STEWART] THOMAS CARLYLE 13 



Scientific men, too, have always remembered with astonishment 

 how completely Carlyle detached himself from the movements of 

 contemporary science, and how little he appreciated the value of 

 some of its most fertile inquiries. In 1830 he entered in his Journal 

 the judgment about economics that it needed far less intellect than 

 successful bellows-mending, that on the whole it did less good, that 

 though a young science it was obviously decrepit, and that for his own 

 part he wished it a soft and speedy death. His language about 

 Bentham shows nowhere the least realisation of what the Utilitarians 

 had done to establish a sound basis for the criminal code, or of the 

 immense improvement which had been already effected in that 

 province through their efforts, while for criminology as such no 

 epithet of scorn was too bitter for him to use. The very idea of a 

 social science he always spoke of with horror. Within a few years of 

 his death Miss Julia Wedgwood called attention to the fact that the 

 immense import of Darwinism had never even begun to impress itself 

 upon his mind, that for him the evolutionary hypothesis was simply 

 as though it had never been. 



As a literary critic, too, in his judgments he used to perplex and even 

 amaze his contemporaries. They could not understand how he could 

 see no geniUs in Wordsworth, how he thought the Pickwick Papers 

 "lowest trash," how he pitied an age that would read Balzac and 

 George Sand, how he dismissed Macaulay's History as quite worthless 

 and Mill's Autobiography as a "mournful psychic curiosity" but 

 otherwise of no value whatever, how he spoke of John Keble as a 

 little ape, of Newman as having no more brains than a moderate-sized 

 rabbit, of Gladstone as on the whole the "contemptiblest man" known 

 to him. If it be the function of a man of letters to guide his time in 

 fixing the rank of its living teachers, then a strong case against Carlyle 

 can easily be built up. But it was built up long ago, and it was not 

 left for our magazines of to-day to make it either clearer or stronger. 



Some at least of the older lines of attack may be distinctly seen 

 as converging in a paragraph of Herbert Spencer's Autobiography. 

 Spencer arraigns Carlyle for showing a spirit that was the very anti- 

 thesis of the philosophic, never setting out from premises and reason- 

 ing his way to conclusions, but relying on nothing better than intuitive 

 dogma, never thinking calmly but always in a passion. He points out 

 how feeble must have been the insight into history of one who argued 

 that the rule of the strong hand, because it was beneficial in an undevel- 

 oped social order, must be good for all time, as if human nature were 

 incapable of growth and change. He urges that sneering at political 

 economy as such must rest on the ludicrous denial of any scientific 



