Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  It proved hard. Piccolomini drafted a report glorifying his own part in the affair but could not be persuaded to sign it. He had not been permitted to reveal that Wallenstein’s murder had been authorized by the emperor: he must have realized the report could therefore be used to make a scapegoat of him. Six of Wallenstein’s officers were accused of being his co-conspirators, but the charge was dropped for lack of evidence. All but one of them were released after a short term in prison. The unlucky one, Count Schaffgotsch, was tortured for three hours before his execution, but still he had nothing to tell his inquisitors that they could use.

  A posthumous trial of Wallenstein himself was mooted but the plan was abandoned: to initiate a trial was to suggest that the accused just might be innocent, an idea too dangerous to entertain. When eventually the Detailed and Thorough Report of the Abominable Treason Planned by Friedland and His Adherents was published by the Imperial Chancellery, it contained only the same vague allegations that had long been circulating at court. The threat Wallenstein posed to the state was indefinable and unprovable. Like that of Alcibiades or of Rodrigo Díaz it lay not in anything he might or might not have done, but in what he had become. Cardinal Richelieu, most worldly wise of all contemporary observers, judged that such a man as Wallenstein must inevitably, eventually fall from favor, “whether it be that monarchs weary of a man to whom they have already granted so much that no more gifts are at their disposal, or that they look askance at those who have to such degree deserved well of them that all and everything which still remains for bestowal is their due.” Hostile pamphleteers and lampoonists made much of Ferdinand’s ingratitude in killing the man to whom he was so indebted, but the cardinal understood that it was precisely because the emperor owed Wallenstein everything that Wallenstein had to die.

  The third and most dully bathetic of the three surprises afforded by the story of Wallenstein’s downfall was the revelation that not only could Wallenstein be killed, he could be dispensed with. He, along with most of his contemporaries, had considered himself essential, not only the chief builder of imperial dominion but its foundation stone. In Glapthorne’s play he boasts, “I have been the Atlas to [the emperor’s] power.” But Atlas died and the skies didn’t fall. Ferdinand’s heir, the young king of Hungary, took over as imperial commander in chief and proved both able and fortunate. The general mutiny of which the Ferdinand and his ministers had for so long lived in terror never took place. The French General Peblis reported that after the murder of Wallenstein the imperial army was apparently well disciplined and quiescent, “at which I marvel as I firmly believed after such a tragedy a great change would follow.” He was one of many who noted with relief, disappointment, or simple amazement of how little consequence was the passing of so great a man. Schiller presents Wallenstein as a tragic hero after the Aristotelian model: “this great Monarch-spirit, if he fall / Will drag a world into ruin with him.” But only the few men killed with him at Eger, and the further handful subsequently accused of conspiring with him, were dragged down. For the rest, the world just went on turning.

  Nothing changed. Wallenstein believed he could have brought the war to an end. “I had peace in my hands,” he told an officer shortly before leaving for Eger. He was wrong. He knew neither how profoundly the Protestant princes with whom he was negotiating distrusted him, nor how far his influence over the emperor had declined. Others had seen him as one of the war’s instigators and prayed that with his removal peace might follow, but another fourteen grievous years were to pass before the Peace of Westphalia was concluded. Alive he had awed princes and intimidated an emperor. Dead he dwindled to nothing. His body, like the Cid’s, was miraculously preserved. Two and a quarter years after his death it was transported to the Carthusian monastery he had founded near Gitschin and the monks demonstrated their gratitude to their benefactor by reporting that it showed no visible or odoriferous sign of decay. But his estates were broken up, his achievements belittled; his reputation shriveled away. The incarnation of terror had turned out to be nothing more than a man. His greatness and his danger proved, like Alcibiades’ world-conquering charm, a stupendous illusion. Alcibiades, brilliant con man, had created his own charisma. Wallenstein’s was the product of others’ fear. But in each case, once the man was dead the vision of his greatness vanished like smoke.

