IO4 CARLYLE. 



the historical plays of Shakespeare. There is nothing in 

 imaginative literature superior in its own way to the episode 

 of Voltaire in the Fritziad. It is delicious in humour, mas 

 terly in minute characterisation. We feel as if the principal 

 victim (for we cannot help feeling all the while that he is so) 

 of this mischievous genius had been put upon the theatre 

 before us by some perfect mimic like Foote, who had studied 

 his habitual gait, gestures, tones, turn of thought, costume, 

 trick of feature, and rendered them with the slight dash of 

 caricature needful to make the whole composition tell. It is 

 in such things that Mr. Carlyle is beyond all rivalry, and 

 that we must go back to Shakespeare for a comparison. But 

 the mastery of Shakespeare is shown perhaps more strikingly 

 in his treatment of the ordinary than of the exceptional. His 

 is the gracious equality of Nature herself. Mr. Carlyle s gift 

 is rather in the representation than in the evolution of cha 

 racter ; and it is a necessity of his art, therefore, to exag 

 gerate slightly his heroic, and to caricature in like manner 

 his comic parts. His appreciation is less psychological than 

 physical and external. Grimm relates that Garrick, riding 

 once with PreVille, proposed to him that they should counter 

 feit drunkenness. They rode through Passy accordingly, 

 deceiving all who saw them. When beyond the town Pre- 

 ville asked how he had succeeded. Excellently/ said Gar- 

 rick, as to your body; but your legs were not tipsy. Mr. 

 Carlyle would be as exact in his observation of nature as the 

 great actor, and would make us see a drunken man as well ; 

 but we doubt whether he could have conceived that unmatch- 

 able scene in Antony and Cleopatra, where the tipsiness of 

 Lepidus pervades the whole metaphysical no less than the 

 physical part of the triumvir. If his sympathies bore any 

 proportion to his instinct for catching those traits which are 

 the expression of character, but not character itself, we might 

 have had a great historian in him instead of a history-painter. 

 But that which is a main element in Mr. Carlyle s talent, 

 and does perhaps more than anything else to make it effect 

 ive, is a defect of his nature. The cynicism which renders 

 him so entertaining precludes him from any just conception 

 of men and their motives, and from any sane estimate of the 

 relative importance of the events which concern them. We 

 remember a picture of Hamon s, where before a Punch s 

 theatre are gathered the wisest of mankind in rapt attention. 



