Mr. Brownell feels a civilized and, I believe, a profoundly sagacious apprehension:
The same plebeian antagonism to democratic feeling [my italics] that leads him to consider the spirit of the time as negligible except as incarnated in the hero, leads him inevitably to magnify the hero in his purely personal and particular character. Thus, for example, his admiration of Johnson is based on his worshipping according to the old formulas in St. Clement Danes every Sunday in the age of Voltaire; though for his attempt to rationalize the same old formulas he has nothing but ridicule for Coleridge.
So much for the main grounds on which Carlyle is decisively condemned. Now hear Mr. Brownell on Emerson:
Specifically, one of his greatest services both to us and to mankind . . . . is what might be called the rationalization of democracy through the ideal development of the individual. . . . Too fastidious to respond to the elementary appeal of philanthropy, he was yet bold enough and detached enough to recognize the injustice of privilege, and the claims of every human potentiality for development into power. . . . The very fact that he was no respecter of persons protected him from illusions as to classes, and the finality of feudalism was alone enough to lead his revolutionary and independent spirit to see it as an arrest of development and not an ideal. . . . If his emotional nature lacked warmth, what eminently it possessed was an exquisite refinement, and a constituent of his refinement was an instinctive antipathy to ideas of dominance, dictation, patronage, caste and material superiority whose
