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Carlyle's chief and just glories is, that for more than forty years he has clearly seen, and kept constantly and conspicuously in his own sight and that of his readers, the profoundly important crisis in the midst of which we are living.
We learnt to perceive that though much in the thought and the lives of the literary precursors of the Revolution laid them fairly open to Carlyle's banter, yet banter was not all, and even grave condemnation was not all.
It strikes perhaps the first note of Carlyle's lifelong war against "Dryasdust". But it contains at least two other points on which it is well for us to pause. The first is the inseparable bond which Carlyle saw to exist between the poetry of a nation and its history; the connection which inevitably follows from the fact that both one and the other are the expression of its character.
Robert Browning's shorter poems are best for the beginner, who should read Rabbi Ben Ezra, Abt Vogler, Home Thoughts from Abroad, Prospice, Saul, The Pied Piper of Hamelin. This should be studied only after a previous acquaintance with his shorter poems. Define Browning's creed as found in Rabbi Ben Ezra. Is he an ethical teacher? Is there any similarity between his teaching and Carlyle's?
Their last glimpse of this best friend of earlier days was in October 1834, when he came on horseback to the door of their new home, and left with the benediction to his lost Jane, "You have made a little Paradise around you." He died in Glasgow in December of the same year, and his memory is pathetically embalmed in Carlyle's threnody.
She read, one after another, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, George Sand's Consuelo, Madame de Stael's Corinne, then Frances Wright's A Few Days in Athens and Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë, making notes in her diary of passages she particularly liked.
The historic position also of every writer is an indispensable key to many things in his teaching. We have to remember in Mr. Carlyle's case, that he was born in the memorable year when the French Revolution, in its narrower sense, was closed by the Whiff of Grape-shot, and when the great century of emancipation and illumination was ending darkly in battles and confusion.
We draw attention to this particular error of Carlyle's because we think that it is a curious example of the waste and unclean places into which that remarkable animal, "the whole hog," more than once led him. In this respect Carlyle has had unquestionably long and an unquestionably bad influence.
'Being, he entered upon the tale, 'once introduced to Carlyle's company, I think by Sir Richard Owen, it was my delight, during any spell in London, to visit him at Chelsea. Perhaps, as the matter has been long under review, I may remark that, to an outsider, no want of harmony was apparent, in the relations between Carlyle and his wife.
He hears of men who swayed the destinies of Europe, who taught society by outraging her conventions, whose morality even was reached sometimes by scorn of the peccadilloes which condemn the ordinary man. Every man has in him in some degree the hero worshipper, and gets inflamed somewhat by reading Carlyle's Frederick the Great. Of course, this popular sense can not be wholly wrong.
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