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"four walls" they would begin a calmer life. Fortunately, Mrs. Carlyle, whose shrewd practical instinct was never at fault, saw through the fallacy, and set herself resolutely against the scheme. Scotland had lost much of its charm for her a year later she refused an invitation from Mrs. Aitken, saying, "I could do nothing at Scotsbrig or Dumfries but cry from morning to night." She herself had enough of the Hill of the Hawks, and she knew that within a year Carlyle would again be calling it the Devil's Den and lamenting Cheyne Row. He gave way with the protest, "I cannot deliberately mean anything that is harmful to you," and certainly it was well for him.

There is no record of an original writer or artist coming from the north of our island to make his mark in the south, succeeding, and then retracing his steps. Had Carlyle done so, he would probably have passed from the growing recognition of a society he was beginning to find on the whole congenial, to the solitude of intellectual ostracism. Scotland may be breezy, but it is not conspicuously free. Erratic opinions, when duly veiled, are generally allowed; but this concession is of little worth. On the tolerance of those who have no strong belief in anything, Carlyle, thinking possibly of rose-water Hunt and the litterateurs of his tribe, expressed himself with incisive and memorable truth: "It is but doubt and indifference. Touch the thing they do believe and value, their own selfconceit: they are rattlesnakes then." Tolerance for the frank expression of views which clash with the sincere or professed faith of the majority is rare everywhere; in Scotland rarest. Episcopalians, high and broad, were content to condone the grim Calvinism that still infiltrated

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1 The italics are Mr. Froude's.

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Carlyle's thoughts, and to smile, at worst, at his idolatry of the iconoclast who said, "the idolater shall die the death." But the reproach of "Pantheism was for long fatal to his reception across the Tweed.

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Towards the close of this period he acknowledged that London was "among improper places" the best for "writing books, after all the one use of living" for him; its inhabitants "greatly the best " he “had ever walked with," and its aristocracy-the Marshalls, Stanleys, Hollands, Russells, Ashburtons, Lansdownes, who held by him through life-its "choicest specimens." Other friendships equally valued he made among the leading authors of the age. Tennyson sought his company, and Connop Thirlwall. Arnold of Rugby wrote in commendation of the French Revolution and of Chartism. Thackeray admired and reviewed him well. Even in Macaulay, condemned to limbo under the suspicion of having reviewed him ill, he found, when the suspicion was proved unjust, a promise of better things. As early as 1839 Sterling had written an article in the Westminster, which gave him intense pleasure; for while contemning it in almost the same words as Byron did, he loved praise equally well. In 1840 he had crossed the Rubicon that lies between aspiration and attainment. The populace might be blind or dumb, the "rattlesnakes "—the irresponsible indolent reviewers," who, from behind a hedge pelt every wrestler till they found societies for the victor might still obscurely hiss; but Carlyle was at length safe by the verdict of the "Conscript Fathers."

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CHAPTER V.

CHEYNE ROW.

[1842-1853.]

THE bold venture of coming to London with a lean purse, few friends, and little fame had succeeded: but it had been a terrible risk, and the struggle had left scars behind it. To this period of his life we may apply Carlyle's words— made use of by himself at a later date-"The battle was over and we were sore wounded." It is as a maimed knight of modern chivalry, who sounded the reveille for an onslaught on the citadels of sham, rather than as a prophet of the future that his name is likely to endure in the history of English thought. He has also a place with Scott amongst the recreators of bygone ages, but he regarded their annals less as pictures than as lesson-books. His aim was that expressed by Tennyson to "steal fire from fountains of the past," but his design was to admonish rather than "to glorify the present." This is the avowed object of the second of his distinctly political works, which, fol lowing on the track of the first, Chartism, and written in a similar spirit, takes higher artistic rank. Past and Present, suggested by a visit to the almshouse of St. Ives and reading the chronicle of Jocelin de Brakelond, was undertaken as a duty, while he was mainly engaged on a greater work, the duty he felt laid upon him to say something that should bear directly on the welfare of the peoG

ple, especially of the poor around him. It was an impulse similar to that which inspired Oliver Twist, but Carlyle's remedies were widely different from those of Dickens. Not merely more kindness and sympathy but paternal government, supplying work to the idle inmates of the workhouse, and insisting by force if need be on it being done, was his panacea. It had been Abbot Samson's way in his strong government of the Monastery of St. Edmunds, and he resolved, half in parable, half in plain sermon, to recommend it to the Ministers Peel and Russell.

In this mood the book was written off in the first seven weeks of 1843, a tour de force comparable to Johnson's writing of Rasselas, and published in April. It at once made a mark by the opposition as well as by the approval it excited. Criticism of the work-of its excellences, which are acknowledged, and its defects as manifold-belongs to a review of the author's political philosophy: it is enough here to note that it was remarkable in three ways. First, the object of its main attack, laissez faire, being a definite one, it was capable of having and had some practical effect. Mr. Froude exaggerates when he says that Carlyle killed the pseudo-science of orthodox political economy; for the fundamental truths in the works of Turgot, Smith, Ricardo, and Mill cannot be killed: but he pointed out that, like Aristotle's leaden rule, the laws of supply and demand must be made to bend; as Mathematics made mechanical must allow for friction, so must Economics leave us a little room for charity. There is ground to believe that the famous Factory Acts owed some of their suggestions to Past and Present. Carlyle always speaks respectfully of the future Lord Shaftesbury. "I heard Milnes saying," notes the Lady Sneerwell of real life, "at the Shuttleworths that Lord Ashley was the greatest man

alive he was the only man that Carlyle praised in his book. I dare say he knew I was overhearing him." But, while supplying arguments and a stimulus to philanthropists, his protests against philanthropy as an adequate solution of the problem of human misery became more pronounced. About the date of the conception of this book we find in the Journal:

Again and again of late I ask myself in whispers, is it the duty of a citizen to paint mere heroisms. . . . Live to make others happy! Yes, surely, at all times, so far as you can. But at bottom that is not the aim of my life. it is mere hypocrisy to call it such, as is continually done nowadays. . . . Avoid cant. Do not think that your life means a mere searching in gutters for fallen figures to wipe and set up.

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Past and Present, in the second place, is notable as the only considerable consecutive book—unless we also except the Life of Sterling-which the author wrote without the accompaniment of wrestlings, agonies, and disgusts. Thirdly, though marking a stage in his mental progress, the fusion of the refrains of Chartism and Hero - Worship, and his first clear breach with Mazzini and with Mill, the book was written as an interlude, when he was in severe travail with his greatest contribution to English history. The last rebuff which Carlyle encountered came, by curious accident, from the Westminster, to which Mill had engaged him to contribute an article on Oliver Cromwell." While this was in preparation, Mill had to leave the country on account of his health, and gave the review in charge of an Aberdonian called Robertson, who wrote to stop the progress of the essay with the message that he had decided to undertake the subject himself. Carlyle was angry; but, instead of sullenly throwing the MS.

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