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tive, undeveloping, and mainly injurious. Happily, he could not do such harm in other directions where he taught as ill. He helped to promote the most unworthy feeling in England in regard to the American Civil War; but he could not perpetuate it; and, after making himself pitiable in the eyes of all wise men by his folly, he in some measure repented bim of his grievous error, and even sought in a somewhat pathetic manner to make amends, by his gift of books to Harvard University. Let us hope that that seed of right feeling which he sowed among his tares of political teaching in his own country is here in a deeper sense to-day making amends for what he did in trampling down good grain of other men's sowing. In his latter years he bitterly declared that while men paid him honour they in no way believed or obeyed his teaching ; ? just as Mr. Ruskin has protested since. It is well that it is so, as regards his view of right method. His school, fortunately, remains impotent as regards the direction of national action; fortunately, I say, because, apart from Mr. Ruskin's valuable gleams of practical insight, the school goes from bad to worse. It was at its best, perhaps, in Kingsley, who, though ready with the others to extol to the skies the action of Governor Eyre in Jamaica, retained enough of wholesome manhood and democratism to rejoice in such a book as Mill's “Liberty," and to avow that the reading of it made him a better man on the spota this when his master was anathematising it. But Kingsley's influence for good was half undone by his hysteria and his sentimentalism, which are poison to science; and it is matter for thankfulness that Mr. Froude, in whom the same qualities are becoming more aggressive in each new book he produces, is rapidly destroying his influence for harm. When one contemplates his thinly-veiled Chauvinisrn, his facile and purposeless rhetoric, his destitution of sincere political insight, one wonders what

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Carlyle would have said of it if he could have lived thus long, even with his faculties withered. I have heard a story-possibly fictitious—of how the prophet once dismissed a popular novelist who went to him for sympathy. “Let me tell ye,” the sage is said to have shouted over the bannisters to his retreating visitor, "ye're gangin' straight to the devil, and ye're gangin' by the verra vulgarest road !” To Mr. Froude, following up " Oceana with “ The Two Chiefs of Dunboy," and that finally with a “Life of Beaconsfield," that monition to-day would not be inapt.

XV.

It is somewhat singular to find, in this connection, that the biography of the pupil and admirer has been a means of bringing the master into extensive discredit. Of course that was in a minor measure to be expected. No man of high literary and moral standing ever had his life told in full detail without falling somewhat from the level to which public hero-worship had raised him. Dị. Johnson must so have fallen in the eyes of the outside public, which had revered the moralist, when they read the details of Boswell; Scott certainly suffered in the same way, so that men accused Lockhart of malice against his father-in-law ;? George Eliot has so suffered in the eyes of some of us; and Carlyle of all men was bound to illustrate the tendency. So many readers had loosely read him, and vaguely reverenced him, that the sharp outlines of his every-day personality, when revealed with any degree of candour-and Mr. Froude has been laudably candid on these points-must needs create an extensive searching of hearts. His admirers say this feeling will pass away, and that he will be replaced on his old pedestal. I hope and believe he will not. I cannot conceive that his confused and rudely prejudiced teachings in the mass will ever again seem to educated people the utterances of a wise and profound thinker, whether in ethics, in politics, or in philosophy. But what may profitably happen is that, while

See Carlyle's Essay on Scott, beginning.

his flagrant errors become more and more palpable to all, his one or two vital and clear perceptions of truth may stand out, purified from their dross, to sympathetic eyes. Whatever he practised, he preached sincerity, honesty, and earnestness in all things; and in the conduct of national life he insisted vehemently on the impossibility of the common weal prospering while its entire industry is carried on by the mere random lights of competing individual interests. That principle we shall carry with us throughout our present inquiry. Taken singly, indeed, it can do little. Again and again we shall have occasion to repeat that an instinct, an aspiration, will never solve the problems of society without a thorough science of them. Hysterical people are now telling us that they are going to be solved by the action of the Salvation Army, an institution resting on hallucination, and flourishing on unintelligence and superstition. That will not come about. Hallucination never did and never will save a State; and it is enough to remind rational people that this phenomenon is really the measure of the special intellectual backwardness of England, is peculiar to England, and is regarded with wondering contempt by Continental peoples. The fact that Carlyle-worshippers now connect it with the name of Carlyle, 7 points to a new development of Nemesis in that direction.

Finally, as to the man Carlyle, I for one will not refuse to anticipate a relaxation among posterity of the kind of critical rigour I have been employing against him. For that rigour I have no apologies to make: it seems to me fully justified by the facts; and it is amply invited by his own more than rigour towards everything he disliked or dissented from But it will be the measure of the progress and prosperity of future generations, how far they are able to look tranquilly back on Carlyle's errors, and pityingly see in them finger-posts to dangerous places in the past march of humanity, places where blinded men painfully stumbled and fell. Nay, even now, even in the act of rigorous judgment, we can avoid ill-will, profiting by his own example, His worst error was to cherish a host of blind repulsions, so that

at length he came to speak as if the universe were a mere medley of forces of evil. Let us above all things shun the darkness into which he fell. We are even now just beginning, as a nation, to acknowledge the central truth on which he insisted, that our affairs will never go aright if we proceed on the principle of each for himself, with an ever vaster stratum of misery and an ever wider area of dwarfed life, a mere spurious semblance of civilisation. At such a time it is fitting that, in the act of scanning narrowly the counsels of all who offer guidance, we should deny none the credit of having at least seen that the road ahead lay among precipices and morasses, in which of old whole nations have sunk, and nations may sink again.

To pass from the presence of Carlyle to that of Mill is to turn from a stormy and sinister to a serene and humane spirit, whose traits are the more winning and welcome from the contrast. The difference might be loosely expressed by the figure of two landscapes: one, say, that of a rugged and volcanic land, lit by the fitful flame of recurrent eruptions, in whose blaze at times hill and valley are lit up with an unearthy clearness, so that close at hand in the ancient lava you see the serpent crawl; while the vista, picked out in distances by peaks of fire, is the more menacing and oppressive. The other picture is, let us say, of a sunlit land on a morning towards the end of winter, ere spring has come.

The trees, stirred by no wind, stand out leafless but graceful in the pure daylight; and though clouds veil some of the farther mountain tops, the vistas are clear and fair ; while in the cool benignant air there is an unspeakable promise of warmth and life to come. But all figures are confessions of imperfect conception, and to many an eye the two landscapes of our fancy, seen under changed skies, will look strangely different.

What all will admit is that these two thinkers represent a profound temperamental difference, affecting all their ways of thinking and by consequence all their conclusions, so that, though both dubbed heretical, and though their ideals at one point almost coincided, they are almost more disparate than any conventionally opposed types, such as Radical and Tory, poet and scientist, or Catholic and Atheist. But it is important to remember that when they first came together as young men they attracted and liked each other; and it is interesting to note how they both come of northern stocks, different and yet both characteristically Scotch. James Mill is as recognisable a northern type--though I suspect