Heroic Power in Thomas Carlyle and Leo Tolstoy

Abstract

This paper explores two opposed paradigmatic approaches to heroic power: Thomas Carlyle's versus Leo Tolstoy's. In On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (1840), Carlyle argues for its crucial importance, whereas in War and Peace (1869), Tolstoy denies its very possibility. Carlyle's heroic model attributes to the hero (the leader) a high degree of mastery and control over social and political circumstances, whereas Tolstoy's a-heroic model implies a small degree of personal mastery and much greater constraints on the individual leader. Both models achieved prominence in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, which brought the role of the individual (hero) in history to the forefront of intellectual and political debate throughout Europe. The two models are shown as parts of and important links in long-established traditions; they are internally coherent yet totally contradictory of each other. The comparison of these opposed perceptions of heroic figures in history suggests that they might originate in an ambivalent, polarized perception of power and mastery, and in the sense of individual insecurity in the face of historical upheavals.

Notes

NOTES

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Professor Jeffrey Perl for his invaluable guidance.

1.  Among the more famous are: Mme Anne de Staël, Reflections on the Major Events of the French Revolution (appeared posthumously, 1818), Adolphe Thiers, The History of the French Revolution (1823), Walter Scott, The History of Napoleon (1825), Antoin Jomini, The Political and the Military Life of Napoleon (1827), and Stendhal, The Life of Napoleon (1837).

2.  Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Warship, and the Heroic in History (1840) (New York: Chelsea House, 1983), 296, 1. All subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text.

3.  Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869), trans. Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942), 1313. All subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text.

4.  Tolstoy, War and Peace, “Some Words about War and Peace,” 1359. This Appendix was published by Tolstoy in Russian Archive (1868) and is included in the above edition of War and Peace.

5.  Cf. Krylov's fable about a conspicuous fly sitting on a horse, imagining it is actually directing it.

6.  Boris Kandiev, War and Peace, the Epic Novel by L. N. Tolstoy (Moscow: Prosvesheniye, 1967), 359.

7.  This logical sequence resembles the argument of a Yiddene who borrowed a pan and returned it broken: first, the pan is not broken; second, it was broken when you gave it to me; and third, I didn’t borrow any pan from you at all!

8.  Tolstoy, “Some Words about War and Peace,” 1357.

9.  Ibid., 1361.

10.  The following statement by George Ford is characteristic: “Because of his insistence on strong and heroic leadership, Carlyle appears to be a violent conservative or, as some have argued, virtually a fascist. That some aspects of his political position are similar to fascism is beyond dispute. The theory of democracy seemed to him to be based on an unrealistic premise about the basic needs of humanity, and he had no confidence that democratic institutions could work efficiently. A few individuals in every age are, in his view, leaders, the rest are followers and are happy only as followers. Society should be organized so that these gifted leaders can have scope to govern effectively. Such leaders are, for Carlyle, heroes.” George Ford, “Introduction to Carlyle,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams, vol. 2, 6th ed. (New York: Norton, 1993), 914.

11.  Salwyn Schapiro, “Thomas Carlyle, Prophet of Fascism,” Journal of Modern History 17.2 (June 1945): 110.

12.  J. S. Mackenzie, “The Dangers of Democracy,” International Journal of Ethics (January 1906): 130.

13.  Thomas Greer and Gavin Lewis, A Brief History of the Western World, 6th ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992), 521.

14.  Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (1901) (Moscow: Nauka, 2000), 241–43; my translation.

15.  These oppositional paradigms may be considered from the point of view of the psychoanalytic notion of empowerment (Bemachtigung) and the perception of mastery over one's environment. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud develops his theory of games (the famous “fort-da” game), and applies it to post-war dreams and neuroses. A game is seen as a practice of mastery over the environment (and over death or the idea of death in particular). One might argue that different kinds of games, different exercises of mastery, correspond to different approaches to hero-figures and the degree of belief in their power and mastery. The heroic paradigm would thus correspond to playing with toy-soldiers in cardboard games of world domination that imply a full mastery over subordinates. Games like “hide and seek”, in contrast, which involve a more realistic environment and interactions, when one's powers of control are limited, would correspond to an a-heroic atomism (Tolstoy's “realities”). The paired responses to heroism might therefore originate in an ambivalent, polarized perception of mastery and influence: very limited or nonexistent mastery vs. full ideal command. This polarized perception is perhaps best manifested in a bipolar disorder: the omnipotence of the manic stage vs. the feeling of helplessness in the depressive stage. The transition from a heroic to a more a-heroic paradigm may reflect the transition from immediate post-traumatic experience requiring greater empowerment or transfer of responsibility to “a great man” towards a lessening of such needs in calmer times. Presumably, the less significant a person feels in times of cataclysm and immediately after, the greater the power he invests in “a hero”; and with the return of one's feeling of personal significance, the hero's value diminishes. See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), trans. James Strachey (New York: Liveright, 1976).

