an make sure what right is, and that our social action is effective.
A born poet, only wanting perhaps a clearer feeling for form and a more
delicate spiritual self-possession to have added another name to the
illustrious band of English singers, he has been driven by the
impetuosity of his sympathies to attack the scientific side of social
questions in an imaginative and highly emotional manner.'

Had Carlyle confined himself to description of social, industrial, and
political diseases, he would have had an unsullied reputation in the
sphere of spiritual dynamics, but flaws immediately appeared when he
endeavoured to prescribe remedies. Many of his remedies were too vague
to be of use; where they were specific, they were so Quixotic as to be
useless. His proposals for dealing with labour and pauperism never
imposed on any sensible man on this side of cloud-land.

CHAPTER IX

CARLYLE AS AN INSPIRATIONAL FORCE

It is the misfortune of the critic, the historian, and the sociologist
to be superseded. In the march of events the specialist is fated to be
left behind. The influence of the inspirationalist is ever-enduring. As
the present writer has elsewhere said:--Carlyle has been called a
prophet. The word in these days has only a vague meaning. Probably
Carlyle earned the name in consequence of the oracular and denunciatory
elements in his later writings. Then, again, the word prophet has come
to be associated with the thought of a foreteller of future events. A
prophet in the true sense of the word is not one who foretells the
future, but one who revives and keeps alive in the minds of his
contemporaries a vivid sense of the great elemental facts of life. Why
is it that the Bible attracts to its pages men of all kinds of
temperament and all degrees of culture? Because in it, especially in the
Psalms, Job, and the writings of Isaiah and his brother prophets,
serious people are brought face to face with the great mysteries, God,
Nature, Man, Death, etc.--mysteries, however, which only rush in upon
the soul of man in full force on special occasions, in hours of lonely
meditation, or by the side of an open grave. In the hurly-burly of life
the sense of what Carlyle calls the Immensities, Eternities, and
Silences, become so weak that even good men have sorrowfully to admit
that they live lives of practical materialism. As Arnold puts it:

"Each day brings its petty dust
Our soon-choked souls to fill,