96 CARLYLfi. 



grotesquely awful. But all is painted by eruption-flashes in 

 violent light and shade. There are no half-tints, no grada 

 tions, and we find it impossible to account for the continuance 

 in power of less Titanic actors in the tragedy like Robes 

 pierre, on any theory, whether of human nature or of individual 

 character, supplied by Mr. Carlyle. Of his success, however, 

 in accomplishing what he aimed at, which was to haunt the 

 mind with memories of a horrible political nightmare, there 

 can be no doubt. 



Goethe says, apparently thinking of Richter, * the worthy 

 Germans have persuaded themselves that the essence of true 

 humour is formlessness. Heine had not yet shown that a 

 German might combine the most airy humour with a sense 

 of form as delicate as Goethe s own, and that there was no 

 need to borrow the bow of Philoctetes for all kinds of game. 

 Mr. Carlyle s own tendency was toward the lawless, and 

 the attraction of Jean Paul made it an overmastering one. 

 Goethe, we think, might have gone farther, and affirmed that 

 nothing but the highest artistic sense can prevent humour 

 from degenerating into the grotesque, and thence downwards 

 to utter anarchy. Rabelais is a striking example of it. The 

 moral purpose of his book cannot give it that unity which the 

 instinct and forethought of art only can bring forth. Perhaps 

 we owe the masterpiece of humorous literature to the fact that 

 Cervantes had been trained to authorship in a school where 

 form predominated over substance, and the most convincing 

 proof of the supremacy of art at the highest period of Greek 

 literature is to be found in Aristophanes. Mr. Carlyle has 



/ no artistic sense of form or rhythm, scarcely of proportion. 



, Accordingly he looks on verse with contempt as something 

 barbarous a savage ornament which a higher refinement 

 will abolish, as it has tattooing and nose-rings. With a con- 

 ceptive imagination vigorous beyond any in his generation, 

 with a mastery of language equalled only by the greatest 

 poets, he wants altogether the plastic imagination, the shap 

 ing faculty, which would have made him a poet in the highest 

 sense. He is a preacher and a prophet anything you will 



(but an artist he is not, and never can be. It is always the 

 knots andgnarls of the oak that he admires, never the perfect 

 and balanced tree. 



It is certainly more agreeable to be grateful for what we 

 owe an author, than to blame him for what he cannot give us. 



