The Misfortune Is That Much Of The Best In
Literature Shares The Fate Of The Best Of Ancient Monuments
And Noble Cities; The Cumulative Rubbish Of Ages Buries Their
Splendours, Till We Know Not Where To Find Them.
The day may
come when the most valuable service of the man of letters
will be to unearth the lost treasures and display them,
rather than add his grain of dust to the ever-increasing
middens.
Is Carlyle forgotten yet, I wonder? How much did my
contemporaries owe to him in their youth? How readily we
followed a leader so sure of himself, so certain of his own
evangel. What an aid to strength to be assured that the true
hero is the morally strong man. One does not criticise what
one loves; one didn't look too closely into the doctrine
that, might is right, for somehow he managed to persuade us
that right makes the might - that the strong man is the man
who, for the most part, does act rightly. He is not over-
patient with human frailty, to be sure, and is apt, as
Herbert Spencer found, to fling about his scorn rather
recklessly. One fancies sometimes that he has more respect
for a genuine bad man than for a sham good one. In fact, his
'Eternal Verities' come pretty much to the same as Darwin's
'Law of the advancement of all organic bodies'; 'let the
strong live, and the weakest die.' He had no objection to
seeing 'the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers, or
ants making slaves.' But he atones for all this by his
hatred of cant and hypocrisy.
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