put ourselves at the point of view of the time when it was written, the
days of Wellington and Melbourne, Brougham and Macaulay, Southey and
Coleridge. None of these men understood the heroic in Norse mythology,
or the grandeur of Oliver Cromwell, or the supreme importance of the
_Divina Commedia_ as the embodiment of Catholic Feudalism. All this
Carlyle felt as no Englishman before him had felt, and told us in a
voice which has since been accepted as conclusive. How far deeper is
the view of Carlyle about some familiar personality like Johnson than
is that of Macaulay, how much farther does Carlyle see into the
Shakesperean firmament than even Coleridge! How far better does he
understand Rousseau and Burns than did Southey, laureate and critic as
he was hailed in his time. The book is a collection of Lectures, and
we now know how entirely Carlyle loathed that kind of utterance, how
much he felt the restraints and limits it involved. And for that
reason, the book is the simplest and most easily legible of his works,
with the least of his mannerism and the largest concessions to the
written language of sublunary mortals. Nearly all the judgments he
passes are not only sound, but now almost universally accepted. To
deal with the heroic in history, he needed, as he said, six months
rather than six days. It was intended, he told his hearers, "to break
ground," to clear up misunderstandings. It has done this: and a rich
crop has resulted from his ploughshare.
Nothing but a few sketches could be compressed into six hours. But it
is curious how many things seem omitted in this survey of the heroic.
At the age of forty-five Carlyle had not recognised Friedrich at all,
for he does not figure in the "Hero as King." Napoleon takes his
place, though Bonaparte was a "hero" only in the bad sense of hero
which Carlyle was seeking to explode. It is well that, since he
finished the _French Revolution_, Carlyle seems to have found out that
Bonaparte "parted with Reality," and had become a charlatan, a sham.
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