the vanity of writing like a German, he [chargeable against him, and that not of might write better than most Englishmen. manner merely, but of substance also. This In expressing our opinion thus plainly of is a more serious subject, and one to be Mr. Carlyle's style, we must not be under-more gravely treated; for the charge we stood to be insensible to its merits, or to mean to bring is one we should be sorry to undervalue the qualities for effect, which it make against any one on slight grounds, undoubtedly possesses. But we do not and yet one in which the public are most think it at all incumbent on us to pronounce especi lly concerned. It is to the religious any eulogium on it, even where it might tendency of his writings that we allude. seem to deserve it, and that for two very No man, we believe, would recoil with sufficient reasons. First, because it is radi- more unfeigned horror from the charge of cally false in taste, and vicious in system, want of, or hostility to, religion, than Mr. and we could no more conscientiously hold Carlyle himself. In some respects justly. it up to admiration for its partial merits, He is a man subject by nature to a strong than a judge, in passing sentence, would access or impulse of the religious feeling. praise a highwayman for his bravery or Phrenologists would say that veneration, or honor. By giving it the sanction of his adoration, was strongly developed in his high name and undoubted genius, he has character. Few writers evince more strongled away many from the "well of English ly the influence of the natural religious undefiled" in search of what they are in- emotions; and it is a subject on which he duced to believe a more elevated and ex- rather has pleasure in dwelling and expapressive style. And secondly, because we tiating. Not only so, but these emotions fear he is becoming more and more harden- themselves have so strong a tendency, at ed in his offences. Some of his works times, in the right direction, that it is not show him capable of better things. But without repugnance that we bring ourselves his last publication on Cromwell, is so ut- to speak as strongly on the subject as it terly and scandalously vicious, as entirely clearly calls for. For instance, the followto overset any relentings of nature towards ing passage from his Essays, goes at once him. We had fondly hoped that "aiblins," home to our sympathies:"he wad tak a thocht and mend." But alas! what can be expected or hoped from him, who ends his book, on so great theme, thus a "The genius of England no longer soars sunward, world-defiant, like an eagle through the storms, 'renewing her mighty youth,' as John Milton saw her do; the genius of England, much liker a greedy ostrich intent on provender, and a whole skin mainly, stands with its other extremity sunward, with its ostrich-head stuck into the readiest bush of old church-tippets, king cloaks, or what other sheltering fallacy' there may be, and so awaits the issue. The issue has been slow, but it is now seen to have been inevitable. No ostrich, intent on gross terrene provender, and sticking its head into fallacies, but will be awakened one day in a terrible a-posteriori manner, il not otherwise. Awake before it come to that; gods and men bid us awake," &c. ! The case is hopeless. He is a beacon to be placed like buoys upon the Goodwin Sands; a warning to all who navigate these seas. If in any measure we may have assisted to prevent future shipwrecks on the same shoals, we shall consider our time and indignation not thrown away. "Honor to all the brave and true; everlastof the true! That, in the moment while he ing honor to brave old Knox, one of the truest and his cause, amid civil broils, in convulsion and confusion, were still but struggling for life, he sent the schoolmaster forth to all corners, and said, 'let the people be taught;' this is but one, and indeed an inevitable and comparatively inconsiderable item in his great message to men. His message, in its true compass, was, 'let men know that they are men, created by God, responsible to God; who work in any meanest moment of time what will last through eternity.' It is verily a great message. Not ploughing and hammerornamental) to digest the produce of these; ing machines, not patent digesters (never so no, in nowise born slaves, neither of their fellow-men, nor of their own appetites: but men! man's voice and strength, and found a people This great message Knox did deliver, with a to believe him."-Essays, vol. v. p. 255. Now, this, as far as it goes, is heartfelt and earnest. Still more, in his "Sketches of Knox and Luther, in his Hero-Worship," and in "The Letters and Speeches of Cromwell," does the same spirit break out and expand; indeed, to such a degree does he seem to enter into the great religious moveSo much for Mr. Carlyle's faults of man-ments of the sixteenth and seventeenth cenWe said there was another offence turies, and so thoroughly to appreciate the ner. 1. power of godliness as a real, active, inducing, engrossing element of conduct, that our foregone conclusion stood half-disarmed; and we inwardly thought, as well as hoped, that our criticisms concerned his writings more than their author. "There is much lying yet undeveloped in the love of Boswell for Johnson,-a cheering proof, in a time which else utterly wanted, and still wants such, that living wisdom is quite the godlike to him, which even weak eyes infinitely precious to man-is the symbol of may discern; that loyalty, discipleship, all that was ever meant by hero-worship, lives perennially in the human bosom, and waits, even it, and inspire all men with it, and again make the world alive. Still, we should be eminently wanting in our duty, were we to omit, in this estimate of his merits as a public instructor, the re-in these dead days, only for