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Carlyle identifies the hero’s key quality as, “original insight into the primal reality of things.” Because of the hero’s grasp of “the great Fact of existence,” he never lies. “He is heartily in earnest. Each act or pronouncement is ‘a kind of revelation.’ ” 24 To Carlyle, “hero worship is the one fixed point in modern revolutionary history, otherwise it is as if [it were] bottomless and shoreless.” Hero worship is evidenced through loyalty to the hero––thus it resembles religious faith.25
Carlyle, in spite of the nod to revolutionary rhetoric, is more concerned with cultural commentary than political analysis. One should view his notion as an attempt to replace God with a faith in human beings and their society. Carlyle’s ideas are readily apparent as both instigator and reflector of social consciousness in the nineteenth century. Certainly the Wagnerian-Nietzschean notions so important to the theatre of the latter part of the century have some part of their genesis in this type of faith. It is also not difficult to recognize the sociological and historical relevance of these ideas to American and European theatre of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Shelley’s “Ozymandias” reveals, the cultural edifice of nationality is built on a foundation of sand. Sifting though those traces is symptomatic of genus envy. Thus, from a variety of perspectives that I hope the ensuing chapters provide, we can see how the consideration of material culture and performance worries the periodization of form and culture itself.