. The political side of the
reverential sentiment is equally conciliated, and the prime business of
individuals and communities pronounced to be the search after worthy
objects of this divine quality of reverence. While kings' cloaks and
church tippets are never spared, still less suffered to protect the
dishonour of ignoble wearers of them, the inadequateness of aggression
and demolition, the necessity of quiet order, the uncounted debt that we
owe to rulers and to all sorts of holy and great men who have given this
order to the world, all this brought repose and harmony into spirits
that the hollow thunders of universal rebellion against tyrants and
priests had worn into thinness and confusion. Again, at the bottom of
the veriest _frondeur_ with English blood in his veins, in his most
defiant moment there lies a conviction that after all something known as
common sense is the measure of life, and that to work hard is a
demonstrated precept of common sense. Carlylism exactly hits this and
brings it forward. We cannot wonder that Byronism was routed from the
field.

* * * * *

It may have been in the transcendently firm and clear-eyed intelligence
of Goethe that Mr. Carlyle first found a responsive encouragement to the
profoundly positive impulses of his own spirit.[6] There is, indeed, a
whole heaven betwixt the serenity, balance, and bright composure of the
one, and the vehemence, passion, masterful wrath, of the other; and the
vast, incessant, exact inquisitiveness of Goethe finds nothing
corresponding to it in Mr. Carlyle's multitudinous contempt and
indifference, sometimes express and sometimes only very significantly
implied, for forms of intellectual activity that do not happen to be
personally congenial. But each is a god, though the one sits ever on
Olympus, while the other is as one from Tartarus. There is in each,
besides all else, a certain remarkable directness of glance, an
intrepid and penetrating quality of vision, which defies analysis.
Occasional turgidity of phrase and unidiomatic handling of language do
not conceal the simplicity of the process by which Mr. Carlyle pierces
through obstruction down to the abstrusest depths. And the important
fact is that this abstruseness is not verbal, any more than it is the
abstruseness of fog and cloud. His epithet, or image, or trope, shoots
like a sunbeam on to the matter, throwing a transfigurating light, even
where it fails to