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To make Hero-Worship close with the installation of Napoleon as "our last great man," was to expose the inherent weakness of the Sartorian creed that humanity exists for the sake of its great men. The other strange delusion is the entire omission from the "Hero as Priest" of any Catholic hero. Not only are St. Bernard, and St.
The Latter-Day Pamphlets do not add much that is new to Past and Present or to Sartor ; and little of what they add is either needful or true. The world had been fully enlightened about Wind-bags, Shams, the approach to Tophet, Stump-orators, Palaver-Parliaments, Phantasm-Captains, and the rest of the Sartorian puppet-pantomime.
And of such, how many entirely understand the inner Philosophy of Clothes, and follow all the allusions, quips, and nicknames of Sartorian subjectivity. It would be a fine subject for some Self-Improvement Circle of readers to write examination papers upon questions as to the exact meaning of all the inward musings of Teufelsdröckh.
The constant passage from text to commentary, from small print to large, from Oliver's Puritan sermonising to Carlyle's Sartorian eccentricities, destroys the artistic harmony of the book as an organic work of art. The "Life" of Cromwell was in fact never written by Carlyle; and has yet to be written. Never yet was such splendid material for a "Life" prepared by a great historian.
But perhaps the whole cycle of Sartorian extravaganza contains no saying so futile as the complaint, that the British nation in the great war with France entrusted their destinies to a phantasmic Pitt, instead of to "the Thunder-god, Robert Burns." Napoleon would no doubt have welcomed such a change of ministry.
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