MASSOJV'S INTERPRETATION OF CARLYLE. 227 



Professor Masson begins by looking into the causes of the " belat- 

 edness " of Carlyle's literary life, or why it was so late before he 

 achieved the success of world-wide recognition. He reminds us that 

 Keats, Shelley, and Byron, who were contemporaries of Carlyle, had 

 blazed into celebrity, finished their careers, and died, while Carlyle 

 was yet an unknown man. Macaulay, who was by five years a younger 

 man, had a brilliant national fame before Carlyle was recognized. 

 " Not till 1837, when Carlyle was in his forty-second year, and had 

 been three years resident in London — or, rather, not till between 1837 

 aud 1840, when he was advancing from his forty-second year to his 

 forty-fifth — did he burst fully upon the public. His 'History of the 

 French Revolution,' published in 1837, began his popularity, not only 

 evoking applauses for itself, but lifting up the unfortunate 'Sartor 

 Resartus ' into more friendly recognition." The "Miscellanies" and 

 "Chartism" followed, and in 1840 appeared "Heroes and Hero-Wor- 

 ship," at which time we may assume that Carlyle had reached his full 

 British celebrity. 



Professor Masson speculates very suggestively over this phenome- 

 non, calling attention to a profound change that gradually came over 

 Carlyle's work, in which he passes from the superficial phase of litera- 

 ture about literature to the graver and deeper problems of human soci- 

 ety and human action, and in which the mere litterateur is merged in 

 the more serious philosopher. 



" The causes of this ' belatedness ' of Carlyle's literary life, to use 

 an expression of Milton's, were various. There had, certainly, been 

 no original defect or sluggishness of genius. The young Carlyle who 

 had just completed his classes in Edinburgh University, the young 

 Carlyle drudging at schoolmastering in Kirkcaldy, the young Carlyle of 

 the next few years again walking in the streets of Edinburgh and liv- 

 ing by private tutorship and hack-writing, was essentially the same 

 Carlyle that became famous afterward — the same in moodiness, the 

 same in moral magnanimity and integrity, the same in intellectual 

 strength of grasp. One is astonished now by the uniformity of the 

 testimonies of his intimates of those early days to his literary and 

 other powers, the boundlessness of the terms in which they predicted 

 his future distinction. His own early letters are also in the evidence. 

 They are wonderful letters to have been written in the late teens and 

 early twenties of a Scottish student's life, and paint him as even then 

 a tremendous kind of person. As respects Carlyle's * belatedness,' then, 

 may not the fact that his element was to be prose and not verse count 

 for something ? It would seem as if that peculiar kind of poetic genius 

 which tends to verse as its proper form of expression can always attain 

 to mastery in that form with less of delay and discipline than is re- 

 quired for mastery in prose ; and, at all events, the traditions of liter- 

 ature are such that the appearance of a new genius in verse is always 

 more quickly hailed by the public than anything corresponding in 



