SPECTATOR'S LIBRARY.

MENTAL PHILOSOPHY.

On Heroes. Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Six Lectures; reported, with emendations and additions. By Thomas Carlyle Fraser.

TRAVELS.

The Chinese As they Are: their Moral. Social, and Literary Character; a new Ana- lysis of their Language; with Succinct Views of their Principal Arts and Sciences. By G. Tradescant Lay, Esq. Naturalist in Beechy's Expedi.ion ; Author of " The

Voyage of the Himmaleh," Ball and Co.

MISCELLANEOUS LITERATVRE,

Home Sketches and Foreign Recollections. By Lady Chatterton. Author of " Ram- bles in the South of Ireland." " A Good Match," &e. In 3 vols.

Saunders and Orley.

CARLYLE'S LECTURES ON HEROES AND THE HEROIC. IT is a common if not a general impression that the manner of CAR- LYLE (for his peculiarity is more than a style) is affected ; but such is not the case. His habits of thought, his mode of composition, and his knack of word-compounding, are a second nature, formed by a long and profound study of German literature operating upon a singular idiosyncracy. So far from affectation being a character- istic of CARLYLE, he is distinguished by great homeliness and great earnestness; or if affected at all, it is in striving to show his contempt for all sorts of cants and conventionalities. His few followers, and those who filch from the foreign fountains whence be has drunk deep, are indeed affected enough ; and hence probably the erroneous charge. But though CARLYLE has no affectation, he has a good deal of ex- aggeration—exaggeration in ideas, in style, and in the use of figures. 'This indeed is his characteristic ; for whilst his peculiar views are frequently questionable, or pushed to an extravagant length, his thoughts are not so much new in their substance as in the mode of their presentation. They attract attention less for themselves than their garb. Translated from the language of CARLYLE into plain English, they would often be recognized as just and true, but would not be so provocative to reflection as when they come in their outlandish guise, half-rustic, half- German. But this remark is subject to the exceptions that belong to all general rules. Ideas will be found in CARLYLE of originality, depth, and justness ; and these, we think, are the most plainly expressed. The title of the volume before us is an example of CARLYLE'S peculiarity of mind. At first sight, "Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History," suggests nothing distinctly to ordinary readers, and something quite different front the real meaning to a person acquainted with the subject-matter on which Mr. CAR- LYLE was about to lecture. Understand his drift, and the title may be admitted to be expressive enough. It is for his own consideration, how far it was judicious to suggest to people notions of Greek, Etruscan, Scandinavian, and all other mythology, mixed -up with a few striking events of a not much more solid and definite character, when he was going to treat the various phases of universal history in a very useful and practical way. According to Mr. CARLYLE'S definition, a "hero" is a "great man " ; and to admire, to reverence, to worship this great man, is natural to all other men, even in the most trifling, selfish, sceptical, and self-sufficient times—as the French of the rotten old regime admired VOLTAIRE. This hero-worship has taken various modes, according to the circumstances of the age and the people, as the character in which the "hero" appears is modified by similar influences; but the essential distinctions of this hero are earnest- ness and broad honesty of purpose, that purpose being the ad- vancement of mankind. This meaning, however, must be de- duced; for Mr. CARLYLE hides it in the cloud of words and mystic notions with which he overlays each species of hero, in his de- " scriptions, panegyrics, and digressions, of and round about him.

