164 CARLYLE. 



book alive than any other single faculty. Burke is rescued 

 from the usual doom of orators because his learning, his 

 experience, his sagacity are rimmed with a halo by this 

 bewitching light behind the intellectual eye from the 

 highest heaven of the brain. Shakespeare has impreg 

 nated his common sense with the steady glow of it, and 

 answers the mood of youth and age, of high and low, 

 immortal as that dateless substance of the soul he 

 wrought in. To have any chance of lasting, a book 

 must satisfy, not merely some fleeting fancy of the day, 

 but a constant longing and hunger of human nature ; 

 and it needs only a superficial study of literature to 

 be convinced that real fame depends rather on the sum 

 of an author s powers than on any brilliancy of special 

 parts. There must be wisdom as well as wit, sense 

 no less than imagination, judgment in equal measure with 

 fancy, and the fiery rocket must be bound fast to the poor 

 wooden stick that gives it guidance if it would mount and 

 draw all eyes. There are some who think that the brooding 

 patience which a great work calls for belonged exclusively 

 to an earlier period than ours. Others lay the blame on our 

 fashion of periodical publication, which necessitates a sensa 

 tion and a crisis in every number, and forces the writer to 

 strive for startling effects, instead of that general lowness of 

 tone which is the last achievement of the artist. The sim 

 plicity of antique passion, the homeliness of antique pathos, 

 seem not merely to be gone out of fashion, but out of being 

 as well. Modern poets appear rather to tease their words 

 into a fury, than to infuse them with the deliberate heats of 

 their matured conception, and strive to replace the rapture 

 of the mind with a fervid intensity of phrase. Our reaction 

 from the decorous platitudes of the last century has no doubt 

 led us to excuse this, and to be thankful for something like 

 real fire, though of stubble ; but our prevailing style of 

 criticism, which regards parts rather than wholes, which 

 dwells on the beauty of passages, and, above all, must have 

 its languid nerves pricked with the expected sensation at 

 whatever cost, has done all it could to confirm us in our evil 



