He feels nothing but contempt for the
banter of men like Jerrold; despises the genial pathos of Lamb; and
salutes the most brilliant wit and exquisite lyrist of our century with
the Puritanical comment, "Blackguard Heine." He deified work as he
deified strength; and so often stimulated his imitators to attempt to
leap beyond their shadows. Hard work will not do everything: a man can
only accomplish what he was born fit for. Many, in the first flush of
ambition doomed to wreck, are blind to the fact that it is not in every
ploughman to be a poet, nor in every prize-student to be a philosopher.
Nature does half: after all perhaps the larger half. Genius has been
inadequately defined as "an infinite capacity for taking trouble"; no
amount of pumping can draw more water than is in the well. Himself in
"the chamber of little ease," Carlyle travestied Goethe's "worship of
sorrow" till it became a pride in pain. He forgot that rude energy
requires restraint. Hercules Furens and Orlando Furioso did more than cut
down trees; they tore them up; but to no useful end. His power is often
almost Miltonic; it is never Shakespearian; and his insistent earnestness
would run the risk of fatiguing us were it not redeemed by his
humour. But he errs on the better side; and his example is a salutary
counteractive in an age when the dust of so many skirmishers obscures the
air, and laughter is too readily accepted as the test of truth, his stern
conception of literature accounts for his exaltations of the ideal, and
denunciations of the actual, profession of letters in passages which,
from his habit of emphasising opposite sides of truth, instead of
striking a balance, appear almost side by side in contradiction.
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