Not pausing to judge of the soundness of this theory, we pass onto describe the subject of the lectures. In the first stage, the great- man-hero appeared as a god ; and ODIN illustrates the lecturer's theory, and enables him to give a brief account of original Scan- dinavian literature, and of old Scandinavian legends, as well as an estimate of the character of the Northmen, intermingled and dashed with a good deal of mysticism. The prophet is the next character in which the hero appeared on earth—MAH0MET being the example: and Mr. CARLYLE'S hearty and honest de- fence of the " Arabian impostor " from the charge of imposi- tion or delusion of any kind, does honour to his own courage and his reverence for intellectual greatness, and would have drawn down upon him a fierce assault from hypocrites and fanatics, were he not " such a peculiar person, with such pe- culiar notions." The hero next appears as poet—DANTE—Smut- SPERE : but this division does not display Mr. CARLYLE'S happiest treatment ; indeed, he seems scarcely to have studied SHAKSPERE, and though he assigns him the first place as a poet, it seems rather out of deference to the opinion of the world than to a conviction grounded on long and deliberate examination. After the hero-poet comes the hero-priest—LUTHER—Knox : under which bead the Reformation is slightly touched upon ; and both heroes are defended from the charges which the refinement of modern criticism has brought against them, of impudence, coarseness, and intolerance. The hero's next character is a man of letters—illustrated by JOHNSON, ROUSSEAU, and Buans ; whose more striking characteristics are well brouFht out, especially their earnestness of purpose, submission to privations, and battling with the world for independence. The hero as king- CROMWELL--BONA.PARTE, is the last example : and here the lecturer gives a striking character of CROMWELL, not new perhaps, for Mr. HORACE SMITH, and especially Mr. HERBERT, in their novels, have taken a somewhat similar view ; but the honesty of CROMWELL, and the necessity to which he yielded in seizing supreme power, have never been so distinctly because so earnestly as well as quaintly impressed. The character of BONAPARTE is dismissed more briefly, treated more sternly, and more in accordance with, the general opinion, and perhaps with more unquestioned truth. The method of each lecture is alike; consisting of a variety of remarks on the generic nature of the subject, with a sketch of thq biography and character of the persons selected to illustrate it ; the; latter being invariably superior to the former. The remarks are frequently of the nature of mystical outpourings, with an oracular wildness about them—genuine Carlyle-Germanism. The histo- rical and biographical parts are occasionally dashed with this de.; feet ; and the opinions are generally too favourable to the hero—if nothing untrue is stated, truth is sometimes suppressed : but as wholes, they are real, hearty, keen, and powerful, presenting the kernel of history and biography as regards some of the most im- portant epochs of the world and some of her greatest men. An idea of the matter and manner of the lecturer will best be conveyed by examples ; which we will render as various as may be and with a certain progress from generals to particulars, but with-. out holding ourselves to acquiesce in all the author's views.

MODERN CRITICISM ON HEROES.

I am well aware, that in these days hero-worship, the thing I call hero-wor- ship, professes to have gone out and finally ceased. This, for reasons which it will be worth while some time to inquire into, is an age that, as it were, denies the existence of great men—denies the desirableness of great men. Show our critics a great man, a Luther for example, they begin to what they call " ac- count " for him ; not to worship him, but take the dimensions of him ; and bring him out to be a little kind of man. He was the "creature of the time," they say: the time called him forth, the time did every thing, he nothing, but what we the little critic could have done too. This seems to me but melan- choly work. The time call forth ? Alas! we have known times call loudly enough for their great man, but not find him when they called. He was not._ there; Providence had not sent him ; the time, calling its loudest, had to go down to confusion and wreck because he would not come when called. For if we will think of it, no time need have gone to ruin could it have found a man great enough, a man wise and good enough ; wisdom to discern truly what the time wanted, valour to lead it on the right road thither : these are the salvation of any time. But I liken common languid times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circum- stances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin ; all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own.

YET HERO-WORSHIP UNIVERSAL.

The unbelieving French believe in their Voltaire ; and burst out roan him into very curious hero-worship, in that last act of his life when tb " stifled him under roses." It has always seemed to me extremely curious t of Voltaire. Truly, if Christianity be the highest instance of hero-worship;. then we may find here in Voltairism one of the lowest. He whose life was that a kind of Antichrist, does again on this side exhibit a curious contrast. No people ever were so little prone to ad:nire at all as those French of Voltaire. Persiflage was the character of their whole mind; adoration had nowhere a place in it. Yet see ! the old man of Feruey comes up to Paris ; an old, tottering, in- firm man of eighty-four years. They feel that he too is a kind of hero; that he has spent his life in opposing error and injustice, delivering Calases, un- masking hypocrites in high places ; in short, that he too, though in a strange way, has fought like a valiant man. They feel withal, that if persiflage be the groat thing, there never was such a persilleur. He is the realized ideal of every one of them ; the thing they are all wanting to be ; of all Frenchmen the most French. He is properly their god—such god as they are fit for. Accordingly, all persons, from the Queen Antoinette to the Dauanier at the Porte St. Denis, do they not worship him? People of quality disguise them- selves as tavern-waiters. The Maitre de Porte, with a broad oath, orders his postilion " Ira ban train; thou art driving M. de Voltaire." At Paris his carriage is "the nucleus of a comet whose train fills whole streets." The ladies pluck a hair or two from his fur, to keep it as a sacred relic. There was nothing highest, beautifullest, noblest in all France, that did not feel this man to be higher, beautifuller, nobler.

