Ohio History Journal

THE GREAT MAN IN HISTORY

 

By PAUL F. BLOOMHARDT

 

You will agree with me that credit is due Mr. Overman and

those who have arranged today's program, for their alertness in

recognizing the centennial of Carlyle's famous dictum. The idea

for his "Hero" lectures seems to have taken shape in his mind

between February 27 and March 2, 1840. The first of this series

of addresses is dated "Tuesday, 5th May 1840." Expanded to

about double the size of the lectures, the essays appeared in an

initial edition of 1000 copies during the first quarter of 1841.

The publisher was Fraser and the price per copy was 10s. 6d.

In the same year a pirated edition was published in New York by

Appletons, and New York newspapers printed it serially. Before

the end of 1841, an American "third edition" appeared in Cin-

cinnati as the work of U. P. James, No. 26 Pearl Street.1

Carlyle's American friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was

chagrined at these piracies as he had planned for the publication

of an authorized edition. Parenthetically it may be remarked

that Emerson's interest in biography dates from the correspond-

ing period of the last century. His lecture on "Great Men" was

delivered in Boston in 1835 and his essays on "Representative

Men" appeared in 1850. To him likewise, "there is properly no

History; only Biography."2

In the fourth sentence of Carlyle's first lecture he states the

opinion that "as I take it, Universal History . . . is at bottom the

History of Great Men" and a dozen pages later he repeats that

"the History of the World . . . was the Biography of Great Men."

Nevertheless it would be a mistake to assume that this is the

thesis which he set out to establish. As a matter of fact, these

sentences and a few adjacent ones which bear upon them, could

have been omitted without impairing the train of his discourse.

The subject which he announced for this series of lectures

1 Archibald MacMechan, Carlyle on Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in

History, Athenaum Press Series (Boston, 1901), Introduction.

2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series, "History."

(233)

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was, "On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History."

His theme was, Hero-Worship as a social force. "Society is

founded on Hero-Worship." The passages devoted to the heroes

themselves are for the most part subordinated both in extent and

significance to the discussion of the social movements with which

they were associated. He saw his heroes less as agents con-

sciously directing the course of history than as symbols which

have motivated their own and later generations to achievement.

For instance, "The Nation that has a Dante is bound together as

no dumb Russia can be."    "The Great Man [Mahomet] was

always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him

like fuel, and then they too would flame."

We may be as impatient with the limitations of Carlyle's social

philosophy when he insists on hero-worship as the ratio omnium

of history, as with his bald statement that history is the biography

of great men. He is capable of saying, "Society, everywhere is

some representation, not insupportably inaccurate, of a graduated

Worship of Heroes." We are led to inquire how he came by such

a concept. I am inclined to find at least a partial explanation in

the religous cast of his thinking. His reverence for his typically

Scottish Calvinist father led him as a youth to seek an education

for the ministry. He was diverted from this by intellectual dif-

ficulties which arose from his reading. But in his twenty-fifth

year he experienced a spiritual crisis which involved three weeks

of sleeplessness, in which his atheism yielded to a positive appre-

ciation of religious impulses. It can be understood from this, how

Carlyle was led to say, "a man's religion is the chief fact with re-

gard to him," and how he was led to subordinate economic and

other mundane interests in human life. This accounts for the

choice of most of the heroes on which he lectured:

The Hero as Divinity: Odin.

The Hero as Prophet: Mahomet.

The Hero as Poet: Dante; Shakespeare.

The Hero as Priest: Luther; Knox.

The Hero as Man of Letters: Johnson; Rousseau; Burns.

The Hero as King: Cromwell; Napoleon.

It may be noted that religious minds, at least as compared

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OHIO HISTORY CONFERENCE, 1941                235

 

with scientific or economic minds, afford congenial soil for the

acceptance of hero-worship as the main-spring of social action

and hence as the core of the interpretation of history. A survey

of the names of the principal religions, Mosaism, Buddhism,

Christianity, Mohammedanism, reveals the prevalence of this con-

cept. An habitual attitude of worship towards the deity is easily

transferred to human relationships. In this connection, it is in-

teresting to note that recent studies in primitive religion recognize

that side by side with a belief in impersonal magic, fetishism, and

animism, there existed the concept of "higher gods," cosmic

deities, and heroes among the gods, even approaching a mono-

theism.³

Not only mythology but also the classic religious writings on

the whole exhibit a philosophy of personalism. Historic Chris-

tianity, with its Christo-centric theology, its saints on the one

hand, and its Antichrists on the other, and the exaltation of

denominational founders, reveals a similar tendency which the

postulate of an overruling Providence and a belief in a divine

plan of salvation operating through the ages, does not modify.

