CARLYLE. 171 



language equalled only by the greatest poets, he wants 

 altogether the plastic imagination, the shaping faculty, 

 which would have made him a poet in the highest sense. 

 He is a preacher and a prophet anything you will but 

 an artist he is not, and never can be. It is always the 

 knots and gnarls of the oak that he admires, never the 

 perfect and balanced tree. 



It is certainly more agreeable to be grateful for what 

 we owe an author, than to blame him for what he cannot 

 give us. But it is sometimes the business of a critic to trace 

 faults of style and of thought to their root in character and 

 temperament to show their necessary relation to, and 

 dependence on, each other and to find some more trust 

 worthy explanation than mere wantonness of will for the 

 moral obliquities of a man so largely moulded and gifted as 

 Mr. Carlyle. So long as he was merely an exhorter or 

 dehorter, we were thankful for such eloquence, such 

 humour, such vivid or grotesque images, and such 

 splendour of illustration as only he could give ; but when 

 he assumes to be a teacher of moral and political philosophy, 

 when he himself takes to compounding the social panaceas 

 he has made us laugh at so often, and advertises none as 

 genuine but his own, we begin to inquire into his qualifica 

 tions and his defects, and to ask ourselves whether his 

 patent pill differs from others except in the larger amount 

 of aloes, or has any better recommendation than the 

 superior advertising powers of a mountebank of genius. 

 Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic 

 defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed. 

 Had Mr. Carlyle been fitted out completely by nature as an 

 artist, he would have had an ideal in his work which would 

 have lifted his mind away from the muddier part of him, 

 and trained him to the habit of seeking and seeing the 

 harmony rather than the discord and contradiction of 

 things. His innate love of the picturesque (which is only 

 another form of the sentimentalism he so scoffs at, perhaps 

 as feeling it a weakness in himself) once turned in the 

 direction of character, and finding its chief satisfaction 



