his sleeve. They see indifference to suffering in his profound conviction of the impotence of spasmodic attempts at its relief; and fancy that he was cynical when, in fact, he was only condemning that incontinence of sentiment which cannot bear to recognize the inexorable barriers of human fate. They cannot understand that a man can really be content to give the most concentrated expression to a melancholy view of human life without fidgeting over the schemes of practical reform. There seems to be a kind of antithesis between the apparent pride of a self-contained independence and the ardent sympathies of genuine benevolence. I do not think, indeed, that any one can really love Carlyle's books without becoming sensible of the emotional depth which underlies his reserve and his superficial harshness; nor is it possible to read the "Life of Sterling"-the most purely charming of his writings-without understanding the invincible charm of the man to a fine and affectionate nature. But upon these points we shall be better qualified to speak when we have the biography, which, if one may prophesy in such matter, bids fair to be one of the most delightful of books. For the present, it is enough to say that, whatever else may be said, Carlyle remains the noblest man of letters of his generation; the man who devoted himself with the greatest persistency to bringing out the very best that was in him; who least allowed himself to be diverted from the highest aims; and who knew how to confer a new dignity upon a character not always-if the truth must be spoken -very remarkable for dignity. He showed his eccentricity as a critic naively tells us-by declining the mystic letters G.C.B. But he missed none of the dignity which comes from the unfeigned respect borne by all honest men

to a

character of absolute independence, the most unspotted honor in every relation of life, and the exclusive devotion of a long life to the high calling imposed by his genius.

What Carlyle's opinion may have been of the state of English literature during his generation it is perhaps better only guessing. Undoubtedly he must have held that it shared in that general decay which, according to him, is a symptom

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of a state of spiritual and social anarchy. I do not speak, of course, of that kind of printed matter which is held for the moment to be a part of literature, though it should rather be called a quasi-literary manufacture. Grub Street is always with us, and perhaps at the present time it is in a rather more blatant and exuberant condition than usual. But Carlyle would have had a good many hard things to say about writers of high pretensions, and about some in whom one could wish that he should have been more ready to recognize genuine fellow-workers instead of setting them down as mouthpieces of the general babble of futile jargonings. cording to him, most of us would do better to hold our tongues or to seek for some honest mode of living which would not involve any swelling of the distracting chorus of advice bestowed by "able editors" upon a bewildered public. A very infinitesimal fraction of modern literature would pass this severe censor as deserving to escape the waste-paper basket. But one must not interpret a humorist too rigidly; and we may follow, so far as we may, Carlyle's example without troubling ourselves too much about his rather sweeping dogmas. That little house in Chelsea will long be surrounded with ennobling associations for the humbler brethren of the craft. For near fifty years it was the scene of the laborious industry of the greatest imaginative writer of the day, and the goal of pilgrimages from which no one ever returned without one great reward—the sense, that is, of having been in contact with a man who, whatever his weaknesses or his oddities, was utterly incapable of condescending to unworthy acts or words, or of touching upon any subject without instinctively dwelling upon its deepest moral significance. If his views of facts might be wrong or distorted and his teaching grotesque in form, it could never be flippant or com monplace, or imply any cynical indifference to the deepest interests of humanity. The hero in literature is the man who is invariably and unflinchingly true to himself; who works to his end undistracted by abuse or flattery, or the temptations of cheap success; whose struggles are not marked by any conspicuous catastrophes or demands for splendid

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self-sacrifices; who has to plod on steady dull round of monotonous labor, under continual temptation to diverge into easier roads, and with the consciousness that his work may meet with little acceptance, or with a kind of acceptance which is even more irritating than neglect; and who must therefore place his reward chiefly in the work it

self. Such heroism requires no small endowment of high moral qualities; and they have seldom or never been embodied more fully than in this sturdy, indomitable Scotchman, whose genius seemed to be the natural outcome of the concentrated essence of the strong virtues of his race.-Cornhill Magazine.

