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GRATITUDE for recogNITION.

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How rarely tender and stalwart his friendship for Sterling and Irving, how affectionate his words for the younger men, how unbounded and hearty his admiration of Dickens, how delicate his consideration for Tennyson! Even his criticisms and outbursts of indignation were almost sure to end in words of mitigation: "Ah, yes; he had, after all, a vein of good feeling in him ;' and then," says Mr. Conway, "came the neatest summing up of virtues concerning some personage whose fragments we had despaired of ever picking up!" His whole heart craved and responded to sincere human recognition, perverse and defiant as the attitude was into which miscellaneous adulation finally drove him. Years after Sartor Resartus had received the stamp of success, he visited Cork and sought out the Catholic priest there who had shared with Emerson the honor of recognizing its merits while it was running in Fraser and provoking general clamor against the "crazy stuff.” He traversed London docks from end to end to see if he could find the ship-captain who had named his vessel the Thomas Carlyle, because he had got some good from Carlyle's books. Carlyle claimed to think that such a man must have been an "extraordinary individual," and not to believe in his existence at all, but we may be sure he would have been very glad and not at all surprised to find him. He was really deeply conscious and deeply satisfied and grateful that he had helped other men, however

wantonly he sometimes mocked admiration and the extravagant thanks of his disciples. "I don't believe that any man ever helped another," he exclaimed, in one of his wild outbursts; but we have only to remember his own acknowledgments to Goethe, his obligations to all the great Germans, the extraordinary prominence generally of books and history in his life, to see how wild the outburst really was, and discount it altogether.

Of his readiness to see genius and power in his contemporaries, and pay frank and hearty tribute to it, no need of any instances, when there are so many. Brightest instance of all, his enthusiasm. for Emerson, whose conception of history and humanity and whose social aims and methods were so different from his. It is a memorable thing that these two men, greatest teachers of truth to the English world of our time, should have found each other out so quickly, been drawn together so unerringly, stood by each other through all differences with such stanch fidelity. "Words cannot tell," said Carlyle, "how I prize the old friendship formed there on Craigenputtoch Hill, or how deeply I have felt in all that Emerson has written the same aspiring intelligence which shone about us when he came as a young man, and left with us a memory always cherished." The letters which came from Emerson were 66 as a window flung open to the azure ;" and it appeared marvelous to him how people can read what they sometimes do with Em.

CARLYLE And emerson.

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erson's books on their shelves. This deep appreciation only deepened with the years. "Emerson is the cleanest mind now living," he said; "I do not know his equal on earth for perception." And in the time when he worked at the Frederick he wrote to an American friend,<<"I hear but one voice, and that comes from Concord."

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That voice from Concord speaks to-day, over Carlyle's grave. What does it say- the voice of him whose eyes are open and whose perception is true? It says: "Carlyle has, best of all men in England, kept the manly attitude in his time. He has stood for scholars, asking no scholar what he should say. He has stood for the people, intrepidly and scornfully teaching the nobles their peremptory duties. In England, where the morgue of aristocracy has very slowly admitted scholars into society, he has carried himself erect, made himself a power confessed by all men, and taught scholars their lofty duty. He never feared the face of man. Nothing will pass with him but what is real and sound. He is a hammer that crushes mediocrity and pretension. He detects weakness on the instant, and touches it. Great is his reverence for realities, - for all such traits as spring from the intrinsic nature of the actor. <Mere intellectual partisanship wearies him; he detects in an instant if a man stands for any cause to which he is not born and organically committed. A natural defender of anything, a lover who will live and die

for that which he speaks for, and who does not care for him, or for anything but his own business, he respects. That decorum which is the idol of the Englishman cannot win from him any obeisance. He is eaten up with indignation against such as desire to make a fair show in the flesh. Combined with this warfare on respectability, and, indeed, pointing all his satire, is the severity of his moral sentiment. In proportion to the peals of laughter amid which he strips the plumes of a pretender and shows the lean hypocrisy to every vantage of ridicule, does he worship whatever enthusiasm, fortitude, love, or other sign of a good nature is in a man. His guiding genius is his moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and duty." 1

1 From Emerson's Impressions of Carlyle, read before the Massachusetts Historical Society, and published in Scribner's Magazine, May, 1881. The above passages are arranged without regard to their original sequence. This little paper of Emerson's seems to me worth more than all else that has appeared upon Carlyle since his death.

It is interesting to reconstruct Carlyle with deference to the legion of critics who have written in these weeks, and to speculate upon the probable influence of the resultant genial Addisonian platitudinarian, writing, at such times as his Exeter Hall engagements permitted, upon the progress of the species. Men forget that much which they criticise was of the very quality of his genius, without which he had not been at all. Naturally enough we are more sensitive to the faults and incompletenesses of the genius than those of the common man; but we are to remember that the one-sided truth of the

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MR. JAMES ON CARLYLE.

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Men have tried to explain Carlyle by putting the peals of laughter in the first place, and the worship of a good nature in the second place. Emerson is wrong, it is said, and this idea that Carlyle's gospel was first of all a gospel of sincerity and earnestness, this is all wrong. Carlyle was a player, not in earnest at all, but a literary trifler like the rest. He claimed to stand for the good of the people, but it was in truth a mere intellectual partisanship, no thing of the heart; his guiding genius was not his perception of the sole importance of truth and justice, but his sense of the dramatic, and of literary effect, which is well served ofttimes by brilliant tilting for the good. "He was wont to question established institutions and dogmas with the utmost license of skepticism," says Mr. James, in

thinker is fuller of the force of truth than the parrot's axiom (50 × 1 × 1), and holds implicit its own necessary complement. "Even where Carlyle's sympathies are misleading," says one, "their truth exceeds their error; " and it is at least true that the errors of such men bring principles to light which the thoughtful man is glad to think about.

The obtuseness of much of the recent criticism of Carlyle is well illustrated by the comments of one of the English critics upon Carlyle's story of listening in reverent sympathy, outside the closed door, to his father's prayer. The critic seriously observes that that kind of sympathy is divided by an exceedingly subtle and faint line from what Carlyle called unveracity, — because, forsooth, Carlyle's theology differed from that of his father's kirk. These super-exquisite people would have qualms about voicing reverence for Christ himself, because he believed not simply in evil, but in the devil.

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