life of our day.  Beneath the shrieks and the laughter of the time we hear in it the boom of great breakers.  Never again can we forget, amidst the gaieties of any island paradise, the solemn ocean that surrounds it.  Carlyle’s teaching sounds and recurs again and again like the Pilgrims’ March in Tannhaeuser breaking through the overture, and rivalling until it vanquishes the music of the Venusberg.

Yet it was quite inevitable that there should be strong reaction from any such work as this.  To the warm blood and the poignant sense of the beauty of the world it brought a sense of chill, a forbidding sombreness and austerity.  Carlyle’s conception of Christianity was that of the worship of sorrow; and, while the essence of his gospel was labour, yet to many minds self-denial seemed to be no longer presented, as in the teaching of Jesus, as a means towards the attainment of further spiritual ends.  It had become an end in itself, and one that few would desire or feel to be justified.  In the reaction it was felt that self-development had claims upon the human spirit as well as self-denial, and indeed that the happy instincts of life had no right to be so winsome unless they were meant to be obeyed.  The beauty of the world could not be regarded as a mere trap for the tempting of people, if one were to retain any worthy conception of the Powers that govern the world.  From this point of view the Carlylians appeared to enter into life maimed.  That, indeed, we all must do, as Christ told us; but they seemed to do it like the beggars of Colombo, with a deliberate and somewhat indecent exhibition of their wounds.

Carlyle found many men around him pagan, worshipping the earth without any spiritual light in them.  He feared that many others were about to go in the same direction, so he cried aloud that the earth was too small, and that they must find a larger object of worship.  For the earth he substituted the universe, and led men’s eyes out among the immensities and eternities.  Professor James tells a story of Margaret Fuller, the American transcendentalist, having said with folded hands, “I accept the universe,” and how Carlyle, hearing this, had answered, “Gad, she’d better!” It was this insistence upon the universe, as distinguished from the earth, which was the note of Sartor Resartus.

The reactionaries took Carlyle at his word.  They said, “Yes, we shall worship the universe”; but they went on to add that Carlyle’s universe is not universal.  It is at once too vague and too austere.  There are other elements in life besides those to which he called attention—­elements very definite and not at all austere—­and they too have a place in the universe and a claim upon our acceptance.  Many of these are in every way more desirable to the type of mind that rebelled than the aspects of the universe on which Carlyle had insisted, and so they went out freely among these neglected elements, set them over against his kind of idealism, and became themselves idealists of other sorts.