All nature, human and external, is ransacked to
serve and run his errands. The bright cutlery, after all the
dross of Birmingham has been thrown aside, is his style....
He has "broken the ice, and the torrent streams forth." He
drives six-in-hand over ruts and streams and never upsets....
With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all
his moods and experiences, and crashes his way through
shoals of dilettante opinions. It is not in man to determine
what his style shall be, if it is to be his own.
But though a rugged, Carlyle was the reverse of a careless or ready
writer. He weighed every sentence: if in all his works, from _Sartor_ to
the _Reminiscences_, you pencil-mark the most suggestive passages you
disfigure the whole book. His opinions will continue to be tossed to and
fro; but as an artist he continually grows. He was, let us grant, though
a powerful, a one-sided historian, a twisted though in some aspects a
great moralist; but he was, in every sense, a mighty painter, now dipping
his pencil "in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse," now etching his
scenes with the tender touch of a Millet.
Emerson, in one of his early letters to Carlyle, wrote, "Nothing seems
hid from those wonderful eyes of yours; those devouring eyes; those
thirsty eyes; those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine."
Men of genius, whether expressing themselves in prose or verse, on canvas
or in harmony, are, save when smitten, like Beethoven, by some malignity
of Nature, endowed with keener physical senses than other men.
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