i So CARLYLE. 



in Antony and Cleopatra, where the tipsiness of Lepidus 

 pervades the whole metaphysical no less than the physical 

 part of the triumvir. If his sympathies bore any propor 

 tion to his instinct for catching those traits which are 

 the expression of character, but not character itself, we 

 might have had a great historian in him instead of a 

 history-painter. But that which is a main element in 

 Mr. Carlyle s talent, and does perhaps more than any 

 thing else to make it effective, is a defect of his nature. 

 The cynicism which renders him so entertaining precludes 

 him from any just conception of men and their motives, 

 and from any sane estimate of the relative importance 

 of the events which concern them. We remember a 

 picture of Hamon s, where before a Punch s theatre 

 are gathered the wisest of mankind in rapt attention. 

 Socrates sits on a front bench, absorbed in the spectacle, 

 and in the corner stands Dante making entries in his note 

 book. Mr. Carlyle as an historian leaves us in somewhat 

 such a mood. The world is a puppet-show, and when we 

 have watched the play out, we depart with a half-comic con 

 sciousness of the futility of all human enterprise, and the 

 ludicrousness of all man s action and passion on the stage 

 of the world. Simple, kindly, blundering Oliver Goldsmith 

 was after all wiser, and his Vicar, ideal as Hector and not 

 less immortal, is a demonstration of the perennial beauty and 

 heroism of the homeliest human nature. The cynical view 

 is congenial to certain moods, and is so little inconsistent 

 with original nobleness of mind, that it is not seldom the 

 acetous fermentation of it ; but it is the view of the satirist, 

 not of the historian, and takes in but a narrow arc in the 

 circumference of truth. Cynicism in itself is essentially dis 

 agreeable. It is the intellectual analogue of the truffle ; and 

 though it may be very well in giving a relish to thought for 

 certain palates, it cannot supply the substance of it. Mr. 

 Carlyle s cynicism is not that polished weariness of the out- 

 sides of life which we find in Ecclesiastes. It goes much 

 deeper than that, to the satisfactions, not of the body or the 

 intellect, but of the very soul itself. It vaunts itself j it ia 



