A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW 207 



struggle, the picturesque power. Try to shape the 

 actual world of politics and human affairs according 

 to the ideal truth, and see if you keep your seren- 

 ity. There is a Niagara gulf between them that 

 must be bridged. But what a gripe this man had 

 upon both shores, the real and the ideal! The 

 quality of action, of tangible performance, that lies 

 in his works, is unique. "He has not so much 

 written as spoken," and he has not so much spoken 

 as he has actually wrought. He experienced, in 

 each of his books, the pain and the antagonism of 

 the man of action. His mental mood and attitude 

 are the same; as is also his impatience of abstrac- 

 tions, of theories, of subtleties, of mere words. In- 

 deed, Carlyle was essentially a man of action, as he 

 himself seemed to think, driven by fate into litera- 

 ture. He is as real and as earnest as Luther or 

 Cromwell, and his faults are the same in kind. Not 

 the mere saying of a thing satisfies him as it does 

 Emerson; you must do it; bring order out of chaos, 

 make the dead alive, make the past present, in some 

 way make your fine sayings point to, or result in, 

 fact. He says the Perennial lies always in the 

 Concrete. Subtlety of intellect, which conducts 

 you, " not to new clearness, but to ever-new abstruse- 

 ness, wheel within wheel, depth under depth," has 

 no charms for him. " My erudite friend, the aston- 

 ishing intellect that occupies itself in splitting hairs, 

 and not in twisting some kind of cordage and effec- 

 tual draught-tackle to take the road with, is not to 

 me the most astonishing of intellects." 



