mood, or the controversial exigencies, of the moment, and therefore in half-a-dozen different ways. He seems on the metaphysical side to have been more or less unconsciously a Fichtean Idealist: at any rate no transcendental German of them all, has insisted more strongly on the supremacy and even the solitude of the individual consciousness, and on the shadowy nature of the external world of sense. Yet the ethical affinities of this theory of perception, and its easy avenues of exit into indifferentism, fatalism, hedonism, and many other 'isms,' which he would have heartily objurgated, never seems to have occurred to him. There is no sign of his having appreciated the difficulty, yet the necessity, of fitting his metaphysical idealism into the framework of his essentially and austerely realistic ethics.

As to those ethics themselves, and the moral cosmology, so to call it, with which they were associated, what do they amount to? That there is a Divine Creator and Governor of the universe, and a prescribed law of human conduct which man will violate at his peril; that the distinctions between right and wrong are fixed from eternity, and the recognition of them implanted ineradicably in the heart of man; that truth is supreme and will ultimately and irresistibly prevail over falsehood; and that suffering is attached to ill-doing by a law of inevitable sequence-these, and a few other correlated dicta of equal simplicity, sum up the whole of Carlyle's theology, just as they composed the entire theological equipment of the Greek tragedians. As to his ethics: that the world is not a hunting-ground of pleasure but an arena of duty; that man must learn to dispense with the happiness of gratified longings, and to seek and ensue only the blessings of right action; and that whether there be or be not a future state of rewards and punishments, the obligation to such action is no less imperativein these maxims, and their like, are contained the whole ethical law and prophets for Carlyle as for the Stoics before him. There is nothing in the one set of doctrines which is not to be found in Sophocles, nor anything in the other which we could not

have learned from Marcus Aurelius; and since the dramas of the Athenian poet, and the meditations of the Roman emperor are still extant, there would be no need for them to rise from the dead, and seek a joint re-incarnation in the person of Carlyle.

How came it then, it will be asked, that this philosopher without a philosophy exerted so powerful an influence over English thought throughout the second thirty years of the present century? and how comes it that now, though that influence has long since spent itself, he still wields, and promises to wield for an indefinite time to come, a power of another kind? Answers to both these questions are not far to seek. The former of the two phenomena is to be explained by the fact that though Carlyle was no teacher in the proper philosophic sense of the word, he was during the day of his influence such a preacher as the world has rarely seen. It is common and perhaps natural enough to confuse the two functions of 'teaching' and 'preaching,' but their distinction is, nevertheless, fundamental. To teach is, in strictness, to impart knowledge to a learner which he did not possess before; while the distinctive purpose of preaching is to give vitality and motive power to knowledge which he already possesses. The fact that in some cases the imparted knowledge is itself new, and the teacher to that extent a preacher also, is an immaterial accident not affecting the essence of his function. Otherwise a Christian missionary to the heathen would stand on the same level as the Founder of his faith. In nineteen cases, moreover, out of twenty the preacher is not addressing the heathen. He does not deal in new, but in forgotten, truths. His object is not to enlarge deficient knowledge, but to awaken slumbering attention; and his success in the attempt will of course be measured partly by his own power of applying the required intellectual or moral stimulus, and partly by the readiness of his hearers to receive it. Seldom has the concurrence of these two conditions been more complete than it was during the period covered by Carlyle's earlier writings. Then, if ever in human history, the hour and

