the reader, who indeed needs a glossary for their comprehension. But they are voluntary accidents of his style, and become mannerisms for which he displayed an increasing fondness. His underlying spontaneity, of which he had a stock proportioned to his enormous energy, often showed, accordingly, a surface of pure affectation. His humor, thus, serves to betray the lack of genuineness in his style, and to bring out more clearly its lack of artistic sincerity. It bears all the marks of conscious elaboration. Original it undoubtedly is. It has no prototype even. But its originality is invented rather than native. Froude says quite truly that he had to make his own audience out of a public at first perplexed and repelled by it. It was deliberately assumed, as its post-dating the correctness of his earlier manner, the manner of the "Life of Schiller," shows. And not improbably it was assumed for effect, as the phrase is, designed, that is to say, to arrest attention rather than to win adhesion for the substance it clothed. He was for years casting about to "do something" that should show his powers and give him his predestined place. The something" proved to be his style. "Sartor" less fantastically habited, would have appeared less singular; it would have appeared as it does now to readers long accustomed to its eccentricities, not so very extraordinary after all. Its style was its Byronic collar, so to say. Oddity was in the air in those days. The outward and visible signs of transcendentalism were quite as striking as its inward sanction. Carlyle eluded its superficialities and concentrated his fantasticality upon something more vital. He had awaked many mornings without finding himself famous. The long delay made it increasingly desirable that he should "burst upon the world" in some way. He did so in his style, which served the purpose-his more or less conscious purpose-perfectly. Artistically sincere it cannot, at any rate, be called, whatever its origin. It is too patently perverse. But it is extremely personal, and as Carlyle developed it, it came to be an admirable instrument of pure expression, its excesses and eccentricities matching the perversities of his mind and giving him a freedom which, however dis advantageous in other respects, enabled him to say effectively whatever he wished to say. They grew together, perhaps, with mutual concessions, until he reached the ability to pour it forth extempore with an ease of effluence rivalling the song of a bird, the natural gush of a fountain, and yet always with such idiosyncrasy as sometimes to borrow from it character for very commonplace substance. No writer has ever achieved such distinction in singularizing ineptitude by the piquancy of his style. It came to vary directly with the varying temper that vibrated around the course of his most constant thinking. It is the vivid and elastic medium of his gravity, his irony, his deep earnestness, his triviality, his vehemence, his sportiveness, because it follows closely his every impulse and never checks nor constricts his utterance by the suggestion of conformity to any consistency of its own. It certainly had consistency. So marked a style must indeed run into mannerism and monotony. But its consistency is the mere reflection of Carlyle's emotional state. When he glows it is vivid, when he nods it is dull with an ashen dulness. The moment his energy flags it becomes mechanical; its elasticity "sets"; its artificial side becomes evident. But certainly at its best, that is to say at his best, it is superb in the transparency with which it discloses the energetic working of a powerful mind under the stress of strong emotion. It interposes no veil between the writer and his readers. It is wonderfully direct and wonderfully plastic. It is vital rather than crystalline because its inspiration is feeling. But it is notably clear. Encrusted with the various extraneities of obscure and recondite allusion dictated by personal caprice and a contemptuous indifference to the comprehension of the reader, the thread of it is always brilliantly plain—like a streak of scarlet through a tangle of green. It is never turgid even in its violences, nor involved even in its fantasticalities. vocabulary is enormous, but never encumbers it. It eschews pedantry with instinctive felicity. Its epithets are complete characterizations. Its very unevenness heightens its color. No conceivable style could better fit the picturesque, and in the external world it is the picturesque that absorbs Carlyle, as the moral does in the Its spiritual. The world, considered purely VIII not have apologized for his painstaking And "THE moral life of man," says Froude, in one of those sentences that tend to make literature of his writings, "is like the flight of a bird in the air. He is sustained only by effort, and when he ceases to exert himself he falls." Carlyle's supreme service to his generation is to have stimulated and strengthened its sustaining moral There remain in the way of formal serenergy. Except his notable rehabilita- vice to his time his slight and suggestive tion of the Puritans and Cromwell--a very rather than systematic advocacy of eminotable exception, it is true, yet after all gration and education as remedies for not only strictly cognate to his work as a English ills and his introduction to the moralist, but strictly also in a sense an English reading public of German literaacademic excursus of it-little else, I think, ture-of which his treatment, however, can be claimed for him. Of the histories, was notably uncritical. It is outside his French Revolution" is a caricature therefore of his partisan history, his not and a libel, and all the pictorial splendor novel philosophy, his imperfect criticism, of its poetic prose