  Sir Thomas Browne, Wallenstein’s contemporary, called mortality “the very disgrace and ignominy of our nature.” Achilles and his fellows sought illustrious and memorable deaths to compensate for the shortness of their lives. But Wallenstein, who had been so famously grand and awful when alive, died ignominiously and “after his death,” wrote Cardinal Richelieu, who shrewdly appreciated the minatory parallels between his own career and that of the emperor’s overmighty servant, “he was reviled by whoever would have extolled him if he had remained alive. Let the tree fall and all will hurry to strip its foliage and hack it to pieces.” Wallenstein’s story offers no consolation. Coleridge found that the effort of working on it “wasted and depressed my spirits, and left a sense of wearisomeness and disgust which unfitted me for anything.” Hegel was appalled by the pessimism of Schiller’s version: “When the play ends it is all over. Night reigns. Death has won the war.” In 1934 Wallenstein’s descendants commissioned a marble plaque to mark his burial place. Its epitaph is desolate: Quid lucidius sole? Et hic deficiet. “What is brighter than the sun? Even that light must fail.”

  VII

  GARIBALDI

  Giuseppe Garibaldi was the best beloved hero of mid-nineteenth-century Europe. At the height of his fame Alexander Herzen described him, without undue hyperbole, as “the Uncrowned King of the Peoples, their enthusiastic hope, their living legend, their holy man—and this from the Ukraine and Serbia to Andalucia and Scotland, from South America to the northern of the United States.” Locks of his hair, bandages from his wounds, even the soapsuds from his bath were bought and treasured as relics. He was believed to be invincible, and invulnerable as well. His enemies, on hearing of his approach, laid down their rifles and ran. Duchesses were besotted with him. Peasants fell to their knees and worshiped him. His ecstatic admirers went into fits of convulsions on seeing him pass by. “It seemed to me,” wrote one of his officers, “as if God spoke to me from his mouth.”

  In his long and eventful life he was (or appeared to be), serially or simultaneously, many different kinds of hero. In his twenties he was a bold revolutionary and bolder lover, banished from his native Piedmont for attempting to raise a rebellion and succored as he went on the run by a sequence of adoring women. Exiled, he went to South America and acquired an aura of exoticism fighting for liberty in faraway places, dressed in the archaic costume which was to remain his hallmark and accompanied by Anita, the Amazonian wife whom he had met and married with deliciously romantic precipitancy. To Europeans feeling cramped in their increasingly tamed and industrialized landscapes he was idealized as a child of the wilderness, colorful and free. It was “his fortune never to take full part in the common prose life of civilised men,” wrote G. M. Trevelyan, whose three-volume biography of him was written when his exploits were still living memory, “though he moved it profoundly, like a great wind blowing off an unknown shore.”

  Back in Europe he was the figurehead of the Risorgimento, Italy’s nationalist liberation movement, maneuvering his guerrilla units to outwit and humiliate the armies of an oppressive great power as Drake had once humbled Spain. After Rome fell to the French in 1849 he was a fugitive again, this time one with the heartbreaking allure of the defeated idealist. As Cato had stood erect amid the ruins of the first republic of Rome, so Garibaldi acquired a melancholy grandeur from his part in the failed defense of the second one, a tragic character made doubly affecting by the fact that he had lost not only his political dream but also the love of his life: Anita died in his arms as four armies crisscrossed Italy, intent on hunting him down. Ten years later that romantic loser, the doomed defender of a lost cause, underwent another metamorp
hosis to become an unstoppable conqueror, one whose amazing victories can stand comparison even with the Cid’s marvelous luck. At the head of a band of just over a thousand untrained and ill-equipped volunteers he drove the Bourbons out of southern Italy, an achievement which ensured that for the remaining two decades of his life he was the world’s most fêted celebrity, venerated for his perceived saintliness, assiduously courted for his prodigious popular influence, and—such was the potency of his reputation and the volatility of his political passions—a source of unremitting anxiety to the authorities of the Italian nation which he had brought into being. His contemporary, the Japanese hero Saigoō Takamori (whose life story in many ways parallels his), once wrote, “He who cares neither about his life, nor about his fame, nor about rank or money—such a man is hard to deal with. Yet it is only such a man who will undergo every hardship with his companions in order to carry out great work for the country.” As “hard to deal with” as Cato, as valiant as the Cid, Garibaldi was such a man.

