that is displayed; the hero is seen at home, playing the
flute; the different tendencies of his work come, one after
another, into notice; and thus something like a true, general
impression of the subject may at last be struck. But in the
short study, the writer, having seized his "point of view,"
must keep his eye steadily to that. He seeks, perhaps,
rather to differentiate than truly to characterise. The
proportions of the sitter must be sacrificed to the
proportions of the portrait; the lights are heightened, the
shadows overcharged; the chosen expression, continually
forced, may degenerate at length into a grimace; and we have
at best something of a caricature, at worst a calumny.
Hence, if they be readable at all, and hang together by their
own ends, the peculiar convincing force of these brief
representations. They take so little a while to read, and
yet in that little while the subject is so repeatedly
introduced in the same light and with the same expression,
that, by sheer force of repetition, that view is imposed upon
the reader. The two English masters of the style, Macaulay
and Carlyle, largely exemplify its dangers. Carlyle, indeed,
had so much more depth and knowledge of the heart, his
portraits of mankind are felt and rendered with so much more
poetic comprehension, and he, like his favourite Ram Dass,
had a fire in his belly so much more hotly burning than the
patent reading lamp by which Macaulay studied, that it seems
at first sight hardly fair to bracket them together. But the
"point of view" was imposed by Carlyle on the men he judged
of in his writings with an austerity not only cruel but
almost stupid. They are too often broken outright on the
Procrustean bed; they are probably always disfigured. The