CARLYLE. 183 



print. His fervour, his oddity of manner, his pugnacious 

 paradox, drew the crowd ; the truth, or, at any rate, the 

 faith that underlay them all, brought also the fitter audience, 

 though fewer. But the curse was upon him ; he must 

 attract, he must astonish. Thenceforth he has done nothing 

 but revamp his telling things ; but the oddity has become 

 always odder, the paradoxes more paradoxical. No very 

 large share of truth falls to the apprehension of any one 

 man ; let him keep it sacred, and beware of repeating it till 

 it turn to falsehood on his lips by becoming ritual. Truth 

 always has a bewitching savour of newness in it, and 

 novelty at the first taste recalls that original sweetness to 

 the tongue ; but alas for him who would make the one a 

 substitute for the other ! We seem to miss of late in Mr. 

 Carlyle the old sincerity. He has become the purely 

 literary man, less concerned about what he says than 

 about how he shall say it to best advantage. The muse 

 should be the companion, not the guide, says he whom Mr. 

 Carlyle has pronounced &quot;the wisest of this generation.&quot; 

 What would be a virtue in the poet is a vice of the most 

 fatal kind in the teacher, and, alas that we should say it ! 

 the very Draco of shams, whose code contained no penalty 

 milder than capital for the most harmless of them, has 

 become at last something very like a sham himself. Mr. 

 Carlyle continues to be a voice crying in the wilderness, 

 but no longer a voice with any earnest conviction behind it. 

 Hearing him rebuke us for being humbugs and impostors, 

 we are inclined to answer, with the ambassador of Philip 

 II., when his master reproached him with forgetting 

 substance in ceremony, &quot;Your Majesty forgets that you 

 are only a ceremony yourself.&quot; And Mr. Carlyle s teaching, 

 moreover if teaching we may call it belongs to what the 

 great German, whose disciple he is, condemned as the 

 &quot; literature of despair.&quot; An apostle to the Gentiles might 

 hope for some fruit of his preaching ; but of what avail an 

 apostle who shouts his message down the mouth of the pit 

 to poor lost souls, whom he can positively assure only that 

 it is impossible to get out? Mr. Carlyle lights up the 



