166 CARLYLE. 



a thing capable of acquisition at all. The most winsome 

 and wayward of brooks draws now and then some lover s 

 foot to its intimate reserve, while the spirt of a bursting 

 water-pipe gathers a gaping crowd forthwith. 



Mr. Carlyle is an author who has now been so long before 

 the world that we may feel toward him something of the 

 unprejudice of posterity. It has long been evident that he 

 has no more ideas to bestow upon us, and that no new turn 

 of his kaleidoscope would give us anything but some 

 variation of arrangement in the brilliant colours of his 

 style. It is perhaps possible, then, to arrive at some not 

 wholly inadequate estimate of his place as a writer, and 

 especially of the value of the ideas whose advocate he makes 

 himself, with a bitterness and violence that increase, as it 

 seems to us, in proportion as his inward conviction of their 

 truth diminishes. 



The leading characteristics of an author who is in any 

 sense original, that is to say, who does not merely reproduce, 

 but modifies the influence of tradition, culture, and contem 

 porary thought upon himself by some admixture of his own, 

 may commonly be traced more or less clearly in his earliest 

 works. This is more strictly true, no doubt, of poets, 

 because the imagination is a fixed quantity, not to be 

 increased by any amount of study and reflection. Skill, 

 wisdom, and even wit are cumulative ; but that diviner 

 faculty, which is the spiritual eye, though it may be trained 

 and sharpened, cannot be added to by taking thought. 

 This has always been something innate, unaccountable, to 

 be laid to a happy conjunction of the stars. Goethe, the 

 last of the great poets, accordingly takes pains to tell us 

 under what planets he was born ; and in him it is curious 

 how uniform the imaginative quality is from the beginning 

 to the end of his long literary activity. His early poems 

 show maturity, his mature ones a youthful freshness. The 

 apple already lies potentially in the blossom, as that may be 

 traced also in the ripened fruit. With a mere change of 

 emphasis, Goethe might be called an old boy at both ends 

 of his career. 