Nor should we neglect to observe that ever since religion divorced

itself from fertility cults, notably at the time of the Hebrew

prophets, it has tended to subordinate, even to deny any lasting

place in history to such social forces as the biologic urge, economic

incentives, and the insatiable curiosity of the human intellect. Of

geographic factors it has been concerned only with the cata-

clysmic, and it regards these as of passing significance.

Carlyle's thinking is colored by these conceptions and we may

be justified in viewing both his great man theory of history and

his hero-worship explanation of social action as characteristic of

the romantic school of history in which mysticism predominates

and the religious interpretation of history has been most prevalent.

As might be expected, Carlyle felt a strong distrust of the

tide of democracy which was arising in his nineteenth century.

He placed his hope on an "Aristocracy of Talent" whose powers

of social control should be exercised through their control of the

 

3 Wilhelm Schmidt, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (Munster, 1926-35); W. F.

Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity (Baltimore, Md., 1940), 124f.

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236    OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

land. In an unpublished essay, my son, Fred Bloomhardt, calls

attention to the military aspect of the Utopia which Carlyle sug-

gests in his "Past and Present" (IV, 3).

Pointing to the army he [Carlyle] declares that there is the one really

efficient institution in the country. "Who can despair of Governments, that

passes a Soldier's Guard-house, or meets a red-coated man on the streets."

True, the army is organized for a militant purpose . . . murder to Carlyle.

Yet it is the organization that Carlyle is now observing. Here, he says, still

is reality and success. Here is more justice than in the Chancery law

courts. Here is no weak-kneed blundering, but effective action. No long-

winded Parliamentary speeches are made, but the needful actions are taken

more quickly and effectively than any Parliament could possibly do. Why

not, asks Carlyle, apply the same principle to civil life? "I could conceive

an Emigration service, a Teaching service, considerable varieties of United

and Separate services, of due thousands strong, all effective as this Fighting

service is; all doing their work like it;--which work, much more than

fighting, is henceforth the necessity of these New Ages we are got into."

(IV, 3.) This borders very closely upon the totalitarianism of our own

age. Certainly it was almost a complete about face from the prevailing

democratic tendencies.--It is more than possible that Carlyle got a large

part of this idea from the Saint-Simonian literature which came into his

hands.

In passing from this notice of Carlyle and his Heroes, I

have not considered it pertinent to refer to the well-known

characteristics of his work--his prejudices, his inadequate use

of sources, his neglect of the critical method, and the shallow-

ness of his analysis.    Only the sheer brilliance of his literary

skill can account for the vogue which he has enjoyed.

 

II

Carlyle wrote a hundred years ago. He was obviously out

of tune with his own century. Might he have felt more at home

in our own times when vast millions of men share his attitude

towards democracy and believe implicitly in das Fuehrer Prin-

zip as exemplified by Mussolini, Mustapha Kemal, Hitler, Riza

Khan, and the Kodo philosophy of Japanese emperor-worship?

Professor Joseph E. Baker (Northwestern University) has sug-

gested that Carlyle is the man to interpret Hitler and his movement

to us since many of Hitler's ideas can be expressed in familiar

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OHIO HISTORY CONFERENCE, 1941              237

 

old phrases from Carlyle and there are parallels in the funda-

mental doctrines of the two men.⁴

Were Carlyle living, he would also hear an echo of his

ideas in the writings of eminent historians who use his own

tongue.  Sir Charles Oman, Professor of Modern History at

Oxford, brought out his On the Writing of History in 1939.

