moral, singularly ill-suited to appreciate Charles Lamb goes without saying; that he did not, in this sketch at least, do justice to Lamb; that the picture is not a complete one, but very partial, having the effect of falsity or caricature, may be admitted without dispute; and still Carlyle should not be condemned for anything more culpable than a narrow, unsympathetic view.

Charles Lamb, the gentle author of "Elia," is and will remain, by the best of titles, one of the sweetest of all who have

written English prose. If Carlyle did not appreciate Lamb's writings, which seems probable, though these "Reminiscences" do not show it, Lamb, as a writer, will be none the less precious to us, though Carlyle has written of his personal weaknesses with a somewhat ruthless hand. To write truthfully is sometimes a duty, higher and far more imperative than to write pleasantly, especially of idols, accepted creeds, and unchallenged reputations. We love Lamb, but we do not love him the less because Carlyle has here emphasized faults and characteristics which were known before to all who ever looked at Lamb with perfectly clear sight.

The Carlyle-Emerson correspondence merits much notice which cannot be given here. The peculiar worth and greatness of each stand out here by contrast as well as independently. Contrasts, comparisons, antitheses are fascinating not only to writers but to readers; and the impulse here to direct comparison is almost irresistible, and yet we think it is not useful. Our idea here is so adequately expressed by Carlyle himself, near the close of his Essay on Schiller "1 that we present the passage:

"Among young students of German literature the question often arises, and is warmly mooted, Whether Schiller or Goethe is the greater poet? Of this question we must be allowed to say that it seems rather a slender one, and for two reasons: First, because Schiller and Goethe are of totally dissimilar endowments and endeavors in regard to all matters intellectual, and cannot well be compared together as poets. And, secondly, because if the question mean to ask which poet is, on the whole, the rarer and more excellent, as probably it does, it must be considered as long ago abundantly answered. To the modest and clear-sighted Schiller, above all, such a question would have appeared surprising."

To us, considering duly the diverse gifts and lives of Carlyle and Emerson, the peaceful, unobstructed career of Emerson, and the hard, hindered, "storm-and-stress" battle of Carlyle; considering, 1 Miscellanies, "Essay on Schiller."

too, what each was and did, how the work of each stood towards the generation and people to which they spoke, our conviction is that the life and work of Carlyle show the greater moral significance and power, while the literary genius of Carlyle seems to us still more clearly the greater. But, recalling again his words of Schiller and Goethe, we would say with him, "However, let us not divide these two Friends, who in life were so benignantly united." Who that loves, on the one hand, heroism, moral elevation, and purity of life and aims, subtle and powerful thought, lofty and picturesque diction unequaled in some ways since Homer; and, on the other, poetic insight, calm and immovable poise of spirit and judgment, with the most unerring and penetrative literary sense, may not find in these two friends enough, and more, to mark the generation to which they belonged as greatly richer than any that have gone before!

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A powerful writer,1 recently analyzing the character of Carlyle, after picturing the lofty plane and spirit of his life, — his proud and unyielding struggle with poverty, his unique and stern resolution to live what he judged a life of integrity, is still moved to say that parts of his career are not " pleasant to read;" that there were "ugly domestic skeletons," and more to the same end, which leads us to ask again, What is it men desire in biography? Truth or pleasure? Or in life? Dauntless courage and persistent simplicity, or affable ways and delicate domestic graces and charms? If one can have all, one would have all; but if, as happens often, only a part of the virtues are illustrated in any one man, shall we be seen pointing the unmoving finger of attention or scorn at even 66 the howls of rage and despair," "maniacal egotism," and "corrosive inhumanity," which are said to have attended the rare and grand virtues of Carlyle? Our deliberate answer is, Let all be told, as it is in these volumes, and blessed be the faithful chronicler! Was there a thoughtful, impressible person, not merely in the three kingdoms, but in America, almost in Europe, who listened to the tones of Carlyle from 1830 to 1845, without receiving an inspiration which can never lose its force, carrying others, no doubt, as another has said, disparagingly, to "heights of living to which he himself never attained?" Such results are hardly to be associated in such minds with the trifles of rough manners or even the unkindness which these volumes reveal.

Of faults, grievous and well nigh unpardonable, of judgment

1 Frederic Harrison.

and feeling on certain other topics of deepest concern, we take leave here to say we do not acquit Carlyle.

We had, too, something which we wished much to say on Carlyle's style, of which so much seems to us to have been said amiss, but we must pause.