cannot obscure its fun- fonally considered, that the true distincdamental misconceptions. His "Fred-on of Carlyle's writings is to be found. erick" is a piece of Titanic special plead-it is to be found in their moral cogency— ing. Freeman remarked of "The Decline and Fall," that whatever else was read, "Gibbon must be read, too." Conversely, one may say of the Frederick," that whether it is read or not, something else must also be read, and Mr. Tuttle need the moral cogency with which, indeed, his history, philosophy, and criticism are impregnated and, which, rather than their historical, philosophic, or critical merits, constitutes their vital value. A critic of the absence of the practical in his gospel calls him merely "a moral brass band," and contrasts him painfully with philosophers of the concrete usefulness of Bentham and Mill. The figure is hardly just. Morally considered, he had not the rudimentary organization it implies; he was rather a double orchestra. But the meaning is sound. Why, however, moral stimulus should be belittled; why, above all, it should be deemed, of all things in the world, unpractical, is difficult to see. "They were not madmen, but men of business," says Taine, of the Puritans. "The whole difference between them and the men we know is that they had a conscience." It is not the whole difference, but it is in the highest degree a practical one. The view that conceives character rather than institutions as the great force in human affairs, individual as well as social, is as practical as the converse view; it is indeed the view which has mainly determined the crises of English progress, the view from which its vaunted "practical results" have proceeded. To celebrate this view, to enforce it on every occasion, to converge upon its significance the sum of human experiences and the reflections they create, to illustrate it with a wealth of example, to extract its essential dignity and nobility from the crudities with which it is often encumbered, to exhibit it as the one necessary and permanently fruitful consideration for bringing human activity into accord with the harmony that is not human but divine, to exalt it with eloquence and preach it with the ardor of fire, all with a view to the induction in the reader of a distinct spiritual attitude governing his every thought and act, must seem to anyone but a pedant, in strictest computation, the most practical thing in the world. To assert the contrary is equivalent to calling the Levitical code, for example, more practical than the Sermon on the Mount. Discussion of the practicality of Carlyle's preaching is in fact pure verbiage. What is really meant by the denial of it is that in a time of measures he occupied himself with men. His real limitation-and it is, I think, a tragic one—is not the miscalled unpractical nature of his writings, the nature they share with those of perhaps the majority of the writers who have influenced the thought and feeling of the world, but the defective nature of his spiritual ideal. His conception of character is of rectitude plus energy, and it is an imperfect conception. Character is, it is true, the basis of everything persistent and effective in the effort of mankind and what saves it from futility and chaos. But character that is most efficient and most benign is character rounded and complete, its energy tempered with sweetness, its derivative conduct illumined with light, and its various powers expanded in every fruitful direction instead of driven in upon themselves in concentration and constraint. "Were we of open sense as the Greeks were," he says finely of the sailing of the Mayflower, we had found a Poem here." Precisely. Of all our writers he most lacks this " open sense," and his lack of it narrows his spiritual horizon. Beauty lies beyond its bounds-even the beauty of holiness. In his hierarchy of heroes there are no saints. He is temperamentally of the old dispensation. The expansion of the new, under its vitalizing principle of the love which casteth out fear, is quite foreign to him. His references to the Crucified One are perfunctory and mechanical—one would say obligatory rather than spontaneous. He never melts in joyous unison with the fair smile upon the face of Duty, or inhales with the dilutest rapture the fragrance that treads in her footing. His almost unremittent tension does not relax into kindness. His exacting demands are not tempered with tolerance. On the whole we are not altogether here to tolerate: We are here to resist, to control and vanquish withal," he says. One perceives the spirit that animates him. Beside such evidence of it, his occasional eulogy of the "Religion of Sorrow," even, seems a concession to the conventional. Of the four powers into which Matthew Arnold conveniently divided humanizing agencies: the power of intellect and science, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners and the power of conduct," the last only interests him or plays any part in his gospel, which is therefore wholly addressed to the individual. The only concert I can recall of which he speaks well is Knox's theocracy, which also appeals to him as the ideal of a millennium in which all the individual units are right eously disposed. What we know as social the least, a sense of dissatisfaction or of forces were to him quite negligible. He feeling that he is ceasing to count at all admired amenity as little as he possessed and declining into the estate of "the it. He praises the "broad simplicity, rus- beasts that perish." Of himself he can ticity" of the "Norse System" as " so very do nothing. Effort and high resolvedifferent from the light gracefulness of the whether labelled "the grace of God" or old Greek paganism," and argues its sin- "the higher self" is