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CARLYLE'S LOVES AND LETTERS 89
with its application to contemporary life will
not do. Darwin and Swinburne, therefore,
the greatest of the English Victorians, were
not eligible ; but the age chose Carlyle
for its select preacher when it might have
had Mill. Naturally it preferred his coloured
rhetoric and warm sentimentality to Mill's
cold reason and white-hot emotion. It chose
him because he was what Mill was not a
Carlyle. Yet, though
Utilitarianism is dis-
credited, Mill remains the candour and
;
subtlety of his intellect impress us still, and
his Autobiography will seem to future generations
one of the most moving documents of
the nineteenth century.
"
As for Carlyle, nobody marks him " we
;
only wonder that he will still be talking.
The old controversy between those who wish
to believe the truth and those who insist
that what they wish to believe is true raves
on ; but neither side dreams of briefing the
Chelsea sage. His vatic eloquence carries no
conviction. Men and women of the younger
generation, whatever their views, find no
support in him, because he appeals to axioms
and postulates which to them seem unreal.
It is not that his arguments are old-fashioned,
but that they are based on nothing and apply
to nothing. A modern emotionalist may call
in Tolstoy or Bergson or Berkley or Leon Bloy