126 CARLYLE. 



tendency was toward the lawless, and the attraction of 

 Jean Paul made it an overmastering one. Goethe, we 

 think, might have gone farther, and affirmed that nothing 

 but the highest artistic sense can prevent humor from 

 degenerating into the grotesque, and thence downwards 

 to utter anarchy. Rabelais is a striking example of 

 it. The moral purpose of his book cannot give it that 

 unity which the instinct and forethought of art only 

 can bring forth. Perhaps we owe the masterpiece of 

 humorous literature to the fact that Cervantes had been 

 trained to authorship in a school where form predomi- 

 nated over substance, and the most convincing proof of 

 the supremacy of art at the highest period of Greek 

 literature is to be found in Aristophanes. Mr. Carlyle 

 has no artistic sense of form or rhythm, scarcely of 

 proportion. Accordingly he looks on verse with con- 

 tempt as something barbarous, — a savage ornament 

 which a higher refinement will abolish, as it has tattoo- 

 ing and nose-rings. With a conceptive imagination 

 vigorous beyond any in his generation, with a mastery 

 of language equalled only by the greatest poets, he wants 

 altogether the plastic imagination, the shaping faculty, 

 which would have made him a poet in the highest sense. 

 He is a preacher and a prophet, — anything you will, — 

 but an artist he is not, and never can be. It is always 

 the knots and gnarls of the oak that he admires, never 

 the perfect and balanced tree. 



It is certainly more agreeable to be grateful for what 

 we owe an author, than to blame him for what he cannot 

 give us. But it is sometimes the business of a critic to 

 trace faults of style and of thought to their root in char- 

 acter and temperament, — to show their necessary rela- 

 tion to, and dependence on, each other, — and to find some 

 more trustworthy explanation than mere wantonness of 

 will for the moral obliquities of a man so largely moulded 



