of the fast-spreading spirit of the new democracy. But more than this.
He insists that the one hope for our distracted world of to-day lies
in the strength and wisdom of the few, not in the organised unwisdom
of the many. The masses of the people can never be safely trusted to
solve for themselves the intricate problems of their own welfare. They
need to be guided, disciplined, at times even driven, by those great
leaders of men, who see more deeply than they see into the reality of
things, and know much better than they can ever know what is good for
them, and how that good is to be attained. Political machinery, in
which the modern world had come to put so much faith, is only another
delusion of a mechanical age. The burden of history is for him always
the need of the Able Man. "I say, Find me the true _Koenning_, King,
Able Man, and he _has_ a divine right over me." Carlyle thus throws
down the gauntlet at once to the scientific and to the democratic
movements of his time. His pronounced antagonism to the modern spirit
in these two most important manifestations must be kept steadily in
mind in our study of him.

Finally, we have to remember that in the whole tone and temper of his
teaching Carlyle is fundamentally the Puritan. The dogmas of
Puritanism he had indeed outgrown; but he never outgrew its ethics.
His thought was dominated and pervaded to the end, as Froude rightly
says, by the spirit of the creed he had dismissed. By reference to
this one fact we may account for much of his strength, and also for
most of his limitations in outlook and sympathy. Those limitations the
reader will not fail to notice for himself. But whatever allowance has
to be made for them, the strength remains. It is, perhaps, the secret
of Carlyle's imperishable greatness as a stimulating and uplifting
power that, beyond any other modern writer, he makes us feel with him
the supreme claims of the moral life, the meaning of our own
responsibilities, the essential spirituality of things, the
indestructible reality of religion. If he had thus a special message
for his own generation, that message has surely not lost any of its
value for ours. "Put Carlyle in your pocket," says Dr. Hal to Paul
Kelver on his starting out in life. "He is not all the voices, but he
is the best maker of men I know." And as a maker of men, Carlyle's
appeal to us is as great as ever.

WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON.

_Life of Schiller_ (_Lond. Mag._, 1823-4), 1825,