, we all know, of two classes:
there are 'the dull millions, who, as a dull flock, roll hither and
thither, whithersoever they are led,' and there are a few superior
natures who can see and can will. There are, in other words, the heroes,
and those whose highest wisdom is to be hero-worshippers. Johnson's
glory is that he belonged to the sacred band, though he could not claim
within it the highest, or even a very high, rank. In the current
dialect, therefore, he was 'nowise a clothes-horse or patent digester,
but a genuine man.' Whatever the accuracy of the general doctrine, or of
certain corollaries which are drawn from it, the application to Johnson
explains one main condition of his power. Persons of colourless
imagination may hold--nor will we dispute their verdict--that Carlyle
overcharges his lights and shades, and brings his heroes into too
startling a contrast with the vulgar herd. Yet it is undeniable that
the great bulk of mankind are transmitters rather than originators of
spiritual force. Most of us are necessarily condemned to express our
thoughts in formulas which we have learnt from others and can but
slightly tinge with our feeble personality. Nor, as a rule, are we even
consistent disciples of any one school of thought. What we call our
opinions are mere bundles of incoherent formulae, arbitrarily stitched
together because our reasoning faculties are too dull to make
inconsistency painful. Of the vast piles of books which load our
libraries, ninety-nine hundredths and more are but printed echoes: and
it is the rarest of pleasures to say, Here is a distinct record of
impressions at first hand. We commonplace beings are hurried along in
the crowd, living from hand to mouth on such slices of material and
spiritual food as happen to drift in our direction, with little more
power of taking an independent course, or of forming any general theory,
than the polyps which are carried along by an oceanic current. Ask any
man what he thinks of the world in which he is placed: whether, for
example, it is on the whole a scene of happiness or misery, and he will
either answer by some cut-and-dried fragments of what was once wisdom,
or he will confine himself to a few incoherent details. He had a good
dinner to-day and a bad toothache yesterday, and a family affliction or
blessing the day before. But he is as incapable of summing up his
impressions as an infant of performing an operation in the differential
calculus. It