Professor Masson begins by looking into the causes of the "belatedness" of Carlyle's literary life, or why it was so late before he achieved the success of world-wide recognition. He reminds us that Keats, Shelley, and Byron, who were contemporaries of Carlyle, had blazed into celebrity, finished their careers, and died, while Carlyle was yet an unknown man. Macaulay, who was by five years a younger man, had a brilliant national fame before Carlyle was recognized. "Not till 1837, when Carlyle was in his forty-second year, and had been three years resident in London—or, rather, not till between 1837 and 1840, when he was advancing from bis forty-second year to his forty-fifth—did he burst fully upon the public. His 'History of the French Revolution,' published in 1837, began his popularity, not only evoking applauses for itself, but lifting up the unfortunate 'Sartor Resartus' into more friendly recognition." The "Miscellanies" and "Chartism" followed, and in 1840 appeared "Heroes and Hero-Worship," at which time we may assume that Carlyle had reached his full British celebrity.
Professor Masson speculates very suggestively over this phenomenon, calling attention to a profound change that gradually came over Carlyle's work, in which he passes from the superficial phase of literature about literature to the graver and deeper problems of human society and human action, and in which the mere littérateur is merged in the more serious philosopher.
"The causes of this 'belatedness' of Carlyle's literary life, to use an expression of Milton's, were various. There had, certainly, been no original defect or sluggishness of genius. The young Carlyle who had just completed his classes in Edinburgh University, the young Carlyle drudging at school-mastering in Kirkcaldy, the young Carlyle of the next few years again walking in the streets of Edinburgh and living by private tutorship and hack-writing, was essentially the same Carlyle that became famous afterward—the same in moodiness, the same in moral magnanimity and integrity, the same in intellectual strength of grasp. One is astonished now by the uniformity of the testimonies of his intimates of those early days to his literary and other powers, the boundlessness of the terms in which they predicted his future distinction. His own early letters are also in the evidence. They are wonderful letters to have been written in the late teens and early twenties of a Scottish student's life, and paint him as even then a tremendous kind of person. As respects Carlyle's 'belatedness,' then, may not the fact that his clement was to be prose and not verse count for something? It would seem as if that peculiar kind of poetic genius which tends to verse as its proper form of expression can always attain to mastery in that form with less of delay and discipline than is required for mastery in prose; and, at all events, the traditions of literature are such that the appearance of a new genius in verse is always more quickly hailed by the public than anything corresponding in
