Past and Present | Page 3

remarkable book, for the variety and excellence of the talent displayed
in it is pretty sure to leave all special
criticism in the wrong. And we
may easily fail in expressing the general objection which we feel. It
appears to us as a certain disproportion in the picture, caused by the
obtrusion of the whims of the painter. In this work, as in his former
labours, Mr. Carlyle reminds us of a sick giant. His humours are

expressed with so much force of constitution that his
fancies are more
attractive and more credible than the sanity of duller men. But the
habitual exaggeration of the tone wearies whilst it stimulated.
It is felt to be so much deduction from the universality of the picture. It
is not serene sunshine, but everything is seen in lurid storm lights.
Every object attitudinises, to the very mountains and stars almost,
under the refraction of this
wonderful humorist; and instead of the
common earth and sky, we have a Martin's Creation or Judgment Day.
A crisis has always arrived which requires a deus ex machina. One can
hardly credit, whilst under the spell of this magician, that the world
always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us--as of a
failed world just re-collecting its old withered forces to begin again and
try to do a little business. It was perhaps inseparable from the attempt
to write a book of wit and
imagination on English politics, that a
certain local emphasis and love of effect, such as is the vice of
preaching, should appear, producing on the reader a feeling of
forlornness by the excess of value attributed to circumstances. But the
splendour of wit cannot out--dazzle the calm daylight, which always
shows every individual man in balance with his age, and able to work
out his own salvation from all the follies of that, and no such glaring

contrasts or severalties in that or this. Each age has its own follies, as
its majority is made up of foolish young people; its superstitions appear
no superstitions to itself; and if you should ask the contemporary, he
would tell you, with pride or with regret (according as he was practical
or poetic), that he had none. But after a short time, down go its follies
and weakness and the memory of them; its virtues alone remain, and its
limitation assumes the poetic form of a beautiful
superstition, as the
dimness of our sight clothes the objects in the horizon with mist and
colour. The revelation of Reason is this of the un-changeableness of the
fate of humanity under all its subjective aspects; that to the cowering it
always cowers, to the daring it opens great avenues. The ancients are
only venerable to us because distance has destroyed what was trivial; as
the sun and stars affect us only grandly, because we cannot reach to
their smoke and surfaces and say, Is that all?
And yet the gravity of the times, the manifold and increasing dangers
of the English State, may easily excuse some overcolouring
of the
picture; and we at this distance are not so far
removed from any of the
specific evils, and are deeply
participant in too many, not to share the
gloom and thank the love and the courage of the counselor. This book
is full of humanity, and nothing is more excellent in this as in all Mr.
Carlyle's works than the attitude of the writer. He has the dignity of a
man of letters, who knows what belongs to him, and never deviates
from his sphere; a continuer of the great line of scholars, and sustains
their office in the highest credit and honour. If the good heaven have
any good word to impart to this unworthy generation, here is one scribe
qualified and clothed for its occasion. One excellence he has in an age
of Mammon and of criticism, that he never suffers the eye of his
wonder to close. Let who will be the dupe of trifles, he cannot keep his
eye oft from that gracious Infinite which embosoms us.
As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main one that
he never wrote one dull line. How well-read, how
adroit, what
thousand arts in his one art of writing; with his expedient for expressing
those unproven opinions which he
entertains but will not endorse, by
summoning one of his men of straw from the cell,--and the respectable

Sauerteig, or
Teufelsdrockh, or Dryasdust, or Picturesque Traveler,
says what is put into his mouth, and disappears. That morbid
temperament has given his rhetoric a somewhat bloated character; a
luxury to many imaginative and learned persons, like a showery
south-wind with its sunbursts and rapid chasing of lights and glooms
over the landscape, and yet its offensiveness to multitudes of

reluctant lovers makes us often wish some concession