Of this class Jeffrey,
Brougham, Macaulay are conspicuous examples. Theirs are not winged
minds. They keep to the plane of commonplace; they are never rapt into
an upper sphere of thought, where sentences grow transparent,
illuminated by soulful revelations. All three lack subtlety, the finer
insight, a penetrating perception. The style of such men, even when
most vivacious, is never marked by geniality, by newness of turns, by
imaginative combinations, by rhythmical sweeps, and especially not by
freshness, of all which the fountain is originality, genius,
creativeness. It is related that after several of Carlyle's papers had
appeared in the "Edinburgh Review," Brougham, one of its founders and
controllers, protested that if that man were permitted to write any
more he should cease to be a contributor. And so the pages of the
Review were closed against the best writer it ever had. This arbitrary
proceeding of Brougham is to be mainly accounted for as betraying the
instinct of creeping talent in the presence of soaring genius.
Not less than men of talent men of genius need to cultivate style;
nay, from the copiousness and variousness of their material, and from
its very inwardness, the molds into which it is to be thrown need the
finest care.
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