moment do him; adding, moreover, that the office of diffusing great transcendental generalities regarding truth and justice through the sentiment of a people, was in itself a higher one than that of initiating specific social remedies or modes of palliation, and also that they believed that even in this latter respect, Mr. Carlyle had more sense and sagacity than he usually got credit for. As vigorously as the adversaries of Mr. Carlyle plied their criticisms, so vigorously did his admirers ply these responses. Still, however, in review-articles and at dinner-tables, the criticisms reappeared. "His style is 'orrible; he is a very disagreeable writa'," said Mr. A.; "A mere Richter in kilts," insinuated B.; "I wish he would tell us what he would have us do," said all the rest of the alphabet. And so the controversy went gaily on.

The publication of the Latter-Day Pamphlets has brought the controversy to a crisis. Never before, probably, was there a publication so.provocative of rage, hatred, and personal malevolence. Whatever amount of antipathy to Mr. Carlyle previously existed throughout the reading community, has been by this concentrated and brought out into explicit manifestation. Simultaneously over the whole kingdom the scattered elements of dislike have mustered themselves; so that nearly the whole force of the critical demonstration that has been made apropos of the author's reappearance in the field of literature, has been on the part of the reaction. In all circles, and on the most various occasions, there have been outbreaks of a spirit of resistance to him amounting almost to malignity. Lord John Russell in the House of Commons takes a highly elaborated revenge for certain impolite allusions to him in the Pamphlets, by incidentally referring to their author as "a clever but whimsical writer." With a similar affectation of condescending unconcern to cover what is in reality the most intense bitterness of feeling, some critics write as if they would have it believed they thought of the author only as a poor driveller that all persons of sense had long ceased to listen to. Others, again, more honestly, assail and vituperate him with the whole force of their undisguised abhorrence. The correspondent of one American newspaper coolly accounts to the Transatlantic public for the "insane" tone of the Pamphlets by the information that "Thomas is believed to have recently taken to whiskey." We have ourselves heard him cursed by name in open society; and were it possible to accumulate in some distinct and visible shape all the imprecations and other expressions of rage and ill-will that the pamphlets have elicited, we fancy the display would be something fearful. In short, at the present moment, Mr. Carlyle is unpopular with at least one half of the kingdom.

Reception of the Pamphlets.

7

Now, this is no doubt partly the mere determination upon this new publication of the feelings already existing against the author. All Mr. Carlyle's previous offences, or supposed offences, against the literary canons of taste and opinion, have been here boldly repeated by him; and, as a criminal is visited with severer punishment in proportion to the number of convictions already registered against him, so the critical public has deemed it right to come down, on this occasion, with a heavier exhibition of critical resentment. Accordingly, all the old criticisms upon Mr. Carlyle's manner of writing have been this year abundantly reiterated. Punch, for example, amongst others, takes up the wearisome topic of his style; and, in a mood alarmingly serious for so comic an organ, takes the trouble to read Mr. Carlyle a lecture on style, by showing him one of his own sentences translated into decent English-a sad blunder, as everybody thought at the time, for the shrewd little periodical to have committed, seeing that the "decent English" occupied in Punch's own columns nearly twice the length of the "piece of jargon" it was meant to supersede. And, along with this renewed outcry against the barbarism of the author's style, have been revived hints of his intellectual indebtedness to those convenient creditors, the dead old gentlemen of Weimar, and revived complaints of his want of practicality and constructive precision.

But there are deeper reasons for the formidable display of animosity with which the Pamphlets have been greeted. The Pamphlets contain in themselves matter more irritating and blistering than any of the author's previous writings. They come more directly into conflict with prevailing sentiments, parties, and interests; and are, in fact, a more explicit assertion than the author had before made, that he detaches himself from the devotees of pure and pleasurable literature, and regards himself as a social agent or recognised force in the country, charged with a special commission and special responsibilities. He has here, as it were, completed his career of respect for his fellow-men; parted with the last shred of his care for their approbation; reached the pulpit, where it is the condemnation of his own soul if he does not speak out, even if they stone him; and determined with himself that whatever may have been his method hitherto, now it his function most emphatically to "make a row about things." And certainly he has done so. If we may judge of others from ourselves, we should say that there can hardly have been an individual reader of these Pamphlets endowed with the least sensitiveness or the least tendency to try whether the that is offered fits him, that has not felt himself aggrieved, wounded, and thrown into a state of dudgeon by much that he

there read. We have heard of people rising from their seats and marching out of church, because, either from the extreme searchingness of the sermon, or from the paucity of the audience, they had an uneasy sense that the preacher was getting personal. Something similar, we should think, must have been the effect of certain passages in these Discourses upon the minds of individual readers. At one time, the reader being in a blunt, untender, and self-conceited frame of mind, the effect of some such passage might be "Psha! mere ethical sound and clamour!" while there would remain, after all, a kind of sullen sense of having been insulted; at another time, the mind being in a better and more docile condition, there would follow, from the same passage, all the nervous deliquescence of a conscience touched to its depths, and a paroxysm of self-reproach giving vent to such ejaculations as this-"What a wretch I am; and how much more nobly this man feels than I do!" Precisely so also in those cases where the matter involved might not be pertinent to the character or mental shortcomings of the reader as an individual, but to his social relations and the antecedents of his public career. In these Pamphlets, for example, not only is there a blow in the face all round for Democracy, Aristocracy, Monarchy, Political Economy, Protectionism, Mammon-worship, and such other recognised interests and social entities as have already been more or less accustomed to be girded at; but other interests and entities that thought themselves safe and consecrated from attack by the high guardianship of universal opinion, have found themselves ridiculed and made a mock of. The "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question," published by Mr. Carlyle anonymously in Fraser's Magazine for December 1849, was a sort of forewarning to the public of what they were to expect from him should he come forward to treat habitually of such subjects. Even the horror of that paper, however, was outdone by certain of the pamphlets. One remembers yet the simultaneous cry of "shame" which was elicited by a passage in the first of them where he spoke of first admonishing, then flogging, and finally shooting paupers if they would not work; and the yet louder cry which greeted him in the second, where he spoke of sweeping criminals into the dust-bin, tumbling them and their concerns over London Bridge, and so getting rid of them.

