Modern English Books of Power | Page 9

fame as one of the greatest of English writers. From this time on he was freed from the fear of poverty, but it was only in his last years, when he needed little, that he enjoyed an income worthy of his labors.
Carlyle's great books, beside those I have mentioned, are the lives of Cromwell and of Frederick the Great. These are too long for general reading, but a single volume condensation of the Frederick gives a good idea of Carlyle's method of combining biography and history. Carlyle outlived all his contemporaries--a lonely old man, full of bitter remorse over imaginary neglect of his wife, and full also of despair over the democratic tendencies of the age, which he regarded as the outward signs of national degeneracy.
Carlyle's fame was clouded thirty years ago by the unwise publication of reminiscences and letters which he never intended for print. Froude was chosen as his biographer. One of the great masters of English, Froude was a bachelor who idealized Mrs. Carlyle and who regarded as the simple truth an old man's bitter regrets over opportunities neglected to make his wife happier. Everyone who has studied Carlyle's life knows that he was dogmatic, dyspeptic, irritable, and given to sharp speech even against those he loved the best. But over against these failings must be placed his tenderness, his unfaltering affection, his self-denial, his tremendous labors, his small rewards.
When separated from his wife Carlyle wrote her letters that are like those of a young lover, an infinite tenderness in every line. One of her great crosses was the belief that her husband was in love with the brilliant Lady Ashburton. Her jealousy was absurd, as this great lady invited Carlyle to her dinners because he was the most brilliant talker in all England, and he accepted because the opportunity to indulge in monologue to appreciative hearers was a keener pleasure to him than to write eloquent warnings to his day and generation. Froude's unhappy book, with a small library of commentary that it called forth, is practically forgotten, but Carlyle's fame and his books endure because they are real and not founded on illusion.
Carlyle opens a new world to the college student or the ambitious youth who may be gaining an education by his own efforts. He sounds a note that is found in no other author of our time. Doubtless some of this attraction is due to his singular style, formed on a long study of the German, but most of it is due to the tremendous earnestness of the man, which lays hold of the young reader. Never shall I forget when in college preparatory days I devoured Past and Present and was stirred to extra effort by its trumpet calls that work is worship and that the night soon cometh when no man can work.
His fine chapter on Labor with its splendid version of the Mason's Song of Goethe has stimulated thousands to take up heavy burdens and go on with the struggle for that culture of the mind and the soul which is the more precious the harder the fight to secure it. I remember copying in a commonplace book some of Carlyle's sonorous passages that stir the blood of the young like a bugle call to arms. Reading them over years after, I am glad to say that they still appealed to me, for it seems to me that the saddest thing in this world is to lose one's youthful enthusiasms. When you can keep these fresh and strong, after years of contact with a selfish world, age cannot touch you.
[Illustration: ARCHHOUSE, ECCLEFECHAN, DUMFRIESSHIRE THE BIRTHPLACE OF THOMAS CARLYLE--FROM A PHOTOGRAPH IN THE POSSESSION OF ALEXANDER CARLYLE, M.A. ON WHICH CARLYLE HAS WRITTEN A MEMORANDUM TO SHOW IN WHICH ROOM HE WAS BORN]
In this appeal to all that is best and noblest in youth, Carlyle stands unrivaled. He has far more heart, force and real warm blood than Emerson, who saw just as clearly, but who could not make his thought reach the reader. A course in Carlyle should be compulsory in the freshman year at every college. If the lecturer were a man still full of his early enthusiasms it could not fail to have rich results. Take, for instance, those two chapters in Past and Present that are entitled "Happy" and "Labor." In a dozen pages are summed up all Carlyle's creed. In these pages he declares that the only enduring happiness is found in good, honest work, done with all a man's heart and soul. And after caustic words on the modern craving for happiness he ends a noble diatribe with these words, which are worth framing and hanging on the wall, where they may be studied day by day:
Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor