The Philosophy of Carlyle (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Philosophy of Carlyle

Boswellism has its place in the case of a man like Carlyle properly a very great place. So far as the flood of personalities and trivialities in his case has been excessive, he provoked it himself, it will be said, by Remim'seenees. What is to be said of these Reminiscence: First, that they' are no true revelation of Carlyle at all to him who does not al ready know Carlyle and know where to place them. We do not, as has been said, reveal a man when we give to the public what his deliberate judgment would have withheld. To print, as the poor fee ble hand left them on the very morrow of the shock which appears for the time to have enfeebled his mind, those incoherent jottings, with their tangled parentheses and their incessant repetitions, seems to us the same kind of mistake as to exhibit some sketch by a great master, almost blotted out by his tears. Hid in its portfolio, the sketch was some thing sacred we can imagine those who had a right to gaze on it drawing it forth reverently, and feeling their own eyes moisten at the sight. But hung on the Academy walls, the effect is far otherwise. We, who find it there, can only pass it in mournful si lence, in painful consciousness that it cannot be in terpreted to the casual looker-ou. That these Rem iniscence: were written in the most inconsiderate manner, in a day of grief, when the mind was sick.

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