Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 22 (US).djvu/138

 which none but the Poet, in the strictest meaning of that word, can shed over them.

So long as humour will avail him, his management even of higher and stronger characters may still be pronounced successful; but whenever humour ceases to be applicable, his success is more or less imperfect. In the treatment of heroes proper he is seldom completely happy. They shoot into rugged exaggeration in his hands, their sensibility becomes too copious and tearful, their magnanimity too fierce, abrupt and thoroughgoing. In some few instances they verge towards absolute failure: compared with their less ambitious brethren, they are almost of a vulgar cast; with all their brilliancy and vigour, too like that positive, determinate, choleric, volcanic class of personages whom we meet with so frequently in novels; they call themselves Men, and do their utmost to prove the assertion, but they cannot make us believe it; for after all their vapouring and storming, we see well enough that they are but Engines, with no more life than the Freethinkers' model in Martinus Scriblerus, the Nuremberg Man, who operated by a combination of pipes and levers, and though he could breathe and digest perfectly, and even reason as well as most country parsons, was made of wood and leather. In the general conduct of such histories and delineations, Richter seldom appears to advantage: the incidents are often startling and extravagant; the whole structure of the story has a rugged, broken, huge, artificial aspect, and will not assume the air of truth. Yet its chasms are strangely filled up with the costhest materials; a world, a universe of wit and knowledge and fancy and imagination has sent its fairest products to adorn the edifice; the rude and rent cyclopean walls are resplendent with jewels and beaten gold; rich stately foliage screens it, the balmiest odours encircle it; we stand astonished if not captivated, delighted if not charmed, by the artist and his art.

By a critic of his own country Richter has been named a Western Oriental, an epithet which Goethe himself is at the