CARLYLE. 107 



a thing possible? Only too possible, we fear; and Mr. 

 Carlyle is an example of it. If the languid public long for a 

 sensation, the excitement of making one becomes also a 

 necessity of the successful author, as the intellectual nerves 

 grow duller and the old inspiration that came unbidden to 

 the bare garret grows shier and shier of the comfortable 

 parlour. As he himself said thirty years ago of Edward 

 Irving, Unconsciously, for the most part in deep uncon 

 sciousness, there was now the impossibility to live neglected 

 to walk on the quiet paths where alone it is well with us. 

 Singularity must henceforth succeed singularity. O foulest 

 Circean draught, thou poison of Popular Applause ! madness 

 is in thee and death ; thy end is Bedlam and the grave/ 

 Mr. Carlyle won his first successes as a kind of preacher in 

 print. His fervour, his oddity of manner, his pugnacious 

 paradox, drew the crowd ; the truth, or, at any rate, the faith 

 that underlay them all, brought also the fitter audience, 

 though fewer. But the curse was upon him ; he must attract, 

 he must astonish. Thenceforth he has done nothing but 

 revamp his telling things ; but the oddity has become always 

 odder, the paradoxes more paradoxical. No very large share 

 of truth falls to the apprehension of any one man ; let him 

 keep it sacred, and beware of repeating it till it turn to false 

 hood on his lips by becoming ritual. Truth always has a 

 bewitching savour of newness in it, and novelty at the first 

 taste recalls that original sweetness to the tongue ; but alas 

 for him who would make the one a substitute for the other ! 

 We seem to miss of late in Mr. Carlyle the old sincerity. He 

 has become the purely literary man, less concerned about 

 what he says than about how he shall say it to best advan 

 tage. The muse should be the companion, not the guide, 

 says he whom Mr. Carlyle has pronounced * the wisest of this 

 generation. What would be a virtue in the poet is a vice of 

 the most fatal kind in the teacher, and, alas that we should 

 say it ! the very Draco of shams, whose code contained no 

 penalty milder than capital for the most harmless of them, 

 has become at last something very likely a sham himself. 

 Mr. Carlyle continues to be a voice crying in the wilderness, 

 but no longer a voice with any earnest conviction behind it. 

 Hearing him rebuke us for being humbugs and impostors, 

 we are inclined to answer, with the ambassador of Philip II., 

 when his master reproached him with forgetting substance in 



