They came to his writings,
inspired by the youthful enthusiasm that carries with it a vein of
credulity, intoxicated by their fervour as by new wine or mountain air,
and found in them the key of the perennial riddle and the solution of the
insoluble mystery. But in later years the curtain to many of them became
the picture.
When Carlyle was first recognised in London as a rising author, curiosity
was rife as to his "opinions"; was he a Chartist at heart or an
Absolutist, a Calvinist like Knox, a Deist like Hume, a Feudalist with
Scott, or a Democrat with Burns--inquisitions mostly vain. He had come
from the Scotch moors and his German studies, a strange element, into the
midst of an almost foreign society, not so much to promulgate a new set
of opinions as to infuse a new life into those already existing. He
claimed to have a "mission," but it was less to controvert any form of
creed than to denounce the insufficiency of shallow modes of belief. He
raised the tone of literature by referring to higher standards than those
currently accepted; he tried to elevate men's minds to the contemplation
of something better than themselves, and impress upon them the vacuity
of lip-services; he insisted that the matter of most consequence was the
grip with which they held their convictions and their willingness to
sacrifice the interests on which they could lay their hands, in loyalty
to some nobler faith.
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