dual, not a
mere bit of machinery worked by colorless formulae. With this eye for
character goes the keen sense of grim humor which keeps him in touch
with reality. Little incidents bring out the absurd side of even the
heroic. The most exciting scenes of his 'French Revolution' are
heightened by the vision of the shivering usher who "accords the grand
entries" when the ferocious mob is rushing into the palace--not
"finding it convenient," as Carlyle observes, "to refuse them"; and
of the gentleman who continues for an hour to "demand the arrestment
of knaves and dastards"--a most comprehensive of all known petitions.
Carlyle's "mannerism" is one result of this strain to be graphic. It
has been attributed to readings of Jean Paul, and by Carlyle himself,
partly to Irving and partly to the early talk in his father's home. It
appears at any rate as soon as Carlyle gets confidence enough in
himself to trust to his own modes of impression; and if it may fairly
be called a mannerism, was not an affectation. It was struck out in
the attempt to give most effective utterance to his genuine thought,
and may be compared, as Burke said of Johnson's conversation, to the
"contortions of the Sibyl."

It is time, however, to try to say what was the prophetic message thus
delivered. Carlyle, I have said, had no logical system of philosophy,
and was too much of a "realist" (in one sense) to find poetry
congenial. He has to preach by pictures of the past; by giving us
history, though history transfused with poetry; an account of the
external fact which shall reveal the real animating principle, quietly
omitted by statisticians and constitutional historians. The doctrine
so delivered appears to be vague. What, the ordinary believer may ask,
would be left of a religion if its historical statements should turn
out to be mere figments and its framework of dogmas to be nonsense? He
would naturally reply, Nothing. Carlyle replies, Everything. The
spirit may survive, though its whole visible embodiment should be
dissolved into fiction and fallacy. But to define this spirit is
obviously impossible. It represents a tone of thought, a mode of
contemplating life and the world, not any distinct set of definite
propositions. Carlyle was called a "mystic," and even, as he says,
was made into a "mystic school." We may accept the phrase, so far as
mysticism means the substitution of a "logic of the heart" for a
"logic of the head"--an appeal to sentime