To which I add an amendment that under no circumstances, and no matter
how completely time and events disprove his lurid vaticinations,
should the English-speaking world forget this man, nor fail to hold in
honor his unsurpass'd conscience, his unique method, and his honest
fame. Never were convictions more earnest and genuine. Never was there
less of a flunkey or temporizer. Never had political progressivism a
foe it could more heartily respect.
The second main point of Carlyle's utterance was the idea of _duty
being done_. (It is simply a new codicil--if it be particularly
new, which is by no means certain--on the time-honor'd bequest of
dynasticism, the mould-eaten rules of legitimacy and kings.) He seems
to have been impatient sometimes to madness when reminded by persons
who thought at least as deeply as himself, that this formula, though
precious, is rather a vague one, and that there are many other
considerations to a philosophical estimate of each and every
department either.
Altogether, I don't know anything more amazing than these persistent
strides and throbbings so far through our Nineteenth century of perhaps
its biggest, sharpest, and most erudite brain, in defiance and
discontent with everything; contemptuously ignoring, (either from
constitutional inaptitude, ignorance itself, or more likely because he
demanded a definite cure-all here and now,) the only solace and solvent
to be had.
There is, apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior
human identity, (in its moral completeness, considered as _ensemble_,
not for that moral alone, but for the whole being, including
physique,) a wondrous something that realizes without argument,
frequently without what is called education, (though I think it the
goal and apex of all education deserving the name)--an intuition
of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this
multifarious, mad chaos of fraud, frivolity, hoggishness--this revel
of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we
call _the world_; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread
which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and
all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leash'd dog
in the hand of the hunter.
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