CARLYLE. 105 



Socrates sits en a front bench, absorbed in the spectacle, 

 and in the corner stands Dante making entries in his note 

 book. Mr. Carlyle as an historian leaves us in somewhat 

 such a mood. The world is a puppet-show, and when we 

 have watched the play out, we depart with a half-comic con 

 sciousness of the futility of all human enterprise, and the 

 ludicrousness of all man s action and passion on the stage 

 of the world. Simple, kindly, blundering Oliver Goldsmith 

 was after all wiser, and his Vicar, ideal as Hector and not 

 less immortal, is a demonstration of the perennial beauty and 

 heroism of the homeliest human nature. The cynical view 

 is congenial to certain moods, and is so little inconsistent 

 with original nobleness of mind, that it is not seldom the 

 acetous fermentation of it; but it is the view of the satirist, 

 not of the historian, and takes in but a narrow arc in the 

 circumference of truth. Cynicism in itself is essentially dis 

 agreeable. It is the intellectual analogue of the truffle; and 

 though it may be very well in giving a relish to thought for 

 certain palates, it cannot supply the substance of it. Mr. 

 Carlyle s cynicism is not that polished weariness of the out- 

 sides of life which we find in Ecclesiastes. It goes much 

 deeper than that, to the satisfactions, not of the body or the 

 intellect, but of the very soul itself. It vaunts itself; it is 

 noisy and aggressive. What the wise master puts into the 

 mouth of desperate ambition, thwarted of the fruit of its 

 crime, as the fitting expression of passionate sophistry, seems 

 to have become an article of his creed. With him 



Life is a tale 



Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 

 Signifying nothing 



He goes about with his Diogenes dark-lantern, professing to 

 seek a man, but inwardly resolved to find a monkey. He 

 loves to flash it suddenly on poor human nature in some 

 ridiculous or degrading posture. He admires still, or keeps 

 affirming that he admires, the doughty, silent, hard-working 

 men who, like Cromwell, go honestly about their business ; 

 but when we come to his later examples, we find that it is 

 not loyalty to duty or to an inward ideal of high-mindedness 

 that he finds admirable in them, but a blind unquestioning 

 vassalage to whomsoever it has pleased him to set up for a 

 hero. He would fain replace the old feudalism with a spiri 

 tual counterpart, in which there shall be an obligation to 



