Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

a god. Then we have another lecture, “The Hero As Prophet,” and Carlyle chooses Mohammed as an example, who until then had only been an object of scorn for Christians in Western Europe. Carlyle says that Mohammed, in the solitude of the desert, was possessed by the idea of solitude and unity with God, and that is how the Koran was written. Then we have other examples of heroes: the hero as poet—Shakespeare. Then as a man of letters:Johnson and Goethe. And the hero as soldier, and, even though he despised the French, he choosesNapoleon.
    Carlyle had absolutely no faith in democracy. Some have even thought of Carlyle—and I understand this fully—as a precursor to Nazism, for he believed in the superiority of the German race. The years 1870 to 1871 saw the Franco-Prussian War. Almost all of Europe—what was intellectual Europe—was on France’s side. The famous Swedish writer Strindberg would later write, “France was right, but Prussia had the cannons.” This is how all of Europe felt. Carlyle was on Prussia’s side. Carlyle believed that the founding of the German Empire would be the beginning of an era of peace in Europe—given what happened later in the world wars we can appreciate the error of his judgment. And Carlyle published two letters in which he said that Count von Bismarck was misunderstood and “the triumph of Germany, that thinks deeply, over the frivolous, vainglorious, and bellicose France,” would be a boon for mankind. In the year eighteen sixty-something, the Civil War in the United States began, and everybody in Europe was on the side of the Northern states. This war, as you well know, did not begin as a war of Northern abolitionists—those opposed to slavery—against supporters of slavery and slaveowners in the South. Legally, the Southern states may have been in the right. The Southern states thought they had the right to secede from the Northern states, and they put forth legal arguments. The real issue was that the United States Constitution had not contemplated the possibility that some states would want to secede. The issue was ambiguous, and when Lincoln was elected president, the Southern states decided to separate from the Northern states. The Northern states said that the South did not have the right to secede. Lincoln, in one of his first speeches, said that he was not an abolitionist, but that he thought slavery should not spread beyond the original Southern states, it should not spread, for example, to new states like Texas or California. But then, as the war grew bloody—the Civil War was the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century—the cause of the North was confounded with the cause of the abolition of slavery.
    The cause of the South was confounded with that of the supporters of slavery, and Carlyle, in an article titled “Shooting Niagara,” went over to the Southern side. 22 He said that the Negro race was inferior, that the only destiny possible for the Negro was slavery, and that he was on the side of the Southern states. He added a sophistic argument that is typical of his sense of humor—because in the middle of his prophetic tone, Carlyle could also be a humorist; he said that he did not understand those who fought against slavery, that he did not understand what possible advantage there could be in continually changing servants. He thought it much more convenient for the servants to be for life. Which could be more convenient for the masters, but perhaps not for the servants.
    In the end, Carlyle condemned democracy. That is why, throughout his entire oeuvre, Carlyle admires dictators, those he called “strong men.” The term is still used today. That is why he wrote a eulogy for William theConqueror, he wrote three volumes of eulogy to the dictator Cromwell; he praised Dr.Francia, Napoleon, and Frederick the Great of Prussia. And as for democracy, he said that it was nothing but “despair of finding strong men,” and that only strong men could save society. He defined democracy with a memorable phrase like “the chaos that comes with voting.” He wrote about the state of affairs in England. He traveled all over England, paid a lot of attention to the problems of poverty, and the workers—he was from a peasant background. And he said that in every city in England he saw chaos, he saw disorder, he saw the absurdity of democracy, but at the same time there were some things that comforted him, that helped him not lose all hope. And these