348 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



called. We have all known many eccentrics whose eccentricity 

 was far indeed from being either amusing or curious; it suc- 

 ceeded merely in making itself supremely annoying or absurd. 

 But the gulf that separates the mere original from the true genius 

 is often as narrow as the gulf that intervenes between the sublime 

 and the ridiculous. Everybody has met odd people, who lived by 

 themselves in odd rooms, who said and did odd things, and whose 

 veriest commonplaces had always about them some lingering 

 flavor of misplaced wit and half -mad imagination. Such queer 

 people, with their dash of insanity, have not infrequently a dash 

 of genius as well, only in their case the divine spark has either 

 never been supplied with sufficient fuel, or never blown up by the 

 breath of appreciation into even a struggling and tentative blaze. 

 Yet who shall say what tiny extra twist in a special direction 

 turns any one of these undiscovered cranky souls into a Dickens, 

 a Heine, a Rabelais, or a Cervantes ? The little additional twist 

 makes to us, the percipients, all the difference ; but in the brain 

 and mind of the man himself, how infinitesimally small must be 

 the peculiarity of fiber or energy that ultimately determines it ! 



Look, again, at such a case as Carlyle's. Hundreds of caustic, 

 saturnine Scotch laboring-folk have something the same quaint 

 power of expression, something the same dour, grim humor, some- 

 thing the same vehement, self-assertive egotism. In all funda- 

 mentals, philosophical and psychological, they are absolutely 

 identical with the grumbler of Chelsea; their hard Scotch Cal- 

 vinistic creed is just his gloomy pessimism in the rough ; their 

 firm belief in a lawgiver of the cosmos, who loves neither fools 

 nor knaves overwell, is just the crude, unelaborated form of the 

 Carlylese political and ethical system. Add a certain native vigor 

 and directness of language, derived by blood from that canny, 

 clever, uneducated sage, the Ecclef echan stone-mason, the " body 

 wha had sic names for things"; supplement it with an Edin- 

 burgh University training, backed up by a strong dose of con- 

 genial dreamy German metaphysics ; turn it loose upon the world 

 of London, or divert it by circumstances into the hard, underpaid 

 literary channel — and a Carlyle at once emerges upon you, burst- 

 ing forth in the full tide of his " picturesque bad style," in " Sar- 

 tor Resartus " and the " French Revolution." Once worked, the 

 trick can never be worked again ; but, while it lasts, its effect is 

 marvelous. The rush and go of that full tide carries us all unre- 

 sistingly before it : we never pause to ask for a moment, as we 

 whirl along helter-skelter down-stream, by what slight variations 

 on a familiar theme the astonishing sense of hurrying, scurrying, 

 clashing music, as of pent-up waters bursting their dams, has 

 been laboriously designed and produced in the far recesses of that 

 wild composer's peculiar idiosyncrasy. 



