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among a thoroughly Royalist people who really loved their king." What struck him as so wise was that, before beginning repressive measures, Government had taken good care to put everything in a state of defence. Then, when the country was full of troops, the oath of allegiance was enforced and the search for arms went on vigorously. Of course the law was in abeyance: "the only part of it that was enforced was that which made it penal for Catholics to have arms; and this searching for arms gave occasion to many outrages, carried on by Orangemen under Orange magistrates, such as must always be expected when the lower orders not only have arms in their hands but also the support of the powers that be." His excuse for this partiality on the part of the Executive is rather a lame one: "I met one high-minded officer who absolutely refused to take sides, and was ready to help whenever wrong was being done; but to have succeeded on that plan a man must have had a very large force at his disposal." His remedy is wholesale transplanting (he does not say of which party), for he is sure that the land is at the bottom

1 Kings in England, he sees, reign but don't govern. "In all the political disputes it is Mr. Pitt or Mr. Fox who says this and does that. The King walks on the terrace at Windsor, takes a drive, goes to bed; that's all we hear about him."

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long time about telling all this; but people will expect me to say something, and when one does speak one is bound to tell what one believes to be the truth."

The sum of all, according to him, is that England should lay aside her ridiculous prejudices, and let Ireland really (they are his italics) "share the beneficent laws that she has made for herself. Thus will she gain the love of four millions of subjects whom her arms have conquered, but whom nothing but justice can make contented." As a Frenchman he cannot understand how it is that for centuries the English should have been content to know less of many parts of Ireland than they do of Otaheite, and to allow the Irish to be maligned and degraded by interested schemers. "It is not so with us. A Provençal is proud of being the fellow-subject of a Norman ; a native of Old France has no antipathy to a Breton. Why is there such a different feeling between Irish and English?"

HENRY STUART FAGAN.

HERO-WORSHIP.

THERE is one of the sayings of Anacharsis Clootz which has always seemed to me both true and profound. Watching the revolutionary populace, and noting their readiness to repose a blind faith in the leader of the moment, the "advocate of the human race was moved to exclaim, France, guéris des individus (France, cure thyself of this passion for individuals). The advice is as sound to-day as it was a hundred years ago. Not by

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way of paradox, but in sober earnest, I maintain that our deference to great men is the direct cause of much erroneous thought and misguided effort.

We have all made acquaintance with the doctrine of Hero-worship as it is revealed to us in the book of the prophecies of Carlyle, and especially in those eloquent lectures which he delivered in London five-and-forty years ago. There is much in the doctrine which none need desire to dispute. We are all ready to admit that a great man ought to be generously appreciated and loyally aided in his work; we may even recognise in his great qualities an express revelation of the divine. But this statement, ample as it is, would not be ample enough for Carlyle. The hero himself must be accepted as divine; heroes are to be worshipped, and worship is defined as "admiration without limit." This exaltation of the great man is accompanied by a corresponding abasement of the average man. Mirabeau is the one Frenchman of the age who has eyes to see; as for Frenchmen in the mass, they may be summed up and set aside in a phrase so many millions, "mostly fools." As a humble unit among the so many millions of mankind, I desire to protest against this view of human life.

I protest against it first, because it is wholly irrational. It is almost too

plain that no man can be accepted as a suitable object of worship. The strongest, wisest, best of men is no more than a man. He knows only a miserable fraction of what is to be known; his power extends only to a small fraction of what ought to be done; his character is flawed in every direction by pride, by temper, and by prejudice. Therefore I cannot allow myself to cherish for my fellow man any admiration except such as is strongly qualified by criticism. To the Hero-worshipper all criticism appears to savour of disrespect, but this is not really so. My critical faculty, poor as it may be, was given to guide me through a deceitful world, in which sham Heroes do everywhere abound. I cannot dispense with this guide, unless you can offer me the guidance of guidance of absolute truth and wisdom.