MAHOMETANISM NOT QUACKERY.

Our current hypothesis about Mahomet, that he was a scheming impostor, a falsehood incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to any one. The lies which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to ourselves only. When Po. coche inquired of Grotius, where the proof was of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered, that there was no proof. It is really time to dismiss all that. The word this man spoke has been the life-guidance now of one hundred and eighty millions of men these twelve hundred years. These hundred and eighty millions were made by God, as well as we. A greater number of God's creatures believe in Mahomet's word at this hour than in any other word whatever. Are we to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spi- ritual legerdemain, this which so many creatures of the Almighty have lived by and died by ? I, for my part, cannot form any such supposition. E will believe most things sooner than that. One would be entirely at a loss what to think of this world at all, if quackery so grew and were sanctioned here.

Alas, such theories are very lamentable. If we would attain to knowledge of any thing in God's true creation, let us disbelieve them wholly. They are the product of an age of scepticism; indicate the saddest spiritual paralysis, and mere death-life of the souls of men : more godless theory, I think, was never promulgated in this earth. A false man found a religion I Why, a false man cannot build a brick house. If he do not know and follow truly the properties of mortar, burnt clay, and what else he works in, it is no house that he makes, but a rubbish-heap. It will not stand for twelve centu- ries, to lodge a hundred and eighty millions; it will fall straightway. A man must conform himself to nature's laws, be verily in communion with nature. and the truth of things, or nature will answer him, no, not at all. Specio- sities are specious—ah me! a Cagliostro, many Cagliostros, prominent world- leaders, do prosper by their quackery, for a day. It is like a forged bank- note; they get it passed out of their worthless hands; others, not they, have to smart for it. Nature bursts up in fire-flames, French Revolutions, and such like, proclaiming with terrible veracity that forged notes are forged.

One power of Mr. CARLYLE, as displayed in these lectures, is the :Talky which Hamlet notes as characteristic of the species, " look- ing before and after." He is not bounded by the forms or opinions of the present time : he can throw himself back into the feelings of the past, and test her heroes by the circumstances of their age ; not bringing, like conceited ignorance, all things and all persons to the test of its own littleness. Here is an example.

COURAGE OF LUTHER.

The essential quality of him was, that he could fight and conquer ; that he was a right piece of human valour. No more valiant man, no mortal heart to be called braver, that one has record of, ever lived in that Teutonic kindred, whose character is valour. His defiance of the "devils" in Worms was not a mere boast, as the like might be if now spoken. It was a faith of Luther's, that there were devils, spiritual denizens of the pit, continually besetting men. Many times in his writings this turns up ; and a most small sneer has been grounded on it by some. In the room of the Wartburg, where he sat trans- lating the Bible, they still show you a black spot on the wall, the strange memorial of one of these conflicts. Luther sat translating one of the Psalms; he was worn down with long labour, with sickness, abstinence from food : there rose before him some hideous indefinable image, which he took for the Evil One, to forbid his work. Luther started up with fiend-defiance; flung his ink- stand at the spectre, and it disappeared. The spot still remains there; a curious monument of several things. Any apothecary's apprentice can now tell us what we are to think of this apparition, in a scientihe sense ; but the man's heart that dare rise defiant, face to face, against Hell itself, can give no higher proof of fearlessness. The thing he will quail before, exists not on this earth or under it. Fearless enough ! They spoke once about his not being at Leipzig, as if " Duke George had hindered him," a great enemy of his. It was not for Duke George, answered he ; no; "If I had business at Leipzig, I would go though it rained Duke Georges for nine days running."

CROMWELL AND CHARLES THE FIRST.

