rtly because he impresses
different people in widely different ways, and partly because his
expression varies greatly. At times he is calm, persuasive, grimly
humorous, as if conversing; at other times, wildly exclamatory, as if he
were shouting and waving his arms at the reader. We have spoken of
Macaulay's style as that of the finished orator, and we might reasonably
speak of Carlyle's as that of the exhorter, who cares little for methods so
long as he makes a strong impression on his hearers. "Every sentence is
alive to its finger tips," writes a modern critic; and though Carlyle often
violates the rules of grammar and rhetoric, we can well afford to let an
original genius express his own intense conviction in his own vivid and
picturesque way.

Carlyle's message may be summed up in two imperatives,--labor, and be
sincere. He lectured and wrote chiefly for the upper classes who had begun
to think, somewhat sentimentally, of the conditions of the laboring men of
the world; and he demanded for the latter, not charity or pity, but justice
and honor. All labor, whether of head or hand, is divine; and labor alone
justifies a man as a son of earth and heaven. To society, which Carlyle
thought to be occupied wholly with conventional affairs, he came with the
stamp of sincerity, calling upon men to lay aside hypocrisy and to think
and speak and live the truth. He had none of Addison's delicate satire and
humor, and in his fury at what he thought was false he was generally
unsympathetic and often harsh; but we must not forget that Thackeray--who
knew society much better than did Carlyle--gave a very unflattering picture
of it in _Vanity Fair_ and _The Book of Snobs_. Apparently the age needed
plain speaking, and Carlyle furnished it in scripture measure. Harriet
Martineau, who knew the world for which Carlyle wrote, summed up his
influence when she said that he had "infused into the mind of the English
nation ... sincerity, earnestness, healthfulness, and courage." If we add
to the above message Carlyle's conceptions of the world as governed by a
God of justice who never forgets, and of human history as "an inarticulate
Bible," slowly revealing the divine purpose, we shall understand better the
force of his ethical appeal and the profound influence he exercised on the
moral and intellectual life of the past century.

JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)

In approaching the study of Ruskin we are to remember, first of all, that
we are