By hero-worship is here meant an emulation that strives to imitate some admired character, in a spirit not of rivalry or opposition, but of loyal enthusiasm. It is higher than rivalry, in the sense that it involves a superior grade of mental activity—though, of course, there is no sharp line of separation between them. While the other is a rather gross and simple impulse, common to all men and to the higher animals, the hero-worshipper is an idealist, imaginative; the object that arouses his enthusiasm and his endeavor does so because it bears a certain relation to his aspirations, to his constructive thought. Hero-worship is thus more selective, more significant of the special character and tendencies of the individual, in every way more highly organized than rivalry.
It has a great place in all active, aspiring lives, especially in the plastic period of youth. We feed our characters, while they are forming, upon the vision of admired models; an ardent sympathy dwells upon the traits through which their personality is communicated to us—facial expression, voice, significant movements, and so on. In this way those tendencies in us that are toward them are literally fed; are stimulated, organized, made habitual and familiar. As already pointed out, sympathy appears to be an act of growth; and this is especially true of the sort of sympathy we call hero-worship. All autobiographies which deal with youth show that the early development of character is through a series of admirations and enthusiasms, which pass away, to be sure, but leave character the richer for their existence. They begin in the nursery, flourish with great vigor in the school-yard, attain a passionate intensity during adolescence, and though they abate rapidly in adult life, do not altogether cease until the power of growth is lost. All will find, I imagine, if they recall their own experience, that times of mental progress were times when the mind found or created heroes to worship, often owning allegiance to several at the same time, each representing a particular need of development. The active tendencies of the schoolboy lead to admiration of the strongest and boldest of his companions; or perhaps, more imaginative, he fixes his thoughts on some famous fighter or explorer; later it is possibly a hero of statesmanship or literature who attracts him. Whatever the tendency, it is sure to have its complementary hero. Even science often begins in hero-worship. “This work,” says Darwin of Humboldt’s “Personal Narrative,” “stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science.”[[80]] We easily forget this varied and impassioned idealism of early life; but “the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,” and it is precisely then and in this way that the most rapid development of character takes place. J. A. Symonds, speaking of Professor Jowett’s early influence upon him says, “Obscurely but vividly I felt my soul grow by his contact, as it had never grown before;” and Goethe remarks that “vicinity to the master, like an element, lifts one and bears him on.”
If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one’s self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life. “Whilst we converse with what is above us we do not grow old but grow young”; and that is what hero-worship means. To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.
As hero-worship becomes more imaginative, it merges insensibly into that devotion to ideal persons that is called religious. It has often been pointed out that the feeling men have toward a visible leader and master like Lincoln, Lee, Napoleon, or Garibaldi, is psychologically much the same thing as the worship of the ideal persons of religion. Hero-worship is a kind of religion, and religion, in so far as it conceives persons, is a kind of hero-worship. Both are expressions of that intrinsically social or communicative nature of human thought and sentiment which was insisted upon in a previous chapter. That the personality toward which the feeling is directed is ideal evidently affords no fundamental distinction. All persons are ideal, in a true sense, and those whom we admire and reverence are peculiarly so. That is to say, the idea of a person, whether his body be present to our senses or not, is imaginative, a synthesis, an interpretation of many elements, resting upon our whole experience of human life, not merely upon our acquaintance with this particular person; and the more our admiration and reverence are awakened the more actively ideal and imaginative does our conception of the person become. Of course we never see a person; we see a few visible traits which stimulate our imaginations to the construction of a personal idea in the mind. The ideal persons of religion are not fundamentally different, psychologically or sociologically, from other persons; they are personal ideas built up in the mind out of the material at its disposal, and serving to appease its need for a sort of intercourse that will give scope to reverence, submission, trust, and self-expanding enthusiasm. So far as they are present to thought and emotion, and so work upon life, they are real, with that immediate social reality discussed in the third chapter. The fact that they have attached to them no visible or tangible material body, similar to that of other persons, is indeed an important fact, but rather of physiological than of psychological or social interest. Perhaps it is not going too far to say that the idea of God is specially mysterious only from a physiological point of view; mentally and socially regarded it is of one sort with other personal ideas, no less a verifiable fact, and no more or less inscrutable. It must be obvious to anyone who reflects upon the matter, I should think, that our conceptions of personality, from the simple and sensuous notions a little child has of those about him, up to the noblest and fullest idea of deity that man can achieve, are one in kind, as being imaginative interpretations of experience, and form a series in which there are no breaks, no gap between human and divine. All is human, and all, if you please, divine.
If there are any who hold that nothing is real except what can be seen and touched, they will necessarily forego the study of persons and of society; because these things are essentially intangible and invisible. The bodily presence furnishes important assistance in the forming of personal ideas, but is not essential. I never saw Shakespeare, and have no lively notion of how he looked. His reality, his presence to my mind, consists in a characteristic impression made upon me by his recorded words, an imaginative interpretation or inference from a book. In a manner equally natural and simple the religious mind comes to the idea of personal deity by a spontaneous interpretation of life as a whole. The two ideas are equally real, equally incapable of verification to the senses.
CHAPTER IX
LEADERSHIP OR PERSONAL ASCENDENCY
Leadership Defines and Organizes Vague Tendency—Power as Based Upon the Mental State of the One Subject to It—The Mental Traits of a Leader: Significance and Breadth—Why the Fame and Power of a Man often Transcend his Real Character—Ascendency of Belief and Hope—Mystery—Good Faith and Imposture—Does the Leader Really Lead?
But how do we choose our heroes? What is it that gives leadership to some and denies it to others? Can we make out anything like a rationale of personal ascendency? We can hardly hope for a complete answer to these questions, which probe the very heart of life and tendency, but at least the attempt to answer them, so far as possible, will bring us into an interesting line of thought.
It is plain that the theory of ascendency involves the question of the mind’s relative valuation of the suggestions coming to it from other minds; leadership depending upon the efficacy of a personal impression to awaken feeling, thought, action, and so to become a cause of life. While there are some men who seem but to add one to the population, there are others whom we cannot help thinking about; they lend arguments to their neighbors’ creeds, so that the life of their contemporaries, and perhaps of following generations, is notably different because they have lived. The immediate reason for this difference is evidently that in the one case there is something seminal or generative in the relation between the personal impression a man makes and the mind that receives it, which is lacking in the other case. If we could go farther than this and discover what it is that makes certain suggestions seminal or generative, we should throw much light on leadership, and through that on all questions of social tendency.
We are born with what may be roughly described as a vaguely differentiated mass of mental tendency, vast and potent, but unformed and needing direction—informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum. This instinctive material is believed to be the outcome of age-long social development in the race, and hence to be, in a general way, expressive of that development and functional in its continuance. The process of evolution has established a probability that a man will find himself at home in the world into which he comes, and prepared to share in its activities. Besides the tendency to various sorts of emotion, we have the thinking instinct, the intelligence, which seems to be fairly distinct from emotion and whose function includes the co-ordination and organization of other instinctive material with reference to the situations which life offers.