Nor will his participation in the King's death involve him in condemnation with us. It is a stern business killing of a king ! But if you once go to war with him, it lies there; this and all else lies there. Once at war, you have made wager of battle with him : it is he to die, or else you. Reconciliation is prob- lematic; may be possible, or, far more likely, is impossible. It is now pretty generally admitted, that the Parliament, having vanquished Charles the First, had no way of making any tenable arrangement with him. The large Presbyterian party, apprehensive now of the Independents, were most anxious to do so ; anxious, indeed, as for their own existence ; but it could not be. The unhappy Charles, in those final Hampton Court negotiations, shows himself as a man fatally incapable of being dealt with : a man who, once for all, could not and ,would not understand;; whose thought did not in any measure represent to him the real fact of the matter; nay, worse, whose word did not at all represent his thought. We may say this of him without cruelty, with deep pity rather;

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but it is true and undeniable. Forsaken there of all but the name of kingship, he still, finding himself treated with outward respect as a king, fancied that he might play off party against party, and smuggle himself into his old power by deceiving both. Alas, they both discovered that he was deceiving them. A man whose word will not inform you at all what be means or will ;do, is not a -man you can bargain with. You must get out of that man's way, or put him out of yours. The Presbyterians, in their despair, were still for believing Charles, though found false, unbelievable again and again. Not so Cromwell: "For all our lighting," says he, "we are to have a little bit of paper?"—No!

THE TRUTH OF CROMWELL.

In fact, everywhere we have to notice the decisive practical eye of this man; how he drives towards the practical and practicable—has a genuine insight into what is fact. Such an intellect, I maintain, does not belong to a false man,: the false man sees false shows, plausibilines, expediencies; the true man is needed to discern even practical truth. Cromwell's advice about the Parlia- ment's army, early in the contest—how they were to dismiss their city-tapsters, flimsy, riotous persons, and choose substantial yeomen, whose heart was in the work, to he soldiers for them ; this is advice by a man who saw. Fact answers, if you see into fact. Cromwell's lronsides were the embodiment of this insight of his ; men fearing God, and without any other fear. No more conclusively genuine set of fighters ever trod the soil of England or of any other land.

THE AMBITION OF LITTLE AND OF GREAT MEN.

We exaggerate the ambition of great men ; we mistake what the nature of it is. Great men are not ambitious in that sense ; he is a small poor man that is ambitious so. Examine the man who lives in misery because be does not shine above other men ; who goes about producing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims ; struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for God's sake to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over the beads of men ! Such a creature is among the wretched sights seen under this sun. A great man? A poor, morbid, prurient, empty man, fitter for the ward of a hospital than for a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths ; unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the emptiness of the man, not his greatness. Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would find something in him. In good truth, I believe no great man, not so much as a genuine man who had health and real substance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented in this way. Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be "noticed" by noisy crowds of people ? God his Maker already noticed him. He, Cromwell, was already there ; no notice would make Ides other than Ile already was. Till his hair was grown gray; and life from the downhill slope was all seen to be limited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurable matter how it went—he had been content to plough the ground and read his Bible. He in his old days could not support it any longer, without selling himself to falsehood, that he might ride in gilt carriages to Whitehall, and have clerks with bundles of papers haunting him—" Decide this, decide that," which in utmost sorrow of heart no man can perfectly decide. What could gilt carriages do for this man? * • * To call such a man "ambitious," to figure him as the prurient wind-bag described above, seems to me the poorest solecism. Such a man will say " Keep your gilt carriages and huzzaing mobs ; keep your red-tape clerks, your influentialities, your important businesses. Leave me alone, leave me alone ; there is too much life in me already !" Old Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in England in his day, was not ambitious. " Corsica Boswell" flaunted at public shows with printed ribbons round his hat ; but the great old Samuel staid at home. The world-wide soul wrapt up in its thoughts, in its sorrows—what could paradiugs and ribbons in the hat do for it ?

It might seem at first sight that Mr. CARLYLE'S selection of heroic characters is limited and odd; but on reflection they will aprear to have been chosen with profound judgment or intuitive sagacity. Of ODIN we know nothing, and he may be passed. The greatness of all the others was innate and self-created—independent of help, accident, or fortune. None of them were rich, most of them poor; CROMWELL and MAHOMET alone being men of compe- tence in their callings—which competence, too, they had acquired : their family connexions were of no service to them, with the exception perhaps of Dazirz—whose connexions did not ad- vance him to his greatness ; and as for influence, interest, or friends, they had none : BONAPARTE was the only man of the band who enjoyed the opportunities of advancement which a pro- fession offers to its members, and the assistance to be derived from their esprit de corps; for neither KNOX nor LUTHER could look for any help from their clerical brethren. In fact, every man in Mr. CARLYLE'S list did not so much achieve greatness as carve his way to it : so far from the choice being odd, we question whether a better could have been made, or, upon these principles, whether any great man has been omitted. Their greatness was all of their own winning—not one of them was put in the way to it.