CARLYLE. 97 



Dut it is sometimes the business of a critic to trace faults of 

 style and of thought to their root in character and tempera 

 ment to show their necessary relation to, and dependence 

 on, each other and to find some more trustworthy explana 

 tion than mere wantonness of will for the moral obliquities of a 

 man so largely moulded and gifted as Mr. Carlyle. So long 

 as he was merely an exhorter or dehorter, we were thankful 

 for such eloquence, such humour, such vivid or grotesque 

 images, and such splendour of illustration as only he could 

 give ; but when he assumes to be a teacher of moral and 

 political philosophy, when he himself takes to compounding 

 the social panaceas he has made us laugh at so often, and 

 advertises none as genuine but his own, we begin to inquire 

 into his qualifications and his defects, and to ask ourselves 

 whether his patent pill differs from others except in the larger 

 amount of aloes, or has any better recommendation than the 

 superior advertising powers of a mountebank of genius. Com 

 parative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects - 

 are more nearly related than is commonly supposed. Had 

 Mr. Carlyle been fitted out completely by nature as an artist, 

 he would have had an ideal in his work which would have 

 lifted his mind away from the muddier part of him, and 

 trained him to the habit of seeking and seeing the harmony 

 rather than the discord and contradiction of things. His 

 innate love of the picturesque (which is only another form of 

 the sentimentalism he so scoffs at, perhaps as feeling it a 

 weakness in himself) once turned in the direction of cha 

 racter, and finding its chief satisfaction there, led him to look 

 for that ideal of human nature in individual men which is but 

 fragmentarily represented in the entire race, and is rather 

 divined from the aspiration, for ever disenchanted to be for 

 ever renewed, of the immortal part in us, than found in any 

 example of actual achievement. A wiser temper would have 

 found something more consoling than disheartening in the 

 continual failure of men eminently endowed to reach the 

 standard of this spiritual requirement, would perhaps have 

 found in it an inspiring hint that it is mankind, and not spe 

 cial men, that are to be shaped at last into the image of God, 

 and that the endless life of the generations may hope to come 

 nearer that goal of which the short-breathed threescore years 

 and ten fall too unhappily short. 



But Mr. Carlyle has invented the Hero-cure, and all who 

 H 



