lenses. Carlyle, if not the greatest prose master of our age, must be
held to be, by virtue of his original genius and mass of stroke, the
literary dictator of Victorian prose. And, though we all know how
wantonly he often misused his mighty gift, though no one now would
venture to imitate him even at a distance, and though Matthew Arnold
was ever taking up his parable--"Flee Carlylese as the very Devil!"--we
are sliding into Carlylese unconsciously from time to time, and even
_Culture_ itself fell into the trap in the very act of warning others.
Side by side with such chastened literary art as that of Thackeray and
George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Morley, Lecky and Froude, Maine
and Symonds, side by side with a Carlylese tendency to extravagance,
slang, and caricature, we find another vein in English prose--the flat,
ungainly, nerveless style of mere scientific research. What lumps of
raw fact are flung at our heads! What interminable gritty collops of
learning have we to munch! Through what tangles of uninteresting
phenomena are we not dragged in the name of Research, Truth, and the
higher Philosophy! Mr. Mill and Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain and Mr.
Sidgwick, have taught our age very much; but no one of them was ever
seen to smile; and it is not easy to recall in their voluminous works a
single irradiating image or one monumental phrase.
There are eminent historians to-day who disdain the luminous style of
Hume and Robertson, and yet deride the colour and fire of Gibbon.
Grote poured forth the precious contents of his portentous notebooks
with as little care for rhythm and as little sense of proportion as a
German professor. Freeman and Gardiner have evidently trained
themselves in the same school of elaborate learning, till they would
appear to count the graceful English of Froude, Lecky, and Green as
hardly becoming the dignity of history. It would seem as if the charge
which some of our historians are most anxious to avoid is the charge of
being "readable," and of keeping to themselves any fact that they know.
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