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THE Completion of this new edition of Mr. Carlyle's collected Works affords us a favorable opportunity for endeavoring to form some estimate of the literary character of a man who has, perhaps, produced a greater impression upon his generation than any other living writer.

It is unquestionable that the greatness of a man is measured, partly by the range of his knowledge of truth, and partly by the resoluteness of his action on the truth which he knows. But there is no Englishman of the present day whose power appears, at first sight, so remote from those two sources of power as Mr. Carlyle. How, on the one hand, can vigorous practical action be attributed to a man whose life has been spent in writing, and in a kind of writing peculiarly devoid of that speciality and definite purpose which action demands? On the other hand, what system of theoretical knowledge can, even by an

*Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works. London. 1869-71. 33 vols. 8vo.

NEW SERIES.-VOL. XVI., No. 2.

admirer, be attributed to Mr. Carlyle as its founder? What single point of scientific or historical fact has been originally discovered by him? What germinating principle has he hit upon that can colligate and embrace our isolated experiences in a grasp of such tenaciousness that succeeding inquirers may safely employ it in help of their own researches? Granted that he has popularized, made intelligible and picturesque, certain portions of history: it need not be said that Mr. Carlyle's fame and influence has greatly transcended that which any mere popularizer could obtain.

There are, accordingly, those at the present day who hold that Mr. Carlyle's influence has rested on illegitimate grounds; that it has been a deceitful phantasm, a will-o'-the-wisp, luring unstable minds into marshy and unprofitable places. A brilliant writer, a writer of genius, these are words which all will apply to Mr. Carlyle, for these are mere fine words, and do not guarantee any definite opinion on the part of those who utter them; but whether he

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writes that which is true, solid, and needful to be known, this is not on all sides accorded without dispute. This, then, is the point to which we must address ourselves. Can we, in Mr. Carlyle's work, lay bare any solid core, any framework of reality which remains when all the external appendages have been stripped off, and when it is set before the pure undazzled understanding to approve or reject? We hold that there is such; nor do we exclude even his later writings from this opinion, though assuredly it is no siccum lumen which streams from the pages of the " Latter-day Pamphlets" and "Shooting Niagara."

First, what is it that Mr. Carlyle has attempted to do? What is it that we have a right to expect from him? He is, above all things, a teacher, a moral and political teacher. He is, indeed, a historian as well; and one of his most remarkable qualities, his power of picturesque narrative, belongs to him solely as a historian. But still it is in the other aspect that he comes forward most prominently.

Now the moral teacher is in a peculiar position. He stands almost precisely in the middle place between the man of action and the man of theory. No man, indeed, is entirely theoretical, no man entirely practical. Even the chemist and the astronomer, though their main office is theoretical, namely, a declaration of facts, yet by preference choose those facts out of their respective sciences which are most subservient to future utility, to future action. They have an eye for the practical, and therefore the title of practical men can not be altogether refused to them. Again, the historian, though his main business is to narrate, is not indiscriminate in his selection of events and periods, but narrates those which seem to him most to touch on the needs of the day; so that he also has a partly practical aim. On the other hand, the statesman and mechanical engineer are chiefly practical, but they can not help having a theoretical bias as well; if they do not accumulate knowledge, and a great deal of knowledge, moreover, for which they have no immediate use, they will be very narrow and feeble statesmen or mechanicians. And thus Watt had in him a great deal of the theorist; Thucydides had in him something of the practical man. But, on the whole, there can be no doubt that the chemist, and astronomer, and historian, belong to the specula

tive class of men, the statesman and mechanician to the active class.

The moral teacher, however, has at once and at the same time a knowledge to gain, and a work to perform; and he has not the one more than the other. He must know the right path of conduct; but he can not know it unless he brings himself into it. He must teach others this right path; but he can not teach them unless he brings them into it. A purely theoretical knowledge of virtue is no knowledge at all; the true knowledge of virtue is a flame that kindles into energy. To instruct men in goodness is, if the instruction takes effect, identical with making them good: as well could a man know the pain of fire before he ever touched the flame as know the nature of goodness before he felt a good impulse. And thus those philosophers who make morality to consist in the calculation of consequences, in calculating for our happiness, lose the main element of it. They forget that we must have experienced feelings, before we can begin to calculate about those feelings; that unless we are animated and inspired by a virtuous energy to start with, it is perfectly vain to put forward such an energy, and the happiness attending it, as an end to be aimed at.

