These bare elemental precepts he clothes in a garment of amazing and bizarre richness.  There is nothing else in English faintly resembling the astonishing eccentricity and individuality of his style.  Gifted with an extraordinarily excitable and vivid imagination; seeing things with sudden and tremendous vividness, as in a searchlight or a lightning flash, he contrived to convey to his readers his impressions full charged with the original emotion that produced them, and thus with the highest poetic effect.  There is nothing in all descriptive writing to match the vividness of some of the scenes in the French Revolution or in the narrative part of Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, or more than perhaps in any of his books, because in it he was setting down deep-seated impressions of his boyhood rather than those got from brooding over documents, in Sartor Resartus.  Alongside this unmatched pictorial vividness and a quite amazing richness and rhythm of language, more surprising and original than anything out of Shakespeare, there are of course, striking defects—­a wearisome reiteration of emphasis, a clumsiness of construction, a saddening fondness for solecisms and hybrid inventions of his own.  The reader who is interested in these (and every one who reads him is forced to become so) will find them faithfully dealt with in John Sterling’s remarkable letter (quoted in Carlyle’s Life of Sterling) on Sartor Resartus.  But gross as they are, and frequently as they provide matter for serious offence, these eccentricities of language link themselves up in a strange indissoluble way with Carlyle’s individuality and his power as an artist.  They are not to be imitated, but he would be much less than he is without them, and they act by their very strength and pungency as a preservative of his work.  That of all the political pamphlets which the new era of reform occasioned, his, which were the least in sympathy with it and are the furthest off the main stream of our political thinking now, alone continue to be read, must be laid down not only to the prophetic fervour and fire of their inspiration but to the dark and violent magic of their style.

CHAPTER IX

THE NOVEL

(1)

The faculty for telling stories is the oldest artistic faculty in the world, and the deepest implanted in the heart of man.  Before the rudest cave-pictures were scratched on the stone, the story-teller, it is not unreasonable to suppose, was plying his trade.  All early poetry is simply story-telling in verse.  Stories are the first literary interest of the awakening mind of a child.  As that is so, it is strange that the novel, which of all literary ways of story-telling seems closest to the unstudied tale-spinning of talk, should be the late discovery that it is.  Of all the main forms into which the literary impulse moulds the stuff of imagination, the novel is the last to be devised.  The drama dates from prehistoric times, so does the epic, the ballad and the lyric.  The novel, as we know it, dates practically speaking from 1740.  What is the reason it is so late in appearing?