Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/178

 altogether a misconstruction to sum up his creed in the familiar lines—

Could any contrast well be greater than that between the master and his disciple? What is the secret of the spell which the one man cast over the other? How can we account for the hold which the poet and artist gained over the Puritan and the prophet?

The answer to this question is not altogether easy. But, in the first place, it must be remembered that, side by side with a Puritan temper, there was in Carlyle an intellect of extraordinary keenness. And this is none the less true if, as has often been said, his intellect worked rather by intuition than by deliberate processes of reasoning, and if the results of his thought were embodied in imaginative, rather than in strictly logical, shape. No mistake could be greater than to confound reason with argument; and it was one of the main tasks of Carlyle, as of his German masters before him, to crusade against the confusion. And this brings us to the second consideration which, throughout our inquiry, must be carefully borne in mind. Not only had Carlyle an exceptionally keen intellect, but he had also, almost in spite of himself, much of the temper of a poet. He might suspect Art, as Plato suspected it, on moral, and even on intellectual, grounds. But, like Plato, he was, at any rate in his earlier days, peculiarly open to its charm. In the words of Plato—and it is difficult not to suppose that, when he wrote them, the philosopher was thinking, half remorsefully, of himself—he 'fell an easy prey' to its enchantments. This, of course, means that to describe Carlyle as a Puritan is only half, or less than half, the truth; that his nature, so far from being simple, was strangely blended; that he was not only prophet, but poet and thinker as well.