In considering this extremely unpopular reception which the Latter-Day Pamphlets have met with, not in all, certainly, but in many quarters, one thing surely seems pretty clear; to wit-that nobody knew better that the outburst was coming than the author did himself. Whatever unpopularity has been or may yet be the consequence of these Pamphlets, the author has knowingly,

Popularity, how far valuable.

9

resolutely, and deliberately braved it. And here lies one of the characteristic differences between his procedure as a social agent by means of the pen, and the procedure of such as are devotees of pure literature. Much as neglected authors and artists console themselves now-a-days by talking, after Wordsworth, about the necessary unpopularity of all great works, and the propriety of writing or painting only for the few, it is certainly a maxim, approved by the profoundest investigation into human nature, that all works of art ought to desire popularity-i.e., the immediate satisfaction of those that have mastered on each specific occasion the mere essential technick; and also, that the greatest works of art do infallibly obtain it. Hence desire to please is so far a fair literary instinct. Watch the author or authoress of a first poem or novel. What eagerness there is to see all the reviews; what fluttering anxiety till the Athenæum or other leader among the critical periodicals comes out; what manoeuvring, indirectly, to ascertain what you in particular think of the book, and what all your friends, and especially Magnus Apollo, privately said to you about it! And how many persons are there, that, even after their apprenticeship to literature or to art is over, can honestly say that this feeling has quite left them? Raphael must have liked to hear his pictures praised; nor was the approbation of the German public indifferent even to the octogenarian Goethe. But, though the artist or practitioner of pure literature may so far make a merit of popularity, it is highly different with the moral teacher, or agent of great social changes. Popularity may, indeed, happen to flow from the exertions of such a man; but, to himself, this popularity should exist not as a reward or incentive testifying to the intrinsic fitness or excellence of what he has done; but rather as a means of deciding what proportion of society he has already impregnated, or at least superficially moved in the direction of his own spirit, and how much yet remains to be invaded and brought into subjection. In certain cases, indeed, as where a man charged with a reforming doctrine appears in the midst of a sensual and embruted community, it might even be proper to lay it down as a maxim, that he cannot honestly or efficiently accomplish his office without the production, in the first instance, of pain and anger at every step he takes. It was pedantic in Phocion, but by no means a mere antique attempt at a bon mot, when, hearing the people cheer him as he spoke, he turned round on the hustings to the Greek gentleman that held his hat, and asked whether he had said anything more than usually stupid. When the soldiers of Cortez knocked down the idols of the Mexicans and white-washed the bloody walls of their temples, they did not expect native applause; but had they set up a theatre, and acted

Spanish dramas instead, it would have been right for them to look for it. When Mahomet began his reform in Mecca, he did not send out on Saturday morning for the Mecca Weekly Gazette, to see whether there was a favourable notice in it of his last blast against unbelief and Polytheism; but we will not say that, so long as he was but a poet, even he may not have been guilty of that pardonable weakness of authorship, in relation, suppose, to some copy of verses on the death of a favourite camel. Now, seeing that it is as a preacher of unpleasant doctrine, on a scale not so large, perhaps, as that of Mahomet, but certainly larger than that of Phocion, that Mr. Carlyle must in his own heart regard himself, (whether he is right in the supposition is another question); seeing, in short, that if ever he professed to be a practitioner of pure literature, he has long practically thrown aside that character, or merged it in another,—it ought not, we think, to be a matter of surprise, if he is rather inattentive to contemporary criticism, and if he does not, like the judicious dramatic author after the first performance of a new piece, bow to the popular decision, and hasten to cut out the passages that have been hissed. We should not imagine, for example, that, as he wrote the tract on Model Prisons, he expected it would bring him in a great deal of praise; nor, accordingly should we suppose that he was much disappointed at not getting it. Or, to speak more plainly, there is not, we should infer from all the evidence we can get, a single man connected with the literature of this country, more thoroughly insensible than Mr. Carlyle to the mere titillation of critical opinion. In this respect, we are disposed to believe, he reaches an absolutely heroic standard, the contemplation of which might shame many Much as it might vex some of his critics to be told so, he, we verily believe, does not send out for the Mecca Gazette, nor care one atom what it says for or against him. Sad, earnest, and great at least in superiority to this littleness, the roar of London notoriety passes, we have been told, totally unheeded around this tenacem propositi virum (we leave the justum still in dispute) walking in his garden at Chelsea.

of us.

And yet, were mere literary reputation his object, he ought in justice to have an accession of it on this occasion. For, though it is chiefly in the matter of the pamphlets that their merit or demerit lies, so that, if the public come to a hostile decision with regard to that, they cannot be expected to be very warm in their praises of them with respect to anything else, yet, in point of literary execution, there is certainly much in them, that, with all our previous experience of the author's astonishing powers, might fairly command our highest admiration. One fault may indeed be charged against them, as artistic productions-the