Beacon Lights of History, Volume 13: Great Writers: Dr Lord's Uncompleted Plan, Supplemented with Essays by Emerson, Macaulay, Hedge, and Mercer AdamLord, John
History
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 13: Great Writers: Dr Lord's Uncompleted Plan, Supplemented with Essays by Emerson, Macaulay, Hedge, and Mercer Adam
Lord, John
History
Fraser's Magazine, meeting no appreciation in England, but very
enthusiastically received by Emerson, Channing, Ripley, and a group of
advanced thinkers in New England, through whose efforts it was published
here in book form. And so, in spite of timid London publishers, it
drifted back to London and a slow-growing fame. In our time, sixty years
later, it sells by scores of thousands annually, in cheap and in
luxurious editions, throughout the English-speaking world.
In respect of early recognition and popularity, Carlyle differs from his
great contemporary Macaulay, who was so immediately and so magnificently
rewarded, and yet received no more than his due as the finest prose
writer of his day. Macaulay's Essays are generally word-pictures of
remarkable men and remarkable events, but of men of action rather than
of quiet meditation. His heroes are such men as Clive and Hastings and
Pitt, not such men as Pascal or Augustine or Leibnitz or Goethe. But
Carlyle in his heroes paints the struggling soul in its deepest
aspirations, and the truths evolved by profound meditations. These are
not such as gain instant popular acceptance; yet they are the
longer-lived.
The time came at last for Carlyle to leave his retirement among moors
and hills, and in 1831 he directed his steps to London, spending the
winter with his wife in the great centre of English life and thought,
and being well received; so that in 1834 he removed permanently to the
metropolis. But he was scarcely less buried at his modest house in
Chelsea than he had been on his farm, for he came to London with only
£200, and was obliged to practise the most rigid economy. For two years
he labored in his London workshop without earning a shilling, and with
a limited acquaintance. Not yet was his society sought by the great
world which he mocked and despised. He fortunately had the genial and
agreeable Leigh Hunt for a neighbor, and Edward Irving for his friend.
He was known to the critics by his writings, but his circle of personal
friends was small. He was more or less intimate with John Stuart Mill,
Charles Austin, Sir William Molesworth, and the advanced section of the
philosophical radicals,--the very class of men from whom he afterwards
was most estranged. None of these men forwarded his fortunes; but they
lent him books, and helped him at the libraries, for no carpenter can
work without tools.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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