[STEWART] THOMAS CARLYLE 25 



board of directors, chosen indeed by those interested, but trusted, 

 and not constantly dictated to as to their line of action. So in the 

 state, Carlyle argues, beware how you select your rulers. Your prob- 

 lem is to get a body of the ablest men in office; but, having put them in 

 office, treat them like steersmen of a ship, working under that good 

 old maxim, "Don't talk to the man at the wheel." If the steering 

 turns out disastrous, you must change your steersman. But it is folly 

 to keep him where he is, and rely upon directing every turn of his 

 rudder by a chorus of passengers' voices. Sometimes, indeed, under 

 democracy the guides are scarcely even passengers with any serious 

 interest in the voyage at all. This becomes a case of steering not 

 according to the chart but according to the shouts from the shore. 



IV 



Thus, as one considers the two types of hostile attitude towards 

 Carlyle, that of a generation ago and that of the last five years, one is 

 struck both by a melancholy fall in the competence of those who write 

 against him, and by the altered incidence of the attack. Temperate- 

 ness, frank and grateful acknowledgment of his unquestionable ser- 

 vices to our literature, a careful sifting out of those elements of wisdom 

 which underlay even that which was most faulty in his teaching, 

 these marks belong to every estimate by such writers as Lord Morley, 

 Leslie Stephen, R. H. Hutton. Violence, disregard of the merits and 

 concentration on the demerits, an ignoring of much that was true in the 

 eager search for all that can be proved false, such is, in short, the tone 

 of such men as Mr. Bertrand Russell and Professor S. P. Sherman. 

 The old critics used to assume that it was Carlyle's greatness rather 

 than his littleness which concerned mankind. The new critics assume 

 the reverse. Those of the past felt that they were judging a poet, a 

 seer, a magnificent literary artist, and they did not forget to make 

 allowance for the peculiarities of such genius; for they knew that a 

 judicial temper must not be expected in a satirist, precise historic 

 accuracy in a glowing rhetorician, unfailing human charity in an 

 habitual dyspeptic. They knew however, at the same time, that high 

 achievement by a man of letters is often found even where these de- 

 fects are conspicuous, and they devoted their energy to appraising 

 this. Those of to-day go to work upon Carlyle's doctrines as if they 

 were legal documents, to be dissected with the literal exactness of a 

 lawyer — and not a lawyer of the broader type-inquiring not into what 

 contains lessons but into what can be shown to be defective, and making 

 no deductions whatever from their censure in view of changed cir- 

 cumstance or fresh light. Such a contrast must not, of course, be 

 made too sweeping, or I should fall into just the same sort of error 



