Section II, 1920 [ii] Trans. R.S.C. 



The Declining Fame of Thomas Carlyle 

 By H. L. Stewart, M.A., Ph.D., F.R.S.C. 



(Read May Meeting, 1920) 



Within the last few years it has been widely contended, and it has 

 been perhaps still more widely taken for granted, that Thomas Carlyle 

 is a spent force in English literature. It is conceded, indeed, that his 

 books must always live in the imagination of some for the sake of their 

 amazing originality of style, their depth of humour, their gift of 

 graphic description, for what Lord Morley has called "the words and 

 images, infinitely picturesque and satiric, marvellous collocations and 

 antitheses." That he was among the very greatest masters of ex- 

 pression who during the nineteenth century made the English language 

 their vehicle is still as generally acknowledged as it was even at the 

 climax of his literary dictatorship. To not a few that extraordinary 

 style was, and remains, in some degree offensive, so that Matthew 

 Arnold's advice, "Flee Carlylese as you would flee the devil," often 

 awakens a note of sympathy. It seems so rugged, so barbaric, so 

 lacking in the grace, the elegance, the smoothness which constitute 

 such a charm in artistic speech. But there has never been any ques- 

 tion of its power, or even of its fascination for those who, while they 

 are again and again repelled, have to come back again and again to 

 wonder. The French Revolution stands to-day by common consent, 

 as it has stood ever since it was published, almost alone among writings 

 of its kind for vividness, for arresting and often bewildering imagin- 

 ative strength, a prose poem — if ever there was one — ^whose music 

 is all the richer for its cunning dissonances, and in whose colours we 

 have revealed as seldom before the literary potencies of light and shade. 

 But, when one passes from form to substance, it does appear to be 

 true that the fame of Carlyle as a thinker has notably declined. We 

 are being assured that the reverence felt for him a generation ago was 

 a huge mistake, that he is among those whom the less competent 

 judgment of the past immensely over-rated, and whom the men of 

 to-day, with their minds clarified by a deeper experience, have defi- 

 nitely deposed from the pedestal. It will be the contention of the 

 present paper that those who speak thus have precisely inverted the 

 truth, that of the charges levelled against Carlyle by far the greatest 

 weight belongs to such as are quite ancient, that the newly coined 

 reproaches are either gross exaggeration or sheer misunderstanding, 

 and that in appraising the positive merits much finer discernment 

 was shown by the older judges than by the later. 



