Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 01.djvu/22

xiv 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 They were alienated and repelled by that very element in Carlyle's writings, which, now that his preachings are out of date, remains their one element of life—their literary quality.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