It was a foggy, cheerless London morning, in May of 1882, when the writer, alone, and self-moved, stood in Cheyne Row, gazing intently on the dingy, blackened, three-story house of yellow London bricks, at Chelsea, which was so long, and to the last, the home of Carlyle. As he had landed from the little Thames steamer and mounted the stone steps which lead up to the little mall or narrow strip of park which is called Cheyne Walk, the old Scotch dockman had answered his inquiries for the house of Carlyle, adding, "The old man and his niece often walked here; but after the wife was gone the old man's look was always down; he held his hands behind his back, and never raised his feet from the ground in walking, but I could always hear his strange, clear, strong voice from the spot where we stand." The writer does not consider himself a sentimentalist, nor is he specially "used to the melting mood;" but this picture, on this spot, did deeply move his heart. Eighty-four years old; what the storms of life, the special and unintermitted wear and havoc of ill-health had left of a grand inherited vitality; the outward eye bent on the earth, the feet dragged slowly, not lifted; all that was mortal worn and wasted; "hoary," as he wrote of his friend, Edward Irving, "with extreme age, trembling over the brink of the grave;" all but the voice and tone,-true types and expres sions of the undaunted soul within, - enfeebled and spent ; childless and wifeless; yet now, spiritually at least, like the Samuel Johnson whom he painted as none other ever did, in "Fraser's Magazine," just forty-eight years before," in still defiance he steps stoutly along." Unconsciously the writer's head was bared on that scene, while a deep sense, not soon to be forgotten, came over him of the moral worth and real greatness of Thomas Carlyle. D. H. Chamberlain.

NEW YORK CITY.

THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY.

II.

THE field and its immediate contiguities which I have thus tried to outline is that within which advanced university courses in psychology should be laid out. No individual mind can master all its details, and there is room for more and more specialization within it, but no university lecture curriculum should omit a survey of all these larger topics. It is a field peculiarly full of promise, not only of new discoveries, but of perhaps still more important and inevitable restatements of old truth, and also a field in which investments of time and labor are at last as sure of quick returns in the way of positions and professional excellence as any. Leaving this, we must now ask what preparatory collegiate training should lead up to these higher studies. True philosophy is the most serious business of manhood, and to fit it to the slowly ripening faculties of our collegiate youth requires a peculiar wisdom quite distinct from knowledge of the subject. Our best young men are but children here, in a sense which can hardly be claimed in other studies; so that the need of the arts of adaptation, and the dangers of too rigorous adherence to the logical methods which the maturer expert mind prefers, are perhaps nowhere greater. He who would prescribe effectually for the disease of self-ignorance at an age when young men are most sincere, yet most apt to be mistaken, must be rather a parent than a doctor. He must distinguish between problems and certainties, and have the pedagogic heroism to prefer homely, old-fashioned, commonplace truths to the latest discoveries or his own newest insights. Adaptation rather than systematic completion should be his cue. Can we not see why Plato could have become so wise in reserves as to be reluctant to write out his deeper penetrations lest they harm those for whom they were not adapted? Can we not catch the educational motive of some of his myths and of the distinction between acroamatic and exoteric, and may we not even wonder whether, after all, such events as the royal rescript addressed to Kant, the expulsion of Wolff from Halle, and even the prosecution of Socrates for corrupting the Athenian youth, do not indicate that the various orthodoxies, culminating as they often seem to do in what is thought best for youth rather than in that accepted as final by educated maturity, had detected a real if slight defect in their

method and self-control? It is more and more evident that Plato, at least, in whom preeminently among all men the philosophic and the educational spirit are harmoniously blended, sought to make philosophy a means of moral regeneration. He seems to assume, as has been well said, that to approach philosophy properly the novitiate must first regulate his life and become an enthusiast for virtue before he can truly love wisdom. The concepts in which he "ultimates" himself have rare parousia in history; somewhat, perhaps, as the swords too heavy or dangerous for common men were put beyond their power, to await a Theseus or Siegmund, who shall have, with the power to resume them, the virtue and wisdom to use them aright. A very fundamental need in education is to arouse some sense for ideality at that period of life when the animal nature is at its strongest and best. Truth then needs to come as an enthusiasm and from beyond the experience of the individual, as a counterpoise to passion, preëmpting the free, unstable psychic energy so abundantly disengaged during later adolescent years, and preforming and preserving it as the precious raw material of life. This whole period is one of dis-ease, of strain and tension between the instructions of childhood and the new faculties and desires which connect us to the race. There is then a certain natural precocity, a kind of delicious mysticism, anticipating the realities of life from afar, the free expressions of which are among the best things in literature, and which it is one of the most sacred offices of the teacher of philosophy to keep alive against the sterilizing tendencies of indifference, nil-admiration, and practical, as distinct from theoretical, materialism of thought. However romantic such idealism, it must be kept practical and life-preserving; it should open and not close the mind, and should anticipate an attainable experience and not lead beyond it. Its ideals, however exalted, should have the true philosophic sanity and virtue of being bent chiefly to the establishment of good mental and moral habits, or, in apt Hegelian phrase, however much estrangement and self-alienation they at first occasion, there should be no unatonable residuum at last. The energy of the instinct of idealization must not be misdirected or overdone; it must not lead men off the proper basis of their own true nature, still less counter to it. Because philosophy is sometimes no truer to literal fact than are the parables of Jesus, there is a saturation point, which there is danger of passing if all that is taught be not in the most sympathetic relation with that nine tenths of life which is so deeply stirred at this age, but which cannot and should not be fully brought into the narrow field of youthful consciousness.