for looking grave, as you read in his vivid pages of the reckless
manner in which too many of his heroes drove coaches-and-six through
the Ten Commandments. As likely as not he will call you a blockhead,
and tell you to close your wide mouth and cease shrieking. But, dear
me! hard words break no bones, and it is an amazing comfort to know
the facts. Is he writing of Cromwell?--down goes everything--letters,
speeches, as they were written, as they were delivered. Few great men
are edited after this fashion. Were they to be so--Luther, for
example--many eyes would be opened very wide. Nor does Carlyle fail in
comment. If the Protector makes a somewhat distant allusion to the
Barbadoes, Carlyle is at your elbow to tell you it means his selling
people to work as slaves in the West Indies. As for Mirabeau, 'our
wild Gabriel Honore,' well! we are told all about him; nor is
Frederick let off a single absurdity or atrocity. But when we have
admitted the veracity, what are we to say of the catholic temper, the
breadth of temperament, the wide Shakespearian tolerance? Carlyle
ought to have them all. By nature he was tolerant enough; so true a
humourist could never be a bigot. When his war-paint is not on, a
child might lead him. His judgments are gracious, chivalrous, tinged
with a kindly melancholy and divine pity. But this mood is never for
long. Some gadfly stings him: he seizes his tomahawk and is off on the
trail. It must sorrowfully be admitted that a long life of opposition
and indigestion, of fierce warfare with cooks and Philistines, spoilt
his temper, never of the best, and made him too often contemptuous,
savage, unjust. His language then becomes unreasonable, unbearable,
bad. Literature takes care of herself. You disobey her rules: well and
good, she shuts her door in your face; you plead your genius: she
replies, 'Your temper,' and bolts it. Carlyle has deliberately
destroyed, by his own wilfulness, the value of a great deal he has
written. It can never become classical. Alas! that this should be true