As summarized by Allan Nevins in an excellent review, Sir

Charles holds that "History is simply a series of happenings

of highly mixed and various tendency; not so much a stream

as a set of eddies and counter-eddies. While some of it moves

logically from cause to effect, a huge part of it is merely acci-

dental, and is constantly affected by unforeseeable and 'cataclys-

mic' occurrences.  Sir Charles believes with Carlyle that the

chief of the cataclysmic forces, unrelated to any conceivable

pattern of cause and effect, is the intermittent occurrence of

great men." Among these he singles out for mention Alex-

ander, Augustus, Mahomet, and Charlemagne. Allan Nevins'

comment on all of this is, "convincing as far as it goes."5

A fundamental consideration in dealing with the problem

of the great man in history is the relative importance, even the

existence of the personal element in the milieu of history. Pure

determinists would interpret the course of history solely as the

result of impersonal forces--geographic, climatic, economic.

For instance, it is held that the entire life process, including the

political, social and religious, is determined by material condi-

tions of production. The existence of these factors in human

affairs is irrefutable but with the whole intricate pattern of

human behavior spread before us it may well be asked whether

those who represent any one or all of them as the unifying

principle of history, have not shared Carlyle's tendency to over-

simplification. To ask this question is by no means to disclaim

the value of the contribution which materialists have made to

the interpretation of history.  Their contribution in the main

has been the strengthening of the concept of continuity. The

reaction to this mechanistic view has been extensive. Skepticism

4 Joseph Ellis Baker, "Carlyle Rules the Reich," Saturday Review of Literature

(New York), X (1933), 291.

5 New York Herald-Tribune, Dec. 31, 1939.

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238   OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

with regard to it has arisen from an inability to conceive of

human society differing only in degree from a herd of cattle,

breeding blindly, nibbling inch by inch towards greener pas-

tures, sniffing the air for the smell of a water-hole, and dumbly

facing the hazards of nature.

Somewhat parallel is the scientific-technological school

which correlates human progress with the development of

natural science.  In this group you will recognize Comte,

Buckle, J. S. Mill, and Spencer. This, of course, reduced his-

tory to the determinism of natural law since such was the

concept of impersonal natural science. A distrust of this in-

terpretation has grown out of the fact that this correlation with

natural science is based on a series of analogies, some of which

are unwarranted, and which in any case is less than soundly

scientific, and out of the confusion into which natural science

has been thrown by the discovery of the principle of indeter-

minacy in nuclear physics.

The essential difference between these views and others

may be designated as the awareness of the element of human

personality.  Other schools of historical interpretation include

this relatively unpredictable element within their perspective.

The causal forces of history are found in the human spirit. The

material factors serve in part to direct these forces in the mass,

and also to challenge men either as individuals or as societies

to oppose and rise above the controls which environment tends

to establish.

One such school, known as the spiritual and represented by

Eucken, Matthews, H. O. Taylor, and W. R. McLaughlin, de-

clares, "The spiritual interpretation of history must be found in

the discovery of spiritual forces cooperating with geographic

and economic to produce a general tendency towards conditions

which are truly personal.  And these conditions will not be

found in generalizations concerning metaphysical entities, but

in the activities of worthful men finding self-expression in social

relations for the ever more complete subjection of physical nature

to human welfare."6

 

6 Shailer Mathews, The Spiritual Interpretation of History (Cambridge, Mass.,

1916).

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OHIO HISTORY CONFERENCE, 1941                    239

 

Both the sociological, defined as an attempt to account for the

origin, structure, and activities of society by the operation of

physical, vital, and psychical causes, working together in a process

of evolution, and the "collective sociological" interpretation seem

at least to leave room for the personal element. This is definitely

true of recent representatives of the sociological interpretation, for

one type of which sometimes the term organismic is used.     In

Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History (1934), his principles of

"Challenge and Response" and "Withdrawal and Return" are

illustrated mainly from biographical sources. Sorokin in his Social

and Cultural Dynamics (1937) tends to minimize the place of the

individual in trying to base his "logico-meaningful" method of

ordering the chaos which seems to prevail among the variable ele-

ments of any social complex or organism, on extensive statistical

and analytical surveys. His theory is criticized by Albright in pre-

senting the following interesting thesis whose implications for the

subject of this discussion are obvious:

