_Cromwell_; for it is far less true and sound as history, and it is
only one out of scores of interpreters of the Revolution, whereas in
the Cromwell Carlyle worked single-handed. But being far more organic,
far more imaginative, indeed more powerful than the _Cromwell_ in
literary art, the _French Revolution_--produced, we may remember,
exactly in the middle of the author's life--will remain the enduring
monument of Carlyle's great spirit and splendid brain.
The book entitled _Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History_
(1840), to give it its full and original title, comes next in order of
time, and perhaps of abiding value. It is a book rather difficult for
us now to estimate after more than half a century, for so very much has
been done in the interval to build upon these foundations, to enlarge
our knowledge of these very heroes, and the estimates of Carlyle in the
first half of this century are for the most part so completely the
commonplaces of the English-speaking world at the close of the century,
that when we open the _Heroes_ again it is apt to seem obvious,
_connu_, the emphatic assertion of a truism that no one disputes. How
infinitely better do we now, in 1895, know Dante and Shakespeare,
Cromwell and Napoleon, than did our grandfathers in 1840! Who,
nowadays, imagines Mahomet to have been an impostor, or Burns to have
been a mere tipsy song-writer? What a copious literature has the last
half-century given us on Dante, on Islam and its spirit, on Rousseau,
on Burns, on the English and the French revolutions! But in 1840 the
true nature of these men was very faintly understood. Few people but
soldiers had the least chance of being called "heroes," and the "heroic
in history" was certainly not thought to include either poets,
preachers, or men of letters. _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, like the
_Cromwell_, has, in fact, done its work so completely that we find it a
little too familiar to need any constant reading or careful study.
To judge fairly all that Carlyle effected by his book on Heroes we must
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