Carlyle has the same eye, but less creative, and tinctured always with the special humors of his temperament; yet the attitude he can hold toward a human personality, the spirit in which he can contemplate it, gives that to his books which will keep them alive, I think, while the world lasts.
Among the recent writers of prose fiction in England, I know of but one who, in a degree worth naming in this connection, has regarded and delineated persons in the large, old, believing way. That one is the author of "Counterparts." In many respects her book seems to me weak; its theories are crude, its tone extravagant. But man and woman are wonderful to her; and when she names them in full voice of admiration, one thinks he has never heard the words before. And this merit is so commanding, that, despite faults and imbecilities, it renders the book almost unique in excellence. Sarona is impossible: thanks for that noble impossibility! Impossible, he yet embodies more reality, more true suggestion of human possibility and resource, than a whole swarming limbo of the ordinary heroes of fiction,—very credible, and the more's the pity! He is finely imagined, and poorly conceived,—true, that is, to the inspiring substance of man, but not true to his limitary form: for imagination gives the revealing form, conception the form which limits and conceals.
In spite, therefore, of marked infirmities and extravagances, the book remains a superior, perhaps a great work. The writer can look at a human existence with childlike, all-believing, Homeric eyes. That creative vision which of old peopled Olympus still peoples the world for her, beholding gods where the skeptic, critical eye sees only a medical doctor and a sick woman. So is she stamped a true child of the Muse, descended on the one side from Memory, or superficial fact, but on the other from Zeus, the soul of fact; and being gifted to discern the divine halo on the brows of humanity, she rightly obtains the laurel upon her own.
Goethe, at least, rivals her in this Olympic intelligence, while he combines it with a practical wisdom far profounder, with a survey and fulness of knowledge incomparably wider and more various, with a tone tempered to the last sobriety, for the whole of actual life, which no man of the world ever surpassed, and no seer ever equalled. And thus I must abide in my opinion, that he has given us the one prose epic of the world, up to this date. In other words, he has best reconciled World with the final vessel of its uses, Man,—and best reconciled actual civilization and the fixed conditions of man with the uses of that in which all the meaning of his existence is summed, his seeing and unseen spirit.
DOCTOR JOHNS.
XXXIV.
Reuben has in many respects vastly improved under his city education. It would be wrong to say that the good Doctor did not take a very human pride in his increased alertness of mind, in his vivacity, in his self-possession,—nay, even in that very air of world-acquaintance which now covered entirely the old homely manner of the country lad. He thought within himself, what a glad smile of triumph would have been kindled upon the face of the lost Rachel, could she but have seen this tall youth with his kindly attentions and his graceful speech. May-be she did see it all,—but with far other eyes, now. Was the child ripening into fellowship with the sainted mother?
The Doctor underneath all his pride carried a great deal of anxious doubt; and as he walked beside his boy upon the thronged street, elated in some strange way by the touch of that strong arm of the youth, whose blood was his own,—so dearly his own,—he pondered gravely with himself, if the mocking delusions of the Evil One were not the occasion of his pride? Was not Satan setting himself artfully to the work of quieting all sense of responsibility in regard to the lad's future, by thus kindling in his old heart anew the vanities of the flesh and the pride of life?
"I say, father, I want to put you through now. It'll do you a great deal of good to see some of our wonders here in the city."