Thomas Carlyle by Nichol, John, 1833-1894

_Taliter, qualiter;_ but one or two remarks on the incisive summary of this adroit and able theorist are obvious. First, the implied assertion,--"Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move,"--that Carlyle was in essential sympathy with the Inquisitors who confronted Galileo with the rack, is perhaps the strangest piece of recent criticism extant: for what is his _French Revolution_ but a cannonade in three volumes, reverberating, as no other book has done, a hurricane of revolutionary thought and deed, a final storming of old fortresses, an assertion of the necessity of movement, progress, and upheaval? Secondly, every new discovery is apt to be discredited by new shibboleths, and one-sided exaggerations of its range. It were platitude to say that Mr. Darwin was not only an almost unrivalled student of nature, as careful and conscientious in his methods, as fearless in stating his results, but--pace Mr. Carlyle--a man of genius, who has thrown Hoods of light on the inter-relations of the organic world. But there are whole troops of serfs, "addicti jururo in verba magistri," who, accepting, without attempt or capacity to verify the conclusions of the master mind, think to solve all the mysteries of the universe by ejaculating the word "Evolution." If I ask what was the secret of Dante's or of Shakespeare's divining rod, and you answer "Evolution," 'tis as if, when sick in heart and sick in head, I were referred, as medicine for "a mind diseased," to Grimm's Law or to the Magnetic Belt.

Let us grant that Caesar was evolved from the currents in the air about the Roman Capitol, that Marcus Aurelius was a blend of Plato and Cleanthes, Charlemagne a graft of Frankish blood on Gallic soil, William I. a rill from Rollo filtered in Neustrian fields, Hildebrand a flame from the altar of the mediaeval church, Barbarossa a plant grown to masterdom in German woods, or later--not to heap up figures whose memories still possess the world--that Columbus was a Genoan breeze, Bacon a _rechauffe_ of Elizabethan thought, Orange the Silent a Dutch dyke, Chatham the frontispiece of eighteenth-century England, or Corsican Buonaparte the "armed soldier of Democracy." These men, at all events, were no bubbles on the froth of the waves which they defied and dominated.