Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/30

xxii and constitutional questions, all disputes between Royal prerogative and popular liberties, as mere irrelevances. To uphold the law of God was ‘the general spirit of England in the seventeenth century,‘ as ‘in other somewhat disfigured form’ (somewhat disfigured indeed!) ‘we have seen the same immortal hope take practical shape in the French Revolution, and once more astonish the world.‘ A man who will set about to explain the whole of the events between 1635 and 1659, on this theory and this alone, will, in Carlyle’s own language, ‘go far.‘ Much, too, is demanded from one who essays to pose Cromwell as a single-minded soldier in the warfare of truth against quackery and sham. ‘Fundamentally sincere,‘ that great man may well have been and was: but to deny that, like hundreds of other men of his age and faith, he habitually abode in a spiritual region in which the dividing line between the genuine and the spurious forms of religious emotion was continually getting obscured, and words which were at one moment the outpourings of a devout soul, sank at another moment into the merest cant of the conventicle—to deny this, is surely not only to shut the eyes to certain obvious features in Cromwell’s career, but to leave many of his otherwise easily explicable utterances unexplained. Carlyle applies his own theory to these with courage: but as regards the more unctuously and offensively pietistic among them, not without effort; nor is the result successful. Fortunately, however, it is pre-eminently as a man of action that Cromwell lives for his countrymen of all political schools and religious sects; and since the time has now come when they can agree to differ as to his motives, Carlyle’s too heroic theory of him need not, and does not, any longer irritate even those who are least in sympathy with it. They willingly acquiesce in Carlyle’s canonisation of the Lord Protector; for they feel that he has earned a right to his saint, by drawing them so masterly a portrait of the man. H. D. TRAILL.