immaterial-are cerity from its rudeness. Sincerity, I needed to dominate the "law of the memthink, is better than grace," he naïvely adds. bers," which operates instinctively along And indeed naïve is the one word to apply the line of least resistance and tends towto some aspects of Carlyle's point of view. ard the greater inclination, and the reHe knew the world profoundly, but he sult of which in the modern world at least viewed it from Ecclefechan; there is no is dissatisfaction and distress. In the such example in literature of inveterate antique world we are apt to think it may perversity. He saw his own principles not have been so. Heine, for example, through the prism of his temperament. And conceived that it was not so, and the no writer ever had so much temperament. tragic result of this belief in his own case It injures his ideal for us and makes it does not refute the many true and searchless attractive. But what is far more grave ing things he said in support of it. "The is that in doing so it weakens the stimulus ideal, cheerful, sensuous, pagan life is not he would otherwise afford to readers who sick or sorry," says Matthew Arnold, writwould otherwise be drawn to those of its ing of Theocritus. Of the real pagan life, elements that are at once noble and in- however, one may find the witness of the dispensable. He imposes it instead of ideal idyllist less illuminating than the making it lovely. To earnest souls-and graver literature from Eschylus to Juvehe can have no other readers-the way nal. And whatever it was, it is over. seems hard enough. Carlyle often recalls Evolution alone has fixed our status. The the anecdote related by Mr. Frederic Har- purely sensuous ideal, if it ever practically rison apropos of Fitzjames Stephen, per- existed, is irrevocably submerged. The haps Carlyle's most distinguished disciple, tyranny of conscience has perhaps also in which a stern confessor tells a dying passed its apogee. When Mr. James, for penitent, endeavoring to turn his thoughts example, concludes his life of Hawthorne toward Heaven, that he "ought to be with the words "Man's conscience was thankful he had a hell to go to." "To his theme, but he saw it in the light of a day thou shalt be with me in Paradise" is creative fancy which added out of its own not only more winning and therefore of a substance an interest and I may almost higher potency, but it illustrates a later say an importance," the modern reader is stage of ethical evolution. quite in agreement with him. But conscience long since won its permanent place in the domain of the common consciousness of mankind. It has not been exorcised in its rationalization. And the status it imposes is recognized by consciousness as the prize of constant effort. What greater service than the stimulation of this effort is it open to literature to render to humanity, one feels like asking in the presence of Carlyle's massive contribution to what he himself loftily defines as "the Thought of Thinking Souls?" Only one, perhaps; that of lightening it as well. Nevertheless Froude's striking figure, which I have already cited, is justified of every man's experience. Every man, the most innocent as well as the most virtuous, knows the incessant pressure of the necessity of moral effort. "There is none that doeth good, no, not one." The opportunity of doing good or of avoiding doing it is exquisitely adjusted in scale to the degrees with which perfection is approached. Everyone is conscious of life as a succession of choices which it behooves him to make rightly on pain either of, at IN WITH THE COUGAR HOUNDS By Theodore Roosevelt FIRST PAPER ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY PHILIP K. STEWART N January, 1901, I started on a five weeks' cougar hunt from Meeker in Northwest Colorado. My companions were Mr. Philip K. Stewart and Dr. Gerald Webb, of Colorado Springs; Stewart was the captain of the victorious Yale nine of '86. We reached Meeker on January 11th, after a forty mile drive from the railroad, through the bitter winter weather; it was eighteen degrees below zero when we started. At Meeker we met John B. Goff, the hunter, and left town the next morning on horseback for his ranch, our hunting beginning that same afternoon, when after a brisk run our dogs treed a bobcat. After a fortnight Stewart and Webb returned, Goff and I staying out three weeks longer. We did not have to camp out, thanks to the warm-hearted hospitality of the proprietor and manager of the Keystone Ranch, and of the Mathes Brothers and Judge Foreman, both of whose ranches I also visited. The five weeks were spent hunting north of the White River, most of the time in the neighborhood of Coyote Basin and Colorow Mountain. In mid VOL. XXX.-45 winter, hunting on horseback in the Rockies is apt to be cold work, but we were too warmly clad to mind the weather. We wore heavy flannels, jackets lined with sheepskin, caps which drew down entirely over our ears, and on our feet heavy ordinary socks, german socks, and overshoes. Galloping through the brush and among the spikes of the dead cedars, meant that now and then one got snagged; I found tough overalls better than trousers; and most of the time I did not need the jacket, wearing my old buckskin shirt, which is to my mind a particularly useful and comfortable garment. It is a high, dry country, where the winters are usually very cold, but the snow not under ordinary circumstances very deep. It is wild and broken in character, the hills and low mountains rising in sheer slopes, broken by cliffs and riven by deeply cut and gloomy gorges and ravines. The sagebrush grows everywhere upon the flats and hillsides. Large open groves of pinyon and cedar are scattered over the peaks, ridges, and table-lands. Tall spruces |