art from, creed and profession and
formulated principle; which indeed directs and colours this creed and
principle as decisively as it is in its turn acted on by them, and this
is their character or humanity. The least important thing about Johnson
is that he was a Tory; and about Burns, that he drank too much and was
incontinent; and if we see in modern literature an increasing tendency
to mount to this higher point of view, this humaner prospect, there is
no living writer to whom we owe more for it than Mr. Carlyle. The same
principle which revealed the valour and godliness of Puritanism, has
proved its most efficacious solvent, for it places character on the
pedestal where Puritanism places dogma.

* * * * *

The second of the qualities which seem to flow from Mr. Carlyle's
fatalism, and one much less useful among such a people as the English,
is a deficiency of sympathy with masses of men. It would be easy enough
to find places where he talks of the dumb millions in terms of fine and
sincere humanity, and his feeling for the common pathos of the human
lot, as he encounters it in individual lives, is as earnest and as
simple, as it is invariably lovely and touching in its expression. But
detached passages cannot counterbalance the effect of a whole compact
body of teaching. The multitude stands between Destiny on the one side,
and the Hero on the other; a sport to the first, and as potter's clay to
the second. _'Dogs, would ye then live for ever?_' Frederick is truly or
fabulously said to have cried to a troop who hesitated to attack a
battery vomiting forth death and destruction. This is a measure of Mr.
Carlyle's own valuation of the store we ought to set on the lives of the
most. We know in what coarse outcome such an estimate of the dignity of
other life than the life heroic has practically issued; in what
barbarous vindication of barbarous law-breaking in Jamaica, in what
inhuman softness for slavery, in what contemptuous and angry words for
'Beales and his 50,000 roughs,' contrasted with gentle words for our
precious aristocracy, with 'the politest and gracefullest kind of woman'
to wife. Here is the end of the Eternal Verities, when one lets them
bulk so big in his eyes as to shut out that perishable speck, the human
race.

'They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen,' he says in one
place, 'what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, that this world
is after all but