16.  Tolstoy, “Some Words about War and Peace,” 1358.

17.  Ibid., 1359.

18.  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), Part 2, chap. 17, 112.

19.  Greer and Lewis, A Brief History of the Western World, n.11 p. 448.

20.  John Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government, 3.19, cited in Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 5 (London: Search Press, 1976), 128.

21.  Charles Frederick Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought: 1819–1834 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1963), 181–82.

22.  Roger Pearson, introduction to Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966).

23.  Stendhal, The Life of Napoleon (1837), trans. Alexander Kulisher (Moscow: Pravda, 1988), chap. 33, 373; chap. 27, 363.

24.  Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, chap. 3, 54.

25.  Sergei Velikovsky, “The Truth of Stendhal,” in Stendhal's The Red and the Black (Moscow: Pravda, 1984), 8; my translation.

26.  Isaiah Berlin insists on the profound affinity of Tolstoy with the French ultramontane royalist Count Joseph de Maistre. Both authors are said to be “bitterly anti-liberal,” distrustful of “all liberalism, positivism, rationalism, and of all the forms of high-minded secularism.” Berlin (as well as Gary Saul Morson, George Steiner, and Edward Wasiolek, among others) admires Tolstoy's novelistic renderings of the “complexity,” “contingency,” or the “wealth” of life, which overshadow or even contradict his “over-simplified” philosophical manifesto in War and Peace. These claims might be countered by the fact that egalitarianism lies at the core of Tolstoy's a-heroic philosophy and artistic representation. The “extreme simplicity” of Tolstoy's philosophy of history consists in giving each person equal weight in shaping historical events (a highly liberal concept). This, in turn, entails the complexity of interactions among protagonists (“the richness of life”). From this standpoint, oversimplification is rather the domain of heroic representations, which treat “lesser” human beings as mere pawns in the hero's game. See Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (1953; Guernsey, U.K.: Phoenix, 1988), 57; George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 107; Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994) 156–57, 277; Edward Wasiolek, Tolstoy's Major Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 14, 67.

27.  Carlyle, On Heroes, 191, 247, 29–30, 238, 274, 228.

28.  It is important to add that, according to Greer, Bentham “took an atomistic view of human society. See A Brief History of the Western World, 494.

29.  Tolstoy, “The Second Epilogue,” War and Peace, 1314, 1315, 1317, 1318.

30.  See Tolstoy's excursions into engineering, physics, physiology, astronomy, and mathematics in “The Second Epilogue,” sec.3, sec. 8, sec. 8, sec. 9, and sec. 11, respectively); and into biology and atomism in “The First Epilogue,” sec. 4. Here Tolstoy enlists scientific principles in support of the a-heroic worldview.

31.  Salwyn Schapiro, “Thomas Carlyle, Prophet of Fascism,” n. 9 p. 114.

32.  Thomas Carlyle, “Sir Walter Scott,” in Scottish and Other Miscellanies (1838) (New York: Everyman's Library, 1964).

33.  On numerous occasions Tolstoy is reported to acknowledge his admiration of Dickens and Dickens's “immense influence” on his work. See, for example, Philip Collins, ed., Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1971), 242; and R. C. Churchill, ed., A Bibliography of Dickensian Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1975), 19, 142.

34.  For testaments of Kipling's indebtedness to Carlyle, see Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works (London: Routledge, 1979), 44; and Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), 49. Stephen Crane acknowledges Tolstoy's influence in his letters; see Stephen Crane: Letters, ed. R. W. Stallman (New York: New York University Press, 1960), 78.

35.  Sidney Hook, The Hero in History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 8, 19.

36.  Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 33–34. All subsequent references are cited in the text.