sation of any commonest
person, remains this--how far has he strengthened and raised the
conscious and harmonious dignity of humanity; how stirred in men and
women, many or few, deeper and more active sense of the worth and
obligation and innumerable possibilities, not of their own little lives,
one or another, but of life collectively; how heightened the
self-respect of the race? There is no need to plant oneself in a fool's
paradise, with no eye for the weakness of men, the futility of their
hopes, the irony of their fate, the dominion of the satyr and the tiger
in their hearts. Laughter has a fore-place in life. All this we may see
and show that we see, and yet so throw it behind the weightier facts of
nobleness and sacrifice, of the boundless gifts which fraternal union
has given, and has the power of giving, as to kindle in every breast,
not callous to exalted impressions, the glow of sympathetic endeavour,
and of serene exultation in the bond that makes 'precious the soul of
man to man.'

This renewal of moral energy by spiritual contact with the mass of men,
and by meditation on the destinies of mankind, is the very reverse of
Mr. Carlyle's method. With him, it is good to leave the mass, and fall
down before the individual, and be saved by him. The victorious hero is
the true Paraclete. 'Nothing so lifts a man from all his mean
imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration.' And this
is really the kernel of the Carlylean doctrine. The whole human race
toils and moils, straining and energising, doing and suffering things
multitudinous and unspeakable under the sun, in order that like the
aloe-tree it may once in a hundred years produce a flower. It is this
hero that age offers to age, and the wisest worship him. Time and nature
once and again distil from out of the lees and froth of common humanity
some wondrous character, of a potent and reviving property hardly short
of miraculous. This the man who knows his own good cherishes in his
inmost soul as a sacred thing, an elixir of moral life. The Great Man is
'the light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the
world; a flowing light fountain, in whose radiance all souls feel that
it is well with them.' This is only another form of the anthropomorphic
conceptions of deity. The divinity of the ordinary hierophant is clothed
in the minds of the worshippers with the highest human qualities they
happen to be capable of conceiving, and this