CARLYLE. 95 



terous and obtrusive, it ends at last, as such humour must, 

 in cynicism. In Sartor Resartus it is still kindly, still 

 infused with sentiment ; and the book, with its mixture of 

 indignation and farce, strikes one as might the prophecies of 

 Jeremiah, if the marginal comments of the Rev. Mr. Sterne 

 in his wildest mood had by some accident been incorporated 

 with the text. In Sartor the marked influence of Jean 

 Paul is undeniable, both in matter and manner. It is curious 

 for one who studies the action and reaction of national litera 

 tures on each other, to see the humour of Swift and Sterne 

 and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in 

 Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, 

 or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind. 

 Unhappily the bit of mother from Swift s vinegar-barrel has 

 had strength enough to sour all the rest. The whimsicality 

 of Tristram Shandy/ which, even in the original, has too 

 often the effect of forethought, becomes a deliberate artifice 

 in Richter, and at last a mere mannerism in Carlyle. 



Mr. Carlyle in his critical essays had the advantage of a 

 well-defined theme, and of limits both in the subject and in 

 the space allowed for its treatment, which kept his natural 

 extravagance within bounds, and compelled some sort of dis 

 cretion and compactness. The great merit of these essays 

 lay in a criticism based on wide and various study, which, 

 careless of tradition, applied its standard to the real and not 

 the contemporary worth of the literary or other performance 

 to be judged, and in an unerring eye for that fleeting expres 

 sion of the moral features of character, a perception of which 

 alone makes the drawing of a coherent likeness possible. 

 Their defect was a tendency, gaining strength with years, to 

 confound the moral with the aesthetic standard, and to make 

 the value of an author s work dependent on the general force 

 of his nature rather than on his special fitness for a given 

 task. In proportion as his humour gradually overbalanced 

 the other qualities of his mind, his taste for the eccentric, 

 amorphous, and violent in men became excessive, disturbing 

 more and more his perception of the more commonplace at 

 tributes which give consistency to portraiture. His * French 

 Revolution is a series of lurid pictures, unmatched for vehe 

 ment power, in which the figures of such sons of earth as 

 Mirabeau and Danton loom gigantic and terrible as in the 

 glare of an eruption, their shadows swaying far and wide, 