occasions to unfold ligious tendency of his writings-the more especially as that is a character which he chiefly affects. It is much his habit and mood to preach, ex cathedra, on the highest and most sacred destinies of man. There is no exercitation he so much loves as to penetrate, or try to penetrate, the recesses of man's desires, affections, and pursuits; and he sneers at their emptiness or falseness, and declaims against their errors, with the authority and air of an acknowledged monitor. Shall we not, then, inquire if the oracle be well inspired? can be built, as on a rock that will endure "Veneration of great men is perennial in the nature of man; this, in all times, especially in these, is one of the blessedest facts predicable of him. In all times, even in these seemingly so disobedient times, it remains a blessed fact, so cunningly has nature ordered it, that whatsoever man ought to obey, he cannot but obey. Show the dullest clodpole, show the than himself is actually here; were his knees haughtiest featherhead, that a soul higher stiffened into brass, he must down and worship. So it has been written; and may be cited and repeated till known to all. UnderTo speak honestly, Carlyle would be a stand it well, this of 'hero-worship' was the far less dangerous writer to the cause of primary creed, and has intrinsically been the religion, if he omitted the subject alto-secondary and tertiary, and will be the ultimate gether. The sneers of an acknowledged changing in shape, but in essence unchangeaand final creed of mankind; indestructible, skeptic carry their own antidote with them ble; whereon politics, religions, loyalties, and -the rattle of the snake forewarns us of all highest human interests, have been, and his fang. One may read with comparative impunity the labored incredulity of Gibbon; for the "believe nothing" principle of the author betrays itself throughout. But not so with Carlyle. His religious emotions not only play round the head, but would seem, at least, to warm his heart. He stirs up, with much warmth and glowing honesty, the devotional affection in the mind of the reader; and then, after all, when he has shown, in his own way, that all is vanity, and derided, with quiet sneer, the ambition, money-making, and gig-respectability of the world-what, after all, is his chief end of man? what the object with which he would fill the void, aching, restless heart? Why, nothing better than a sort of intellectual pantheism. No higher-scarce, indeed, so high, as the ancients reached; below the immortal musings of Cicero, or the choral-P. 188. inspirations of Greek tragedy. His religion is truly a man-worship-a homage rendered to the godlike principles of our nature; and with him the power by which a strong mind ascends over the weak, is in that man the power of a god. Hence his hero-worship, an enthusiasm extravagantly and profanely exalted into a system and a creed, in which end all his speculations on man's destiny-all his admonitions-all his ironical warnings. Let him speak for himself. "We all love great men; love, venerate, and bow down submissive before great men: nay, can we honestly bow down to any thing else?"-P. 23. "The most precious gift that Heaven can give to the earth, a man of genius, as we call it-the soul of a man actually sent down from the skies with a god's message to us."-P. 67. "No fact that ever dwelt honestly as true in the heart of man, but was an honest insight essential truth in it, which endures through all into God's truth on man's part, and has an changes, an everlasting possession for us all." “At first view, it might seem as if Protestantism were entirely destructive to this that we call hero-worship, and represent as the basis of all possible good, religious or social, for mankind."—P. 194. These scattered sentences indicate the general opinion inculcated by him on this head. We have done our best, in our study of our author, to come at the precise idea in volved in this hero-worship theory, not, we fairly own, with very satisfactory success; for, as he announces it, we doubt if it be very susceptible of precision. He would probably say, that the true knowledge of it can only be known to, and perceived by, the refined eye that can gaze like the eagle's on the unclouded sun; and that we ordinary mortals pass and repass daily the great treasure of life, without having the privilege to discern it. This, and much rhapsody of the same kind, is more easily said than reduced within the just limits of sense or reason. 'As one of the multitudeone of the vast family for whom, assuredly, religion was intended-we wish to know exactly what God or what worship he preaches; by what course of logic he, professing Christianity, deduces from the inspired Word the doctrine he loves to propound, by so strange a name, and in so unaccustomed a dress. religious principle in man finds fitting and sufficient exercise and fulfilment in the contemplation of what is great and magnificent in his fellow-man. The God whom he would adore is the abstract sense or impersonation of such qualities; and the homage paid by the weaker to the stronger mind, is essentially, as he thinks, the religious obedience of the soul. In Christianity he sees nothing but a perfect model of the man worthy of adoration; and he divides his homage among all in whom the adorable quality may seem to reside. To say nothing for the moment of higher views, this new Pantheon is truly one at which the heathen philosophers would have looked with contempt. They saw what was noble in man; but they saw also how man had debased, degraded, quenched it. So far from seeing, as our author says, that "Nature had so willed it, that whatever man ought to obey, man must obey," they saw the very reverse-that the law which they could not but reverence, they could not obey; that the diviner