hero where heroism was not. It cannot be a genuine aim for a nation, in our period of the world's history, or, indeed, at any period, to try to find a man to whom they may submit absolutely. If such a man comes, well and good; but let us find him spontaneously, and not because we are told that we must find him. It is even salutary to be very sceptical about one who comes forward guaranteed to be such a man. Mr. Carlyle's doctrine is too much the natural instinct of the world already, to add to it that additional sanction which is implied in setting it up as a principle of morality. Is the lending an enthusiastic support to a man of brilliant ability, whose views command so large a following as to render opposition useless, a virtue so extraordinarily difficult of acquirement? Are the mass of men so unduly suspicious of their leaders? Have the Prussians been too obstinately antagonistic to Prince Bismarck? Was not Louis Napoleon for eighteen years undisputed master of France? Has it been unknown in England that a Prime Minister should be, for a time, autocratic? Parliaments, and nations as well, are in truth so perfectly aware of their inherent weaknesses, which Mr. Carlyle is never weary of bringing forward, that they lend an even too ready ear to any man who has a clear and resolute design.

We should say that the very reverse doctrine needed to be inculcated from that which Mr. Carlyle inculcates. Men have to be taught to turn aside from a plausible unity of purpose, which is common enough, and to contemplate instead the complexity and variety of interests which fill a land like ours, and of which only a small part can be thoroughly known by the most comprehensive, earnest, and industrious inquirer. How easy is it to be ignorant! How easy to be unjust from pure ignorance, without a touch of malevolence! Let us study what exists, with all the faculties of our understanding, and do what little we can to amend it; this is the most heroic thing that we can do for our own part, and the only possible way of recognising a true hero in another. The inevitable result of our following Mr. Carlyle's advice would be that we should get a hero of mere physical force, who would compel whether he had or had not intelligence to judge that compulsion was beneficial. Such a man is not a great A great mind must abstain from action in matters which it has not scientifically proved and got hold of from the root, and much of such abstinence is required even of the strongest intellects. Wise government comes first, strong government only second. However much it is true that a wise governor may sometimes have to compel his people to obey him, it yet is indispensable that we should be satisfied that the governor

man.

is wise before we can approve of such compulsion. This prodigious step, that we must be satisfied that we have a man at our head whom we can trust on all points even against our own judgment, Mr. Carlyle takes as a mere nothing. According to Homer, the god Neptune crossed the Ægean Sea at three strides ; but if we poor mortals attempted to do the same, we should assuredly get drowned.

The truth is, the real force and vitality of Mr. Carlyle's doctrine of hero-worship does not lie in his recommendation of the hero, as the one single ruler, at all. This is a mere accident; it is a more picturesque state, it is indeed a better state, when one man gathers into himself all the instincts of the nation and directs them; but it is not a transcendently better state, there is nothing of necessity about it. The real force of Mr. Carlyle's doctrine lies in his preference of men to institutions ; in his insistence on the living energy of mind as superior to any external thing, or indeed to all external things put together. Some people think that, just as Mr. Babbage's machine grinds out logarithms, so our excellent Constitution will grind out for us all that is desirable and advantageous. Others, and a more numerous class, think that at any rate virtue and energy cannot be of so much importance as they used to be: that we cannot do without them altogether will be conceded, but they think that our institutions supply their place in a measure, in a certain degree. Now Mr. Carlyle rightly judges, that so far from the progress of society diminishing the importance of virtuous and energetic men, it renders them even more important. Indeed, he goes (and we join with him in going) even further; it is not a question simply of more or less importance; it is even the one end of society (and therefore of infinite importance) to produce virtuous and energetic men, and to commit the highest functions to the most virtuous and most energetic. But yet institutions have a value, conserving where they cannot create, and guiding where they cannot animate; and Mr. Carlyle, in his later writings, has forgotten this. Further, it has to be remembered that institutions which are full of meaning and value to one man may be meaningless and valueless to another; of this fact Mr. Carlyle shows no recognition whatever; he would have each individual judge absolutely for himself about them. We deny the right of any individual to judge upon such matters, except he has first made himself acquainted with the feelings and experience of society at large upon them.

Thus while we are not at war with Mr. Carlyle's doctrine of hero-worship as a theory, with his practical application of it we are wholly and entirely at variance. But one thing more remains

to

to be said. What has surprised most people in Mr. Carlyle's later career is, not simply that he has advocated this doctrine, but that he has advocated it with such fanatical and almost terrifying intensity. He declares that we walk in a 'nightmare wilderness, a wreck of dead men's bones, a false world.' Why? we ask. Evils enough and to spare there are in the world around us; but was it a better state of things when the Black Death swept away half the population of England? or when William the Conqueror laid waste with fire and sword all England north of the Humber? We shall not think so without very much more reason than Mr. Carlyle, or any one, has ever given for our thinking so. Or if it be some deep moral blindness in the age to which Mr. Carlyle refers, we seek in vain through his writings for that light which alone can reveal, and by revealing dispel, the darkness. But our persuasion, our strong persuasion is, that this despondency lies in Mr. Carlyle's own nature alone. Far are we from accusing him of personal vanity; it is not against such a man that such an accusation can be brought. But he suffers, we think, from not having realized his own idea; he has had a vision, a Utopia, before his eyes, which has never been brought into actuality. To speak the plain truth, he has wished himself to be the hero of this modern age; not, we repeat, from vanity, but because he has felt in himself somewhat of the power to be so- -somewhat, but not the whole requisite power. The amorphic, vast, gigantesque productions of his later years have resulted from the strain to bring out that which yet he was unable to bring out. The discordant elements have been too much for his power of combination; he has let slip now one thread, now another thread, of the intricate skein that needs unravelling; and at last, in sheer despair, he has turned his eyes to the sword, which, if it cannot solve, can cut the knot. In this despair we do not join; and, indeed, we deem it unworthy to join in it, for any one who has not been worn out with delayed and frustrated hope. In such an one we can only lament it, and think it mistaken. Just as Bacon said in respect of discoveries, that they are temporis partus, non ingenii;' so it is with the laws and principles which are the welfare of society. Those who first anticipate them seldom see them in their fullness; and if they imperatively demand to see them in their fullness, they will only suffer themselves, in the recoil of failure upon their own minds.

