quence than Creighton or Stanhope:
while, as an artist, he ranks with such faded rhetoricians as
Chateaubriand.

What is the meaning of this? Why simply that the Victorians made the
mistake about Carlyle that every age makes about its Carlyles. They took
a thoughtful journalist for a master; and this they did because the
journalist had the skill and conviction to persuade them, and himself,
that what is commonest and most vigorous in human nature is also most
sublime. Carlyle could, in perfect good faith, give tone to the vulgar
instincts and passions; he could make narrow-mindedness, brutality,
intolerance, obtuseness, and sentimentality seem noble; he knew, being
an unconscious hypocrite, how, without a glimmer of open cynicism, to
make the best of both worlds. For instance, Carlyle and his public
wished to believe in Eternal Justice regulating the affairs of men. They
believed in it as something emotionally congenial to them, not, you may
be sure, as a metaphysical truth discovered and confirmed by the
intellect. Intellectual processes were not in Carlyle's way: he was a
popular philosopher. From this belief in Eternal Justice he naturally
deduced the doctrine that Right is Might, which doctrine applied to
history bore fruit most grateful to hero-worshippers--a sect that
flourished uncommonly in those days. When, however, it was pointed out
by earthy and eristic rationalists that if in the past Right was Might
then it followed that Might was Right, Carlyle, who had ever the
shortest of ways with dissenters, drowned the argument in a flood of
invective. Of course if Right is Might it does follow that the good
cause has always been the successful one; and in that case it looks as
though the successful one must always have been the good. Might, in
fact, is Right. Carlyle knew better: and he who would be the prophet of
his age must know, as he did, to reject unwholesome conclusions without
invalidating the healthy premises from which they follow.

Each age has its Carlyles, but it never much respects the Carlyles of
other ages. We have our Ferrero and our H. G. Wells, to say nothing of
such small fry as Faguets, Marinetti, _e tutti quanti_. They are people
who have something for their own age and nothing for any other, and
their own age is pretty sure to prefer them to any great man it may
produce but fail to smother: they are adored and duly forgotten. They
must come forward as the critics and guides of society; whethe