He denied every type and species of prop or association or support which
threw the responsibility upon civilisation or society, or anything but
the individual conscience. He has often been called a prophet. The real
ground of the truth of this phrase is often neglected. Since the last
era of purely religious literature, the era of English Puritanism, there
has been no writer in whose eyes the soul stood so much alone.
Carlyle was, as we have suggested, a mystic, and mysticism was with him,
as with all its genuine professors, only a transcendent form of common
sense. Mysticism and common sense alike consist in a sense of the
dominance of certain truths and tendencies which cannot be formally
demonstrated or even formally named. Mysticism and common sense are
alike appeals to realities that we all know to be real, but which have
no place in argument except as postulates. Carlyle's work did consist in
breaking through formulae, old and new, to these old and silent and
ironical sanities. Philosophers might abolish kings a hundred times
over, he maintained, they could not alter the fact that every man and
woman does choose a king and repudiate all the pride of citizenship for
the exultation of humility. If inequality of this kind was a weakness,
it was a weakness bound up with the very strength of the universe. About
hero worship, indeed, few critics have done the smallest justice to
Carlyle. Misled by those hasty and choleric passages in which he
sometimes expressed a preference for mere violence, passages which were
a great deal more connected with his temperament than with his
philosophy, they have finally imbibed the notion that Carlyle's theory
of hero worship was a theory of terrified submission to stern and
arrogant men.
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