ften gives to Carlyle the air of a man worshiping
mere success; when, if we take his own interpretation, he takes the
success to be the consequence, not the cause, of the rightness. The
hero is the man who sees the fact and disregards the conventional
fiction; but for the moment he looks very like the man who disregards
principles and attends to his own interest.

Here again Carlyle approximates to a doctrine to which he was most
averse, the theory of the struggle for existence and the survival of
the fittest. The Darwinian answers in this way Carlyle's problem, how
it is to come to pass that the stupidity of the masses comes to
blunder into a better order? Here and there, as in his accounts of the
way in which the intensely stupid British public managed to blunder
into the establishment of a great empire, Carlyle seems to fall in
with the Darwinian view. That view shocked him because he thought it
mechanical. To him the essence of history was to be found not in the
blind striving of the dull, but in the lives of great men. They
represent the incarnate wisdom which must guide all wholesome
aspiration. History is really the biography of the heroes. All
so-called philosophies of history, attempts to discover general laws
and to dispense with the agency of great men, are tainted with
materialism. They would substitute "blind laws" for the living spirit
which really guides the development of the race. But if you ask how
your hero is to be known, the only answer can be, Know him at your
peril.

Carlyle's most elaborate books, the 'Cromwell' and the 'Frederick,'
are designed to give an explicit answer to the "right" and "might"
problem. Carlyle in both cases seems to be toiling amidst the
dust-heaps of some ancient ruin, painfully disinterring the shattered
and defaced fragments of a noble statue and reconstructing it to be
hereafter placed in a worthy Valhalla. Cromwell, according to the
vulgar legend, was a mere hypocrite, and Frederick a mere cynical
conqueror. The success of both--that is his intended moral--was in
proportion to the clearness with which they recognized the eternal
laws of the universe. Cromwell probably is the more satisfactory hero,
as more really sympathetic to his admirer. But each requires an
interpreter. Cromwell's gifts did not lie in the direction of lucid
utterance; and Frederick, if he could have read, would certainly have
scorned, the doctrine of his eulogist. Carlyle, that is, has to dig
out