead lion is left to decay and

oblivion, while the sheep multiply, and the looms cease not their busy rattle, and forth from these village schools come millions of voters, to shape a history wherein their own names shall not be heard.

Thus those who see nothing in history but a few great names and important crises neglect entirely the reality, to indulge their glowing imagination with a few theatrical scenes. The steady sunshine of truth is exchanged for the fitful glare of the foot-lights, or the lurid flash of battle. The world's annals are broken up into tableaux, disposed like a tragedy group when the curtain falls, the chief hero in the middle, with the dead symmetrically ranged about him. The real progress of our race in civilization and the arts-the history of the human mind-the deep feelings that pervade the masses of men, unheard, unthought of, for years before they are written out in history with the sword's point-above all the unromantic but most powerful interests that pierce the most invulnerable breast through that Achilles' heel of the pocket-all these are charmed out of sight by some half-dozen wonderful names. Alexander, Cesar, Napoleon,-what a disproportionate space do the drunkard, the profligate, and the egotist fill in history! We scarcely speak of the English Rebellion apart from Cromwell, or think of our own without Washington; and yet, great as these men really were, how little hand they had in creating those political tornadoes, and how utterly powerless would their efforts have been to withstand them! Both were the outbreaks of a storm that had been gathering for generations among the vapors and fermentations of society; and over them these lofty names had no more power than the flag which streams highest from the mast-head has to stay the huge ship that bears it on.

Still, much might be said in defence of this mode of writing history, if it even gave us faithful pictures of its few favorite heroes. So simple are the general principles which pervade all the countless varieties of human character, that the true history of a few well-chosen individuals would nearly compensate us for the neglect of all the rest, in one at least of the great ends of history, the practical lesson we may derive from its pages for our own conduct. But the influence of the spirit we have been discussing is as pernicious here as in the other case. Even its favorite heroes are no more like reality than the fanciful conception of the novelist. A few prominent qualities are brought out in strong light; a few memorable scenes ambitiously described; a brilliantly inconsistent character detailed in antitheses: but the real qualities and real life so completely distorted, that we would

undertake to find a dozen individuals to whom one of Thackeray's fictitious personages would apply more closely than do the written to the true characters of those who play "the heroic in history." One unfamiliar with the process of hero-making, would be surprised to follow a great man through the hand of two or three of these worshipers, and see how different a being he becomes before leaving them. The savage's clay idol could scarcely be more changed by its metamorphosis from a clod of mother earth to "the image of nothing in heaven above, earth below, or the waters under the earth," with all the rights, privileges, and immunities of Deity.

We do not mean to imply that there is no real greatness in human character, or that all the great men of the earth owe their celebrity entirely to the good offices of these gentlemen of the long quill. But we do think that the greatest of these have on the whole excelled their fellow-men by less than is commonly imagined. There is a law of compensation almost universally prevalent in the moral world, which provides that an excess in one direction of a person's character, must be supplied by a deficiency in another: or, more correctly, the same marked trait which in one respect forms his chief merit, is in other relations a great defect. Thus the firmness of purpose which always raises men of even moderate abilities above the heads of the less resolute though more gifted, is a chief element in a prominent class of historical demigods; and yet,-though the worshipers leave out this part of it, the same trait invariably shows itself at times in a selfsufficient obstinacy, void of sense, and deaf to reason, which in any man, not a hero, would be expressively termed "pig-headedness." If any private individual in the management of his person or property should act on the same principles that Leonidas did at Thermopyle, he would be called a fool; but Leonidas played the fool, on a larger scale, and is worshiped as a hero. The late President Jackson may be cited too as a good illustration of the preceding remark. It cannot be denied, that on more than one occasion the same firmness of will which placed him at the head of American politics, led him into errors that an inferior man would have avoided: we may add, that he could not have avoided without being an inferior man. So again the sensitiveness to all the beauties of nature or the passions of humanity which forms an essential element of the poet, serves equally as a basis for morbid vanity, and a fickle and reckless impulsiveness, which is too apt to terminate either in the madness of Cowper or the dissipation of Byron. Indeed, these two authors, with Pope, may be taken as striking exam

ples of this truth. Pope could not have been less vain and jealous, or Byron less reckless, without losing a portion of their power; for with these faults, the former would have lost his keen observation of men and manners, and the latter that native enthusiasm which made him a worthy listener, when

"Jura answered through her misty shroud

Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud."

That dissipation makes poets, we by no means aver: else we should have Byrons launched upon the world at every Commencement, as plentifully as we now have aspirant Edwardses and Robert Halls. But it is a melancholy truth, that the temperament which makes the poet, is precisely the one most obnoxious to the temptations of gay life and least able to bear up against them. The same stimulants that destroy the man, inspire the bard: and the strains that were once looked upon as almost a special whisper of heaven, are now seen to be too often the work of no other spirits than the ardent. Richter, in a most unpoetical estimate of the first cost of a contemplated work, mentions as one of the most important items, wine to supply the necessary inspiration: and if we deduct from that portion of literature which we are accustomed to consider as especially the works of genius, all that owes its existence to wine, brandy, opium, or some such artificial stimulus,-if only green tea,-the remainder will be as insipid as milk-punch, minus the like ingredient.

It would be a task more easy than agreeable to go on in illustration of this doctrine from the lives of eminent authors: which do indeed form "next to the Newgate Calendar, the most sickening chapter in the history of man." Or if our limits would permit, it might not be uninteresting to take some of the world's heroes in other fields, and try to see how much of their greatness was real, and how much factitious;-due to some disproportion in their own character, whose corresponding defect was unprobed or has been glossed over, or depending entirely on a chain of lucky circumstances. Traces of such defects, though soon lost from sight in the system of indiscriminate idolatry, may almost always be found in contemporary history, which furnishes us with the facts, apart from the plausible glosses with which worshiping historians have decked them. Indeed, whatever be our opinion of the real greatness of heroes in history, we cannot but admit them to have been very disagreeable neighbors. Of the fighting hero this can hardly be doubted: otherwise, read the English and some American papers from 1800 to 1815, and see what they say of Napo