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86 CARLYLE'S LOVES AND LETTERS
was to give Jane the splendour of his name,
seem rather to demand prompt satisfaction for
the insult paid him in our first paragraph ?
There we said, or implied, that he was obsolescent
; and it is, perhaps, worth pausing
to inquire how a man who seemed to his own
age one of the great teachers and spiritual
masters of humanity the peer of Pythagoras
and Buddha, of Plato, Epictetus, St. Francis
and Rousseau comes in this generation to be
held a little higher than Emerson, a good deal
lower than Matthew Arnold, immeasurably so
than Renan. And is it not worth pausing
again to reflect that, contemporaneously with
these men, and almost unknown to Western
Europe, lived one who bids fair to produce a
greater effect on the world than has been
produced by any teacher since the crucifixion ?
It was primarily as a teacher, as a disseminator
of ideas, that Carlyle appeared
venerable to his own age ; in a less degree
admired him as an historian and an artist.
they
To-day, his ideas are as musty
as those of
Godwin a better exponent of deeper speculations
: as an historian in spite of an
undeniable gift for visualizing and describing
scenes from the past he is hardly of more
consequence than Creighton or Stanhope :
while, as an artist, he ranks with such faded
rhetoricians as Chateaubriand.