148 CARLYLE. 



of a man who has every quality of a great poet except 

 that supreme one of rhythm which shapes both matter 

 and manner to harmonious proportion, and that where 

 it is good, it is good as only genius knows how to be. 



With the gift of song, Carlyle would have been the 

 greatest of epic poets since Homer. Without it, to 

 modulate and harmonize and bring parts into their 

 proper relation, he is the most amorphous of humorists, 

 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 deductions, he re- 

 mains the profoundest critic and the most dramatic imagi- 

 nation 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 whole- 

 some in his unswerving loyalty to reality, as he under- 

 stands 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 pic- 

 tures of events, such living conceptions of character, we 

 find nowhere else in prose. The figures of most histo- 

 rians seem like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole sut> 



