might not have been achieved by
a happier or more healthy-minded man. He never rose to more deadly irony
than in such _macabre_ descriptions as that of the poor woman proving
her sisterhood with the rich by giving them all typhoid fever; or that
perfect piece of _badinage_ about "Overproduction of Shirts"; in which
he imagines the aristocrats claiming to be quite clear of this offence.
"Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse _us_ of overproduction? We
take the Heavens and the Earth to witness that we have produced nothing
at all.... He that accuses us of producing, let him show himself. Let
him say what and when." And he never wrote so sternly and justly as when
he compared the "divine sorrow" of Dante with the "undivine sorrow" of
Utilitarianism, which had already come down to talking about the
breeding of the poor and to hinting at infanticide. This is a
representative quarrel; for if the Utilitarian spirit reached its
highest point in Mill, it certainly reached its lowest point in Malthus.

One last element in the influence of Carlyle ought to be mentioned;
because it very strongly dominated his disciples--especially Kingsley,
and to some extent Tennyson and Ruskin. Because he frowned at the
cockney cheerfulness of the cheaper economists, they and others
represented him as a pessimist, and reduced all his azure infinities to
a fit of the blues. But Carlyle's philosophy, more carefully considered,
will be found to be dangerously optimist rather than pessimist. As a
thinker Carlyle is not sad, but recklessly and rather unscrupulously
satisfied. For he seems to have held the theory that good could not be
definitely defeated in this world; and that everything in the long run
finds its right level. It began with what we may call the "Bible of
History" idea: that all affairs and politics were a clouded but unbroken
revelation of the divine. Thus any enormous and unaltered human
settlement--as the Norman Conquest or the secession of America--we must
suppose to be the will of God. It lent itself to picturesque treatment;
and Carlyle and the Carlyleans were above all things picturesque. It
gave them at first a rhetorical advantage over the Catholic and other
older schools. They could boast that their Creator was still creating;
that he was in Man and Nature, and was not hedged round in a Paradise or
imprisoned in a pyx. They could say their God had not grown too old for
war: that He was present at Gettysburg and Gravelott