The greatest moralists have therefore ever taught men to feel and to act, before teaching them to weigh and to calculate. Look at examples. Has Thomas à Kempis, or Bentham turned more men from a selfish to an unselfish life? Is it from his moral theories, or from his delineation of the pure and magnanimous character of Socrates, that Plato gains most power?

This is the first eminent merit we discern in Mr. Carlyle. He has understood and embraced his function truly. With all his breadth of culture, he has never refined himself away into a simple intellectual thinker. He is all on fire, not merely to know what is right, but to have the right done. He ever refuses to confine himself to the office of a theorist. He appeals to the age, to his country, to the men about him, in strong and urgent entreaty: "Do this; do not that." When he treats of the men of his time, or of preceding times, he does not discuss merely whether they have held right opinions, but whether they have acted rightly. Voltaire, Diderot, Fichtethese, whom others carelessly think of as speculatists-Mr. Carlyle insists on dealing

with as men. He knows what an effect a man's life has on his opinions; and hence he refuses to make any divorce between the two. In the midst of many changes that have come over him, this fundamental characteristic has remained. Hence, too, the simple, obvious nature of most of his precepts; for truisms and platitudes, though the bane and abhorrence of the speculatist, have often to be urged in practical life, from the proneness of men to neglect what is most evident. "Work, work ;""speak the truth;" "shun cant;" "have a clear understanding;"-maxims like these form no small part of Mr. Carlyle's ethics.

But yet over the precepts most easy of comprehension he throws a mysterious splendor by reminding men of their universality. From eternity to eternity these remain the same; Nature herself has ordained them; in every time and in every place those prosper who obey them, those fall into ruin who disobey them. These are the Eternities, the Immensities, of which he speaks so much; nay, they are even the divine Silences, for the force and vigor of these truths lie not in their being spoken, but in their being acted upon. These are the "unwritten and sure laws of the gods, that were not born to-day or yesterday, but live forever, and no man knows whence they came," of which Sophocles speaks. These are what Moses describes; "the commandment which I command thee this day . . . is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it? neither is it beyond the sea.

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the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it." Taking these laws as his rule and standard, Mr. Carlyle throws himself into the broad life of his own age and of other ages; narrating, criticising, preaching, advising, with reverence or with scorn, with laughter or with anger; passing in review statesmen, soldiers, writers, even quacks and impostors. To none is he indifferent. We are dealing here with the general line Mr. Carlyle has proposed to himself, and not with his special successes or failures in that line; and we hold that his type of moral teaching is the truest. Every thing that he writes bears the impress of humanity; he is of our own flesh and blood, not a machine for calculating results. Whatever may be Mr. Carlyle's er

rors, it can never be said of him that he lacks the material of human nature; he lays a broad and solid foundation, whatever may be the eccentricities of the building.

And in his earlier writings it is plain that he is merely laying a foundation, and no more. That trenchant and aggressive style, which has been his best known quality of late, was then wholly absent from him. He examines; he does not yet judge.

A wide impartiality throughout characterizes the "Miscellanies." The attitude is that of one who waits; of one who does not yet know the truth, the perfect and highest course open to man; and who, as not knowing it, surveys with the serenity of suspended force all who come professing to have the truth to impart. Such an attitude has a peculiar charm. When we know a person's final conclusions, when he has told us all that he has to impart, we may indeed feel grateful to him, but we feel also that we know the limits of that for which we are grateful. But in the yet undeveloped germ there lies an infinite possibility; there is no saying to what height such a germ may grow, in what directions and forms it may unfold itself; and an eager curiosity gathers around this first working, which can not attend on the perfectly developed plant. This is the beauty of childhood; but it is a beauty which belongs to all those who, being past childhood, yet know and feel that they are in a state of growth and not of completion.

And certainly, Mr. Carlyle did not affect completion at the time when he wrote his "Miscellanies." Then, he was content to receive all the figures of history or literature on the unruffled surface of a mind that could afford to be generous, that was not wedded to any exclusive hypothesis of its own, that could admire without falling down to worship, and sympathize where strong admiration was impossible. Consider the following widely different characters: Burns, Novalis, Johnson, Boswell, Hume, Voltaire, Louis XVI. In including the last-named we are considering the "French Revolution" as well as the "Miscellanies;" and indeed they stand side by side, belonging, as they do, to the same period of Mr. Carlyle's life. How few are there who could have discerned something to love and esteem in all the

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