[STEWART] THOMAS CARLYLE 15 



the dominant English Empiricism of his day were pointed out with a 

 force which later critics had gone far indeed to confirm, and that the 

 strength of the coming neo-Kantian philosophy in England was 

 anticipated by at least fifty years. They saw in his paper on Moham- 

 med, and in many incidental paragraphs elsewhere, some very early 

 and very pregnant suggestions for the new science of Comparative 

 Religion. One of them very truly declared that Carlyle's French 

 Revolution had done more to bring that great cataclysm before the 

 English public than all other English writings upon that subject taken 

 together, and that he was absolutely the first to do historic justice to 

 Oliver Cromwell and Puritanism. They spoke with reverence of his 

 achievement in raising the level of literary reviewing to a point from 

 which it had never since quite fallen, fixing thought upon the deepest 

 and most fundamental issues in which literature relates itself to life. 

 Even in what they took to be his most vulnerable, because his least 

 temperate, aspect they found in his social pamphleteering a force 

 which drew attention to the defects in many a current belief and 

 practice and institution. His gospel of work marks, according to 

 R. H. Hutton, the opening of an epoch in which idle aristocracy 

 ceased to be bearable. And his paper on Chartism was probably the 

 wisest word on that subject which the England of 1838 was given a 

 chance to hear and to disregard. Men like Kingsley and Dickens and 

 Ruskin and the whole circle of writers who took their part in destroy- 

 ing the old political economy now blessedly extinct drew their inspir- 

 ation from no other than Carlyle. And those who understood the 

 dark mid-Victorian epoch, in which laissez-faire was the watchword 

 of a heartless commercialism, had no spokesman like the author of 

 Past and Present. "He was not merely the foremost literary figure of 

 his time," said Lord Morley; "he was one of the greatest moral forces 

 of all time." 



H 



So much for the judicial balance of those who taught our fathers 

 what to think of Carlyle. Let us now look at some current estimates 

 by which feeling towards him in the present is being changed. I 

 select two. One is by Mr. W. L. Courtney, the editor of the Fort- 

 nightly Review; the other is by Professor S. P. Sherman, of the Univer- 

 sity of Wisconsin. Of these Mr. Courtney has the advantage of very 

 much more light, while Professor Sherman has the stimulus of abound- 

 ing heat. 



Mr. Courtney declares it to be an acknowledged fact that the 

 younger generation does not now open Carlyle's books. He thinks 

 that this neglect is quite natural, that it is typical of the spirit of the 