THE Common figment that we have lost a great writer for the first time, when first there ceases to be any place on the earth where his living body can be found, is perhaps more obviously a figment in the case of Thomas Carlyle than in that of any author of this century. For many years back it had been tolerably certain that Carlyle would add nothing more to that body of unique imaginative work which constitutes his real contribution to the life of man, except whatever of reminiscences and correspondence might be forthcoming at his death. And we now know not only that this has added, and will add, much very rich material to our knowledge of him, but also that what it adds will be exactly of the kind most fitted to increase the due appreciation of his great genius, and temper the undiscriminating idolatry of his special adorers. An author is best known, known in the best manner, when the largest number of those who are accessible to his influence first realize most clearly what he was as a whole; and it is certain that a much larger number of people will recognize more clearly what Carlyle was as a whole, during the next ten years, than have ever realized it up to the present

moment.

Carlyle seems to me to have had the temperament and the powers of a great artist, with what was in effect a single inspiration for his art, and that one which required so great a revolution in the use of his appropriate artistic materials, that the first impression he produced on ordinary minds was that of bewilderment and even confusion. This subject—almost his only subject

whether he wrote history or biography, or the sort of musings which contained his conceptions of life, was always the dim struggle of man's nature with the passions, doubts, and confusions by which it is surrounded, with special regard to the grip of the infinite spiritual cravings, whether good or evil, upon it. He was always trying to paint the light shining in darkness and the darkness comprehending it not, and therefore it was that he strove so hard to invent a new sort of style which should express not simply the amount of human knowledge, but also, so far as possible, the much vaster amount of human ignorance against which that knowledge sparkled in mere radiant points breaking the gloom. Every one knows what Carlylese means, and every apt literary man can manufacture a little tolerably good Carlylese at will. But very few of us reflect what it was in Carlyle which generated the style, and what the style, in spite of its artificiality, has done for Indeed I doubt if Carlyle himself. knew. In these reminiscences he admits its flavor of affectation with a comment which seems to me to show less self-knowledge than usual. Of his friend Irving's early style, as an imitation of the Miltonic or old English. Puritan style, he says, "At this time, and for years afterward, there was something of preconceived intention visible in it, in fact of real affectation, as there could not well help being. To his example also I suppose I owe something of my own poor affectations.in that matter which are now more or less visible to me, much repented of, or not." I suspect of the two alternatives

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suggested in this amusing little bit of characteristic mystification, the "not" should be taken as the truth. Carlyle could not repent of his affectation, for it was in some sense of the very essence of his art. Some critics have attempted to account for the difference in style between his early reviews in the Edinburgh and his later productions by the corrections of Jeffrey. But Jeffrey did not correct Carlyle's Life of Schiller, and if any one who possesses the volume containing both the life of Schiller and the life of Sterling will compare the one with the other, he will see at once that, between the two, Carlyle had deliberately developed a new organon for his own characteristic genius, and that so far from losing, his genius gained enormously by the process. And I say this not without fully recognizing that simplicity is after all the highest of all qualities of style, and that no one can pretend to find simplicity in Carlyle's mature style. But after all the purpose of style is to express thought, and if the central and pervading thought of all which you wish to express and must express if you are to attain the real object of your life, is inconsistent with simplicity, let simplicity go to the wall, and let us have the real drift. And this seems to me to be exactly Carlyle's case. It would have been impossible to express adequately in such English as was the English of his Life of Schiller, the class of convictions which had most deeply engraved themselves on his own mind. That class of convictions was, to state it shortly, the result of his belief-a onesided belief no doubt, but full of significance-that human language, and especially our glib cultivated use of it, had done as much or more to conceal from men how little they do know, and how ill they grasp even that which they partly know, as to define and preserve for them the little that they have actually puzzled-out of the riddle of life. In the very opening of the "Heroes and Hero Worship," Carlyle says:

is a poor science that would hide from us that great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience science swims as a mere superficial film. This whither we can never penetrate, on which all world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical, and more, to whosoever will think of it."