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If men are not to be worshipped, great men especially are not to be regarded with that admiration which knows no critical limit. For what is greatness? It would be unjust to confound Hero-worship with the vulgar worship of success. But, after all, the recognisable Heroes-those that have temples and worshippers-are the men who have succeeded. cess, as we know, is often determined, not by the purity of a man's good qualities, but by the nice combination and co-operation of good and evil. Any one of the divinities of Carlyle's Pantheon would serve to illustrate this truth. What would Cromwell be without his craft, or Burns without his animal nature, or Goethe without his cool indifference to others? But let us take one sufficient examplethe great Napoleon. It is impossible not to admire the man. Turn over any volume of his correspondence find yourself in the presence

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of a mighty intellect. His ruthless, luminous, straightforward way of dealing with a practical problem is like a revelation. But why was Na

poleon so great? Because during his whole life he never thought twice about suppressing any moral impulse which could not be made to serve his personal ambition. If he had been a good man he would have attained some kind of success, and Mr. Carlyle, lecturing at Willis's Rooms in the year 1840, would perhaps have included him among the heroes-and perhaps not. Just because he was a low man, because the current of his intellectual energy was pent in the narrowest channel, Napoleon became unquestionably great.

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One proof of the irrationality of Hero-worship is found in the worshipper's inability to describe his Hero in clear and satisfactory terms. There are few literary achievements to be compared with Carlyle's Cromwell,' few books in any language which exhibit so wonderful a combination of industrious accuracy and poetic power. But does it enable us to understand Cromwell? Surely not. Carlyle is justly chargeable with the superficiality which he himself charged on Scott. He gives us a life-like presentment of his hero, his clothes, his outer man, the country in which he lived. But when he comes to the inner man, his purposes and motives, we find ourselves in contact, not with a man but with a cloudy portent of Energy, Veracity, and other abstractions spelt with capital letters. The roll of the devout biographer's style, broken only by ejaculations of praise, becomes at last positively wearisome; you put down the volume and look round impatiently for some historian who has not bound himself by a religious obligation to admire every act of Oliver, Lord Protector. Perhaps you find solace in Mozley's essay, the work of a High Churchman, who thought it right to be less than fair to the great Puritan; but at the same time the work of a critic, who sets out to describe a Man, and not

a false god. Mozley gives you at least some measure of the man he describes ; Carlyle gives you none, and would probably have throttled you had you asked him to measure Cromwell by the standards which apply to other

men.

It is just the same when the hero happens to be a living person. How interesting, for example, and how various is the character of Mr. Gladstone ! But the hero of the pious Gladstonian's worship is neither interesting nor various. A more intolerable embodiment of unrelieved excellence and monotonous success was never moulded out of plaster of Paris.

If a religion is irrational, it is pretty sure to be demoralising; Hero-worship certainly retards moral progress, and that for several reasons. In the first place it degrades the worshipper by depriving him of that independence of judgment which is the only safe basis for a responsible being to stand on. My standards of right may be very imperfect, but they are my own; I must think and live by them, not by the second-hand inspiration of somebody else's virtue. There is nohuman character fit to serve me for a model. Should a man argue thus with himself, "I will act thus because so-and-so my Hero has done the same"; or again, "This act must be noble and right because so-and-so, my Hero, did it"; in the one case, and in the other, he forfeits his individuality and accepts a morally inferior position. Wilfully suppressing his own judgment, he may end by doing what is bad himself and approving of the bad deeds of others.

If the Hero is a living man, the act of worship is twice cursed; it injures him who renders and him who accepts it. Carlyle is perfectly right when he tells us that we do not know how to treat our Great Men. He is, naturally, bitter and eloquent in describing the lot of a man of letters;

"Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail."

But this is only half the truth.

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Our kindness is even more than our cruelty; our worship more than our indifference press the noble rage of genius. We all can see the harm that is caused by worshipping sham Heroes; but that is not my point. What I want to bring out is this, that, even when a truly great man is worshipped by an honest and loyal commonplace man, there is an element of moral danger in the relation between the two. The voice of fervent, unlimited praise may well excite in our minds a sympathetic fear.

Remember the words that were spoken of King Herod: "It is the voice of a god and not of a man." This exclamation may have been, and very likely was, a genuine outburst of Hero-worship. The holiday crowd at Cæsarea saw before them a striking figure—a prince who had held his own, and rather more than his own, among the great powers of his day. The king rises, and makes a fluent, sonorous speech, in itself a kind of miracle to the average inarticulate man, and there swells out the cry: "It is the voice of a god, and not of a man." Alas for such gods! they are all eaten by worms and give up the ghost, sooner or later.

I hope nobody will suppose that my purpose in making these remarks is merely to criticise the writings of Mr. Carlyle, a person of whom we have lately heard quite enough from critics far abler than myself. My purpose is not literary, but practical; it would not be necessary to attack Heroworship at all, if it were not that this doctrine is working great mischief all round us in society.

