CARLYLE. 137 



of his nature. The cynicism which renders him so en- 

 tertaining 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 be- 

 fore a Punch's theatre are gathered the wisest of man- 

 kind 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 consciousness of 

 the futility of all human enterprise, and the ludicrous- 

 ness 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 disagreeable. 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. Car- 

 lyle'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 ; it is noisy and aggressive. What the wise master 

 puts into the mouth of desperate ambition, thwarted of 

 the fruit of its crime, as the fitting expression of pas- 

 sionate sophistry, seems to have become an article of his 

 creed. With him 



