Dyspepsia is to be traced in every page,
and now and then fills the page. One may include among the lessons
of his life--even though that life stretch'd to amazing length--how
behind the tally of genius and morals stands the stomach, and gives a
sort of casting vote.
Two conflicting agonistic elements seem to have contended in the
man, sometimes pulling him different ways like wild horses. He was a
cautious, conservative Scotchman, fully aware what a foetid gas-bag
much of modern radicalism is; but then his great heart demanded
reform, demanded change--often terribly at odds with his scornful
brain. No author ever put so much wailing and despair into his books,
sometimes palpable, oftener latent. He reminds me of that passage in
Young's poems where as death presses closer and closer for his prey,
the soul rushes hither and thither, appealing, shrieking, berating, to
escape the general doom.
Of short-comings, even positive blur-spots, from an American point of
view, he had serious share.
Not for his merely literary merit, (though that was great)--not as
"maker of books," but as launching into the self-complacent atmosphere
of our days a rasping, questioning, dislocating agitation and shock,
is Carlyle's final value. It is time the English-speaking peoples had
some true idea about the verteber of genius, namely power. As if they
must always have it cut and bias'd to the fashion, like a lady's
cloak! What a needed service he performs! How he shakes our
comfortable reading circles with a touch of the old Hebraic anger and
prophecy--and indeed it is just the same.
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