Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) is noted as a historian and essayist. He was the son of a Scotch stone-mason of Ecclefechan. When, at fourteen, he was ready to enter college, he walked the eighty miles to Edinburgh to enter the university there. Most of his life was spent in London, and it was given entirely to literature, resulting in a long row of volumes. His first book, Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Re-tailored), was a curious setting forth of his philosophy of life, written in such an unusual style that it found few readers. His next book, The French Revolution, made him famous. For vivid description, picturesque characterization, and dramatic narrative, it stands alone among historical works. He also wrote biographies of Cromwell, of John Sterling, and of Frederick the Great, and contributed to magazines a number of critical essays, including a famous paper on Burns. He delivered a course of lectures on great men, which was published under the title Heroes and Hero-Worship. This book and his French Revolution are the best known of his works. The selection here given is from Heroes and HeroWorship, being a part of the lecture on "The Hero as Man of Letters." It shows the vigor of Carlyle's style, the intense earnestness of the man, and the originality of his thought. THOMAS CARLYLE THE INFLUENCE OF BOOKS (From Heroes and Hero-Worship, Lecture V) Complaint is often made, in these times, of what we call the disorganized condition of society: how ill many arranged forces of society fulfil their work; how many powerful forces are seen working in a wasteful, chaotic, altogether unarranged manner. It is too just a complaint, as we all know. But perhaps if we look at this of Books and the Writers of Books, we shall find here, as it were, the summary of all other disorganization;—a sort of heart, from which, and to which, all other confusion circulates in the world! Considering what Book-writers do in the world, and what the world does with Bookwriters, I should say, it is the most anomalous thing the world at present has to show.-We should get into a sea far beyond sounding, did we attempt to give account of this: but we must glance at it for the sake of our subject. Our pious Fathers, feeling well what importance lay in the speaking of man to men, founded churches, made endowments, regulations; everywhere in the civilized world there is a Pulpit, environed with all manner of complex dignified appurtenances and furtherances, that therefrom a man with the tongue may, to best advantage, address his fellow men. They felt that this was the most important thing; that without this there was no good thing. It is a right pious work, that of theirs; beautiful to behold! But now with the art of Writing, with the art of Printing, a total change has come over that business. The Writer of a Book, is not he a Preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or that, but to all men in all times and places? Surely it is of the last importance that he do his work right, whoever do it wrong; that the eye report not falsely, for then all the other members are astray! Well; how he may do his work, whether he do it right or wrong, or do it at all, is a point which no man in the world has taken the pains to think of. To a certain shopkeeper, trying to get some money for his books, if lucky, he is of some importance; to no other man of any. Whence he came, whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived, by what he might be furthered on his course, no one asks. He is an accident in society. He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is as the spiritual light, either the guidance or the misguidance! * Certainly the art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin's Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero; Books, written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined, they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives; can be called up again into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in ** Runes, a name given to the ancient Scandinavian alphabet, which according to tradition was given to mankind by the god Odin. magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men. Do not Books still accomplish miracles, as Runes were fabled to do? They persuade men. Not the wretchedest circulating-library novel, which foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual practical weddings and households of those foolish girls. So "Celia" felt, so "Clifford" acted: the foolish Theorem of Life, stamped into those young brains, comes out as a solid Practice one day. Consider whether any Rune in the wildest imagination of Mythologist ever did such wonders as, on the actual firm Earth, some Books have done! What built St. Paul's Cathedral? Look at the heart of the matter, it was that divine Hebrew Book, -the word partly of the man Moses, an outlaw tending his Midianitish herds, four thousand years ago, in the wildernesses of Sinai! It is the strangest of things, yet nothing is truer. With the art of Writing, of which Printing is a simple, an inevitable and comparatively insignificant corollary, the true reign of miracles for mankind commenced. It related, with a wondrous new contiguity and perpetual closeness, the Past and Distant with the Present in time and place; all times and all places with this our actual Here and Now. All things were altered for men; all modes of important work of men: teaching, preaching, governing, and all else. To look at Teaching, for instance. Universities are a notable, respectable product of the modern ages. Their existence too is modified, to the very basis of it, by the existence of Books. Universities arose while there were yet no Bocks procurable; while a man, for a single Book, had to give an estate of land. That, in those circumstances, when a man had some knowledge to communicate, he should do it by gathering the learners round him, face to face, was a necessity for him. If you wanted to |