THE CARLYLE MEMORIAL.
[TO TDB EDITOR OF THE n SPECTATOR."] em,—If the subscriptions to Mr. Carlyle's Memorial have been slackened by the perusal of his " Reminiscences," as Mr. Roden Noel indirectly suggests to your readers, I do not think it is because the world has discovered that " the hero trod upon the corns of many excellent people, whose relatives are still alive." There are few men of whom that might not be said, whether a monument has been erected to them or not ; and though, doubtless, it was especially true of Mr. Carlyle, I do not think any reader of the " Reminiscences " would discover it, if he did not know it before. What those feel who are disinclined to subscribe to the memorial, I suppose, is not that Carlyle bad " a bitter humour," but that he was disloyal to his own ideal in putting on record views and statements about others, some of whom had been kind to him, which could do no good, which were certain to give pain, and which were not always true. The lithenalum of May 14th, for instance, shows him to have wrongly accused his namesake of taking advantage of their common name. They feel, probably, that this carelessness about truth in some cases, and want of loyalty to old friendship in others., Is a kind of offence against what he himself taught, which changes their sense of its value. I think admirers of Carlyle /night do good service in pointing out whatever is unjust in that feeling, but when they speak as if it were groundless, or as if genius were an excuse for what in other men we should think treacherous, they seem to me to weaken their cause, and to show that the book has done more harm than one hoped it
Previous page
