igo CARLYLE. 



With the gift of song, Carlyle would have been the 

 greatest of epic poets since Homer. Without it, to modu 

 late and harmonise and bring parts into their proper 

 relation, he is the most amorphous of humourists, the most 

 shining avatar of whim the world has ever seen. Beginning 

 with a hearty contempt for shams, he has come at length to 

 believe in brute force as the only reality, and has as little 

 sense of justice as Thackeray allowed to women. We say 

 brute force, because, though the theory is that this force 

 should be directed by the supreme intellect for the time 

 being, yet all inferior wits are treated rather as obstacles to 

 be contemptuously shoved aside than as ancillary forces to 

 be conciliated through their reason. But, with all deduc 

 tions, he remains the profoundest critic and the most 

 dramatic imagination of modern times. Never was there a 

 more striking example of that ingenium perfervidum long 

 ago said to be characteristic of his countrymen. His is one 

 of the natures, rare in these latter centuries, capable of 

 rising to a white heat ; but once fairly kindled, he is like a 

 three-decker on fire, and his shotted guns go off, as the glow 

 reaches them, alike dangerous to friend or foe. Though he 

 seems more and more to confound material with moral 

 success, yet there is always something wholesome in his 

 unswerving loyalty to reality, as he understands it. History, 

 in the true sense, he does not and cannot write, for he looks 

 on mankind as a herd without volition, and without moral 

 force ; but such vivid pictures of events, such living con 

 ceptions of character, we find nowhere else in prose. The 

 figures of most historians seem like dolls stuffed with bran, 

 whose whole substance runs out through any hole that 

 criticism may tear in them ; but Carlyle s are so real in 

 comparison, that, if you prick them, they bleed. He seems 

 a little wearied, here and there, in his Friedrich, with the 

 multiplicity of detail, and does his filling-in rather shabbily ; 

 but he still remains in his own way, like his hero, the Only, 

 and such episodes as that of Yoltaire would make the fortune 

 of any other writer. Though not the safest of guides in 

 politics or practical philosophy, his value as an inspirer and 



