CARLYLE. 101 



The cynicism, however, which h?!s now become the pre 

 vailing temper of his mind, has gone on expanding with 

 unhappy vigour. In Mr. Carlyle it is not, certainly, as in 

 Swift, the result of personal disappointment, and of the fatal 

 eyejof an accomplice for the mean qualities by which power 

 could be attained that it might be used for purposes as mean. 

 It seems rather the natural corruption of his exuberant 

 humour. Humour in its first analysis is a perception of the 

 incongruous, and, in its highest development, of the incon 

 gruity between the actual and the ideal in men and life. 

 With so keen a sense of the ludicrous contrast between what 

 men might be, nay, wish to be, and what they are, and with 

 a vehement nature that demands the instant realisation of 

 his vision of a world altogether heroic, it is no wonder that 

 Mr. Carlyle, always hoping for a thing and always disap 

 pointed, should become bitter. Perhaps if he expected less 

 he would find more. Saul seeking his father s asses found 

 himself turned suddenly into a king; but Mr. Carlyle, on the 

 lookout for a king, always seems to find the other sort of 

 animal. He sees nothing on any side of him but a proces 

 sion of the Lord of Misrule in gloomier moments, a Dance 

 of Death, where everything is either a parody of whatever 

 is noble, or an aimless jig that stumbles at last into the an 

 nihilation of the grave, and so passes from one nothing to 

 another. Is a world, then, which buys and reads Mr. 

 Carlyle s works distinguished only for its fair, large ears ? 

 If he who has read and remembered so much would only 

 now and then call to mind the old proverb, Nee deus, nee 

 lupus, sedhomo! If he would only recollect that, from the 

 days of the first grandfather, everybody has remembered a 

 golden age behind him ! 



The very qualities, it seems to us, which came so near 

 making a great poet of Mr. Carlyle, disqualify him for the 

 office of historian. The poet s concern is with the appear 

 ances of things, with their harmony in that whole which the 

 imagination demands for its satisfaction, and their truth to 

 that ideal nature which is the proper object of poetry. 

 History, unfortunately, is very far from being ideal, still 

 farther from an exclusive interest in those heroic or typical 

 figures which answer all the wants of the epic and the drama 

 and fill their utmost artistic limits, Mr. Carlyle has an un 

 equalled power and vividness in painting detached scenes, in 



