66 whose works he came to regard as the spoon-meat of his "rude untutored youth," is beyond the range of his or of any shafts. When he trod on Mazzini's pure patriot career, as a rose-water imbecility," or maligned Mill's intrepid thought as that of a mere machine, he was astray on more delicate ground, and alienated some of his truest friends. Among the many curses of our nineteenth-century literature denounced by its leading Censor, the worst, the want of loyalty among literary men, he fails to denounce. because he largely shares in it. "No sadder proof," he declares, can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men," and no one has done more to retrieve from misconception the memories of heroes of the past; but rarely do either he or Mrs. Carlyle say a good word for any considerable English writer then living. It is true that he criticises, more or less disparagingly, all his own works, from Sartor, of which he remarks that "only some ten pages are fused and harmonious," to his self-entitled "rigmarole on the Norse Kings:" but he would not let his enemy say so; nor his friend. Mill's just strictures on the "Nigger Pamphlet" he treats as the impertinence of a boy, and only to Emerson would he grant the privilege to hold his own. Per contra, he overestimated those who were content to be his echoes. Material help he refused with a red Indian pride; intellectual he used and slighted. He renders scant justice to those who had preceded him in his lines of historical investigation, as if they had been poachers on his premises, e.g. Heath, the royalist writer of the Commonwealth time, is "carrion Heath" Noble, a former biographer of Cromwell, is "my reverend imbecile friend:" his predecessors in Friedrich, as Schlosser, Preuss, Ranke, Förster, Vehse, are "dark chaotic dullards whose books are mere blotches of printed stupor, tumbled mountains of marine stores "--criticism valueless even when it raises the laughter due to a pantomime. Carlyle assailed three sets of people : 1. Real humbugs, or those who had behaved, or whom he believed to have behaved, badly to him. 2. Persons from whom he differed, or whom he could not understand—as Shelley, Keats, Lamb, Coleridge, and the leaders of Physics and Metaphysics. 3. Persons who had befriended, but would not give him an unrestricted homage or an implicit following, as Mill, Mazzini, Miss Martineau, etc. The last series of assaults are hard to pardon. Had his strictures been always just, so winged with humorous epigram, they would have blasted a score of reputations: as it is they have only served to mar his own. He was a typical Scotch student of the better class, stung by the olarpos of their ambitious competition and restless push, wanting in repose, never like a gentleman at ease With moral breadth of temperament, too apt to note his superiority with the sneer, "they call this man as good as me." Bacon, in one of his finest antitheses, draws a contrast between the love of Excellence and the love of Excelling. Carlyle is possessed by both; he had none of the exaggerated caution which in others of his race is apt to degenerate into moral cowardice: but when he thought himself trod on he became, to use his own figure, "a rattlesnake," and put out fangs like those of the griffins curiously, if not sardonically, carved on th tombs of his family in the church-yard of Ecclefechan. Truth, in the sense of saying what he thought, was one of his ruling passions. To one of his brothers on the birth of a daughter, he writes, "Train her to this, as the cornerstone of all morality, to stand by the truth, to abhor a lie as she does hell-fire." The "gates of hell" is the phrase of Achilles; but Carlyle has no real point of contact with the Greek love of abstract truth. He objects that "Socrates is terribly at ease in Zion :" he liked no one to be at ease anywhere. He is angry with Walter Scott because he hunted with his friends over the breezy heath instead of mooning alone over twilight moors. Read Scott's Memoirs in the morning, the Reminiscences at night, and dispute if you like about the greater genius, but never about the healthier, better, and larger man. Hebraism, says Matthew Arnold, is the spirit which obeys the mandate, "walk by your light." Hellenism the spirit which remembers the other, "have a care your light be not darkness;" the former prefers doing to thinking, the latter is bent on finding the truth it loves. Carlyle is a Hebraist unrelieved and unretrieved by the Hellene. A man of inconsistencies, egotisms, Alpine grandeurs, and crevasses, let us take from him what the gods or protoplasms have allowed. His way of life,' duly admired for 1 In the Times of February 7th, 1881, there appeared an interesting account of Carlyle's daily routine. "No book hack could have surpassed the regularity and industry with which he worked early and late in his small attic. A walk before breakfast was part of the day's duties. At ten o'clock in the morning, whether the spirit moved him or not, he took up his pen and laboured hard until three o'clock. Nothing, not even the opening of the morning letters, was allowed to distract him. Then came walking, answering letters, and seeing friends. . . . In the evening he read and prepared for the work of the morrow." its stern temperance, its rigidity of noble aim — eighty The sense that he was greater than his kind fit him, like Ruskin's verdict, "What can you say of Carlyle but that he was born in the clouds and struck by the lightning," which withers while it immortalises. 38 CHAPTER VIII. CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN. CARLYLE was so essentially a Preacher that the choice of a profession made for him by his parents was in some measure justified; but he was also a keen Critic, unamenable to ecclesiastic or other rule, a leader of the revolutionary spirit of the age, even while protesting against its extremes: above all, he was a literary Artist. Various opinions will continue to be held as to the value of his sermons; the excellence of his best workmanship is universally acknowledged. He was endowed with few of the qualities which secure a quick success fluency, finish of style, the art of giving graceful utterance to current thought; he had in full measure the stronger if slower powers-sound knowledge, infinite industry, and the sympathetic insight of penetrative imagination-that ultimately hold the fastnesses of fame. His habit of startling his hearers, which for a time restricted, at a later date widened their circle. There is much, sometimes even tiresome, repetition in Carlyle's work; the range of his ideas is limited; he plays on a few strings with wonderfully versatile variations; in reading his later we are continually confronted with the "old familiar faces" of his earlier essays. But, after the perfunctory work for Brewster, he wrote |