ideas. It was long after Goethe's privately-uttered prediction of the influence Carlyle would one day exercise over his countrymen as a "new moral force" had been fully verified that his rank among writers began to be recognized. Now we find an accomplished critic, Mr. H. D. Traill, himself a purist in diction, pronouncing Carlyle "the greatest stylist that ever lived." Nor would there probably be many good judges to question the statement that no other prose writer has shown such mastery of the art of expression, giving through the medium of language an exact and complete reflection of perceptions and sentiments in regard to a vast variety of subjects, and making his readers see what he has seen, think what he has thought, and feel what he has felt.
Throughout the fifty years in which the common opinion of Carlyle's literary qualities has been thus entirely reversed there has been a more or less vehement discontent with his political views, and since the publication of the "Reminiscences" incessant and violent attacks have been directed against his character as a man. On these matters it will probably be long before the final word is spoken. It is easy to show that Carlyle was not one of those faultless beings that exist only as ideals, easy to prove that in many particulars his practice deviated from his preaching. But no true estimate will be reached until the facts so recently and copiously supplied shall have lost their sharp and contrasted outlines and be seen in their right proportions and full relations under a suffused and steady light. Carlyle himself was the first to put aside formal judgments based on catalogues of virtues and defects, to penetrate to the centre from which complex characteristics spring and diverge, to present us with portraits made vivid and consistent by full insight and comprehension. If in his hasty censures on contemporaries he too often showed a mere microscopic faculty directed by a partial and acrid spirit, it may be a just retribution that has exposed his own life to a similar criticism, but this is not the rectifying element on which the ultimate solution will depend. As to Carlyle's anti-democratic utterances, those who denounce them as pleas for despotism show simply that they have not understood them, and those who ridicule them as falsified by events run the usual risk of drawing premature conclusions. It is not an insignificant fact that the leading organ of philosophical radicalism in England recognizes in Carlyle "one of the most potent political forces of our time," asserts that "this democracy which he scorned has proved more amenable to his teachings, more receptive of his doctrines, than to those of any other teacher," and agrees with Mr. Froude in attributing to his influence a large share in the long series of legislative enactments that has broken in upon the doctrine of Laissez faire. Far from considering this influence as a thing of the past, the "Pall Mall Gazette" finds it "every day contributing to strengthen the distrust of Democracy in itself," and predicts that the completion of this biography "will be remembered long after the merits of the present dispute between Lords and Commons have become almost inconceivable by the human mind."
Whatever may be thought on these points, no one with a sense for what is fine in literature or attractive in the study of human character will question either the present interest or permanent value of this work. It consists in a large degree of self-revelations more entirely real, as well as more intimate and full, than can be found in all the "Confessions," "Apologies," and autobiographies, in whatever form, of notable people, from St. Augustine to Cardinal Newman, and relating to a personality which friends and enemies concur in regarding as a subject for close and curious investigation. The inner and outward life are unfolded in a complete and inseparable web, with a sequence of movement and a vividness of color that keep the attention fixed at every stage of the process. The precision and intensity that distinguish Carlyle's descriptions of scenes and events, of feelings and ideas, are not more apparent in his most elaborate and carefully revised writings than in the loose jottings in his diary and in letters dashed off without study or effort. There could be no better evidence of the deep sincerity and entire veracity of his nature than this unique accordance in tone and manner between his private and public utterances. If it be true that "the style is the man," the identity is here preserved at every point. The little pictures of external nature that are scattered through this record, adding greatly to its charm, are such as no artistic labor or study of "effects" could have bettered by a stroke. The repetition of laments and complainings, of invectives and self-reproaches, however painfully these may affect us,