6

We have said nothing hitherto of that feature in Mr. Carlyle which first strikes and astonishes the casual reader-his style; yet it is a feature which it is impossible to pass over. It is a style which sacrifices clearness in the central idea to vividness

in particular points; and this is a characteristic which no brilliance can prevent from being a signal fault. So great a fault is it that not only Mr. Carlyle's reader, but Mr. Carlyle himself, is at times prevented, by the eccentricities of his style, from knowing what the real thing is which he means to impress. He flings out a crowd of ideas pell-mell; but each separate idea is left to take its chance by itself; there is no subordination in the motley assemblage. This is not good; and of all causes none has been so powerful as this in hindering that complete success which Mr. Carlyle by his capacity was qualified to attain. For there has been a certain amount of wilfulness, and (to say the truth) even of affectation in it; he will often prefer an uncouth and unusual phrase where an ordinary word would express the meaning without the smallest shadow of a difference. This may seem a small matter, but it is precisely in small matters that people ought to conform to the common usage. To differ invests them with an artificial and unnatural importance.

We must now part with this remarkable writer. Without disguising what seem to us his faults, we have spoken of him throughout as a man of extraordinary power. Seldom is it possible to make a criticism on him that he has not himself, to some extent, anticipated and forestalled; in the depths of his own mind, he guards himself against the erroneous deductions that others draw from him. With all his antagonism to his age, he is never arrogant or self-complacent; he can admire and reverence. He for the most part appears one-sided, but he is many-sided; in his impatience and desire for incisiveness he lays such emphasis on that aspect of the truth which he is insisting on, that for the moment he forgets the others. The most spiritual of modern historians, he has been mistaken, not without his own fault, for an admirer of mere physical force. Penetrated to his inmost heart with sympathy for the poor, he has been mistaken, again not without his own fault, for an advocate of their high-handed oppression. To conclude, there is no man who so resolutely goes to the reality of things, determining to make men see what is, through all the veils and forms in which it is wrapped; but he fails in putting his facts together. in deducing from them a tenable design or detailed scheme of action. If there is any point in this article in which we have misunderstood him, or forgotten somewhat that would have de fended him against our criticisms, this has not been from want of recognising the honour due to his genius.

ART.

ART. III.-1. Journeys in North China. By the Rev. Alexander Williamson, B.A. 2 Vols. London, 1870.

2. Pekin, Yeddo, and St. Francisco.

By the Marquis De Beauvoir. Forming the concluding volume of a Voyage round the World. London, 1872.

3. Reports on the Provinces of Hunan, Hupeh, Honan, Shansi, Che Kiang and Nganhwei. By Baron von Richthofen. Shanghai, 1870 and 1871.

4. Report of the Delegates of the Shanghae General Chamber of Commerce on the Trade of the Upper Yangtsze. Shanghai,

1869.

5. Reports of Journeys in China and Japan, performed by Mr. Alabaster, Mr. Oxenham, Mr. Markham, and Dr. Willis, of Her Majesty's Consular Service in those Countries. Presented to Parliament. 1869.

6. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1869 and 1870. 7. The Tientsin Massacre. By George Thin, M.D. Edinburgh, 1870.

8. British Policy in China. By a Shanghae Merchant. London, 1871.

9. Correspondence respecting the Revision of the Treaty of Tientsin. Presented to the House of Commons. 1871. 10. Parliamentary Correspondence on the Affairs of China. 1859-71.

11. The London and China Telegraph. 1871.

NOTY

TOTWITHSTANDING the very numerous works on China, it is somewhat surprising how little is generally known of that wonderful country and its strange inhabitants. And the ignorance of the average Englishman—that is, excluding the comparatively small number who have special inducements to study the subject-is rendered, perhaps, the more impenetrable by being shrouded in a veil of purely conventional notions of China which have, so to speak, become stereotyped. A region of universal productiveness, inhabited by 200 millions of people, united under one Government, with a history at the least two thousand years old-these were objects

Though there are no means of arriving at an exact estimate of the population. of China, there can be no doubt that the commonly received one of 300,000,000 is enormously exaggerated. An analysis by Baron von Richthofen of the population of one province, Che-kiang, founded on his own observation, gives the numbers as 8,000,000, whereas the Census of 1812, usually adopted as authoritative, puts them at 26,000,000. It is admitted that in no other province is the exaggeration of the so-called census so conspicuous; but the occurrence of one such glaring error is justly held to invalidate the document in which it is contained, and to destroy faith in even its approximate accuracy as a whole. It is highly probable that the actual population of China never reached 200,000,000.