CARLYLE. 169 



with its mixture of indignation and farce, strikes one as 

 might the prophecies of Jeremiah, if the marginal comments 

 of the Rev. Mr. Sterne in his wildest mood had by some 

 accident been incorporated with the text. In &quot; Sartor &quot; 

 the marked influence of Jean Paul is undeniable, both in 

 matter and manner. It is curious for one who studies the 

 action and reaction of national literatures on each other, to 

 see the humour of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after 

 filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge 

 of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeas 

 ing, as the case may be, to the English mind. Unhappily 

 the bit of mother from Swift s vinegar-barrel has had 

 strength enough to sour all the rest. The whimsicality of 

 &quot; Tristram Shandy,&quot; which, even in the original, has too 

 often the effect of forethought, becomes a deliberate artifice 

 in Richter, and at last a mere mannerism in Carlyle. 



Mr. Carlyle in his critical essays had the advantage of a 

 well-defined theme, and of limits both in the subject and in 

 the space allowed for its treatment, which kept his natural 

 extravagance within bounds, and compelled some sort of 

 discretion and compactness. The great merit of these essays 

 lay in a criticism based on wide and various study, which, 

 careless of tradition, applied its standard to the real and not 

 the contemporary worth of the literary or other performance 

 to be judged, and in an unerring eye for that fleeting expres 

 sion of the moral features of character, a perception of 

 which alone makes the drawing of a coherent likeness 

 possible. Their defect was a tendency, gaining strength 

 with years, to confound the moral with the aesthetic 

 standard, and to make the value of an author s work 

 dependent on the general force of his nature rather than on 

 his special fitness for a given task. In proportion as his 

 humour gradually overbalanced the other qualities of his 

 mind, his taste for the eccentric, amorphous, and violent in 

 men became excessive, disturbing more and more his per- 

 peption of the more commonplace attributes which give 

 consistency to portraiture. His &quot; French Revolution &quot; is a 

 series of lurid pictures, unmatched for vehement power, in 



