To our minds,
there is a taint of this sort, something which we should call
theatrical, false, affected, in every one of these otherwise so
powerful pieces."
In the same paper, that on Burns, Mr. Carlyle thus opened the ears of
that generation,--partially opened, for the general aesthetic ear is
not fully opened yet,--to a hollowness which was musical to the many:
"Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write almost as if _in vacuo_;
the thing written bears no mark of place; it is not written so much
for Englishmen as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable result
of this, for certain generalizations which philosophy termed men." And
in the paper on Goethe, he calls Gray's poetry, "a laborious mosaic,
through the hard, stiff lineaments of which, little life or true grace
could be expected to look." Thus choicely endowed was Mr. Carlyle to
be, what is the critic's noblest office, an interpreter between new
poets and the public. Such an interpreter England grievously needed,
to help and teach her educated and scholarly classes to prize the
treasures just lavished upon them by Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and
Shelley, and Keats.
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