spirit within them kept up an unequal warfare with the affections and corruptions of the flesh. " Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor," was the true and just language of the ancient philosophy of Greece and Rome. This did not, and could not, lead them to man or hero-worship; on the contrary, it led them to reject, as empty fables, the established congregation of divinities; for they were keenly alive to the contradiction of giving homage or obedience of soul to imperfection or impurity. "What, then," was the natural inquiry, "are there no gods?” "Plerique deos esse dixerunt,— dubitare se Protagoras: nullos esse omnino Diagoras Melius et Theodorus Cyrenaicus putaverunt-(Cic. de. Nat. Deor. I.) Then, darkly resolving the existence of a Deity and a future state, from the imperfection of our nature and the inequality of our condition, the Platonist goes on to search out the attributes of the one, and the nature and requisites of the other, until his stream of thought is absorbed in the sands of bewilderment, and he "finds no end, in devious mazes lost." If all our author means by hero-worship -which he exalts, in such glowing phrase, as the prime end and object of our beingwere merely to express, in rather hyperbolic phrase, our natural reverence for the noble and the good, he would, after all, but grovel at the bottom of the ladder, and see no farther, and feel no surer, with all his imagined light, than the most darkened of Pagan inquirers after truth. For if man, in the ruder ages, deified the grosser and coarser qualities, and worshipped those who excelled in them as gods, it needed not the light of revelation, or any addition to the educated sense, to perceive the folly and absurdity of such hero-culture, nor to point out, more or less dimly, the diviner spark which resided within the corrupted clay. The ancient philosophers could discern and reverence those purer aspirations of the soul, and recognize them also as emanations from a heavenly source. So that, if this be all that is implied in Mr. Carlyle's religion, it may be sufficiently true as far as it goes, but it did not require so many emphatic words to announce it to the world. But this is far short of our author's idea. He means to tell us, if we rightly understand his language, that not only are there qualities in man which are venerable But with what scorn would such a sage or admirable in themselves, but that these have heard our author propound, that the qualities in the man are worthy objects of power of one man's mind over another's adoration, and that the man himself is so, was that of a divinity-a hero-to be worin respect of the quality residing within shipped!-when he saw, in the world him; not that his worship is the vulgar one around, how the recklessness of the strong of setting up idols in a temple, and offer-mind daily triumphed over the uneasy coning vain oblations, but he thinks that the science of the weak-and still more, how -'tis true, this god did shake: Ay, and that tongue of his, that bade the Ro mans Mark him, and write his speeches in their Alas! it cried, give me some drink, Titinius, the fierce contending passions hourly tram- discerns all the failings of a common napled down the ineffectual pleading of con- turescience within the soul, making the ascendency of the mind of man over his fellows more that of a demon than of a god; and even, where the purer sense had acquired a purer sway, how uncertain, how wavering, how corrupt, how ungodlike, how insufficient for that heavenly light, by the undying and unobscured refulgence of which even the unenlightened soul feels As a mere enthusiasm, we think all this that its pathway should be guided! speculation false; but its direct tendency Were we therefore to take this hero-wor- as a practical system of belief is very danship to task on no higher grounds, we think gerous. The mischief is not so much that it offensive to natural, as well as adverse to our author exalts the admiration of heroes revealed religion. An Augustus sits on to the rank of religion, as that he brings the world's throne, and poets sing the religion down to nothing but the worship of advent of Saturnian days, and paint him man, or of God as displayed in man. He quaffing nectar with purple-lips among the very carefully avoids, in his work on Herogods; while all the while the object of their Worship, saying a syllable offensive on the flattery is stained by every crime that can subject of Christianity; but it would be a degrade man below the brutes. The peo- very easy task to demonstrate from his ple shout at the inauguration of Herod, and opinions that all religions are alike true, the worms seize their newly proclaimed and that the true religion is simply the god, ere their plaudits have died upon his aggregate of all. Whatever a man thinks ear. Were it not even better, one might honestly-is God's revealed will in himthink, to bestow man's reverence on some Odin-Mahomet-are as much God's mesconsecrated image, that might at least body sengers-proclaimers of truth-as Isaiah or forth and enshadow the qualities to which John the Baptist-nay, as our Saviour himthe devout mind turns with adoration, than self. Not in the same degree, he admits, to cast it away on the degraded and sindefaced image of our Maker, which in spirit and in body attests how far it has fallen short of divinity? but of the same kind-an emanation from the same holiness. But, dress it in what vividness and kindliness of language he will, what a false and unstable position. It may be said we take this too literally. What a man thinks honestly!