as the dining-room and its loquacity and miscellaneousness, or the garden behind the house. Morbid, perhaps, and damaging, this haunting consciousness of the infinities, certainly uncommon enough, - but this it was which made the conventions and even the amenities seem so superficial and supererogatory, which, and not jealousy, not pique, not thanklessness, made what at moments might have gratified and encouraged, even flattered, the unrecognized beginner in literature, seem nothing to the old prophet, much enduring, much embittered, on the stony top of Pisgah.

But the old prophet on Pisgah should not have been embittered, just that it is which is urged by the men of "sweet reasonableness." And I suppose they are correct enough in this; bitterness has been condemned by the best authorities. His egotism was the secret of this bitterness and uncharitableness, they say. Everything is said when it is said that he was an egotist, and looked upon other men as less than himself. Let us consider this egotism, of what sort it was. "Once or twice, among the flood of equipages at ner, I recollect sternly thinking, haps none of you could do what I am at.'" So Carlyle, in the early London days, Sartor Resartus born, and the French Revolution in the making. "The manifestation of a weak and unworthy vanity," says the magazine."What they will do with this book," he said, when the last

Hyde Park cor'Yes; and per

SENSE OF superiorITY.

9

page of the French Revolution was written, "none knows, my Jeannie lass, but they have not had, for two hundred years, any book that came more truly from a man's very heart; and so let them trample it under foot and hoof as they see best." "But a great artist," says the magazine, "feels that, after all his toil, he has failed of his ideal, and finds no place for gratulation." Yet the French Revolution itself proves its author a great artist, and his recognition of its value in no way affects the matter. Much more, and there will be occasion to employ the point, in turn, against Carlyle himself, it is not true that it is the greatest artists who are most sadly conscious of failure to realize ideals, and it is altogether false that a great artist is not the best judge of his own work. According to the degree of his greatness are his ideals realized and his judgments just. It is the secondary artist, the man whose power lags far behind his fancy, who is most sorely rent by the wretchedness of unfealized ideals. Goethe, Dante, Michael Angelo, these do not speak of the poorness of their work. How much might be quoted from all of these, showing the same proud consciousness of great accomplishment, the same assumption of superiority, which the after-dinner reader now criticises in Carlyle! And how much that the afterdinner reader votes presumptuous and arrogant could not Dante and Michael Angelo "recollect sternly thinking" among the flood of equipages

that carted supercilious Tuscan incompetence, or emptied themselves of scarlet cardinals at the Vatican! This grim defiance of pope or populace or big battalions, tastes and orthodoxies and idols of majorities, we come upon in the history of almost every of these stern, astral souls that dwelt apart. The trouble with many of the critics of Carlyle is that they mistake the size of their man, and pronounce that presumptuous in him which would only be presumptuous in them. Pity enough, if we em.] who blame Carlyle for not having his eyes open to the greatness of the time have not our eyes open to the real greatness of this man! This was a son of Anak, who did not write books for the pleasure of seeing reviews of them in the Athenæum, nor belong to the generation of those that do.

Yet he valued human recognition, not for weak reasons, but as some sort of figure and vindication of objective justice. Is it wonderful, was it bad, that the greatest man in England, forty years old, after a dozen years of Jeffrey's reviewing and scissoring, Fraser's toleration, and the stolid neglect of most other English people, should grate his teeth a bit at Hyde Park Corner, and even talk of hoofs to his "Jeannie"? Of course it is not to be commended, and of course we perfect people should not do it, shall not do it, when our equal genius is equally provoked, but was not the thing par

donable, at least in a dyspeptic?

There seems to me no weakness in this. I find,

CARLYLE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

II

whatever of stubbornness and willfulness, whatever of what may seem to me false opinion and philosophy, no ignoble egotism in Carlyle. Plainly enough, he thought himself greater than the men about him, I for one should not respect his judg

ment, had he not, - but no man who had

title

any to his confidence or companionship ever complained, or had reason to complain, of disrespect or any failure to be met on the equal ground of manhood. It has been said that he held his contemporaries cheaply. The sole point of interest is whether he rated them justly. Cheaply, by what standard? He did not find many Goethes or Fichtes among them, and contemporaneousness was not an element in his estimates: B. in the nineteenth century could not have precedence of A. in the ninth to him who wrote the pages on Time and Space in Sartor Resartus. (I believe that he failed signally to recognize how great were many of the causes represented by nany of his friends, and how deep the insight of the men who will stand as the true exponents of the age. But he was not blind to excellence in his contemporaries, and no man poured out admiration more ungrudgingly and heartily upon his friends, or upon those of his time, in whom he saw genius and power. Lover and friend he was, - his love and friendship entire and intense and necessary, like the boy's. The man of an intrinsic vanity and egotism is not a lover, but this man had a heart. Very significant and very

noble is the frank and half-remorseful exclamation of one of the English critics, at the end of his really just and warranted criticism. That which was truest, elemental, and deeply human in Carlyle appeared more and more clearly to this critic as he wrote: "I am half-tempted to blot what I have written. There were depths of love, radiant sublimities, in this man which we shall not soon meet with again." There were many who felt that, in his later life, Carlyle had, as Mill once said, "turned against all his friends ;" but, as Mr. Conway observes, it was not against his friends, but only against their opinions that he turned, and it was they who stopped going to see him as his reactionary opinions came out more strongly, when they should have stood by him and insisted on coming to a right understanding. "It was a characteristic of Carlyle that he never recalled his heart once given." For Mill himself personally he had the kindest feelings and the kindest words, however "saw-dustish" Mill's philosophy appeared to him. "He was a beautiful person, affectionate, lucid; he had always the habit of studying out the thing that interested him, and could tell how he came by his thoughts and views. For many years now I have not been able to travel with him on his ways. His work on Liberty appears to me the most exhaustive statement of precisely that I feel to be untrue on the subject. But I have not been in the least doubtful of his own entire honesty."