THE

HOHENZOLLERN STAGE OF HERO-WORSHIP.

Hero-Worship Refuted by recent Discoveries.-Its reductio ad absurdum by Mr. Carlyle.-The Hohenzollern Kurfürsts and the Reformation.-The Hohenzollerns Greedy but Irresolute.-Their Great Kurfürst.-Their King Friedrich Wilhelm.-Discrepancy between Mr. Carlyle and Lord Macaulay. -Explanation of the Mania for Giants.-Friedrich Wilhelm sacrifices the Happiness of those about him, for Political Schemes which come to nothing. Mr. Carlyle has made him intelligible, but he cannot make him Veracious, Just, or Valiant.-Mr. Carlyle Contentious.-Hero-Worship on the Offensive.

THERE is a school among us which worships heroes; which tends to exaggerate the value of the individual, and to assign him the chief place among historic agencies. It would be unbecoming to allude to its members without respect, though we are pointing to this their besetting error. At the same time, it is no less becoming to protest, when this error takes an ex cathedra form, as in the inaugural lecture of Mr. Charles Kingsley, the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Mr. Kingsley's genius and learning add a special weight to anything that falls from his lips, at least when he speaks thus deliberately and decisively. "Instead of saying that the history of mankind is the history of its masses, it would be much more true to say," (so far does he press his argument,) "that the history of mankind is the history of its great men." Now, if this be true in its extreme sense, then the units have been of more importance than the millions, and the impulses and exigencies which these obey in common; the great normal sources of history have been secondary to the caprices of individual will, and the moral harmony of human progress relapses into chaos. In

the more rational sense, that great men have been the representatives of instincts of class or race, or wider human nature, even then it is too much to imply that they have counted, historically speaking, for more than the masses whose instincts endowed them with their potency. The greater portion of their force was imparted and derivative, alienable to successors and substitutes, and we question whether any man has ever been so indispensable, in any historic sense, that in the course of half a century no equivalent would have substantially replaced him. The prominence of certain names on the page of history is out of all proportion to the importance of those who bore them, and the attempt to exaggerate this importance now is directly adverse to the current of our modern discoveries. If we must waive the generalisations of historic philosophers, at least let us note the common bearing of the histories proper which have resulted from the investigations of recent years. In almost every instance,* where new facts have been acquired and sifted, the result has been invariably of the same tenor; the influence ascribed to one or more individuals has resolved itself into something wider and deeper; some popular fallacy concerning them has exploded, and some imagined part of their value for good or for evil has melted away in the historic crucible. Were we apt to attribute the progress of the Reformation in England to the imperiousness of Henry the Eighth, or the reaction to his daughter Mary? Mr. Froude has shown us the social elements, more potent than either, which originated, swayed, or determined the conflict. Do we ascribe the protection of England from the Spanish Armada to the prescience and capacity of Elizabeth and her ministers, since the researches of Mr. Motley among the archives of Simancas? Was the Revocation of the Edict of

We might say, "in every instance," but for one exception: the exaltation of William the Third by the work of Lord Macaulay. And

how much of this was due to the writer's theory and falser practice has been already indicated in the preceding paper.

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Nantes the especial work of Le Tellier and Madame de Maintenon? We have a conclusive negative in Monsieur Lanfrey's "L'Eglise et les philosophes du dixhuitième Siècle." Were the literary glories of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth due to his personal influence and fostering care? Mr. Buckle has relieved us from obligations on this score. Was French centralisation the achievement either of the Directory or the Empire? The last great work of Monsieur De Tocqueville explodes our errors in this particular. Monsieur Villemain can tell us how impossible it was even for Napoleon to identify the energies of France with his ambition, and how inevitable was the collapse which the allies only precipitated. In all these cases we see the proportions of individual agents dwindling, in comparison with general and popular causes, and we infer that we are in the track of a series of such discoveries. If Attila was more the servant than the leader of barbarians, impatiently requiring food and fresh pastures, there is many a feather yet to fall from the heroic plumage of the ages between Attila's and ours. The inquiry is so immense and endless that we rest simply on its tendency to one average and consistent inference. The great man grows less and less imposing as we view him closer, and compare him with his generation, its capacities and results.

