172 CARLYLE. 



there, led him to look for that ideal of human nature in 

 individual men which is but fragmentarily represented in 

 the entire race, and is rather divined from the aspiration, 

 for ever disenchanted to be for ever renewed, of the 

 immortal part in us, than found in any example of actual 

 achievement. A wiser temper would have found something 

 more consoling than disheartening in the continual failure 

 of men eminently endowed to reach the standard of this 

 spiritual requirement, would perhaps have found in it an 

 inspiring hint that it is mankind, and not special men, that 

 are to be shaped at last into the image of God, and that the 

 endless life of the generations may hope to come nearer that 

 goal of which the short-breathed threescore years and ten 

 fall too unhappily short. 



But Mr. Carlyle has invented the Hero-cure, and all who 

 recommend any other method, or see any hope of healing 

 elsewhere, are either quacks and charlatans or their victims. 

 His lively imagination conjures up the image of an impos 

 sible he, as contradictorily endowed as the chief personage 

 in a modern sentimental novel, and who, at all hazards, 

 must not lead mankind like a shepherd, but bark, bite, and 

 otherwise worry them toward the fold like a truculent 

 sheep-dog. If Mr. Carlyle would only now and then 

 recollect that men are men, and not sheep nay, that the 

 farther they are from being such, the more well grounded 

 our hope of one day making something better of them ! It 

 is indeed strange that one who values Will so highly in the 

 greatest, should be blind to its infinite worth in the least of 

 men ; nay, that he should so often seem to confound it with 

 its irritable and purposeless counterfeit, Wilfulness. The 

 natural impatience of an imaginative temperament, which 

 conceives so vividly the beauty and desirableness of a 

 nobler manhood and a diviner political order, makes him 

 fret at the slow moral processes by which the All-Wise 

 brings about his ends and turns the very foolishness of men 

 to his praise and glory. Mr. Carlyle is for calling down 

 fire from Heaven whenever he cannot readily lay his hand 

 on the match-box. No doubt it is somewhat provoking 



