MAS SON'S INTERPRETATION OF CARLYLE. 233 



main matter — which was that men should continue to believe that all 

 things had originated in a supreme and infinite eternal, the reality of 

 all realities, and should walk in that belief as their religion. 



" One may be a Transcendentalist in philosophy, however, whether 

 of the Idealistic or of the Realistic sort, and yet go through the world 

 calmly and composedly. Not so with Carlyle. Jeffrey's laughing 

 complaint about him in the first days of their acquaintance was that 

 he was always ' so dreadfully in earnest ' ; and no one can study the 

 records of his early life without seeing what Jeffrey meant. Carlyle's 

 vitality from his youth upward was something enormous. There was 

 nothing sluggish or sleepy or cool in his constitution, and no capacity 

 for being sluggish or sleepy or cool. lie was always restlessly awake ; 

 to whatever subject he addressed himself, he grasped it, or coiled him- 

 self round it, as with muscles all on strain and nerves all a-tingling ; 

 and, when he had formed his conclusions, he was vehement in an- 

 nouncing them and aggressive in their propagation. Necessarily this 

 was the case most of all with his conclusions on subjects the greatest 

 and most fundamental. ' Woe to them that are at ease in Zion ' was 

 a text quite after his own heart, and which he was fond of applying 

 to those •sf.h.o seemed to him to be sufficiently right in the main in their 

 private ways of thinking on the deepest problems, but not to be suffi- 

 ciently earnest in fighting for their conclusions and rousing and agi- 

 tating society to get them accepted. Plato himself, the supreme tran- 

 scendentalist of anticjuity, and to this day unapproacbed among man- 

 kind for the magnificent sweep of clear intellect and the beauty and 

 gorgeousness of poetic expression with which he expounded Tran- 

 scendentalism once for all to the philosophic world, was in this cate- 

 gory with Carlyle. ' He was a gentleman very much at ease in Zion ' 

 was Carlyle's definition of him. In fact, with the exception of Shake- 

 speare in Elizabethan England and of Goethe in more recent times, the 

 calm and composed type of character, in matters of sublime concern, 

 was not that which won Carlyle's highest regard. 



*' Dropping now all terms of scholastic nomenclature, we may say, 

 more simply, that Carlyle went through the world as a fervid Theist. 

 God, the Almighty, the Maker of all— through all the eighty-five 

 years of Carlyle's life, all the seventy of his speech and writing, this 

 was his constant phrase to his fellow-mortals. ' There is a God, there 

 is a God, there is a God ' — not even did the Koran of Mohammed 

 fulminate this message more incessantly in the ears, or burn it more 

 glowingly into the hearts, of the previously atheistic Arabs whom 

 the inspired camel-driver sought to rouse, than did the series of Car- 

 lyle's writings fulminate it and try to make it blaze in a region and 

 generation where, as he imagined, despite all the contrary appear- 

 ances of organized churches and myriads of clergy and of pulpits, the 

 canker of atheism was again all but universal. When he avoided the 

 simple name *God' or 'the Almighty,' and had recourse to those 



