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90 CARLYLE'S LOVES AND LETTERS
or Peguy or Plato himself to break the head
of Anatole France or Bertrand Russell, but
he will not trouble Carlyle. And besides
finding him empty, the new age is quite aware
of his
positive
defects. It cannot away
with his peasant morality moralizing rather
his provincialism, and the grossness of his
method. From the beginning to the end of
his works there is neither pure thought nor
pure feeling nothing but a point of view
which is now perceived to be ridiculously
plebeian. Nevertheless, Carlyle had one
positive gift that the younger generation is
perhaps not very well qualified to appreciate,
he was an extraordinarily capable man of
letters. His footnotes, for instance, might
serve as models ; he had a prodigious talent
for picking out just those bits of by-information
that will amuse and interest a reader and
send him back to the text with renewed
attention. His editing of Mrs. Carlyle's letters
letters which come not within our terms of
reference and from which, therefore, we cannot
decently quote is remarkable : only, even
here, his intolerable virtue and vanity, his
callous self-content, his miserable, misplaced
self-pity and his nauseous sentimentality
parade themselves on almost every page.
For all his " Oh heavenses," " courageous
little souls," and " ay de mis," he never once