Consider first how the habit of Hero-worship tends to support the principle of sacerdotalism in religion. In all our churches there are many people who believe in the existence of a distinct order of men, having a special vocation and aptitude for sanctity. We can't, all of us, quite believe what we think we ought to believe; and therefore we put faith in a priest or minister who seems to have

no doubt about anything. We don't, all of us, even endeavour to do what we know we ought to do; and therefore it is pleasant to hold on by the priest or the minister, who is professionally committed to a pious life. It is not surprising that a great preacher should be to many of us the highest kind of Hero, or that any preacher, not being personally contemptible, should be a Hero to his own parish or congregation. Much satire has been expended on this phase of Hero-worship, but I have no desire to be satirical. It would be unjust to ignore the sacredness of the relation between the priest or minister, and the people whom he helps to live a higher life than their neighbours. But there is in any such relation an element of dangeran element of "voluntary humility and worshipping of angels." It is so comforting to think that if you have no spring of faith and aspiration in yourself you can find one in some other

man.

Consider again what Hero-worship does for us in the world of literature and speculation. A great thinker rot only assists, but directs the thoughts of others; a great writer not only influences but forms the style of others. Now it is right that I should be assisted and influenced by men greater than myself; it is not right that I should be directed and formed. To me the greatest of thinkers is no authority; he is an advocate whom I am bound to hear with respect, reserving my own right to form an independent judgment. As to the expression of thought, it is surely plain that nothing could be more fatal to the highest qualities of style than the imitation of a model, however excellent that model may be.

But it is perhaps in the world of politics that the evils of Hero-worship are most plainly seen; and they never were more evident than in our own country at the present time. During the last fifty years we have been passing from one type of government to another. For many generations this

kingdom was in the hands of a governing class, the gentlemen "who made the name of England great, and ran her deep in debt." Those men had many faults, but they had one invaluable political merit-they were not Hero-worshippers. They disliked being governed despotically by a man of genius; they thwarted Strafford and Cromwell; they gave way unwillingly before Disraeli and Gladstone. They prevented the centralisation of political power, and therein they did well.

Aristocracy is gone, and popular government has taken its place. I think, for my own part, that there was good reason for making the change, and that good results have followed it. But we may have to consider very seriously whether democracy is not deficient in the saving virtue of aristocracy. Large masses of men are prone to Hero-worship in its most exaggerated form; and this tendency is worked on continually for party purposes. Where many opinions prevail among the citizens, it is not easy to form a party strong enough and homogeneous enough to carry on the business of government.

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ticians, as a rule, are very intolerant; each is bent on having all his own way; they will not combine except under force majeure; and the most effective force for the purpose is the influence of a party Hero. Lord Beaconsfield, for example, formed a strong party out of very heterogeneous materials Protectionists Peelites, High Churchmen and Orange Protestants, the old landed interest and the Nouveaux Riches. Perhaps no section of the party had entire confidence in its leader; but they followed him because he was their indispensable man-the man without whom they could not win an election or form a government. So they worked hard to make him a popular Hero; they invented an impressive legend, and set up that ritual which has been,so wonderfully developed by the Primrose League.

The same process has been carried

on with equal success by the other great party in the State. Mr. Gladstone had to lead a party composed of Whigs and Radicals, High Churchmen, Dissenters, and Unbelievers, Palmerstonians and Cobdenites, Economists and Sentimentalists. Most Liberals were at first disposed to regard Mr. Gladstone with suspicion; many Liberals, it is now obvious, are still far from putting entire trust in him; but many (it seems to be no less obvious) still follow him because he is their indispensable man, without whom they cannot even face a general election. Some years ago, a Welsh member of Parliament told his constituents that he would rather be governed despotically by Mr. Gladstone than constitutionally by his Conservative rivals-a saying fit to be pondered by those who imagine that personal government came to an end with the execution of Charles the First.

If we look beyond our own country we see the same influence at work, turning the principle of popular government against itself. Napoleon the Third gave France universal suffrage, because he knew that the peasantry would demand a Cæsar. Since the Empire fell, French politics have been in a state of unstable equilibrium, because there has been no man big enough to personify the people and impose silence on the factions. Prince Bismarck, again, insisted on making universal suffrage the basis of the Empire which he founded. He knew that his countrymen would demand an individual to govern them, and he had a shrewd notion who the individual would be.

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