r they
declare their messages in prose or verse, in novels, histories,
speeches, essays, or philosophical treatises is of no consequence. It
must be possible to make prophets of them, that is all. A pure artist or
philosopher or man of science, one who is concerned with Beauty or Truth
but not with its application to contemporary life will not do. Darwin
and Swinburne, therefore, the greatest of the English Victorians, were
not eligible; but the age chose Carlyle for its select preacher when it
might have had Mill. Naturally it preferred his coloured rhetoric and
warm sentimentality to Mill's cold reason and white-hot emotion. It
chose him because he was what Mill was not--a Carlyle. Yet, though
Utilitarianism is discredited, Mill remains; the candour and subtlety of
his intellect impress us still, and his Autobiography will seem to
future generations one of the most moving documents of the nineteenth
century.

As for Carlyle, "nobody marks him"; we only wonder that he will still be
talking. The old controversy between those who wish to believe the truth
and those who insist that what they wish to believe is true raves on;
but neither side dreams of briefing the Chelsea sage. His vatic
eloquence carries no conviction. Men and women of the younger
generation, whatever their views, find no support in him, because he
appeals to axioms and postulates which to them seem unreal. It is not
that his arguments are old-fashioned, but that they are based on nothing
and apply to nothing. A modern emotionalist may call in Tolstoy or
Bergson or Berkley or Leon Bloy or Peguy or Plato himself to break
the head of Anatole France or Bertrand Russell, but he will not
trouble Carlyle. And besides finding him empty, the new age is quite
aware of his positive defects. It cannot away with his peasant
morality--moralizing rather--his provincialism, and the grossness of his
method. From the beginning to the end of his works there is neither pure
thought nor pure feeling--nothing but a point of view which is now
perceived to be ridiculously plebeian. Nevertheless, Carlyle had one
positive gift that the younger generation is perhaps not very well
qualified to appreciate, he was an extraordinarily capable man of
letters. His footnotes, for instance, might serve as models; he had a
prodigious talent for picking out just those bits of by-information that
will amuse and interest a reader and send him back to the text with
renewed attention. His edit