nite wit and exuberant
richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and
a splendor scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not
converse;--only harangues. It is the usual misfortune of such marked
men,--happily not one invariable or inevitable,--that they cannot
allow other minds room to breathe, and show themselves in their
atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the
greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest.
Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not
only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as
so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority,--raising his
voice, and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound. This is
not in the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others. On the
contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought.
But it is the habit of a mind accustomed to follow out its own
impulse, as the hawk its prey, and which knows not how to stop in
the chase. Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing; but in his
arrogance there is no littleness,--no self-love. It is the heroic
arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror;--it is his nature, and
the untamable energy 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 seems, to me, quite isolated,--lonely as
the desert,--yet never was a man more fitted to prize a man, could he
find one to match his mood. He finds them, but only in the past.
He sings, rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical,
heroical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and generally, near
the beginning, hits upon 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