MASSOA^'S INTERPRETATION OF CARLYLE. 225 



no room here to state the case as fully as it is presented in these lect- 

 ures. Mr. Froude was the official custodian of all the Carlylian docu- 

 ments, and held the great man's reputation in the hollow of his hand. 

 Professor Masson is justly severe upon him (as have also been many 

 others) for his lack of sympathetic discrimination in dealing with the 

 private expressions of his deceased friend, and giving to the publio 

 much to which it had no right, which was undoubtedly never intended 

 for publication, and which was an inexcusable outrage upon innocent 

 persons. Mr. Froude was incompetent for his editorial task : though 

 an intimate and life-long friend of Carlyle, he was constitutionally in- 

 competent to understand and do justice to his character. This is well 

 illustrated by the following passage from Professor Masson's first 

 lecture : 



" Another cause which has contributed not a little to the unhappy 

 general effect of the nine volumes is the prevailing somberness and 

 lugubriousness of those portions of them which come from Mr. 

 Froude's own pen. In the ' Reminiscences' and the 'Letters and Me- 

 morials of Jane Welsh Carlyle ' these consist, of course, but of casual 

 editorial notes and explanations ; but, in the four volumes of the 'Bi- 

 ography,' they form the text of narrative and comment in which the 

 fragments of documentary material for all the eighty-five years of 

 Carlyle's life are imbedded. Now, wherever Mr. Froude himself thus 

 becomes the narrator or commentator, his mood is too uniformly like 

 that of a man driving a hearse. 



" The contrast in this respect between what is from his own pen 

 and much of the documentary material he digests and edits is very re- 

 markable. There is gloom enough, seriousness enough, in the matter 

 of the documents ; but they are not all gloomy or serious. They 

 abound with the picturesque, the comic, the startlingly grotesque, or 

 the quaintly pleasant ; some of them actually swim in humor, or 

 sparkle with wit. These Mr. Froude faithfully prints, and perhaps 

 relishes ; but they do not seem to have any influence on his own gait 

 or countenance in his office of biographer. This is unfortunate. No 

 mind not profoundly in earnest itself could understand Carlyle, or rep- 

 resent him properly to others ; but, if ever there was a life that re- 

 quired also some considerable amount of humor in the bystander for 

 correct apprehension and interpretation of its singularities it was Car- 

 lyle's. Those about him that knew him best, always felt that the most 

 proper relation to much that he said and did was to take it humorous- 

 ly or suffuse it with humor ; and that he himself had the same feeling 

 and authorized it in others appeared in the frequency, almost the 

 habitual constancy, with which he would check his conscious exag- 

 gerations at the last point with some ludicrous touch of self-irony, and 

 would dissolve his fiercest objurgations and tumults of wrath in some 

 sudden phantasy of the sheerly absurd and a burst of uproarious laugh- 

 ter. Without a recollection of this, many a saying of his, many a 



VOL. XXVIII. — 15 