  For the second half of his life he lived on Caprera, a windswept island off the northern coast of Sardinia, where, between campaigns, he followed the routine of a peasant smallholder. Three hotels were built on the next island to accommodate the tourists who came from all over Europe to peer across the straits in the hope of catching sight of him chasing his goats or hoeing his beans. When her foreign secretary proposed she write to him, Queen Victoria demurred on the grounds that to do so might constitute “a recognition of the General’s position as a European power.” Her concern was justified. Garibaldi was the son of a simple sailor. He never became rich. Although he was briefly the dictator of half Italy he abdicated from that post and never afterwards held another one anywhere near commensurate with his tremendous prestige, but, simple citizen though he was, he was a “power.” As such he became a menace to the nation he had helped create, another person of seditionary greatness like Alcibiades, Wallenstein, or the Cid. King Victor Emmanuel, whom Garibaldi made the first monarch of all Italy, was repeatedly to use him only to cast him aside, to arrest and imprison him, to blockade him into his island home, to send out armies against him. When it was rumored that he was contemplating starting a new revolution the Italian government judged it necessary to send eight warships to prevent him from leaving Caprera, provoking him into yet another demonstration of his superiority—as a solitary individual—over the might of a kingdom. As the massive vessels cruised the straits he slipped past them, rowing himself alone in a little boat.

  In 1840, when Garibaldi was still on the other side of the Atlantic fighting unsuccessfully for the independence of Rio Grande do Sul, Thomas Carlyle gave the series of lectures in London which were subsequently published under the title On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History. The lectures were sensationally successful—the fashionable and the high-minded alike scrambled for tickets—and the book was a best-seller. In them Carlyle deplored the skepticism of his age which “denies the existence and desirableness of Great Men” and enunciated his theory that “every advance which humanity had made was due to special individuals supremely gifted in mind and character, whom Providence sent among them at favoured epochs,” that “the history of the world is but the biography of Great Men.” Each of his lectures was on one such person. Collectively they add up to an image of the complete hero, a man (they are all male) of “deep, rude, earnest mind,” splendidly free of worldly sophistication, inarticulate almost to the point of dumbness, driven by passionate conviction. When Garibaldi returned to Europe he was generally found to be the all-but-perfect incarnation of that ideal.

  He was a plain man. Giuseppe Mazzini, the theorist of the Risorgimento, its head as Garibaldi was its heart and arm, was largely responsible for the creation of Garibaldi’s public image but privately he scoffed at him. At the height of Garibaldi’s fame it was commonplace to compare him, with his long tawny hair, his air of impassive nobility, his unswerving courage, to a lion, king among beasts. When the medieval poets made the same comparison with the Cid they did so with unreserved admiration, but nineteenth-century politicians, although happy to make use of a hero, were less impressed by godlike animals. “Have you ever noticed the face of a lion?” wrote Mazzini to a confidant. “Don’t you think it is a very stupid face? Well, that is Garibaldi.” Another contemporary thought he had “the heart of a child and the head of a buffalo.” But Garibaldi’s simplicity was that not of the simpleminded but of the single-minded. “Sincerity, a deep great genuine sincerity is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic,” said Carlyle. Garibaldi had it. He was a man without any kind of duplicity. He was as incapable of tact and diplomacy and political game playing as Cato had been. What he believed he believed entirely. He entertained no doubts, no second thoughts. He had not a scrap of deviousness or subtlety about him, no irony, no eye for the ridiculous, no sense of humor whatsoever. He was a man like Carlyle’s Luther, a man of “rugged honesty, homeliness; a rugged sterling sense and strength” or Carlyle’s Cromwell, who resembled the craggy Alps, “huge granite masses rooted in the Heart of the World.” Athenian intellectuals of the fifth century BC saw the Spartans both as tongue-tied primitives and as repositories of archaic nobility; so Garibaldi, with his white horse, his billowing cloak, and his career as peripatetic as any knight-errant’s, seemed to nineteenth-century Europeans like a throwback to a simpler and grander age. His valor, his unblemished probity, and his austerity, “though a little affected,” reminded a French official who knew him in Uruguay of the ancient Romans. Alexandre Dumas, the creator of The Three Musketeers and an enthusiastic admirer of Garibaldi’s, titled his book on the campaign Garibaldi fought in Uruguay The New Troy.

