CARLYLE. 127 



and gifted as Mr. Carlyle. So long as he was merely an 

 exhorter or dehorter, we were thankful for such elo 

 quence, such humor, such vivid or grotesque images, 

 and such splendor of illustration as only he could give ; 

 but when he assumes to be a teacher of moral and polit 

 ical philosophy, when he himself takes to compounding 

 the social panaceas he has made us laugh at so often, 

 and advertises none as genuine but his own, we begin to 

 inquire into his qualifications and his defects, and to 

 ask ourselves whether his patent pill differs from others 

 except in the larger amount of aloes, or has any better 

 recommendation than the superior advertising powers of 

 a mountebank of genius. Comparative criticism teaches 

 us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly 

 related than is commonly supposed. Had Mr. Carlyle 

 been fitted out completely by nature as an artist, he 

 would have had an ideal in his work which would have 

 lifted his mind away from the muddier part of him, and 

 trained him to the habit of seeking and seeing the 

 harmony rather than the discord and contradiction of 

 things. His innate love of the picturesque, (which is 

 only another form of the sentimentalism he so scoffs at, 

 perhaps as feeling it a weakness in himself,) once turned 

 in the direction of character, and finding its chief satis 

 faction there, led him to look for that ideal of human 

 nature in individual men which is but fragmentarily 

 represented in the entire race, and is rather divined 

 from the aspiration, forever disenchanted to be forever 

 renewed, of the immortal part in us, than found in any 

 example of actual achievement. A wiser temper would 

 have found something more consoling than disheartening 

 in the continual failure of men eminently endowed to 

 reach the standard of this spiritual requirement, would 

 perhaps have found in it an inspiring hint that it is 

 mankind, and not special men, that are to be shaped at 



