MASSOW'S INTERPRETATION OF CARLYLE. 229 



crime, to the quicqidd ajunt Jiommes in all lands and ages, literature 

 as but one of the interests. As the capacity for this had to be included 

 in his polyhistoric preparation, we have here also perhaps one of the 

 causes of his comparative ' belatedness.' But there was another, and 

 the chief of all. It lies in that fundamental characteristic of Carlyle's 

 literary genius which Goethe had detected as early as 1827. ' It is ad- 

 mirable in Carlyle,' said Goethe to Eckermann in the July of that year, 

 ' that in his judgments of our German authors he has especially in view 

 the mental and moral core as that which is really influential. Carlyle 

 is a moral force of great importance ; there is in him much for the 

 future, and we can not foresee what he will produce and effect.' 

 Goethe here struck the key-note. It was the depth and strength of 

 the ynoral element in Carlyle's constitution that was to impart to his 

 literary career its extraordinary importance and its special character 

 of originality. Precisely on this account, however — precisely because 

 he was to be no ordinary man of letters, turning out book after book 

 as an artist turns out picture after picture, but a new moral force in 

 the British community and the whole English-speaking community of 

 the world — he had to bide his time. He had to ascertain and reason 

 out his principles ; he had to form his creed. When he did burst 

 fully upon the public it was to be not only as the polyhistor, not only 

 as the humorist, not only as the splendid prose-artist, but also — to use 

 a cant phrase which I do not like, though Carlyle himself rather fa- 

 vored it — as the Chelsea Prophet." 



" But if Carlyle was slow in his own individual development, so that 

 the success was long postponed, he must be regarded as slower, and 

 still more ' belated,' with regard to the great progress of thought in 

 this century. He belonged to a former age, and lived over into an age 

 for which he was not prepared, and which he could not understand. He 

 was an earnest man — a man, indeed, of great religious seriousness, and 

 preached loyalty to truth as the supreme duty — but he was behind the 

 age in knowing what truth is or how it is to be found. Of science he 

 knew nothing, and could neither enter into its spirit nor employ its 

 methods, nor even accept its great results. He had positive and sys- 

 tematic views which, although vague, he held with such great tenacity 

 that he was disqualified from entering into those larger conceptions of 

 Nature and the universe which pervade modern thought," On the 

 creed and philosophy of Carlyle Professor Masson expatiates as fol- 

 lows : 



" No need at this time of day to dilate on the literary merits of 

 Carlyle's works. There they stand on our shelves, as extraordinary 

 an array of volumes for combined solidity and splendor, all the prod- 

 uct of one pen, as can be pointed to in the literature of English prose. 

 It is with the creed running through the volumes that we are now con- 

 cerned, that system of ideas by virtue of which Carlyle became, as 

 Goethe predicted he would become, a powerful moral force in his gen- 