Though we seek to mitigate the fervour of his worship as an idol, we must be content with its simple reductio ad absurdum. Mr. Carlyle is the chief apostle of this creed, and he has lived to bring it to its last extremity. We can trace in his works the struggle to sustain the worship of heroes under difficulties of all kinds, until in his last work he has announced the discovery of a hero, in a plot of history the least propitious to his growth. We may speculate on the motives which induced him to seek in this direction, and on his desire to proclaim the success of his determined quest. It is obvious-in fact it has been his constant plaint, that as time has gone on, the breed of heroes has become

rarer, until in modern days it is all but extinguished. This complaint involves a damaging admission, and we can understand the desire to qualify it and its inevitable corollary,-that the hero was the imperfect product of less worthy times, when the inferiority of his kin gave him space to overtop them, and their servile temper exalted him to a demigod. If such a desire as that of which we speak is natural, then a hero in the eighteenth century, if such could be found, was a hero in point, and would be justly regarded as a potential prize or bulb of great promise by a cultivator of heroes par excellence. There is, nevertheless, a penalty attached to the lucky discovery, that the rarity of the specimen must arouse suspicion, and his claims be subjected to a rigorous scrutiny. More especially, if we are required to supply him with a pedestal by the sacrifice of some of our cherished convictions. And if this sacrifice is demanded of us contemptuously and rudely, from the instinct of self-defence we make such resistance as we can.

Such resistance is, happily, compatible with the sincerest admiration for Mr. Carlyle's great genius, and with an equally sincere confidence in his thorough conscientiousness. It may be coupled with a conviction of his candour in the recognition of facts, which contrasts, to his credit, with the failing of Lord Macaulay; and it may defer to his exclusive possession of a learning, appropriate to his subject, which is at this day, perhaps, unparalleled in English literature. In fact, Mr. Carlyle has expended on his history of the Hohenzollern line a wealth of materials which makes their other histories look beggarly and frivolous. As he himself observes, our previous authorities for the history of Brandenburg and the Hohenzollerns are extremely confused and extremely illusory. He himself speaks of Pauli, Pollnitz, Erman, and the rest, as feeble or watery, superficial or nugatory, as wanting in all the essentials of historical composition. "The truth is," he says, "that the Prussian Dryasdust, otherwise an honest fellow, and not afraid of labour, excels all other Dryasdusts

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yet known. I have often sorrowfully felt as if there were not in nature, for darkness, dreariness, immethodic platitude, anything comparable to him." Independently of his " dull, tombstone style," he is especially given to dispense with dates and indexes, and Mr. Carlyle has striven to forgive him with an ill success, which is creditable to his own ideal of the obligations of an historian. Indexless, dateless, helpless Prussian books ("printed blotches of human stupor," as under his pseudonym of " Smelfungus" he terms them) have aided him little in interpreting the State papers, Prussian and English, through which he has waded with an ardour and diligence which are rare in a veteran. If the result is sometimes unsatisfactory, he plaintively asks the reader to forgive him also, in consideration of his helpless friend Dryasdust, and to think what probably was the state of his raw material. Simple forgiveness, however, is not his appropriate meed or tribute. When we find him lucidly ordering these "Sibylline farragos, the terror of human nature," and shifting them, for the most part, into sense and sequence,—when we find him deciphering such “Flunkey Sanscrit" as he terms the Nosti-Grumkow correspondence, referred to in vol. 2, 153, and detecting by his fine scent the unsigned memorial of Villa in our State-paper-office, these and a number of similar achievements render ordinary praise inadequate. It is only when we come to the sum and purport of the whole, to the historic moral of this admirable performance, that we pause and we protest.

Our objections commence with the introduction of the Hohenzollerns, after a narrative of the early fortunes of Brandenburg, as vivid as a flash of lightning through the dim expanse which spreads over its vacant and primitive wastes. The descendants of Conrad of Hohenzollern are themselves obscure, even to Mr. Carlyle, until one of them, the Burggraf Friedrich, manifesting, "the growing gaining nature" of his race, advanced money on Brandenburg, and so acquired it of a certain Sigismund, whose chief boast it was that he was