Ossian Collection > Aspects of poetry

XIV.] THOMAS CARLYLE. 435
of his own, highly artificial, no doubt intensely self-
conscious, but yet one which reflected with wonderful
power and exactness his whole mental attitude, — the
way in which he habitually looked out from his dark
soul on men and things. He was weary of glib words,
and fluent periods, which impose on reader and writer
alike, which film over the chasms of their ignorance, and
make them think they know what they do not know. As
to style, he himself gives this rule in his Reminiscences :
' Learn, so far as possible, to be intelligible and trans-
parent — no notice taken of your style, but solely of what
you express by it : this is your clear rule, and if you
have anything which is not quite trivial to express to
your contemporaries, you will find such rule a great
deal more difficult to follow than many people think.'
Excellent precept ; but, alas for performance ! none
ever broke the rule more habitually than Carlyle himself.
The idiom which he ultimately forged for himself was
a new and strange form of English — rugged, disjointed,
often uncouth ; in his own phrase, ' vast, fitful, decidedly
fuliginous,' but yet bringing out with marvellous vivid-
ness the thoughts that possessed him, the few truths
which he saw clearly, and was sure of — while it
suggested not less powerfully the dark background of
ignorance against which those truths shone out. In
all this he was a great and original artist, using words,
his tools, to bring out forcibly the effects most present
to his own mind, and to convey them to the minds of
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