[Section II.—Wherein Carlyle is Original]
We have here a German theory, but transformed, made precise, thickened after the English manner. The Germans said that every nation, period, civilization, has its idea; that is, its chief feature, from which the rest were derived; so that philosophy, religion, arts, and morals, all the elements of thought and action, could be deduced from some original and fundamental quality, from which all proceeded and in which all ended. Where Hegel proposed an idea, Carlyle proposes a heroic sentiment. It is more palpable and moral. To complete his escape from the vague, he considers this sentiment in a hero. He must give to abstractions a body and soul; he is not at ease in pure conceptions, and wishes to touch a real being.
But this being, as he conceives it, is an abstract of the rest. For according to him, the hero contains and represents the civilization in which he is comprised; he has discovered, proclaimed or practised an original conception, and in this his age has followed him. The knowledge of a heroic sentiment, thus gives us a knowledge of a whole age. By this method Carlyle has emerged beyond biography. He has rediscovered the grand views of his masters. He has felt, like them, that a civilization, vast and dispersed as it is over time and space, forms an indivisible whole. He has combined, in a system of hero-worship, the scattered fragments which Hegel united by a law. He has derived from a common sentiment the events which the Germans derived from a common definition. He has comprehended the deep and distant connection of things, such as bind a great man to his time, such as connect the works of accomplished thought with the stutterings of infant thought, such as link the wise inventions of modern constitutions to the disorderly furies of primitive barbarism:
"Silent, with closed lips, as I fancy them, unconscious that they were specially brave; defying the wild ocean with its monsters, and all men and things;—progenitors of our own Blakes and Nelsons. ... Hrolf or Rollo, Duke of Normandy, the wild Sea-king, has a share in governing England at this hour."[386]
"No wild Saint Dominies and Thebaïd Eremites, there had been no melodious Dante; rough Practical Endeavour, Scandinavian and other, from Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila to Cranmer, enabled Shakespeare to speak. Nay, the finished Poet, I remark sometimes, is a symptom that his epoch itself has reached perfection and is finished; that before long there will be a new epoch, new Reformers needed."[387]
His great poetical or practical works only publish or apply this dominant idea; the historian makes use of it to rediscover the primitive sentiment which engenders them, and to form the segregate conception which unites them.
CHRIST CROWNED WITH THORNS
Fac-simile example of Printing and Engraving in the Sixteenth Century.