i68 CARLYLE. 



Chronicles. What was the real meaning of this phenome 

 non ? what the amount of this man s honest performance in 

 the world 1 and in what does he show that family likeness, 

 common to all the sons of Adam, which gives us a fair hope 

 of being able to comprehend him 1 These were the questions 

 which Carlyle seems to have set himself honestly to answer 

 in the critical writings which fill the first period of his life 

 as a man of letters. In this mood he rescued poor Boswell 

 from the unmerited obloquy of an ungrateful generation, 

 and taught us to see something half-comically beautiful in 

 the poor, weak creature, with his pathetic instinct of 

 reverence for what was nobler, wiser, and stronger than 

 himself. Everything that Mr. Carlyle wrote during this 

 first period thrills with the purest appreciation of whatever 

 is brave and beautiful in human nature, with the most 

 vehement scorn of cowardly compromise with things base ; 

 and yet, immitigable as his demand for the highest in us 

 seems to be, there is always something reassuring in the 

 humorous sympathy with mortal frailty which softens 

 condemnation and consoles for shortcoming. The remark 

 able freature of Mr. Carlyle s criticism (see, for example, 

 his analysis and exposition of Goethe s &quot; Helena &quot;) is the 

 sleuth-hound instinct with which he presses on to the matter 

 of his theme never turned aside by a false scent, regardless 

 of the outward beauty of form, sometimes almost con 

 temptuous of it, in his hunger after the intellectual nourish 

 ment which it may hide. THe delicate skeleton of 

 admirably articulated and related parts which underlies 

 and sustains every true work of art, and keeps it from 

 sinking on itself a shapeless heap, he would crush remorse 

 lessly to come at the marrow of meaning. With him the 

 ideal sense is secondary to the ethical and metaphysical, 

 and he has but a faint conception of their possible unity. 



By degrees the humorous element in his nature gains 

 ground, till it overmasters all the rest. Becoming always 

 more boisterous and obtrusive, it ends at last, as such 

 humour must, in cynicism. In &quot; Sartor Resartus &quot; it is 

 ptill kindly, still infused with sentiment] and the book, 