Every cultural complex is itself a microcosm, in which opposing fac-

tors are constantly meeting and clashing, so that sometimes one, sometimes

its opposite, prevails.... It cannot be too strongly insisted that integration

of a culture is not necessarily a good thing. Perfect integration of a per-

sonality leads to stagnation of that personality. Practically all great men,

and certainly all geniuses have been very poorly integrated. It is precisely

the friction and conflict between imperfectly balanced or harmonized ele-

ments in a man's mental make-up which may lead to innovations and dis-

coveries. Real greatness often emerges from profound spiritual or intel-

lectual travail. A placid, bovine mind may be exceedingly well integrated

at a low level; a gifted demagogue may enjoy perfect nervous and mental

health, with few conscientious scruples or intellectual struggles to prevent

him from employing his talents to personal advantage and to public dis-

aster--in other words, he is well integrated at a higher level. The same is

true, mutatis mutandis, of groups and nations. A group may be so com-

pletely integrated that it exhibits little internal friction, a high degree of

efficiency in accomplishing its purposes, together with self-sufficiency and

smugness--but it will accomplish little of value for the world. The early

Christians were certainly not well integrated as a group, since it required

centuries for them to come to a temporary agreement on normative theologi-

cal doctrines and social policies--yet few will dispute their potential capac-

ities for good. Modern Jewish intellectual circles are generally as fine ex-

amples as can be found in history of lack of integration, yet they are

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240    OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

producing an astonishingly high proportion of the significant intellectual

achievements of our age. It is even possible that the greatest advances of

any group are made when that group is in the highest state of excitation

that can be attained without disaster to the group. All this obviously means

that there is most likely to be progress within a group when that group

contains an optimum number of polar elements, i. e., of elements standing in

real or potential opposition to one-another.⁷

As a philosophy, personalism raises certain questions into

which we are not called upon to enter here, namely, whether per-

sonality alone is reality and material environment is but phe-

nomena; and whether the only causal force in history of which we

have a strictly empirical knowledge, i. e., our own inner awareness

of ourselves as active beings, is volitional personality.⁸

In those who hold, as for instance Shotwell,⁹ that life itself

escapes materialistic analysis, and that the problem of historical

interpretation is to establish the relations between the psychic

element and the material element in human affairs, this philosophy

of personalism is implicit.

At this point the social psychologist enters. Acknowledging

the infinite variety of personalities, he yet finds, as Sorokin, that

the material, social, and mental characteristics of a given culture

are relatively stable and can generally be fixed with a decreasing

margin of error as social organization becomes more primitive and

less self-conscious or sophisticated. Nevertheless there is a margin

of error. There is a difference in historic certainty in interpreting

the actions of groups and of individuals. There is no way of tell-

ing how an individual will act and his action will be more eccentric

as he approaches the stature of genius. Moreover, the reaction

of a group cannot be predicted if too many or too elusive variable

factors are involved, or if a group is under the influence of a

superior personality of unpredictable character.10

If the psychologists should succeed in explaining the sum of

human behavior on naturalistic grounds, the significance of unique

individuals will be seriously impaired. Yet such studies of genius

7 An excellent criticism of Arnold Joseph Toynbee and Pitirim Aleksandrovich

Sorokin, and a presentation of the organismic philosophy of history is found in

Albright, Stone Age to Christianity, 60-87.

8 Cf. Albert C. Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism (New York, 1927).

9 James T. Shotwell, An Introduction to the History of History (New York,

1836), 332.

10 Cf. Albright, Stone Age to Christianity, 78f.

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OHIO HISTORY CONFERENCE, 1941             241

 

as have appeared seem to be concerned only with groups of

superior individuals, an intellectual haute bourgeoisie. (Terman,11

following Ellis and Galton, rejects as an unscientific concept, the

use of the word genius to designate some kind of mystical gift

which cannot be explained by the ordinary laws of human nature.)

The possibility is not shown that a child can be chosen on the

basis of eugenic and psychological tests and surrounded by any

known educational environment so that he will unquestionably

emerge as a person of heroic size either as a directive force in

society or as a creative genius. To some extent, therefore, the

emergence of great men seems to introduce a degree of the cata-

clysmic in history which is unique in the orderly processes of

nature.

Into the phase of individualism which is represented by

Nietzsche's "Superman," it is not necessary for us to enter since

in the first place history knows no such man, and in the second

place its discussion belongs in the realm of ethics.

