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"He

his recent essay on Carlyle, "but he obviously meant nothing beyond the production of a certain literary surprise, or the enjoyment of his own æsthetic power." "He dallied with the divine ideas [of reform and human fellowship] long enough to suck them dry of their rhetorical juices." was a harlequin in the guise of Jeremiah, who fed you with laughter in place of tears, and put the old prophetic sincerity out of countenance by his broad, persistent winks at the bystanders over the footlights." Picturesqueness in man and nature was the one key to his intellectual favor, and it made little difference to his artist eye whether the man were spiritually angel or demon."

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Now, this seems to me with all modesty be it said precisely the dreadfulest of all possible mistakes concerning Carlyle. I say it with the greater freedom, so far as Mr. James is concerned, because I consider his paper, unsatisfactory enough as an estimate of Carlyle, the expression of a noble humanity and a noble philosophy, the philosophy which contains the true corrective to what is really false in Carlyle. He who thinks that the laugh was the deep thing and the written book the superficial thing with Carlyle, has just reversed the proper order, and missed the secret altogether. It was not by way of sport, not for the sake of rhetorical indulgence and the enjoyment of æsthetic power, that these burning protests against falsehood and pretension and the wrongs done humanity were written. They came

CARLYLE'S EARNESTNESS.

"Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below."

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If counterfeit, then the test of genuineness no more exists. The attempt to set Carlyle's books, the fruit of a life-time of desperate, persistent, consistent effort, and the inspiration of the sincerest, severest endeavors of two generations, gyrating about after-dinner satire and ridicule and extravagance, making these last suns and those satellites and comets, is like going from Copernicus to Ptolemy for a solution of the riddles of the sky. The printed page, deliberate, authentic, is the centre of this system, and whatever happened in Cheyne Row, which cannot be made to harmonize with this, must be viewed as the wild wantonness of a nature so surcharged with earnestness, so over-conscious of the infinities, that only in these intemperate fits, this effervescence and cavalier highhandedness, could it find any saving relief. The irreconcilable is always the cometic here, never the central. No interpretation of Carlyle can last beyond a moment which does not recognize his fundamental honesty and earnestness, all such are Ptolemaic. "The motto of Past and Present, from was deeply "These are the words

Schiller, · Ernst ist das Leben,'

graven on Carlyle's heart."

of a serious man," he said himself to Thomas Cooper, as he put a copy of Past and Present into his hands; and Jeffrey, whatever he did not see in Carlyle, did see that he was "terribly in ear:

successfully pose as "Falser hypothesis, Carlyle's own words, Bad is by its nature

nest." Indeed, no trifler ever imposes upon an earnest people long; oracles do not fall from lips of cunning, and men do not prophets for two generations. we may venture to say," in 66 never rose in human soul. negative, and can do nothing; whatsoever enables us to do anything is by its very nature good. This man wrote a good Book because he had a heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth; because of his free insight, his lively talent, above all, of his Love." 1 To write books was

1 From the essay on Johnson. This essay demands special study from those who would intimately understand Carlyle, for with no man of whom he writes did he have more points in common, both in character and in career, than with Johnson. It deserves, too, the special attention of those who are inclined to separate Carlyle's political thoughts into two sharply defined periods. It was written in 1832, yet nowhere in Carlyle's writings is common mankind treated more disdainfully, as a mere flock of sheep, the main thing being to find good bell-wethers, "guides of the dull host." But I refer to the essay here principally for the sake of quoting the following passage, so full of significance in application to Carlyle himself:

"In spite of all practical shortcomings, no one that sees into the significance of Johnson will say that his prime object was not truth. In conversation, doubtless, you may observe him, on occasion, fighting as if for victory; and must pardon these ebulliences of a careless hour, which were not without temptation and provocation. Remark, likewise, two things: that such prize arguings were ever on merely superficial, debatable questions; and then that they were argued generally

CARLYLE'S SINCERITY.

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his work in this world, and it was an altogether sufficient and honorable work. He was a man of letters, a poet, not an economist, lawyer, or professional philanthropist. To disagree with all reformers about reform was doubtless his mistake, but it was his undoubted right, and his disagreement was essential and sincere, so deep that it seemed almost useless and mockery to him to come down to details with them. Convince him of error, but do not charge him with insincerity and indifference, unless you are willing to be a target for the vulgar criticism which impeaches the honesty and earnestness of your writing for reform, because you are not a conspicuous drudge in the vestry and the mission. It were, doubtless, well for you to work there, but you are not necessarily and irredeemably bad if you do not.

by the fair laws of battle and logic-fence, by one cunning in that same. If their purpose was excusable, their effect was harmless, perhaps beneficial: that of taming noisy mediocrity, and showing it another side of a debatable matter; to see both sides of which was, for the first time, to see the truth of it. In his writings themselves are errors enough, crabbed prepossessions enough, yet these also of a quite extraneous and accidental nature; nowhere a willful shutting of the eyes to the truth. Nay, is there not everywhere a heartfelt discernment, singular, almost admirable, if we consider through what confused, conflicting lights and hallucinations it had to be attained, of the highest everlasting truth, and beginning of all truths: this, namely, that man is ever, and even in the age of Wilkes and Whitefield, a Revelation of God to man; and lives, moves, and has his being in truth only; is either true, or, in strict speech, is not at all?"

If Carlyle was wrong, it was not because his heart was wrong, but because his philosophy was imperfect. We shall be truly helped to the lesson of his life, in both kinds, not by seeking for insincerity or seeing how far insincerity will operate as an explanation, but by patiently tracing the development of his thought and analyzing the forces which flowed into it. I do not say that it is not legitimate and right to criticise the person. Be it owned, freely enough, that Carlyle had grievous faults and grievously certainly hath he answered them. It is not urged that genius is exempt from obligations if indeed it is not competent for me. diocrity to codify the laws. But it will be chiefly profitable for men, believing this great thinker to have been in earnest in what he said, believing that, saying this or that, it was in fidelity to some philosophy, to inquire what that philosophy was not to devise a name for it or pigeon-hole it, but to discover by serious study the principle of its unities and the secret of its discords.

II.

But it will be said that Carlyle was not a philosopher at all.1 Prophet, seer, poet, what you will,

1 The nucleus of the present essay is a paper read shortly after Carlyle's death, before the Harvard Philosophical Club, a society of students in the University. This it seems proper to state, as explaining the structure of the essay and something in the line of thought pursued, as also possibly some expres

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