CARLYLE. 91 



no less than imagination, judgment in equal measure with 

 fancy, and the fiery rocket must be bound fast to the poor 

 wooden stick that gives it guidance if it would mount and 

 draw all eyes. There are some who think that the brooding 

 patience which a great work calls for belonged exclusively to 

 an earlier period than ours. Others lay the blame on our 

 fashion of periodical publication, which necessitates a sensa 

 tion and a crisis in every number, and forces the writer to 

 strive for startling effects, instead of that general lowness of 

 tone which is the last achievement of the artist. The sim 

 plicity of antique passion, the homeliness of antique pathos, 

 seem not merely to be gone out of fashion, but out of being 

 as well. Modern poets appear rather to tease their words 

 into a fury, than to infuse them with the deliberate heats of 

 their matured conception, and strive to replace the rapture 

 of the mind with a fervid intensity of phrase. Our reaction 

 from the decorous platitudes of the last century has no doubt 

 led us to excuse this, and to be thankful for something like 

 real fire, though of stubble ; but our prevailing style of 

 criticism, which regards parts rather than wholes, which 

 dwells on the beauty of passages, and, above all, must have 

 its languid nerves pricked with the expected sensation at 

 whatever cost, has done all it could to confirm us in our evil 

 way. Passages are good when they lead to something, when 

 they are necessary parts of the building, but they are not 

 good to dwell in. This taste for the startling reminds us of 

 something which happened once at the burning of a country 

 meeting-house. The building stood on a hill, and, apart 

 from any other considerations, the fire was as picturesque as 

 could be desired. When all was a black heap, licking itself 

 here and there with tongues of fire, there rushed up a farmer 

 gasping anxiously, Hez the bell fell yit ? An ordinary fire 

 was no more to him than that on his hearth-stone ; even the 

 burning of a meeting-house, in itself a vulcanic rarity (so 

 long as he was of another parish), could not tickle his out 

 worn palate ; but he had hoped for a certain tang in the 

 downcome of the bell that might recall the boyish flavour of 

 conflagration. There was something dramatic, no doubt, in 

 this surprise of the brazen sentinel at his post, but the 

 breathless rustic has always seemed to us a type of the pre 

 vailing delusion in aesthetics. Alas ! if the bell must fall in 

 every stanza or every monthly number, how shall an author 



