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They make things happen

This article is more than 19 years old
Old-fashioned hero-worship is barely tenable in our egalitarian age, says Colin Burrow, but we still do our best to keep it up. Lucy Hughes-Hallett suggests why in Heroes

Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen
by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
624pp, Fourth Estate, £25

"The history of the world is the biography of great men," declared Thomas Carlyle in his Lectures on Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840). Carlyle tried to prove his point by giving rhapsodic accounts of the lives and influence of a bizarre mix of prophets, poets and rulers (Odin, Mohammed, Dante, Shakespeare, Luther, Burns, Johnson, Rousseau, Cromwell and Napoleon), whom he saw as the motors of human history. Most of us would find it pretty difficult now to call someone "my hero" without putting on the voice of Popeye's Olive Oyl and doing a lot of batting of our eyelids to show we don't really mean what we're saying. Democracies have problems with heroes, and democracies in which most people believe that human character is principally fashioned by environment find it hard to believe in the existence of, let alone to worship, the kind of overwhelming natural brilliance that Carlyle found in his heroes.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett knows all this and treads a canny line in constructing her new canon of heroes to supplant Carlyle's. She offers short and sparky biographies of eight men, all of whom had troubled relations with their political rulers: Achilles (for Homer still the best of the Achaeans despite his rebelliousness), Alcibiades (the charismatic and deceitful freelance Athenian general), Cato (the priggish defender of the Roman Republic against the rise of Julius Caesar), El Cid (the glamorous mercenary who resisted Muslim incursions into Spain), Francis Drake (the pirate-cum-imperial voyager), Wallenstein (the one-man military-industrial complex who led the imperial army in the thirty years war), Garibaldi (the engagingly lecherous, swashbuckling liberator of Italy) and finally, and all too briefly, the wily Odysseus.

Her selection of heroes is skewed towards military leaders: there is no Christ or Sir Thomas More to alleviate the swashing of buckles, or to indicate that heroes can be people of principle rather than simple men of action. The closest she comes to a patient and resistant hero is Cato, who withstood many trials in his vain attempt to protect the Roman Republic, including being pelted with dung. But she tells the life stories of all these men (and yes, they are all hairy-chested blokes) with vivacity and wit. Although she does not believe with Carlyle that the biographies of Great Men make history happen, she is extremely good at using the events of her heroes' lives to evoke a larger swath of historical events. The chapter on Wallenstein does as much as anyone could in the space to make the thirty years war comprehensible and interesting, and people who want to know a bit about fifth-century BC Athens or about the unification of Italy could do a lot worse than read the chapters on Alcibiades and Garibaldi.

She also has a sharp eye for the kind of anecdote that can bring history to life. Apparently one Spaniard got so carried away showing what he would do to Francis Drake that he shot a bystander dead. And there is a glorious cameo appearance by the Irishman John Peard, who, when asked why he was fighting with Garibaldi (in his tweeds), declared that he respected Italian independence, "but I am also very fond of shooting". He was, apparently, sometimes taken for Garibaldi himself, and the ladies all swooned over him in place of the real hero. The chapter on Garibaldi also almost offers the book's only female hero: his first wife Anita stood by him while bullets whistled through her hat, and was bowled over not only by him but also by cannon-balls. They had met in South America, where Garibaldi had said "You must be mine" (as he remarks "my impudence was magnetic"), and she was. He tried more or less the same line with his second wife (Anita could not stick the life of a Garibaldina for long, and died in 1849). He was less lucky second time around: the beautiful young Giuseppina Raimondi, it transpired, had had a sexual career almost as colourful as Garibaldi's own before their marriage. Unfortunately Garibaldi learnt about this immediately after the wedding and, being a hero with traditional male beliefs about female promiscuity, never spoke to her again.

It's a witty and readable book, but it does have problems with its argument. The basic idea is that the particular kind of heroes that Hughes-Hallett is interested in are men of (in her excellent phrase) "seditionary greatness". They're too big, too wild, too dangerous. They fight at one moment for their leader or regime, and then turn against them - indeed several of them, including El Cid and Alcibiades, turn and turn about in their political allegiances. A final chapter introduces a more sinister note: it shows how D'Annunzio, Mussolini and Hitler manipulated hero-worship to suit their own ends, and argues that by contrast Leopold Bloom, the humdrum democratic Odyssean hero of James Joyce's Ulysses, is far more appealing to our age. As Hughes-Hallett puts it, with a distinct hint of a wrist-slap, hero-worship "allows worshippers to abnegate responsibility, looking to the great man for salvation or for fulfilment that they should more properly be working to accomplish for themselves". So don't sit there watching replays of Beckham's free kicks; get out there and kick a ball yourself until you can bend it with the best.

As well as this thoroughly decent strand of liberal-democratic horror at what a hero can do to a state and at what hero-worship can do to the soul, this book also has a strong thread of soft-core Nietzschean wonder at the superman running through it. These two strands don't sit comfortably together, and it is often not clear whether we're being invited to wonder at the natural charisma of heroic individuals or to deplore the ruses by which heroes trick people into admiring them.

To make up for this problem with her argument, Hughes-Hallett has to throw in a heavy dose of comparisons between her subjects. Sometimes the effect is a bit like the first-century Greek historian Plutarch, whose Parallel Lives compared the actions of a famous Roman with those of an equally famous Greek counterpart. But most of the time the comparisons stand in for a clear argument about what really might be good or bad about heroes. We are told far too often that "As Cato" stood up for the state, "so" Garibaldi, or Drake, or Alcibiades or whoever did the same; or "As Achilles" sulked in his tent "so Wallenstein" retired to his private chamber to indulge in dark thoughts about the emperor. There are moments when these comparisons are so strained that they recall dear old Fluellen in Shakespeare's Henry V , who tries to prove that Henry V (a fellow Welshman) is as heroic as Alexander the Great, but can't muster anything much that they have in common except "there is a River in Macedon, and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth... and there is salmons in both".

If Hughes-Hallett is finally unclear about whether she loves or loathes her heroes, or what they all have in common, this is not simply her fault. We all have a problem with heroes. We want them so badly that we keep inventing new ones, and yet our political culture tells us that naturally exceptional individuals should not be either possible or desirable, because we are all equal and equally the products of our environment. In that respect this book suits our times as much as Carlyle's did his: instead of his unashamed and defiant hero-worship, it offers the guilty pleasure of wondering at the undemocratic wildness of eight great men.

· Colin Burrow is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and is the editor of Shakespeare's Complete Sonnets and Poems for the Oxford Shakespeare.

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