Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 2

a sense of the reality on the one hand, and
the unreality on the other, of all that man can do or suffer, has not been

surpassed by any teacher now living.
One of Mr. Carlyle's chief and just glories is, that for more than forty
years he has clearly seen, and kept constantly and conspicuously in his
own sight and that of his readers, the profoundly important crisis in the
midst of which we are living. The moral and social dissolution in
progress about us, and the enormous peril of sailing blindfold and
haphazard, without rudder or compass or chart, have always been fully
visible to him, and it is no fault of his if they have not become equally
plain to his contemporaries. The policy of drifting has had no
countenance from him. That a society should be likely to last with
hollow and scanty faith, with no government, with a number of
institutions hardly one of them real, with a horrible mass of
poverty-stricken and hopeless subjects; that, if it should last, it could be
regarded as other than an abomination of desolation, he has boldly and
often declared to be things incredible. We are not promoting the objects
which the social union subsists to fulfil, nor applying with energetic
spirit to the task of preparing a sounder state for our successors. The
relations between master and servant, between capitalist and labourer,
between landlord and tenant, between governing race and subject race,
between the feelings and intelligence of the legislature and the feelings
and intelligence of the nation, between the spiritual power, literary and
ecclesiastical, and those who are under it--the anarchy that prevails in
all these, and the extreme danger of it, have been with Mr. Carlyle a
never-ending theme. What seems to many of us the extreme
inefficiency or worse of his solutions, still allows us to feel grateful for
the vigour and perspicacity with which he has pressed on the world the
urgency of the problem.
The degree of durability which his influence is likely to possess with
the next and following generations is another and rather sterile question,
which we are not now concerned to discuss. The unrestrained
eccentricities which Mr. Carlyle's strong individuality has precipitated
in his written style may, in spite of the poetic fineness of his
imagination, which no historian or humorist has excelled, still be
expected to deprive his work of that permanence which is only secured
by classic form. The incorporation of so many phrases, allusions,

nicknames, that belong only to the hour, inevitably makes the vitality
of the composition conditional on the vitality of these transient and
accidental elements which are so deeply imbedded in it. Another
consideration is that no philosophic writer, however ardently his words
may have been treasured and followed by the people of his own time,
can well be cherished by succeeding generations, unless his name is
associated through some definable and positive contribution with the
central march of European thought and feeling. In other words, there is
a difference between living in the history of literature or belief, and
living in literature itself and in the minds of believers. Mr. Carlyle has
been a most powerful solvent, but it is the tendency of solvents to
become merely historic. The historian of the intellectual and moral
movements of Great Britain during the present century, will fail
egregiously in his task if he omits to give a large and conspicuous
space to the author of Sartor Resartus. But it is one thing to study
historically the ideas which have influenced our predecessors, and
another thing to seek in them an influence fruitful for ourselves. It is to
be hoped that one may doubt the permanent soundness of Mr. Carlyle's
peculiar speculations, without either doubting or failing to share that
warm affection and reverence which his personality has worthily
inspired in many thousands of his readers. He has himself taught us to
separate these two sides of a man, and we have learnt from him to love
Samuel Johnson without reading much or a word that the old sage
wrote. 'Sterling and I walked westward,' he says once, 'arguing
copiously, but except in opinion not disagreeing.'
It is none the less for what has just been said a weightier and a rarer
privilege for a man to give a stirring impulse to the moral activity of a
generation, than to write in classic style; and to have impressed the
spirit of his own personality deeply upon the minds of multitudes of
men, than to have composed most of those works which the world is
said not willingly to let die. Nor, again, is to say that this higher renown
belongs to Mr. Carlyle, to underrate the less resounding, but most
substantial, services of a definite kind which