Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 05.djvu/17

Rh no doubt, a sound thesis, but it is also an eminently simple one, and does not bear expanding over as many pages as Carlyle devotes to it The attempts to diversify it, as when he speaks of the Norse Skald as a 'huge untutored Brobdingnag genius, needing only to be tamed down, into Shakespeares, Dantes, Goethes,' are purely fantastic.

No doubt the interest of the lectures increased as the course proceeded; but they suffer throughout from endless repetition and from the obviously artificial character of their subdivisions of subject An undertaking to deliver six lectures on Heroes necessitates at least a sixfold classification of the various forms of the heroic, and this, as a matter of fact, has only been accomplished by dint of varying the definition of the word. 'Hero' sometimes stands for an actual leader of men; sometimes merely for a man by whom men, in Carlyle's opinion, would do well to take example; and sometimes simply for a man of genius, whom men may admire enthusiastically, and by whom they may be intellectually and spiritually influenced, but whom, in some respects, the mass of them could not imitate if they would, and in other respects should not if they could. Mahomet and Luther, Cromwell and Napoleon, are examples of the first variety, Johnson of the second, Rousseau and, still more distinctly, Burns of the third. Indeed, the presence of the last in this particular company is as mysterious, as the collocation of his two companions Johnson and Rousseau, the former of whom, it may be remembered, observed of the latter, 'I would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation than that of any felon who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years; yes, I should like to have him work in the plantations.' It is evident enough from this, that one hero may stand to another in the same relation as he proverbially stands to his valet.

Not only, however, would many of Carlyle's heroes have been astonished at their company; they would probably have been almost as much surprised at their own apotheosis. Johnson is a typical man of letters, as Burns is a typical poet of nature: one