Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 01.djvu/25

Rh have been almost invariably mere mimics of his mannerisms, with no thoughts of their own to express, nor probably any natural manner of their own to spoil by the affectation; and the Carlylian style is too distinctively shaped and coloured by the Carlylian individuality to tempt any writer with an individuality of his own to adopt it. English prose, in short, appears on the whole to be much what it would have been if Carlyle had never lived; he has made not a hundredth part of the impression on it that it received, for instance, from Macaulay. There was justice again in the contention that that prose style of ours which has been slowly perfecting itself throughout the two centuries that have passed since the day of Dryden, is the best possible mould in which the historian can cast his narrative, or the philosopher his thoughts. Carlyle wherever he has a commonplace tale to tell is himself the witness; he has proved the point over many a long dry tract of his Frederick, where the jerky emphasis of his manner of narrating what could not be narrated too unemphatically, becomes a mere weariness to the flesh. But this contention of his censors overlooks the fact that rules without exceptions are as rare in literature as in life, and that to a genius of exceptional and indeed unique character rules of style must bend. It fails to recognise that—in the literary art at any rate—the claim of symmetry, of formal beauty, though great, is not paramount, but that the adequacy of the medium of expression to the thing to be expresssed, must always be the first consideration. For so many-sided and many-coloured a genius as Carlyle's with his throng of commanding faculties—his fiery eloquence, his rugged pathos, his grim and caustic humour, his unrivalled talent for word-portraiture and picturesque description—all struggling, sometimes almost simultaneously, to express themselves, there was but one possible language—the Carlylese. And whatever may happen to the 'claim of style,' whatever may become of the 'dignity of history,' we may be sure that so long as eloquence, and pathos, and humour, and vivid portraiture and picturesque description retain their power to