Carlyle, indeed,
is arrogant and overbearing, but in his arrogance there is no littleness
or self-love: it is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian
conqueror,--it is his nature, and the untamable impulse that has given
him power to crush the dragons. You do not love him, perhaps, nor
revere, and perhaps, also, he would only laugh at you if you did; but
you like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith, the
Siegfried, melting all the old iron, in his furnace till it glows to a
sunset red, and burns you if you senselessly go too near. He seemed to
me quite isolated, lonely as the desert; yet never was man more fitted
to prize a man, could he find one to match his mood. He finds such, but
only in the past. He sings rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind
of satirical, heretical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and
generally catching up near the beginning some singular epithet, which
serves as a _refrain_ when his song is full, or with which as with a
knitting-needle he catches up the stitches, if he has chanced now and
then to let fall a row. For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense,
and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd; he
sometimes stops a minute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with
fresh vigor; for all the spirits he is driving before him seem to him as
Fata Morgana; ugly masks in fact, if he can but make them turn about,
but he laughs that they seem to others such dainty Ariels.
Pages:
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420