  His revolutionary career began in his twenties when, as a seaman in the Piedmontese navy, he was recruited by Young Italy, the underground liberation movement Mazzini had founded in 1831. Italy at the time was what the Austrian Prince Metternich called it, a “geographical expression” corresponding to no political reality. The peninsula was divided into a number of distinct states, the majority of them governed—more or less oppressively—by foreigners. The Pope reigned over much of central Italy. Southern Italy and Sicily were ruled from Naples by a Bourbon king. Most of the north was under Austrian domination, the exception being the independent Kingdom of Piedmont, Garibaldi’s native country, which also controlled Sardinia. Mazzini’s aim was to dethrone the kings, oust the priests, expel the foreigners, and unite all of these disparate states in a brand-new sovereign republic of Italy. It was a cause to stir the blood of Romantics everywhere. “Only think,” Byron had written. “A free Italy … It is a grand object—the very poetry of politics.”

  Garibaldi grew up in Nice, which was part of France at the time of his birth. His first language was Ligurian, his second French. He was no more an obvious candidate for the role of Italy’s national hero than the Italian-speaking Corsican Bonaparte had been for that of France. Nor might he have seemed an eligible target for recruitment to an Italian nationalist organization. According to Risorgimento myth, and Garibaldi’s own account, it was Mazzini himself who won him over to the cause. That meeting was later depicted on prints decorating homes all over Italy, showing the visionary Mazzini, with his long dark hair and burning eyes, gazing enraptured at Garibaldi, the leonine warrior who would translate his dream of a united Republican Italy into reality. In fact the meeting never took place. But be that as it may, by 1834 Garibaldi was a member of Young Italy, and one of a group of mutinous seamen in the Piedmontese navy plotting to seize their ships in the harbor at Genoa and put them to revolutionary use. The mutiny was aborted. Garibaldi, who had gone ashore to join the uprising which never happened, thus effectively deserting, went into hiding.

  It was a time when a man could be shot dead simply for reading a republican journal: Garibaldi was in grave danger. He escaped, helped on his way by several women and, according to legend, making love to at least three of them in the course of one afternoon while the Piedmontese authorities sea
rched the streets and cafés for him and his co-conspirators. (Decades later several dozen Genoese matrons wrote to him, each claiming to have been among the three. A man who, like the ideal chivalric knight, combined a zest for warfare with punctilious politeness—especially to ladies—Garibaldi replied to each one of them, offering courteous thanks and good wishes, while evading any questions as to his own memories of their alleged past intimacies.) He was tried in absentia and sentenced to death.

  Making his way to Marseilles after some thrilling escapades (leaping from the upstairs windows of a customs house, singing revolutionary songs to placate an innkeeper who had threatened to turn him in, saving a boy from drowning), he found a ship bound for Rio de Janeiro—a popular destination for political refugees—and worked his passage there to begin the fourteen years of exile during which, in his absence and largely without his knowledge, he became a celebrity of the Italian liberation movement.

  He had been found guilty of treason, but then every revolution, every independence movement, every rebellion against oppressive or unjust authority must begin with a similar offense. In 1560, six years before Drake first crossed the Atlantic, 370 Spanish conquistadors set out eastwards from Lima into the interior of South America in search of El Dorado. Four months later their leader was murdered by a gang of mutineers led by Lope de Aguirre, a psychotic killer and visionary who styled himself, in signing his declaration of the expedition’s new purpose, “the Wrath of God, Prince of Freedom” and—most strikingly—“traitor.” Aguirre was the subject of Drake’s opponent Philip of Spain, the man who came closer than any other ruler since the fall of Rome to world domination. To declare oneself traitor against such an authority was insanely self-destructive, but it could be presented as a politically and morally heroic act, even perhaps a sacred duty. God’s wrath had been aroused by Philip’s hubristic annexation of greater power than it was proper for a mere mortal to wield. Aguirre, the Wrath of God, would establish a free state in his defiance. Aguirre’s adventure ended in a frenzied orgy of killing. Nearly half of his companions were murdered by him or on his orders. He himself was eventually hunted down by the Spanish colonial authorities and trapped and killed near Caracas, but—crazy and dangerous as he was—he had won himself a place in history as one of the first heroes of the American independence movement and an unusually self-aware example of the principle that every act of rebellion is, seen the other way around, an act of treachery.