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the world before;" in another mood, he styles the English and Americans "the finest nations of the world." He heaps reproaches on poor Rousseau for his excitability, vehemence, and "convulsion fits;" yet he certainly has been in no wise remarkable for "burning his own smoke" and "holding his peace." He writes satire upon Coleridge for his endless talking; yet he himself liked nothing better than an intelligent listener, and was the most notable "talker" since Dr. Johnson. "The habit and power of haranguing have increased so much upon him," wrote Margaret Fuller, who visited him five years before the Life of Sterling appeared, with its satire upon Coleridge, "that you are a perfect prisoner when he has once got hold of you." He is the great apostle of the gospel of silence, — and his preaching of it fills thirty volumes, rhetorical and thick.

All this, however, is a very superficial sort of contradiction. We laugh at it and understand it easily enough. We know from the first page that Carlyle is a humorist, "there is nothing deeper in his constitution than his humor," says Emerson, - that he takes up only one side at a time, and that he loves to express himself, gives utterance freely to the mood of the moment. "Not only does he feel all that he writes," said Mazzini," but he writes nearly all that he feels." As a humorist he delights in caricature, and draws out the tortures of the dilettante and the "dandy," phantasmal lordling and "sea

CONTRADICTIONS.

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green Robespierre," for the very pleasure that their spasms give him. He puts things one-sidedly because his nature is concentrated and intense, and he utters the thought of the moment freely because he knows it is an honest thought and comes from the same centre as that other which flew away north by northeast. Moreover he exercises the right of every great man of leaving much to the wit and candor of his readers, and does not waste time in evening up and silly qualifyings. John Baptist did not have much doubt, probably, that most of the Pharisees and Sadducees who went out from Jerusalem to Jordan were the decent husbands of one wife apiece and paid their grocers' bills and donkeyhire. But they were a "generation of vipers," and that was the main thing then, and supplementary talk on domesticity and livery-stables would have been inconvenient. "When one has something to say which he regards as of great moment," says somebody, with reference to Carlyle himself, "he can be pardoned for not saying at every turn what everybody knows. A man whose ruling belief is that there is much to be said on both sides, and who, moreover, undertakes to say it, cannot hope to accomplish much for the side on which he considers the weight of evidence to lie."

But there is a deeper sort of contradiction in Carlyle than that spoken of. Else we should not find men seeing in him, these or now a prophet and an inspirer of men, those or then a raven and a

reactionist. His life is even cut sharply in two, and with 1840 we hear of "Pessimism." Men take sides. "Past and Present," says one, "is a book about one half larger than Sartor Resartus and worth about one tenth as much; 'Midas,' 'Labor,' 'Democracy,' are scraps, potatoes, turnips, garlic, and dishwater, thrown in to fill the big pot." Oliver Cromwell and the Life of Sterling published, and the old Carlyle, we are told, was wholly dead. On the other hand, "Sartor Resartus is a freak, a sardonic paradox, lacking the characteristic earnestness of Carlyle, and not to be compared with Past and Present in point of serious purpose." "Past and Present," say the parties of the second part, "is Carlyle's best book, and certainly the best summary of what we call Carlylism."

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Those who find this radical change in Carlyle, a new cynicism and pessimism, have two reasons for it a bad stomach, and a certain unconscious insincerity, begotten of a tyrannical and overmastering humor, and too great indulgence of the tongue and pen" intoxication," as Beaconsfield would phrase it, "by the exuberance of his own verbosity." This last idea has a certain amount of truth in it—it is a very different thing from the insincerity discussed in the preceding pages. It is emphasized by Mr. Lowell, in his essay on Carlyle. "By degrees," Mr. Lowell says, "the humorous element in his nature gains ground, till it overmasters all the rest. Becoming always more boister

HUMOR AND CYNICISM.

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ous and obtrusive, it ends at last, as such humor must, in cynicism." And again, "in the earlier part of his literary career Mr. Carlyle was the denouncer of shams, the preacher up of sincerity, manliness, and of a living faith, instead of a droning ritual. He had intense convictions, and he made disciples. His fervor, his oddity of manner, his pugnacious paradox, drew the crowd; the truth, or, at any rate, the faith that underlay them all, brought also the fitter audience, though fewer. But the curse was upon him; he must attract, he must astonish. Thenceforth he has done nothing but revamp his telling things; but the oddity has become always odder, the paradoxes more paradoxical. No very large share of truth falls to the apprehension of any one man; let him keep it sacred, and beware of repeating it till it turn to falsehood on his lips by becoming ritual." This last is unwarrantably harsh as concerns Carlyle, but let it pass. The truth that is in it is recognized sufficiently when we say that Carlyle utters himself more truly in Sartor Resartus than in Shooting Niagara, which we have the same right to do that we have to say that the Luther of Wittenberg, and not the Luther of Erfurt, was the true Luther, because freer in thought, less deflected by circum

stances.

That there was a real change in Carlyle's mental attitude goes, of course, without saying. The general tone of the Sartor Resartus period was

very different from the general tone of the Frederick period. Relations shift, and things which at first held small proportions become developed to chief prominence. The main point he has himself touched, in this wise:<"It steadily grew into my mind that, of all the insanities that ever gained foothold in human minds, the wildest was that of telling masses of ignorant people that it is their business to attend to the regulation of human society." All this, however, lay essentially in his treatment of mankind, in the essay on Johnson, as a flock of sheep, for which the main thing was to find good bell-wethers; this conception only becomes more prominent, till in the Frederick period it is the prevailing conception.

The matter of the bad stomach is certainly a very important matter in the study of Carlyle. Fichte said that the kind of philosophy a man will have depends upon the kind of man he is. It is true enough, too, that the world which appears to us takes its hue very largely from our own condition. The sun does not shine to the man who has a grumbling tooth, and when the nerves are tired we make mountains out of mole-hills and suspect our best friends. The bluest of all blue spectacles is dyspepsia; and the man who for forty years has known no minute when he has not been conscious of a grumbling stomach, may well be pardoned for having less buoyant impressions than Louis Napoleon of the spirit of the age and the progress of

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