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The book has met with great favor, whereat I am much pleased, as you must be. Yes, Carlyle's "Reminiscences" must be admired; but it will take all the sweets about his wife to neutralize his
But the deductions drawn from his philosophy lead to absurdity, and are an insult to the understanding of the world. It was about this time, on the conclusion of the "Cromwell," when he was on the summit of his literary fame, and the world began to shower its favors upon him, that Carlyle's days were saddened by a domestic trouble which gave him inexpressible solicitude and grief.
"How much a year, George? How much a year? I suppose you must respect Carlyle! Well, you take Carlyle's test solvency. That shows the ones it really wants. There's a justice in these big things, George, over and above the apparent injustice. I tell you it wants trade. It's Trade that makes the world go round! Argosies! Venice! Empire!" My uncle suddenly rose to his feet.
It is curious to observe how at this early period of Carlyle's life, when all the talent and learning of England bowed at these levees before the gigantic speculator and dreamer, he, perhaps alone, stood aloof from the motley throng of worshippers, with them, but not of them, coolly analyzing every sentence delivered by the oracle, and sufficiently learned in the divine lore to separate the gold from the dross.
They are generally rather forcible and not very dignified words, for Carlyle's writings were critical of almost everything and everybody, and he seemed to love rather ugly words, which made the faults he described seem contemptible or ridiculous.
He admirably illustrates in a negative way Carlyle's striking statement that "never wise head yet was without warm heart," and he throws light on the profoundness of Saint Paul's meaning when he said, "Love is...never conceited...but has full sympathy with truth." Without an abundance of affection a man is self-centered, a selfish aristocrat.
This being the case, I ask, as a mere layman, what right has the Bible to usurp the title of "the word of God"? What evidence can be sharked up to show that it is any more a holy or an inspired book than any book of Thomas Carlyle's, or John Ruskin's, or William Morris'? What evidence is forthcoming that the Bible is true?
When he said farewell, she never answered but looked out straight before her with a stony look. "What time, my lady?" inquired the footman, as he alighted at Mrs. Jefferson's. "Early. Half-past nine." A little before eight o'clock, Richard Hare, in his smock-frock and his slouching hat and his false whiskers, rang dubiously at the outer door of Mr. Carlyle's office.
Carlyle's teaching tends altogether in this direction; and whilst he belongs to no church and no creed, he is tolerant of all, and of everything that is heartily and unfeignedly believed in by his fellows. He is no Catholic; and yet for years he read little else than the forty volumes of the "Acta Sanctorum," and found, he says, all Christian history there, and much of profane history.
Had prayers found place in the pagan rituals of her soul she would have asked of life only to be unmolested for a while, lazily acquiescent to the ready, naif flow of Carlyle's ideas, his vivid boyish imagination, and the vein of monomania that seemed to run crosswise through his temperament and colored his every action.
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