Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 10.djvu/17



, it was affirmed in the pages prefatory to the First Volume of this series, 'is neither political prophet nor ethical doctor, but simply a great master of literature who lives for posterity by the art which he despised.' This pronouncement has been challenged in some quarters, as it was inevitable that it should be; but it has, on the whole, been received with a greater amount of assent, express or tacit, than one would have ventured to count upon when the sentence was originally penned. To those who still find it a stumbling-block I would respectfully commend a careful perusal of the volume to which this is the Introduction. Nowhere, as it seems to me, is the contrast between the prophet who has perished and the writer who is immortal more ironically presented to us than in the pages of Past and Present. The irony enters into the very title; for it is the Present of Carlyle's description which has now passed so completely away as to carry with it into the limbo of futilities the predictions which he based upon it; while it is the Past of his fond retrospect which his literary genius has made to live again for us with a reality to which our conceptions of his and even of our own Present seldom attain, and which they hardly ever surpass. In the first six chapters of this volume, which form Book ., and are entitled 'Proem,' as also to a considerable extent in Books in. and IV., we have to do with a political pessimist who mistook a passing phase of trouble in the history of a nation for a crisis, probably a fatal crisis, in its fortunes; and his boding prophecies, stormily eloquent, grimly humorous as is the form of their expression, are marred for us of to-day by an ever-present consciousness of their subsequent falsification. But in Book. the preacher