SO as to fill all the details of knowledge with a significance which they cannot have in themselves, but only as seen sub specie æternitatis.

THE GENIUS OF CARLYLE.1

THE best way of dealing with a great author is,

in the first instance, to go to him without much criticism, and with a receptive mind, and to let his way of thinking permeate into our minds, until it becomes part of their very substance. For, till we have done so, our criticism will not be adequate; it will be wanting in sympathy, and it will rather tend to defend us against his spirit than enable us to appreciate it. When, however, we have for a long time submitted to such a powerful influence, when we have learned to live in the atmosphere of our author's ideas, so that we can almost anticipate the turn his thoughts will take on any occasion, it is advisable for us to change our method, to put him,

1 A lecture delivered to the Dialectic Society of the University of Glasgow.

SO to speak, at arm's length, and to attempt calmly to estimate what we have got from him, and so to determine his proper place among the inhabitants of our private Walhalla-among the company of the wise to whom we return ever again and again, as the permanent possessions of our intellectual life.

Such reflections as these naturally occurred to me in trying to put together a few thoughts about an author who was the greatest literary influence of my own student days. Every new generation has a language of its own, and is spoken to, if not with the most permanent power, at least with the greatest immediate awakening effect, by the writers who are fighting their way to recognition rather than by those who have already achieved the position of classics and authorities. And undoubtedly, at that time, Carlyle was the author who exercised the most powerful charm upon young men who were beginning to think. It is hardly possible for those who now for the first time take up Carlyle's works to realise how potent that charm was. "Since then many things have happened." It would scarcely be too much to say that then this country was

still outside of the main stream of European culture. It would certainly not be too much to say that its intellectual horizon was then closed in by many limits which now, partly by Carlyle's own agency, have ceased to exist. To name only a few points, Carlyle was the first in this country who discovered the full significance of the great revival of German literature, and the enormous reinforcement which its poetic and philosophic idealism had brought to the failing faith of man. He was at least the first who, in a definite and effective way, in broad and powerfully drawn outlines, represented to us the new ideas about man and his world which that literature contains. He spoke, therefore, from what was recognisably a higher point higher point of view than that of the ordinary sects and parties which divided opinion in this country, a higher point of view than any of the prevailing orthodoxies and heterodoxies. He spoke, besides, not only for himself, but as representing the weight of a new learning and culture of which we were ignorant; and, in addition to his own great genius, he had the advantage of being thus the first from whom we heard the great words of Goethe and

Fichte, of Schiller and Richter and Novalis.

Nor

was he content to speak of the significance of German thought from an abstract point of view; he was continually trying to show what it meant for us. By the aid of the clue it put into his hands he gave us a new interpretation of history, and especially of those two great revolutionsthe English and the French Revolution-from which the political, social, and religious history of this country and of modern Europe take their new beginning. He broke through the narrow limits of the conventional dignity of history, not only by an imaginative presentment of the facts which made them spring into life again, as if they were taking place before our eyes, but by what was almost a new kind of insight into those inner forces of belief and passion which are called into action whenever men are freed from the yoke of habit by the shock of revolution. His prophetic tones,

his humour and pathos, his denunciations of cant and formalism, even the strange tricks he played with the English language, seemed to make literature a living thing, and to realise the conception of his first great book-to strip from humanity all that the tailor has done for it, and to let us

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