That passage reminds one of the best of the many amusing travesties of Mr. Carlyle's style, a travestie which may be found in Marmaduke Savage's "Falcon Family," where one of the "Young Ireland" party praises another for having "a deep no-meaning in the great fiery heart of him." But in Mr. Carlyle's mind this conviction of the immeasurable ignorance (or "nescience," as he preferred to call it in antithesis to science), which underlies all our knowledge, was not in the least a "deep nomeaning" but a constant conviction, which it took a great genius like his to interpret to all who were capable of learning from him. I can speak for myself at least, that to me it has been the great use of Carlyle's peculiar chiarooscura style, so to turn language inside out, as it were, for us, that we realize its inadequacy, and its tendency to blind and mislead us, as we could never have realized it by any limpid style at all. To expose the pretensions of human speech, to show us that it seems much clearer than it is, to warn us habitually that it swims as a mere superficial film" on a wide unplumbed sea of undiscovered reality, is a function hardly to be discharged at all by plain and limpid speech. Genuine Carlylesewhich, of course, in its turn is in great danger of becoming a deceptive mask, and often does become so in Carlyle's own writings, so that you begin to think that all careful observation, sound reasoning, and precise thinking is useless, and that a true man would keep his intellect foaming and gasping, as it were, in one eternal epileptic fit of wonderis intended to keep constantly before us the relative proportions between the immensity on every subject which we fail to apprehend, and the few well-defined focal spots of light that we can clearly discern and take in. Nothing is so well adapted as Carlyle's style to teach one that the truest language on the deepest subjects is thrown out, as it were, with more or less happy effect, at great realities far above our analysis or grasp, and

not a triumphant formula which contains the whole secret of our existence.

"Does not distort his character or genius into shapes which he thinks more becoming than their natural one; he does not bring out principles which are not his, or harbor beloved persuasions which he half or wholly knows to be false. He did not often speak of wholesome prejudices; he did not embrace the Roman Catholic religion because it was the grandest and most comfortable.' Truth with Schiller, or what seemed such, was an indispensable requisite; if he but suspected an opinion to be false, however dear it may have been, he seems to have examined it with rigid scrutiny, and if he found it guilty, to have plucked it out and resolutely cast it forth. The sacrifice might cause him pain, permanent pain; but danger, he imagined, it could hardly cause him. It is irksome and dangerous to tread in the dark; but better so than with an ignis-fatuus to guide

us.

Considering the warmth of his sensibilities, Schiller's merit on this point is greater than it at first might appear."

And now let me take, the opposite judgment passed upon Coleridge in the Life of Sterling :

"The truth is, I now see, Coleridge's talk and speculation was the emblem of himself; in it, as in him, a ray of heavenly inspiration struggled, in a tragically ineffectual degree, with the weakness of flesh and blood. He says once he had skirted the howling deserts of Infidelity; this was evident enough; but he had not had the courage, in defiance of pain and terror, to press resolutely across said deserts to the new firm lands of faith beyond; he

preferred to create logical fatamorganas for himself on the hither side, and laboriously solace himself with these. To the man himself Nature had given, in high measure, the seeds of a noble endowment; and to unfold it had been forbidden him. A subtle lynx-eyed intellect, tremulous, pious sensibility to all good and all beautiful; truly a ray of empyrean light; but embedded in such weak laxity of character, in such indolences and esuriences, as had made strange work with it. Once more the tragic story of a high endowment with an insufficient will. An eye to discern the divineness of the heaven's splendors and lightnings, the insatiable wish to revel in their god-like radiances and brilliancies; but no heart to front the seething terrors of them, which is the first condition of your conquering an abiding place there. The courage necessary for him above

valiantly grappled with it; he had fled from it ; sought refuge in vague day-dreams, hollow compromises, in opium, in theosophic metaphysics. Harsh pain, danger, necessity, slavto him. ish harnessed toil, were of all things abhorrent And so the empyrean element lying smothered under the terrene and yet inextinguishable there, made sad writhings. For the old Eternal Powers do live forever, nor do their laws see any change, however we or our poor Wigs and Church tippets may attempt to read their laws. To steal into heavenby the modern method of sticking, ostrich-like, your head into fallacies on earth, equally as by the ancient and by all conceivable methods-is forever forbidden. High treason is the name of that attempt, and it continues to be punished as such. Strange enough! here once more was a kind of heaven-scaling Ixion; and to him, as to the old one, the just gods were very stern; the ever-revolving, never-advancing wheel (of a kind) was his through life; and from his cloud Juno did not he too procreate strange Centaurs, spectral Puseyisms,

monstrous

illusory hybrids, and ecclesiastical chimeras, which now roam the earth in a very lamentable manner?".

