262 FRESH FIELDS 



It is his supreme merit that he spoke with abso- 

 lute sincerity; not according to the beliefs, tradi- 

 tions, conventionalities of his times, for they were 

 mostly against him, but according to his private 

 and solemn conviction of what the will of his Maker 

 with reference to himself was. The reason why so 

 much writing and preaching sounds hollow and 

 insincere compared with his is that the writers and 

 speakers are mostly under the influence of current 

 beliefs or received traditions; they deliver them- 

 selves of what they have been taught, or what is 

 fashionable and pleasant; they draw upon a sort of 

 public fund of conviction and sentiment and not at 

 all from original private resources, as he did. It 

 is not their own minds or their own experience they 

 speak from, but a vague, featureless, general mind 

 and general experience. We drink from a cistern 

 or reservoir and not from a fountain-head. Carlyle 

 always takes us to the source of intense personal 

 and original conviction. The spring may be a hot 

 spring, or a sulphur spring, or a spouting spring, 

 a geyser, as Froude says, shooting up volumes of 

 steam and stone, or the most refreshing and deli- 

 cious of fountains (and he seems to have been all 

 these things alternately); but in any case it was 

 an original source and came from out the depths, 

 at times from out the Plutonic depths. 



He bewails his gloom and loneliness, and the 

 isolation of his soul in the paths in which he was 

 called to walk. In many ways he was an exile, 

 a wanderer, forlorn or uncertain, like one who had 



