Authors, Scottish -- 19th century -- Biography; Carlyle, Thomas, 1795-1881; Historians -- Great Britain -- Biography
Enough has been said of the limits of Carlyle's magnanimity in estimating
his English contemporaries; but the deliberate judgments of his essays
were often more genial than those of his letters and conversation; and
perhaps his overestimate of inferiors, whom in later days he drew round
him as the sun draws the mist, was more hurtful than his severity; it is
good for no man to live with satellites. His practical severance from
Mazzini was mainly a personal loss: the widening of the gulf between
him and Mill was a public calamity, for seldom have two men been better
qualified the one to correct the excesses of the other. Carlyle was the
greater genius; but the question which was the greater mind must be
decided by the conflict between logic and emotion. They were related
proximately as Plato to Aristotle, the one saw what the other missed, and
their hold on the future has been divided. Mill had "the dry light," and
his meaning is always clear; he is occasionally open to the charge
of being a formalist, allowing too little for the "infusion of the
affections," save when touched, as Carlyle was, by a personal loss; yet
the critical range indicated by his essay on "Coleridge" on the one side,
that on "Bentham" on the other, is as wide as that of his friend; and
while neither said anything base, Mill alone is clear from the charge of
having ever said anything absurd. His influence, though more indirect,
may prove, save artistically, more lasting. The two teachers, in their
assaults on _laissez faire,_ curiously combine in giving sometimes
undesigned support to social movements with which the elder at least had
no sympathy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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