 

III

As a kind of appendix, we may consider the place of the

great man in the writing of history. From a great mass of in-

formation the writer is constrained to select and arrange what

he or his age views as significant for the closest possible approxi-

mation of historical truth. His goal like that of the teacher, must

be the establishment and retention of this approximation to true

concepts in the minds of his readers and students. The degree

to which he achieves this purpose will depend in large part upon

the artistry with which he employs his materials. Painters and

cinema directors know well that attention must be centered upon

individual figures if comprehension is to be conveyed. In a battle

scene or mob action, one or more individuals are pictured strongly

in the foreground and the hundreds or thousands of others are

represented less distinctly in the background, leaving it to the

viewers' imagination to think of them as engaged in the same

action. In magazines of recent weeks we have seen a large picture

of a mass of thousands of people on the beach of Coney Island.

11 Science (New York), XC (1940), 293.

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242   OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

It leaves an impression of chaos and its significance escapes us.

One feels an impulse to look at it more closely and try to pick

out some individuals whose postures and expressions may tell a

story of some kind. Thucydides, Polybius, Xenephon, Tacitus,

Sallust, and Suetonius among the ancients, whatever their limita-

tions may have been, did not fail to appreciate this characteristic

of human comprehension. And modern history writers have ob-

viously followed this lead with their Augustan Age, the Age of

Charlemagne, Elizabethan Era, the Age of Louis XIV, the French

Revolution and Napoleon, the Era of Metternich, Jacksonian

Democracy, etc. Like the artificial make-up which actors in the

cinema wear before the Klieg lights in order to produce a truer

picture on the screen for the film followers, it is possible that

history written on this pattern, when strictly considered, over-

draws the part which the great man has played in his time. Such

a view may leave the impression that the historiographer is merely

a popularizer but Egon Friedell definitely claims that the salient

characteristics of any age can best be comprehended in the person

of its outstanding man or men.¹²  In a somewhat parallel way,

Professor Roy F. Nichols advocated the use of biography as a

"case method" in order to achieve "a clearer and more accurate

understanding of the process of social change and development."13

Such a work as the Chronicles of America exhibits the biograph-

ical element to an unusual degree.

On the other hand, I have the impression which I am unable

to demonstrate, that in spite of Friedell, much of the modern

"culture history" gives less space to the significance of great men

in the development of institutions, manners, social classes, and

other interests to which men have given their attention. In some

special fields there has been a lag in this respect. Many of us have

on our shelves histories of medicine, literature, preaching, art,

philosophy, science, some of relatively recent date, which are little

more than "Who's Whos" in their respective fields, arranged

chronologically instead of alphabetically, and attempting little more

than a classification by "schools." It may even contribute to our

12 Egon Friedell, A Cultural History of the Modern Age (New York, 1930-32),

I, 24-7.

13 Historical Outlook (Philadelphia), VII (1926), 270.

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OHIO HISTORY CONFERENCE, 1941             243

 

own humility to look into the histories of history. This will pass,

as it is clearly beginning to pass in the histories of literature, art

and science.

IV

From the foregoing we may be tempted to conclude that the

significance of the great man in history is to be found specifically

within his own period; later ages are influenced rather by some

institution (used in the widest sense) which lives after him.

Many instances to support this conclusion arise in our minds;

thus Hammurabi, Ikhnaton, Pheidias, Aurelius, Justinian, Attila,

Henry II (Plantagenet), Isaac Watts, Edward Jenner, and maybe

Henry Ford. As our perspective expands geographically to em-

brace world history, and chronologically to view the whole story

from the Stone Age to the present, and culturally to include all

the varied interests that have engaged the attention of men, we

may expect to find proportionately less occasion to magnify great

men except as a means to be used in effective historiographic

presentation. However, I am little inclined to agree with such

generalizations. It has also been suggested14 that some individ-

uals seem to stand out in bolder perspective as the details of their

age are lost, and that men of thought, as compared with men of

action, sometimes take on a richer significance as they are digested

by later ages. The recent deluge of biographies may be considered

as a response to a deep-seated desire not only to know of men's

achievements, but also to feel directly the impact of their lives on

our own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

14 In a personal communication by Prof. C. A. Clausen of Wittenberg College.

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