A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW 227 



ideal natures to him was not the character of his 

 conviction, hut the torrid impetuosity of his belief. 

 He had the earnestness of fanaticism, the earnest- 

 ness of rebellion; the earnestness of the Long Par- 

 liament and the National Convention, — the only 

 two parliaments he praises. He did not merely see 

 the truth and placidly state it, standing aloof and 

 apart from it; but, as soon as his intellect had con- 

 ceived a thing as true, every current of his being 

 set swiftly in that direction; it was an outlet at 

 once for his whole pent-up energies, and there was 

 a flood and sometimes an inundation of Carlylean 

 wrath and power. Coming from Goethe, with his 

 marvelous insight and cool, uncommitted moral 

 nature, to the great Scotchman, is like coming from 

 dress parade to a battle, from Melancthon to Luther. 

 It would be far from the truth to say that Goethe 

 was not in earnest: he was all eyes, all vision; he 

 saw everything, but saw it for his own ends and 

 behoof, for contemplation and enjoyment. In Car- 

 lyle the vision is productive of pain and suffering, 

 because his moral nature sympathizes so instantly 

 and thoroughly with his intellectual; it is a call 

 to battle, and every faculty is enlisted. It was 

 this that made Carlyle akin to the reformers and 

 the fanatics, and led them to expect more of him 

 than they got. The artist element in him, and his 

 vital hold upon the central truths of character and 

 personal force, saved him from any such fate as 

 overtook his friend Irving. 



Out of Carlyle's fierce and rampant individualism 