the man had met. The Genius of the eighteenth century-that age of victorious but unsatisfying common sense-lay at its last gasp. It had indeed received its mortal wound in that revolt of the human spirit against its contented optimism, from which the French Revolution sprang: and its death, though it might be postponed, was impossible to avert. Eighty-Nine-if Eighty-Nine had borne no Jacobin children-would have killed it outright; and Coleridge and Wordsworth would have sung a new Song of Deborah over its destruction. But Eighty-Nine unfortunately was too soon succeeded by Ninety-Three; and the moribund Genius received a new lease of life amid loud rejoicings, in which Coleridge and Wordsworth joined. But by 1830 this lease had run out, and the long delayed reaction came. The new generation were tired to death of the eighteenth century tradition, and profoundly disgusted with the intellectual and spiritual patrimony which they had inherited from it. They were sick of its sandy Utilitarianism, its cast-iron economics, its uninspired and uninspiring theology, the flat and deadly prose of its theory of life. They were ripe, especially the younger among them, for rebellion against a system which however eminently conformable to the practical reason, had no word of response to utter, no shred of satisfaction to offer to those two most importunate claimants in human and especially in youthful human nature--the energies and the emotions. The new generation were crying out for at least a religion of action if they could hold no longer by any religion of speculative belief. They wanted a politico-social creed which would find room for the new ideas and aspirations rejected or coldly viewed by the politicians of the old order. Above all they passionately longed, as did the newly risen Romanticists in France-for a presentment of human life in literature with all the wealth of colour and animation of movement which belong to it in every age, and which they felt were not wanting to it in their own. They were unutterably weary of contemplating the world as a mere storehouse of facts and figures, or as a mechanical creation of laws,

forces and formula; and they were eager to realise it once more as the scene of the endless drama of human action and passion, of struggle, and triumph and defeat.

It was in the hour when this mood was dominant over the younger and more active minds throughout educated England that the man appeared. He came bringing with him all that they asked for, feeling all that they felt, hating everything that they hated (and a good deal more on his own account) and filled full of the same ardent if somewhat vague aspirations with which they too were bursting. His contempt for the accepted philosophy, the conventional theology, the current politics of his time was even more profound than theirs. The gritty Benthamism of his age was more irritating to his palate, the yoke of its cast-iron economics more galling to his shoulders. He was even more impatient of laws, forces and formula' than they, even more impressed than they with the superiority of action to thought and its immeasurable superiority to words. Had his powers of

expression been only a little above the average; had his enthusiasm of the preacher glowed to no extraordinary pitch of ardour, he could not have failed to obtain a hearing. What wonder then, that with the passionate force of conviction which animated his utterances, and the marvellous mastery of language which went to the shaping of them, he should alike have stormed the heart and carried captive the intellect of his age?

This, of course, is not to say that the Preacher of the Thirties had anything like the congregation that 'sat under' him during the two succeeding decades-that the Carlyle of Sartor Resartus had a tithe of the following that attended on the Carlyle of Past and Present, and the Latter Day Pamphlets. No more is meant than that his earliest writings caught the ear of that tribus prærogativa of his countrymen whose suffrage in such cases is to be taken first, and who think to-day what the great body of their fellow-citizens will think to-morrow. Their suffrage however he certainly won-if not unanimously, yet at least, from all of them,

save those who still clung to the belief that salvation was to be found in politics, and who looked, inconsiderately enough, for a pioneer of the future in that new Radicalism which was essentially the offspring, and in many respects the degraded offspring, of the immediate past. But a very few years' experience of a Reformed Parliament sufficed to make converts of them also. They found that the new Radical was politically and philosophically as unhelpful as the old Whig whom he had supplanted; that his social ideals were no less inadequate and much more vulgar than those of his predecessor; and that his general views of the world and life were those of an infinitely more dreary dog.' By the end of the decade the process of disenchantment was complete. The same great turn of the political tide which swept the Liberals out of power, and brought in the great Conservative majority of 1841, had its intellectual counterpart in the movement which two years later brought a whole multitude of new disciples round the author of Past and Present. From this year we may perhaps most safely date the commencing growth of that strictly didactic influence which was to go on steadily increasing for the next quarter of a century.

As for the rest of Carlyle's countrymen-for that proportion of them (and it was no inconsiderable one), who remained uninfluenced by him for a yet longer time, and many of whom died, indeed, in their hardness of heart-their case also is intelligible enough. They were alienated and repelled by that very element in Carlyle's writings, which, now that his preachings are out of date, remains their one element of life-their literary quality. Nor should this appear a paradox even to those who were not born into the world until Carlyle had attained the position of an established and accepted master in letters. They should be able, imaginatively at any rate, to realise to themselves the distressing shock which was given to the elder world of literary purists by the first and yet more by the second publication of Carlyle in 'Carlylese,' and the effects of which survived among them, plainly perceptible down to a period well within the memory of men not