'A Noble Unconsciousness Is in Him'

A reader asks if I have any heroes. “I’m guessing Samuel Johnson is one,” she writes, and that’s correct. “I think people are too cynical to have heroes today,” she continues. “They’re embarrassed to say someone is a hero. Nobody’s good enough. Everybody wants to look for failure and weakness.” Again, correct. A kind of corrosive skepticism is taken for sophistication. It’s self-promotion masking as fashionable cynicism. 

Many people I admire but heroes are distinguished by their indifference to approval or disapproval. They don’t make up their minds by reading reviews or waiting for poll results. They don’t play to the audience, which rules out politicians. Their values are solid and coherent but not autocratic. They possess a sort of courageous commitment to honesty, while being human and thus susceptible to self-delusion. A hero would be embarrassed to be called a hero. Without thinking deeply about it, my pantheon: Jonathan Swift, Yvor Winters, Whittaker Chamber, Simon Leys, the Colombian aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila (known as Don Colacho).

 

Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) includes the lecture “The Hero as Man of Letters,” in which Carlyle lauds the absence of fuss in Dr. Johnson, the indifference to impressing his fellows and polishing his image. Making the world better is too often the slogan of those who would destroy it. Johnson had no interest in utopia-building. Carlyle writes:

 

“Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his ‘sincerity.’ He has no suspicion of his being particularly sincere, — of his being particularly anything! A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or ‘scholar’ as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live — without stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in him.”

 

With his fears of idleness and madness, Johnson often self-prescribed work as the cure. That too seems a characteristic common to heroes. Carlyle calls the attitude “rude stubborn self-help,” and we are its beneficiaries: “Had Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. . . . There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great solid square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a true Builder did it.”

 

[See Matthew Pheneger’s essay “Nicolás Gómez Dávila and the ‘Authentic Reactionary.’”]