Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/239

Rh crime, to the quicquid agunt homines in all lands and ages, literature as but one of the interests. As the capacity for this had to be included in his poly historic preparation, we have here also perhaps one of the causes of his comparative 'belatedness.' But there was another, and the chief of all. It lies in that fundamental characteristic of Carlyle's literary genius which Goethe had detected as early as 1827. 'It is admirable in Carlyle,' said Goethe to Eckermann in the July of that year, 'that in his judgments of our German authors he has especially in view the mental and moral core as that which is really influential. Carlyle is a moral force of great importance; there is in him much for the future, and we can not foresee what he will produce and effect.' Goethe here struck the key-note. It was the depth and strength of the moral element in Carlyle's constitution that was to impart to his literary career its extraordinary importance and its special character of originality. Precisely on this account, however—precisely because he was to be no ordinary man of letters, turning out book after book as an artist turns out picture after picture, but a new moral force in the British community and the whole English-speaking community of the world—he had to bide his time. He had to ascertain and reason out his principles; he had to form his creed. When he did burst fully upon the public it was to be not only as the polyhistor, not only as the humorist, not only as the splendid prose-artist, but also—to use a cant phrase which I do not like, though Carlyle himself rather favored it—as the Chelsea Prophet."

"But if Carlyle was slow in his own individual development, so that the success was long postponed, he must be regarded as slower, and still more 'belated,' with regard to the great progress of thought in this century. He belonged to a former age, and lived over into an age for which he was not prepared, and which he could not understand. lie was an earnest man—a man, indeed, of great religious seriousness, and preached loyalty to truth as the supreme duty—but he was behind the age in knowing what truth is or how it is to be found. Of science he knew nothing, and could neither enter into its spirit nor employ its methods, nor even accept its great results. He had positive and systematic views which, although vague, he held with such great tenacity that he was disqualified from entering into those larger conceptions of Nature and the universe which pervade modern thought." On the creed and philosophy of Carlyle Professor Masson expatiates as follows:

"No need at this time of day to dilate on the literary merits of Carlyle's works. There they stand on our shelves, as extraordinary an array of volumes for combined solidity and splendor, all the product of one pen, as can be pointed to in the literature of English prose. It is with the creed running through the volumes that we are now concerned, that system of ideas by virtue of which Carlyle became, as Goethe predicted he would become, a powerful moral force in his