On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in HistoryCarlyle, Thomas
Philosophy
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
Carlyle, Thomas
Hero worship; Heroes
For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a
man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is
physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a
likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of doing
it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could not have
discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it, unless he
had, what we may call, _sympathized_ with it,--had sympathy in him to
bestow on objects. He must have been _sincere_ about it too; sincere
and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the likeness of
any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay,
about all objects. And indeed may we not say that intellect altogether
expresses itself in this power of discerning what an object is?
Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may have will come out here. Is it
even of business, a matter to be done? The gifted man is he who _sees_
the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside as surplusage: it is
his faculty too, the man of business's faculty, that he discern the true
_likeness_, not the false superficial one, of the thing he has got to
work in. And how much of _morality_ is in the kind of insight we get
of anything; "the eye seeing in all things what it brought with it the
faculty of seeing"! To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly
as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, the Painters tell us, is
the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No most gifted eye can exhaust
the significance of any object. In the commonest human face there lies
more than Raphael will take away with him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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