Each age has its Carlyles, but it never much respects the Carlyles of other ages. We have our Ferrero and our H. G. Wells, to say nothing of such small fry as Faguets, Marinetti, _e tutti quanti_. They are people who have something for their own age and nothing for any other, and their own age is pretty sure to prefer them to any great man it may produce but fail to smother: they are adored and duly forgotten. They must come forward as the critics and guides of society; whether they declare their messages in prose or verse, in novels, histories, speeches, essays, or philosophical treatises is of no consequence. It must be possible to make prophets of them, that is all. A pure artist or philosopher or man of science, one who is concerned with Beauty or Truth but not with its application to contemporary life will not do. Darwin and Swinburne, therefore, the greatest of the English Victorians, were not eligible; but the age chose Carlyle for its select preacher when it might have had Mill. Naturally it preferred his coloured rhetoric and warm sentimentality to Mill's cold reason and white-hot emotion. It chose him because he was what Mill was not--a Carlyle. Yet, though Utilitarianism is discredited, Mill remains; the candour and subtlety of his intellect impress us still, and his Autobiography will seem to future generations one of the most moving documents of the nineteenth century. As for Carlyle, "nobody marks him"; we only wonder that he will still be talking. The old controversy between those who wish to believe the truth and those who insist that what they wish to believe is true raves on; but neither side dreams of briefing the Chelsea sage. His vatic eloquence carries no conviction. Men and women of the younger generation, whatever their views, find no support in him, because he appeals to axioms and postulates which to them seem unreal. It is not that his arguments are old-fashioned, but that they are based on nothing and apply to nothing. A modern emotionalist may call in Tolstoy or Bergson or Berkley or Leon Bloy or Peguy or Plato himself to break the head of Anatole France or Bertrand Russell, but he will not trouble Carlyle. And besides finding him empty, the new age is quite aware of his positive defects. It cannot away with his peasant morality--moralizing rather--his provincialism, and the grossness of his method. From the beginning to the end of his works there is neither pure thought nor pure feeling--nothing but a point of view which is now perceived to be ridiculously plebeian. Nevertheless, Carlyle had one positive gift that the younger generation is perhaps not very well qualified to appreciate, he was an extraordinarily capable man of letters. His footnotes, for instance, might serve as models; he had a prodigious talent for picking out just those bits of by-information that will amuse and interest a reader and send him back to the text with renewed attention. His editing of Mrs. Carlyle's letters--letters which