This conflict fortunately concerns us but little here. It is certain that Carlyle--springing from the lower ranks of society, educated excellently as far as the intellect was concerned, but without attention to such trifles as the habit (which his future wife early remarked in him) of putting bread and butter in his tea, a martyr from very early years to dyspepsia, fostering a retiring spirit and not too social temper, thoroughly convinced that the times were out of joint and not at all thoroughly convinced that he or any one could set them right, finally possessed of an intensely religious nature which by accident or waywardness had somehow thrown itself out of gear with religion--was not a happy man himself or likely to make any one else happy who lived with him. But it is certain also that both in respect to his wife and to those men, famous or not famous, of whom he has left too often unkindly record, his bark was much worse than his bite. And it is further certain that Mrs. Carlyle was no down-trodden drudge, but a woman of brains almost as alert as her husband's and a tongue almost as sharp as his, who had deliberately made her election of the vocation of being "wife to a man of genius," and who received what she had bargained for to the uttermost farthing. There will always be those who will think that Mr. Froude, doubtless with the best intentions, made a very great mistake; that, at any rate for many years after Carlyle's death, only a strictly genuine but judicious selection of the Reminiscences and Memorials should have been published, or else that the whole should have been worked into a real biography in which the frame and setting could have given the relief that the text required. But already, after more than the due voices, there is some peace on the subject; and a temporary wave of neglect, partly occasioned by this very controversy, was to be expected.
That this wave will pass may be asserted with a fulness and calmness of assurance not to be surpassed in any similar case. Carlyle's influence during a great part of the second and the whole of the third quarter of this century was so enormous, his life was so prolonged, and the general tone of public thought and public policy which has prevailed since some time before his death has been so adverse to his temper, that the reaction which is all but inevitable in all cases was certain to be severe in his. And if this were a history of thought instead of being a history of the verbal expression of thought, it would be possible and interesting to explain this reaction, and to forecast the certain rebound from it. As it is, however, we have to do with Carlyle as a man of letters only; and if his position as the greatest English man of letters of the century in prose be disputed, it will generally be found that the opposition is due to some not strictly literary cause, while it is certain that any competitor who is set up can be dislodged by a fervent and well-equipped Carlylian without very much difficulty.