specified as having influenced him. The French influence on his style has apparently passed unnoticed; but it will probably not be denied by those who will turn over the literature out of which he composed his History of the French Revolution. The essential thing is, however, that he constructed for himself a preciosity of a kind, a preciosity of dramatic manner, of dramatic pitch, of archaic style, of factitious concision, of Puritan colour, of "thees and thous," of prophetic airs and cynic humours. A few serious writers partly caught his manner — Mr. Forster and Mr. Masson, for instance ; and to some extent Kingsley and Dickens — but it says something for the independence of our age that despite the great reputation which Carlyle gradually attained, the manner never became a fashion. Even by those who admired the doctrine, it was generally recognised that such a manner could be sincere only at first hand. As for its indirect effects, we can say to-day, when it is recognisable as a preciosity of a sort, a display of wayward egoism in matters of language, that in its earlier phases it has no little artistic force, and that the sense of this has given later serious writers the courage to be more vari-coloured, more emotional, more individual in their writing than they otherwise would have been. Even such an unCarlylean book as Mill's Liberty probably owes something to Carlyle's example; and perhaps Green's Short History owes no less, though neither exhibits any direct imitation whatever. On the other hand, the growing exaggeration of Carlyle's special preciosity with his years, showing as it did how far mere temperamental self-assertion was its motive, undoubtedly repelled part of the rising generation, and undermined his influence in advance. The "extraordinary arrogance" which Mr. Froude[1] confesses him to have shown in private had thus its Nemesis.
- ↑ Life of Carlyle; First Forty Years, ii. 391.
