Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 12.djvu/22

XIV as the last specimen of the King ('King, König, Canning, Able-Man, 'one who kens or cans'), his eulogies must be taken with some reservation. All that can fairly be said of Frederick in the character of the 'Hero as King,' is that he was a good enough stick to beat the dog of Democracy withal. Carlyle was just then in his most contentious mood. The Latter-day Pamphlets had, as has been said, aroused vehement protest. He had a feeling that it had set the world against him, and he became daily more and more convinced that he had been cast by destiny for the rôle of Athanasius. This is hardly the spirit in which to look about for a subject of biography, and certainly if a writer is to select a hero with a special view to using his biography for a temporary polemical purpose, it is just as well that he should not plan his work on such a scale as to make it last him the remainder of his life. But no doubt it was the selection which determined the plan, and it was the mass of biographical detail which German industry, German formlessness, and German inartistic lack of perception for the inessential had accumulated round the hero, which made the choice so fatal a one. It was not exactly a free choice either. Theoretically speaking, any born 'leader of men,' any one of the figures, for instance, whom he had robed and crowned as ideal rulers in his lectures on Hero-Worship, would have answered that temporary polemical purpose to which he eventually made so gigantic a sacrifice. But practically he found on examination that none of them would do. 'He thought of Ireland,' writes the late Professor Nichol,' but that was too burning a subject; of William the Conqueror, of Simon de Montfort, the Norsemen, the Cid; but these may have seemed to him too remote. Why, ask patriotic Scotsmen, did he not take up his and their favourite Knox? But Knox's life had been fairly handled by M'Crie, and Carlyle would have found it hard to adjust is treatment of that essentially national hero to the exodus from Houndsditch. Luther might have been an apter theme; but there too it would have been a strain to steer clear of theological con