INTRODUCTION

TIME, the final judge of appeal from the verdicts of successive ages, is rather fond of 'reserving' his decisions. Often they

are held over for a generation or more, under the formula of suspension known in the somewhat 'late' Latinity of the lawyers, as Curia advisari vult. But sitting as Lord Justice on that supreme appellate tribunal which examines the claims of departed writers, Time has been 'swift of despatch' in the case of Thomas Carlyle. His award has been delivered within fifteen years of Carlyle's death, and it confirms the judgment of his contemporaries as to his literary greatness. The appeal of his posthumous detractors is dismissed with costs.

We cannot exactly condole with the defeated appellants: they hardly deserve that. But we can make some allowance for them, for, in truth, we can now more clearly see what grounds they had for taking the case to a higher court. Nay, we can even admit that their excuse has been in part provided for them by the victorious respondent himself. No great man of letters has ever so persistently be-littled the mere art of literature as Carlyle. It is true that he had his literary heroes to point his discourses on hero-worship—his Johnson, his Rousseau, his Burns: surely as strange a leash as were ever strung together,—and of course not even he could fail to disengage the matchless art of Shakespeare from his philosophy, his morality, his profound thoughts on life, and what not else among those high matters in which alone Carlyle was interested. But as a rule, it is the direct dogmatic teaching of a work of literature (which is its accident) and not the manner of it, the æsthetic charm, the emotional appeal, the intel

lectual delight, the spiritual refreshment of it (which are of its essence) that he values: so that when, as in Scott's romances, he came across work which consists wholly of the essentials of literature, detached from its accidents, the contact with it produced a memorable and lamentable effect on his critical faculty. Allowing, in short, for a few inconsistencies, Carlyle's attitude towards literature pure and simple,―literature as literature—is uniform. On scores of pages, in hundreds of passages, he enounces or reveals the opinion that, dissociated from direct didactic purpose, it is but as sounding brass, and as a tinkling cymbal. The preacher with him is immeasurably ahead of the mere man of letters, as perhaps the man of action is of both.

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There is thus a certain poetical justice about the resistance offered in certain quarters to his decree of canonisation. insisting, in fact, on the superior dignity of the prophet-preacher, and by idealising the silent man of action-exalting him who does nobly, to a level so vastly higher than his who merely writes nobly of noble deeds-Carlyle was in fact briefing' a 'devil's advocate' against himself. For he has now become a prophet whose prophecies are of little account; while in the domain of action and conduct, his figure as viewed in the light thrown on it by his famous biographer, shows distinctly less heroic than it was supposed to have been. The disclosure of his personal weaknesses -his egoism, his ill-tempers, his peasant-bred envy, his undue self-pity-passed harmlessly, as all such disclosures should, and will pass, by those whose admiration had always centred on the writer and not on the man; but it fell at first with a most agitating shock upon those to whom the man, the leader, the master and doctor, the teacher,—by example, as was assumed, as well as by precept,--counted for so much more than the writer. The echo of their outcries of disenchantment had to die away before a hearing could be obtained for the truth that Carlyle is neither politica] prophet nor ethical doctor, but simply a great master of literature who lives for posterity by the art which he despised.

Neither prophet nor doctor: no, nor yet philosopher either. The word 'philosophy' and its derivatives are among the hardestworked vocables in the language. The substantive has been applied to everything, from a theory of the universe to the minutest researches in a single branch of physical science; its adjectival form is used indiscriminately to describe a variety of the human temperament, and the contents of an optician's shop. Men, who never so much as heard of the Stoics, have been called 'philosophers' for meeting adversity with fortitude; quadrants and sextants have been dignified with the name of 'philosophical' instruments. And there was hardly less laxity in the employment of the word 'philosophy' as applied to the teachings of Carlyle, a writer who was alike ignorant of philosophical systems, and contemptuous of philosophical method, dismissing the former as 'word-spinning,' and the latter as 'logic chopping,' and whose own metaphysic was a mere tissue of poetic rhapsodies, as his ethic was a mere series of intuitional and unreasoned dogmas. One hardly knows whether Carlyle himself was aware of the popular designation of him in later years as the 'philosopher of Chelsea,' or, if he was, what he thought of the cognomen. But there can, at least, be no doubt that the appellation was one which he ought in common consistency to have emphatically, if not indignantly, repudiated.

It is interesting, indeed, to inquire what system of philosophy the disciples of the master could have managed to extract from his writings. A philosopher, whether so self-styled or not, may be expected either to suggest some speculative solution of the problems of man's origin, man's destiny, man's duty, and above all, man's relation to the external world, or, if he is a pure sceptic, definitely to pronounce these problems unsoluble. But, while Carlyle would presumably have rejected pure dogmatic scepticism, such as Hume's, with impatience, there is, nevertheless, not one of the questions connected with these high matters, to which he has any definite answer to propound. To some of them he offers no reply at all; to others he replies according to the personal

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