242 PRESH FIELDS 



save mankind, yet the fittest is not forthcoming. 

 We do not know him; he does not know himself. 

 The case is desperate. Hence the despair of Car- 

 lyle in his view of modern politics. 



Who that has read his history of Frederick has 

 not at times felt that he would gladly be the sub- 

 ject of a real king like the great Prussian, a king 

 who was indeed the father of his people ; a sovereign 

 man at the head of affairs with the reins of govern- 

 ment all in his own hands; an imperial husbandman 

 devoted to improving, extending, and building up 

 his nation as the farmer his farm, and toiling as no 

 husbandman ever toiled; a man to reverence, to 

 love, to fear; who called all the women his daugh- 

 ters, and all the men his sons, and whom to see 

 and to speak with was the event of a lifetime; a 

 shepherd to his people, a lion to his enemies ? Such 

 a man gives head and character to a nation ; he is 

 the head and the people are the body ; currents of 

 influence and of power stream down from such a 

 hero to the life of the humblest peasant; his spirit 

 diffuses itself through the nation. It is the ideal 

 state; it is x^aptivating to the imagination; there 

 is an artistic completeness about it. Probably this 

 is why it so captivated Carlyle, inevitable artist 

 that he was. But how impossible to us! how 

 impossible to any English-speaking people by their 

 own action and choice; not because we are unwor- 

 thy such a man, but because an entirely new order 

 of things has arrived, and arrived in due course of 

 time, through the political and social evolution of 



