12 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



I 



There are three distinct phases in Carlyle's work. He was an 

 historian, he was a literary critic, and he was a social pamphleteer. 

 His shortcomings, such as they are, in the first of these departments 

 were long ago pointed out. The historians who speak of history as a 

 "science" have never been able to forgive him for his rhetoric, for the 

 lurid contrasts to which he so often sacrificed exactness, for the 

 disregard with which he always treated the economic factor, the 

 mass-movement, the significance of an age in determining the char- 

 acter of leaders rather than that of leaders in determining their age. 

 For at least forty years it has been emphasized and re-emphasized 

 that Carlyle was quite blind to those sociological laws without which 

 the past can never be explained. Of equally long standing is the 

 criticism that he wrote history with certain preconceived theses which 

 he meant to vindicate — such as the paramount importance of the 

 "Hero," or the inevitable collapse of democracy, and that he vindicated 

 these by the simple expedient of arranging his data for the purpose, 

 reducing here and magnifying there, so that the perspective should be 

 adapted to the dogma he had in mind. As far back as 1894 Mr. 

 Frederic Harrison found the most notable example of this in the 

 picture of the French Revolution not as an enduring movement whose 

 significance fifty years had been unable to exhaust, but as a single 

 violent explosion brought to a sudden close by Napoleon's whiff of 

 grapeshot. "Not a judicial page," wrote Lord Morley in 1877, "or 

 sense of any wisdom in the judicial is to be found in his greatest pieces 

 of history." 



The same kind of complaint was long ago urged with still more 

 force against Carlyle's pamphlets. R. H. Hutton objected that he 

 was constantly demanding our submission to a Hero, but gave us no 

 hint how the Hero was to be identified. Leslie Stephen could find 

 no fertile suggestion of a remedy, or a way out, or anything socially 

 practicable in the diatribes against parliamentary government. The 

 Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question ended for ever Carlyle's 

 friendship with John Stuart Mill, for it seemed nothing more than an 

 abusive tirade against the most fundamental principles of the rights 

 of man, and when it was followed up by support of the South in the 

 American Civil War the temper of abolitionists in general was strained 

 more than it could bear. Believers in democracy have quoted to us 

 over and over again the predictions in the paper called Shooting 

 Niagara that a lowered franchise would conduct England into what 

 Carlyle called "the Bottomless," and that fifty years at most would 

 complete the doom. 



