I often go to Brantwood, which is a sacred place indeed, and see with deep emotion the little rooms, with all their beautiful treasures, and all the great accumulations of that fierce industry of mind, and remember that in that peaceful background a man of exquisite genius fought with sinister shadows, and was worsted in the fight, for a time; because the last ten years of that long life were a time of serene waiting for death, a beguiling by little childish and homely occupations the heavy hours:  he could uplift his voice no more, often could hardly frame an intelligible thought.  But meanwhile his great message went on rippling out to the world, touching heart after heart into light and hope, and doing, insensibly and graciously, by the spirit, the very thing he had failed to do by might and power.

And then we come to Carlyle, and here we are on somewhat different ground.  Carlyle had a colossal quarrel with the age, but he thought very little of the message of beauty and peace.  His idea of the world was that of a stern combative place, with the one hope a strenuous and grim righteousness; Carlyle thought of the world as a place where cheats and liars cozened and beguiled men, for their own advantage, with all sorts of shams and pretences:  but he did not really know the world; he put down to individual action and deliberate policy much that was due simply to the prevalence of tradition and system, and to the complexity of civilisation.  He was so fierce an individualist himself that he credited everyone else with purpose and prejudice.  He did not realise the vast preponderance of helpless good-nature and muddled kindliness.  The mistake of much of Carlyle’s work is that it is too poignantly dramatic, and bristles with intention and significance; and he did not allow sufficiently for the crowd of vague supers who throng the background of the stage.  Neither did he ever go about the world with his eyes open for general facts.  Wherever he was, he was intensely observant, but he spent his days either in a fierce absorption of work, blind even to the sorrow and discomfort of his wife, or taking rapid tours to store his mind with the details of historical scenes, or in the big houses of wealthy people, where he kept much to himself, stored up irresistibly absurd caricatures of the other guests, and lamented his own inaction.  I have never been able to discover exactly why Carlyle spent so much time in staying at great houses, deriding and satirising everything he set eyes upon; it was, I believe, vaguely gratifying to him to have raised himself unaided into the highest social stratum; and the old man was after all a tremendous aristocrat at heart.  Or else he skulked with infinite melancholy in his mother’s house, being waited upon and humoured, and indulging his deep and true family affection.  But he was a solitary man for the most part, and mixed with men, involved in a cloud of his own irresistibly fantastic and whimsical talk; for his real gift was half-humorous, half-melancholy improvisation rather than deliberate writing.