Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 01.djvu/16

viii 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.

There is thus a certain poetical justice about the resistance offered in certain quarters to his decree of canonisation. By 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 political prophet nor ethical doctor, but simply a great master of literature who lives for posterity by the art which he despised.