Emerson's "Threnody" shows that he has known the shadow; but he
has fought with no Apollyons, reached the Celestial City without crossing
the dark river, and won the immortal garland "without the dust and heat."
Self-sacrifice, inconsistently maintained, is the watchword of the one:
self-reliance, more consistently, of the other. The art of the two
writers is in strong contrast. The charm of Emerson's style is its
precision; his sentences are like medals each hung on its own string; the
fields of his thought are combed rather than ploughed: he draws outlines,
as Flaxman, clear and colourless. Carlyle's paragraphs are like streams
from Pactolus, that roll nuggets from their source on their turbid way.
His expressions are often grotesque, but rarely offensive. Both writers
are essentially ascetic,--though the one swallows Mirabeau, and the other
says that Jane Eyre should have accepted Eochester and "left the world in
a minority." But Emerson is never coarse, which Carlyle occasionally is;
and Carlyle is never flippant, as Emerson often is. In condemning the
hurry and noise of mobs the American keeps his temper, and insists on
justice without vindictiveness: wars and revolutions take nothing from
his tranquillity, and he sets Hafiz and Shakespeare against Luther and
Knox. Careless of formal consistency--"the hobgoblin of little minds"--he
balances his aristocratic reserve with a belief in democracy, in
progression by antagonism, and in collective wisdom as a limit to
collective folly.
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