What, again, is one to make of Dickens, with his love of private theatricals, his florid waistcoats and watch-chains, his sentimental radicalism, his kindly, convivial, gregarious life?  He, again, did his work in a rapture of solitary creation, and seemed to have no taste for discussing his ideas or methods.  Then, too, Dickens’s later desertion of his work in favour of public readings and money-making is curious to note.  He was like Shakespeare in this, that the passion of his later life seemed to be to realise an ideal of bourgeois prosperity.  Dickens seems to have regarded his art partly as a means of social reform, and partly as a method of making money.  The latter aim is to a great extent accounted for by the miserable and humiliating circumstances of his early life, which bit very deep into him.  Yet his art was hardly an end in itself, but something through which he made his way to other aims.

Carlyle, again, was a writer who put ideas first, despised his craft except as a means of prophesying, hated literary men and coteries, preferred aristocratic society, while at the same time he loved to say how unutterably tiresome he found it.  Who will ever understand why Carlyle trudged many miles to attend parties and receptions at Bath House, where the Ashburtons lived, or what stimulus he discerned in it?  I have a belief that Carlyle felt a quite unconscious pride in the fact that he, the son of a small Scotch farmer, had his assured and respected place among a semi-feudal circle, just as I have very little doubt that his migration to Craigenputtock was ultimately suggested to him by the pleasure and dignity of being an undoubted laird, and living among his own, or at least his wife’s, lands.  In saying this, I do not wish to belittle Carlyle, or to accuse him of what may be called snobbishness.  He had no wish to worm himself by slavish deference into the society of the great, but he liked to be able to walk in and say his say there, fearing no man; it was like a huge mirror that reflected his own independence.  Yet no one ever said harder or fiercer things of his own fellow-craftsmen.  His description of Charles Lamb as “a pitiful rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tom-fool” is not an amiable one!  Or take his account of Wordsworth--how instead of a hand-shake, the poet intrusted him with “a handful of numb unresponsive fingers,” and how his speech “for prolixity, thinness, endless dilution” excelled all the other speech that Carlyle had ever heard from mortals.  He admitted that Wordsworth was “a genuine man, but intrinsically and extrinsically a small one, let them sing or say what they will.”  In fact, Carlyle despised his trade:  one of the most vivid and voluble of writers, he derided the desire of self-expression; one of the most continuous and brilliant of talkers, he praised and upheld the virtue of silence.  He spoke and wrote of himself as a would-be man of action condemned to twaddle; and Ruskin expressed very