t directorates? Did he join either the Chartists or
the Special Constables in Trafalgar Square? As in a concert you want
listeners as well as performers, so in public life, those who look on
are quite as essential as those who shout and deal heavy blows.

Nature has not endowed everybody with the requisite muscle to be a
muscular Christian. But it may be said, that even if Carlyle and
Ruskin were absolved from doing muscular work in Trafalgar Square,
what excuse could they plead for not walking in procession to Hyde
Park, climbing up one of the platforms and haranguing the men and
women and children? I suppose they had the feeling which the razor has
when it is used for cutting stones: they would feel that it was not
exactly their _metier_. Arguing when reason meets reason is most
delightful, whether we win or lose; but arguing against unreason,
against anything that is by nature thick, dense, impenetrable,
irrational, has always seemed to me the most disheartening occupation.
Majorities, mere numerical majorities, by which the world is governed
now, strike me as mere brute force, though to argue against them is
no doubt as foolish as arguing against a railway train that is going
to crush you. Gladstone could harangue multitudes; so could Disraeli;
all honour to them for it. But think of Carlyle or Ruskin doing so!
Stroking the shell of a tortoise, or the cupola of St. Paul's, would
have been no more attractive to them than addressing the discontented,
when in their hundreds and their thousands they descended into the
streets. All I claim is that there must be a division of labour, and
as little as Wayland Smith was useless in his smithy, when he hardened
the iron in the fire for making swords or horse-shoes, was Carlyle a
man that could be spared, while he sat in his study preparing thoughts
that would not bend or break.

But I cannot even claim to have been a man of action in the sense in
which Carlyle was in England, or Emerson in America. They were men who
in their books were constantly teaching and preaching. "Do this!" they
said; "Do not do that!" The Jewish prophets did much the same, and
they are not considered to have been useless men, though they did not
make bricks, or fight battles like Jehu. But the poor _Stubengelehrte_
has not even that comfort. Only now and then he gets some unexpected
recognition, as when Lord Derby, then Secretary of State for India,
declared that the scholars who had discovered and p