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Updated: May 7, 2025
If a clew to the character of a nation is gained by a study of the nature of the gods it worships, no less valuable an insight is gained by a study of its heroes. Such a study confirms the impression that the emotional life is fundamental in the Japanese temperament. Japan is a nation of hero-worshipers. This is no exaggeration.
Some men are born to be hero-worshipers. Théophile Gautier is an example. If one did not love Gautier for his wit and his good-nature, one would certainly love him because he dared to be sentimental. He displayed an almost comic excess of emotion at his first meeting with Victor Hugo. Gautier smiles as he tells the story; but he tells it exactly, not being afraid of ridicule.
The ordinary stereopticon and the moving picture should not be disdained in so good a cause. Boys are hero-worshipers, and history is full of heroes of first-rate religious significance. As a further factor in elevating and enriching the life of the country boy, the minister may endeavor to create a taste for good reading.
Here are brave, self-sacrificing, noble men who have fought heroically for us, and have been forced to surrender by unpropitious fate, confined in a city peopled by their friends and kindred, and as totally isolated from them as though they inhabited the Dry Tortugas! Ladies are naturally hero-worshipers.
Victory in the convention only foreshadowed the sweeping victory in October. He resigned as legislator, to become a congressman. The whole people appear to revere the great soldier, the men admire the successful politician, and the women bow down before the noted preacher. These classes of hero-worshipers melt into each other, of course, but broadly they may be said to separately exist.
He was, in fact, an unsparing critic of men's characters, and he had a trait, not rare in New England, a willingness to underrate men and minimize them. His fellow-citizens are not natural hero-worshipers; to them "a man is a man, for a' that," with an accent that levels down as well as up. Hawthorne had to the full this democratic, familiar, derogatory temper.
There then remained the cliques of Danton and Robespierre; the former claiming the name of moderates, and telling men to be calm, the latter with no principle but devotion to a person who claimed to be the regenerator of society. These hero-worshipers were for a time victorious. Danton, like Hébert, was foully murdered, and Robespierre remained alone, virtually dictator.
So is Charle Bonnet, who was not afraid to stand up for orthodoxy against Voltaire; so is Mallet, who traveled as far as Lapland; and so is that man of whom his contemporaries always spoke, with the reverence of hero-worshipers, as "the illustrious de Saussure."...
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