Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/437

Rh special beat of low caricature, and what is he? What noble person has he sketched? The utter poverty of almost every current novelist in any grand universal human traits in his own character, is shown in nothing more clearly than in the kind of interest the reader takes in his books. We are led along solely by the ingenuity of the plot, and a silly desire to see how the affair came out. What must be the effect, long continued, of this class of jugglers working upon the sympathies and the imagination of a nation of gestating women?

How the best modern novel collapses before the homely but immense human significance of Homer's celestial swine-herd entertaining divine Ulysses, or even the solitary watchman, in Æschylus' Agamemnon, crouched, like a night-dog, on the roofs of the Atreidae, waiting for the signal fires that should announce the fall of sacred Ilion.

But one need not look long, even in contemporary British literature, to find a man. In the author of "Characteristics" and "Sartor Resartus," we surely encounter one of the true heroic cast. We are made aware that here is something more than a littérateur, something more than genius. Here is veracity, homely directness and sincerity, and strong primary idiosyncracies. Here the man enters into the estimate of the author. There is no separating them, as there never is in great examples. A curious perversity runs through all, but in no way vitiates the result. In both his moral and intellectual natures, Carlyle seems made with a sort of stub and twist, like the best gun-barrels. The knotty and corrugated character of his sentences suits well the peculiar and intense activity of his mind. What a transition from his terse and sharply-articulated pages, brimming with character and life, and a strange mixture of rage, humor, tenderness, poetry, philosophy, to the cold disbelief and municipal splendor of Macaulay! Nothing in Carlyle's contributions seems fortuitous. It all flows from a good and sufficient cause in the character of the man.

Every great man is, in a certain way, an Atlas, with the weight of the world upon him. And if one is to criticise at all, he may say that if Carlyle had not been quite so conscious of this weight, his work would have been better done. Yet, to whom do we owe more, even as Americans? Anti-democratic in his opinions, he surely is not so in spirit, or in the quality of his make. The nobility of labor, and the essential nobility of man, were never so effectively preached before. Is it a king-bee he would foster? But the bread he has put in his hive would make all king-bees, and all king-bees workers. What kind of bees is this mock pollen of the popular poets calculated to feed? The deadliest enemy of Democracy is not the warning or dissenting voice. No one knows that