The public of our own day shows plenty of disposition to make heroes, and is not at all too apt to think that they can be dispensed with. But the doctrine which Carlyle preached in the late Thirties and early Forties was a doctrine 'very necessary for those times'; for they were times when a democracy^ which had not yet 'found itself,' was being fed full on the delusion that the 'age of the individual' was gone by for ever, and that salvation was to be found in political machinery and blind reliance on the operation of certain economical principles, applicable only over a narrow area of human life.
For the reader as well as, though no doubt less than, the listener the lectures suffer from a thesis too narrow, and, as regards some of them, too fanciful for such elaborate treatment There are, of course, fine and striking things in the volume, as there were in everything Carlyle wrote or, with due preparation, uttered:—the Dante and Shakespeare in the 'Hero as Poet,' the austere figure of Knox in the 'Hero as Priest,' the brief but brilliant sketch of Burns in the 'Hero as Man of Letters.' But, on the whole, an end-to-end perusal of the volume produces an effect of monotony rare in Carlyle, and diversified only by a more than Carlylean inconsistency. On the same page of the 'Hero as King' he represents Cromwell at one moment as having sent the Rump Parliament packing because they 'were hurrying through the House a kind of Reform Bill,' whereas he recognised the probability that 'the great numerical majority of England' was indifferent to his cause, while in the next breath he is spoken of as having 'dared to appeal to the genuine Fact of this England whether it will support him or No'—which obviously is just what, for the excellent reason above stated, he dared not do. And it is midway in the 'Hero as Man of Letters' that he suddenly breaks forth into an amazing panegyric on the Chinese system of testing practical aptitude for the work of government by the methods of the examination schools. Anything which in his ordinary moods would have been more provocative of Carlyle's most scornful merriment it would be difficult to imagine.
H. D. TRAILL.
