the person with the great social forces of the age; heroes cannot change the course of history alone. In this sense, Carlyle disagrees with his intellectual successor, Friedrich Nietzsche, who argues that the hero can, by sheer force of will, determine the course of events in his or her own life and in society. Carlyle also is at odds with his contemporary Karl Marx, whose view of the inevitability of the “march of history” leaves no room for individuals to alter the inexorable course of human events.

Carlyle believes that heroes must use their power in the service of others; all of his heroes are in some fashion selfless. Carlyle expands the notion of heroism to include those who not only lead but also serve. Every person is capable of being heroic; hero-worship, the act of recognizing and willingly obeying those who are given the gift to lead, can make heroes of ordinary people. Such a concept may be unacceptable to those who believe in egalitarian societies; for Carlyle, however, the balance of selfless leaders and willing followers was essential to the attainment of the good society.

Carlyle begins his historical survey with the hero as prophet. Muhammad made Islam a historical force through the sword, but history sustained his vision and rewarded him; hence, he is a hero in Carlyle’s pantheon. The prophet as hero is a terrifying figure of a bygone age; more in character with the spirit of the time is the poet as hero. After discussing poetry as a romantic vision that makes the poet the spiritual kinsman of the prophet, Carlyle treats Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802) as the poem of an age of faith. He calls it “genuine song,” but it is the Christian message that Carlyle truly values: The literary work is an allegory of the invisible idea. As Dante gave “Faith, or a soul,” so William Shakespeare gave “Practice, or body.” Poet-heroes are born, not made; thus, Carlyle labels Shakespeare a romantic visionary who can be adored, not analyzed. Shakespeare must have suffered heroically himself; otherwise he could not have created Hamlet or Macbeth.

The hero as priest is a spiritual captain, unlike the prophet, who was a spiritual king. Martin Luther and John Knox are Carlyle’s subjects—although they were primarily reformers, they become more priestlike than the priests. As are all of Carlyle’s heroes, they are visionaries who saw the truth and led their followers to battle for it. (Carlyle abounds in military metaphor, whether he writes of peace or war.) Great religious leaders battle idolatry: Idolatry is symbolic, but it is insincere symbolism and therefore must be destroyed. Carlyle notes that the significant visionary is the person who combats delusion and outworn convention. Every hero, every image breaker, comes to a new sense of reality and brings it to the world. A hero must “stand upon things, not upon the shadow of things.”

Protestantism dwindled into factions in Germany, according to Carlyle, but in Scotland, with John Knox, Lutherism found its true home. (Here, and later with James Boswell and Robert Burns, the Scottish Carlyle shows a special fondness for his countrymen who found fame and success.) Some may censure Puritanism, but it is fervent faith that brought democracy to England, through Oliver Cromwell, and colonized much of America as well. Knox was intolerant and despotic, but he was a zealot and therefore a hero for Carlyle, who distinguishes between good and bad tyrannies with reasons he never discusses.

The heroes who are closest to Carlyle’s audience were Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Burns. As the priests are less than the prophets, so the heroic men of letters are less than the poets. In Carlyle’s opinion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is the only heroic poet of the preceding century. Johnson, Rousseau, and Burns were seekers rather than “bringers” of truth. Carlyle delivers a famous paean of praise for learning and publishing, from the Bible to the newspaper. All ideas are first books; then they become institutions and empires. The eighteenth century was a skeptical age, disbelieving, and therefore unheroic and insincere. Carlyle’s three heroes in this section had to struggle against both the climate of opinion and poverty, as all real visionaries should. Boswell picked his hero well, for Johnson’s gospel of moral prudence and practical sense was necessary in an age of cant.

Carlyle was more doubtful about Rousseau. Too complex and introspective to be favored by Carlyle, and French as well, Rousseau stands as an ambiguous hero whom Carlyle acclaims as a zealot but blames for the fanaticism of the French Revolution. Carlyle believes that Rousseau venerated the “savage” and thus abetted the French lapse into savagery. Burns is a much more engaging figure (and Scottish as well). Carlyle contradicts himself, however, by admitting that Burns’s career was virtually ruined by the lionizing paid him by his hero worshipers in Edinburgh.

The last heroism for Carlyle is kingship—the leadership of people in war and politics. Interestingly, the leaders he specifically presents are not revolutionary heroes, but antirevolutionaries. Heroes seek order, and order, to Carlyle, is discipline and peace, even at the cost of liberty and variety. Napoleon came to equate himself with France, and so fulfilled his ego at the cost of his nation. Carlyle respects Napoleon’s practical intelligence, which enabled him to seize the salient factor in a situation and make fools of Europe’s conventional generals and statesmen.

Throughout his effusive presentation, Carlyle never analyzes, but exhorts, praises, and condemns. He admires the movers and shakers of the earth; his praise of Dante and Shakespeare is perfunctory compared with his veneration of Cromwell, who could barely speak coherently, but could and did act eloquently. Anti-intellectualism, veneration of power, and love of enthusiasm as an end in itself are everywhere in this work.