-Why, Paul It is not the hero properly who is to be of Tarsus, yet breathing out threatenings worshipped, but the heroic principle-the and slaughter, thought he did God good divinity within the man. But, alas, what service-thought it as honestly-with as is the heroic principle, and where does it reside? A vivid fancy will invest a conqueror with all the attributes of generosity, courage, clemency, and the far-seeing eye of government, and year after year may have fixed its admiration on this exalted subject of idolatry, when a trifle, light as air, may tumble this hero-god from his pedestal, and reduce him to a mere earthly mortal. No man, it is said, is a hero to his valet a true saying, which Mr. Carlyle may well take note of. "No," he says, "the valet does not know the hero when he sees him." Not so. The valet sees him to be no hero. The proverb is eminently expressive of the frailty, and weakness, and inconsistency of humanity, which an intimate acquaintance with the best and greatest is sure to expose. The man is a hero to the world, who only see him on his pedestal, in his robes of state, but the close observer much hero-sincerity as ever Luther or Knox His sketch of Mahomet is very vigorous, and, as we think, in great measure just. | perform to keep his transcendental theory He regards him as an honest, earnest man in any unision with his manifest personal in the main, subject to some delusions, but impressions. preaching down idolatry, and setting up On a lower stage, and in a less ambitious the one God, in short establishing a sort of mood, his analysis of the love of heroes has pseudo-Christianity. Before he is done much that is natural, beautiful, and true; with him, we find him exclaiming-"Alas, and we own that we never read a book poor Mahomet, all that he was conscious of with more interest than his six lectures on was a mere error, a futility and triviality, Hero-worship, or found more in a book as indeed such error is!" Yet this is his worth reading. The sketches of Mahomet, true prophet-his hero-to be worshipped! Dante, and Luther, are very masterly, and So that his conception of a true prophet is, if only divorced from his theory, which after all, nothing but an able, earnest man, adds nothing to the ornament, and only deworking out with honest sincerity, though tracts from the moral, they deserve to rank with many errors, futilities, and trivialities, very high in tone, expression, and execuwhat he believes to be true. He admits tion. that the Koran, in so far as not a transcript Having now relieved ourselves of Mr. of the Scriptures, is a falsehood,-that it is no inspiration of God, as Mahomet said it was, but a very dull, stupid, human book. Yet it seems no objection to his hero-God that he promulgated a lie; nor any calamity, or of any dangerous issue to the multitude of his followers, that they have for centuries believed a lie. It was preached and believed in sincerity, and, according to his creed, no more can be required. It really needs no words to show any truly religious man how destructive all these vain philosophizings are to Evangelical reality to the doctrine of the corruption of our nature-the renewal of the heart by grace the redemption of our fallen race by the sacrifice for sin, and justification through faith. By our author's theory, there is no reality in them but the earnestness with which they are believed, and other doctrines, held as honestly, are just as true as they. We have no leisure to pursue this farther, but we thought that we could not, in any fidelity, pass by in our notice of our author this delusive tendency of his writings, which is rendered doubly dangerous by the great amount of truth with which it is illustrated, and the glowing kindliness and social warmth with which it is expounded by him. We do not think Mr. Carlyle had any thought of undermining religion; but quite the reverse. He has, however, allowed himself to be carried out of his depth by a mere German fantasy-an exhalation from the fens of neology, which has led him much farther than he himself is aware. The school of Goethe is a very bad theological institute we know none worse; for with a certain show of belief, it truly abrogates Christianity altogether, and Mr. Carlyle has a harder task than he can Carlyle's great cardinal sins, of manner and substance, we have no intention of parting with him in ill humor. He is no common writer, in merit or in influence, or we should not have thought his offences so important to the public. In discharging our duty of censure, we feel as one might do who has told his friend some disagreeable truth long withheld, and now that it is over, we cannot pass to the review of Cromwell's Letters, without a parting word of esteem and admiration. Carlyle has fine, manly, poetic spirit. When he writes simply, his words breathe poetry, and even in his most overlaid writing the fine imagination will burst. forth. Take for instance this passage on the death of Goethe: "And yet, when the inanimate, material sun has sunk and disappeared, it will happen that we stand to gaze into the still glowing west, and there rise great pale motionless clouds, like coulisses or curtains, to close the flametheatre within; and then, in that death-pause of the day, an unspeakable feeling will come over us; it is as if the poor sounds of time, vils, those voices of simple men had become those hammerings of tired labor on his anawful and supernatural; as if in listening, we could hear them mingle with the ever-pealing tone of old eternity.' In such moments the secrets of life lie opener to us; mysterious things flit over the soul; life itself seems holier, wonderful, and fearful. How much more when our sunset was of a living sun, and its bright countenance and shining return to us, not on the morrow, but no more again, at all, for ever.""-Essays, vol. iv. p. 116. This is finely conceived, and expressed both with power and music. We might easily add to the instances, as, indeed, every page of his writings teems with them. But his great-his greatest praise |