4 CARLYLE. 



few years were to make Carlyle the first in insight of English 

 critics and the most vivid of English historians. In all his 

 earlier writing he never loses sight of his master s great rule, 

 Den Gegenstand fest zu halten. He accordingly gave to 

 Englishmen the first humanly possible likeness of Voltaire, 

 Diderot, Mirabeau, and others, who had hitherto been mea 

 sured by the usual British standard of their respect for the 

 geognosy of Moses and the historic credibility of the Books of 

 Chronicles. What was the real meaning of this phenome 

 non ? what the amount of this man s honest performance in 

 the world ? and in what does he show that family likeness, 

 common to all the sons of Adam, which gives us a fair hope 

 of being able to comprehend him ? These were the questions 

 which Carlyle seems to have set himself honestly to answer 

 in the critical writings which fill the first period of his life as 

 a man of letters. In this mood he rescued poor Boswell 

 from the unmerited obloquy of an ungrateful generation, and 

 taught us to see something half-comically beautiful in the 

 poor, weak creature, with his pathetic instinct of reverence 

 for what was nobler, wiser, and stronger than himself. Every 

 thing that Mr. Carlyle wrote during this first period thrills 

 with the purest appreciation of whatever is brave and beauti 

 ful in human nature, with the most vehement scorn of 

 cowardly compromise with things base ; and yet, immitigable 

 as his demand for the highest in us seems to be, there is 

 always something reassuring in the humorous sympathy 

 with mortal frailty which softens condemnation and consoles 

 for shortcoming. The remarkable feature of Mr. Carlyle s 

 criticism (see, for example, his analysis and exposition of 

 Goethe s Helena ) is the sleuth-hound instinct with which he 

 presses on to the matter of his theme never turned aside by 

 a false scent, regardless of the outward beauty of form, some 

 times almost contemptuous of it, in his hunger after the in 

 tellectual nourishment which it may hide. The delicate 

 skeleton of admirably articulated and related parts which 

 underlies and sustains every true work of art, and keeps it 

 from sinking on itself a shapeless heap, he would crush re 

 morselessly to come at the marrow of meaning. With him 

 the ideal sense is secondary to the ethical and metaphysical, 

 and he has but a faint conception of their possible unity. 



By degrees the humorous element in his nature gains ground, 

 till it overmasters all the rest. Becoming always more bois- 



