I think it will be conceded that the twenty years which have elapsed since he accomplished his task are a period of growth rather than decadence in the number and zeal of Carlyle’s admirers.  This is no doubt in large measure due to Carlyle’s own books.  He has been called the father of modern socialism, and credited with the destruction of political economy.  I am too much out of sympathy with these views to judge them fairly.  But I suppose it cannot be denied that Carlyle fascinates thousands who do not accept him as an infallible, or even as a fallible, guide, or that they, as well as his disciples, devour the pages of Froude.

Nothing annoyed Carlyle more than to be told that he confounded might with right.  He declared that, on the contrary, he had never said, and would never say, a word for power which was not founded on justice.  Cromwell was as good as he was great, and he had never glorified Frederick, unless to write a book about a man is necessarily to glorify him.  This prevalent misconception of Carlyle’s gospel, so prevalent that it deceived no less keen a critic than Lecky, was completely dissipated by Froude.  No one can read his Life intelligently without perceiving that Carlyle’s real foe was materialism.  The French Revolution was to him the central fact of modern history, and at the same time a supreme judgment of Heaven upon a society given up to unrestrained licentiousness.  Whether he was right or wrong is not the point.  He was as far as possible from being, in the modern sense, a scientific historian.  Yet in some respects he was utilitarian enough.  The condition of England was to him more important than any constitutional change, any triumph in diplomacy, or any victory in war, and this fact explains apparently inconsistent admiration of Peel, who though a Parliamentary statesman, had accomplished a solid achievement for the benefit of the people.  Carlyle in his own writings is an almost insoluble enigma.  To have given the true solution is the supreme merit of Froude.*

—­ * John Nichol, a name still dear in Scotland, formerly Professor of Literature at the University of Glasgow, who wrote on Carlyle for Mr. Morley’s English Men of Letters in 1892, says in his preface:  “Every critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligation to Mr. Froude as every critic of Byron to Moore, or of Scott to Lockhart ....  I must here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the persistent, often virulent, attach directed against a loyal friend, betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith, and the defective reticence that often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero.  But Mr. Froude’s quotation, in defence, from the essay on Sir Walter Scott, requires no supplement:  it should be remembered that he acted with the most ample authority; that the restrictions under which he was first entrusted with the MSS. of the Reminiscences and the Letters and Memorials (annotated by Carlyle himself as if for publication) were withdrawn; and that the initial permission to select finally approached a practical injunction to communicate the whole.” —­