I think Carlyle was driving by implication at something which seems to me quite false in the latter passage, and possibly even in the former also. But no one can doubt, I think, which of these two styles conveys the more vividly the idea common to both-that it is very easy and very fatal to deceive ourselves into thinking or believing what we only wish to believe, and that a mind which cannot distinguish firmly between the two loses all sense of the distinction between words and things. And how much more powerfully is the thought expressed in the strange idiom of the later style. The fundamental difference between the two styles is that while the former aims, like most good styles, at what Carlyle wants to say expressly, the later is, in addition, lavish of suggestions which come in aid of his express meaning, by bringing out in the background the general chaos of vague indeterminate agencies which bewilder the believing nature, and render a definite creed difficult. Take the very characteristic Carlylese phrase "in a tragically ineffectual degree," and note the result of grafting the stronger thought of tragedy on the weaker one of ineffectuality-how it dashes in a dark background to the spectacle of human helplessness, and suggests, what Carlyle

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wanted to suggest, how the powers above are dooming to disappointment the man who fortifies himself in any self-willed pet theory of his own. So, too, the expressions "logical fatamorganas, tremulous, pious sensibility, a ray of empyrean embedded in such weak laxity of character," "spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory hybrids,' ecclesiastical chimæras". all produce their intended daunting effect on the imagination, suggesting how much vagueness, darkness, and ignorance Carlyle apprehended behind. these attempted philosophical "views" views' of the great à priori thinker. Observe, too, the constant use of the plurals-indolences and esuriences," "god-like radiances and brilliancies," which just suggest to the mind in how very many different forms the same qualities may be manifested. And finally observe the discouraging effect of the touch which contrasts the conventionality of castecostume, our poor Wigs and Church tippets," with the "Eternal Powers that live forever'a touch that says to us in effect, Your conventions mystify you, take you in, make you believe in an authority which the Eternal Powers never gave. And all this is conveyed in such little space, by the mere suggestion of contrasts. The secret of Carlyle's style is a great crowding-in of contrasted ideas and colors—indeed, such a crowding in, that for any purpose but his it would be wholly false art. But his purpose being to impress upon us with all the force that was in him, that the universe presents to us only a few focal points of light which may be clearly discerned against vast and almost illimitable tracts of mystery that human language and custom mislead us miserably as to what these points of light are-and that much of the light, all indeed which he himself does not recognize, comes from putre fying and phosphorescent ignes fatui, which will only betray us to our doom -the later style is infinitely more effective than the first. He does contrive to paint the incapacity of the mind to grasp truth, its wonderful capacity to miss it, the enormous chances against hitting the mark precisely in the higher regions of belief, with a wonderful. effect which his earlier style gave little

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promise of. It seems to me a style invented for the purpose of convincing those whom it charmed that moral truth can only be discerned by a sort of brilliant imaginative tact and audacity in discriminating the various sprinkled in a dark vault of mystery, and then walking boldly by the doubtful light they give ;-that very much cannot be believed except by self-deceivers or fools;-but that wonder is of the essence of all right-mindedness; - that the enigmatic character of life is good for us, so long as we are stern and almost hard in acting upon the little truth we can know ;-but that any sort of clear solution of the enigma must be falseand that any attempt to mitigate the sternness of life must be ascribed to radical weakness and the smooth selfdelusions to which the weak are liable.

In speaking of his style, I have already suggested by implication a good deal of the drift of Carlyle's faith. What he loves to delineate is the man who can discern and grope his way honestly by a little light struggling through a world of darkness-the man whose gloom is deep, but whose lucidity of vision, so far as it goes, is keen-the man who is half hypochondriac, half devotee, but wholly indomitable, like Mahomet, Cromwell, Johnson. Thus he says of Cromwell:

"And withal this hypochondria, what was it but the very greatness of the man, the depth and tenderness of his ideal affections; the quantity of sympathy he had with things? The quantity of insight he could yet get into the heart of things; the mastery he could get over things; this was his hypochondria. man's misery, as men's misery always does, came of his greatness. Samuel Johnson is Sorrow-stricken, half-disthat kind of man. tracted, the wide element of mournful black

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enveloping him-wide as the world. It is the character of a prophetic man; a man with his whole soul seeing and struggling to see."

In his life of Frederick the Great, writing on Voltaire, Carlyle describes the same sort of character as the ideal Teutonic character, a type which recommended itself to Voltaire because it was

the reverse of his own.

"A rugged, surly kind of fellow, much-enduring, not intrinsically bad; splenetic without that natural stoicism of his; taciturn, yet with complaint; standing oddly inexpugnable in

strange flashes of speech in him now and then something which goes beyond laughter and