THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) is on the whole the strongest, though far from
the finest spirit of the age succeeding--an age of criticism threatening
to crowd creation out, of jostling interests and of surging streams,
some of which he has striven to direct, more to stem. Even now what Mill
twenty-five years ago wrote of Coleridge is still true of Carlyle: "The
reading public is apt to be divided between those to whom his views are
everything and those to whom they are nothing." But it is possible to
extricate from a mass of often turbid eloquence the strands of his
thought and to measure his influence by indicating its range.
Travellers in the Hartz, ascending the Brocken, are in certain
atmospheres startled by the apparition of a shadowy figure,--a giant
image of themselves, thrown on the horizon by the dawn. Similar is the
relation of Carlyle to the common types of his countrymen. Burns, despite
his perfervid patriotism, was in many ways "a starry stranger." Carlyle
was Scotch to the core and to the close, in every respect a macrocosm of
the higher peasant class of the Lowlanders. Saturated to the last with
the spirit of a dismissed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could
never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent,
dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer.
He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals,
self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost
mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous--with one
exception, that of Goethe,--to his intellectual creditors; and, with
reference to men and manners around him at variance with himself,
violently intolerant.
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