Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 01.djvu/23

Rh long past middle age. It was naturally The French Revolution which dealt the rudest blow at their susceptibilities. Sartor Resartus could be neglected as a mere subjective rhapsody; but the grave or professedly grave history of one of the gravest of modern events was another matter. A work of that description, from the pen of a writer already rising into celebrity compelled the attention of the whole educated public to its contents, and therewith of necessity to its style. And what a style! exclaimed the elder world of literary purists, absolutely aghast. Was it even a 'style' at all? Could you any more discuss it as a style, than you could debate the merits of 'oratory' which did not condescend to begin by being an articulate utterance? If excellence of style (they continued, breathless) consisted partly in the choice of words, and partly in their collocation, what was to be said of a writer who fetched his words from anywhere, and flung them down anyhow upon the page? Was it for this hotch-pot of vocabular monstrosities, this witches' caldron of disjointed sentences, outlandish compounds, fantastic nicknames, extravagant metaphors and obscure allusions, that the world was asked to exchange the gravity, the lucidity, the eloquence of the accepted masters of historical narrative—the simple but nervous English of Hume, the polished periods and majestic cadences of Gibbon? What would be the fate of our prose literature if the so-called style were to be tolerated and find imitators? And what, O! what would become of the 'dignity of history,' if this was how history was to be written in the future? Such were the alarmed inquiries and despairing cries which Carlyle's writings drew from the elder generation, and the echo of which was still clearly audible until the majority of that generation had passed away. Well on into the Sixties it was still to be heard, and some of us who were then in our own twenties will remember how many grey-beards were then extant, who, while fully abreast of the time in most of their ideas, nay, often admirers of the genius, and even adherents to the opinions of Carlyle, continued