CARLYLE. 125 



porary 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 its special fitness for a given task. In propor- 

 tion as his humor gradually overbalanced the other 

 qualities of his mind, his taste for the eccentric, amor- 

 phous, and violent in men became excessive, disturbing 

 more and more his perception of the more common- 

 place attributes which give consistency to portraiture. 

 His " French Revolution " is a series of lurid pictures, 

 unmatched for vehement power, in which the figures 

 of such sons of earth as Mirabeau and Danton loom 

 gigantic and terrible as in the glare of an eruption, their 

 shadows swaying far and wide grotesquely awful. But 

 all is painted by eruption-flashes in violent light and 

 shade. There are no half-tints, no gradations, and we 

 find it impossible to account for the continuance in 

 power of less Titanic actors in the tragedy like Robes- 

 pierre, on any theory whether of human nature or of 

 individual character supplied by Mr. Carlyle. Of his 

 success, however, in accomplishing what he aimed at, 

 which was to haunt the mind with memories of a horri- 

 ble political nightmare, there can be no doubt. 



Goethe says, apparently thinking of Richter, "The 

 worthy Germans have persuaded themselves that the 

 essence of true humor is formlessness." Heine had not 

 yet shown that a German might combine the most airy 

 humor with a sense of form as delicate as Goethe's own, 

 and that there was no need to borrow the bow of Phi- 

 loctetes for all kinds of game. Mr. Carlyle's own 



