A Characterisation Of Carlyle By The Tainean Hand

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, History of English Literature (Philadelphia: H. Altemus, 1908), vol. 4, Modern Authors, ch. IV., Philosophy and History: Carlyle, pp. 311-12:

Many will find Carlyle presumptuous, coarse; they will suspect from his theories, and also from his way of speaking, that he looks upon himself as a great man, neglected, of the race of heroes; that, in his opinion, the human race ought to put themselves in his hands, and trust him with their business. Certainly he lectures us, and with contempt. He despises his epoch; he has a sulky, sour tone; he keeps purposely on stilts. He disdains objections. In his eyes, opponents are not up to his form. He abuses his predecessors: when he speaks of Cromwell's biographers, he takes the tone of a man of genius astray amongst pedants. He has the superior smile, the resigned condescension of a hero who feels himself a martyr, and he only quits it, to shout at the top of his voice, like an ill-bred plebeian.

All this is redeemed, and more, by rare merits. He speaks truly: minds like his are the most fertile. They are almost the only ones which make discoveries. Pure classifiers do not invent; they are too dry. «To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathise with it.» «Fantasy is the organ of the Godlike, the understanding is indeed thy window; too clear thou canst not make it; but fantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving retina, healthy or diseased.» In more simple language, this means that every object, animate or inanimate, is gifted with powers which constitute its nature and produce its development; that, in order to know it, we must recreate it in ourselves, with the train of its potentialities, and that we only know it entirely by inwardly perceiving all its tendencies, and inwardly seeing all its effects. And verily this process, which is the imitation of nature, is the only one by which we can penetrate nature; Shakspeare had it as an instinct, and Goethe as a method. There is none so powerful or delicate, so fitted to the complexity of things and to the structure of our mind. There is none more proper to renew our ideas, to withdraw us from formulas, to deliver us from the prejudices, with which education involves us, to overthrow the barriers in which our surroundings enclose us. It is by this that Carlyle escaped from conventional English ideas, penetrated into the philosophy and science of Germany, to think out again in his own manner the Germanic discoveries, and to give an original theory of man and of the universe.

Between Seneca And Plutarch Again, And The Judgment Of Quintilian

Arthur Murphy, The Works of Cornelius Tacitus, vol. VIII. (London, 1805), Notes on the Dialogue Concerning Oratory, pp. 285-288:

Menage says, if all the books in the world were in the fire, there is not one, whom he would so eagerly snatch from the flames as Plutarch. That author never tires him; he reads him often, and always finds new beauties. He cannot say the same of Seneca; not but there are admirable passages in his works, but when brought to the test, they lose their apparent beauty by a close examination. Seneca serves to be quoted in the warmth of conversation, but is not of equal value in the closet. Whatever be the subject, he wishes to shine, and, by consequence, his thoughts are too refined, and often false.

. . . Quintilian was his [Seneca's] contemporary; he saw, and heard the man, and, in less than twenty years after his death, pronounced judgment against him. In the conclusion of the first chapter of his tenth book, after having given an account of the Greek and Roman authors, he says, he reserved Seneca for the last place, because, having always endeavoured to counteract the influence of a bad taste, he was supposed to be influenced by motives of personal enmity. But the case was otherwise. He saw that Seneca was the favourite of the times, and, to check the torrent that threatened the ruin of all true eloquence, he exerted his best efforts to diffuse a sounder judgment. He did not wish that Seneca should be laid aside: but he could not, in silence, see him preferred to the writers of the Augustan age, whom that writer endeavoured to depreciate, conscious, that, having chosen a different style, he could not hope to please the taste of those, who were charmed with the authors of a former day. But Seneca was still in fashion; his partisans continued to admire, though it cannot be said that they imitated him. He fell short of the ancients, and they were still more beneath their model. Since they were content to copy, it were to be wished that they had been able to vie with him. He pleased by his defects, and the herd of imitators chose the worst. They acquired a vicious manner, and flattered themselves that they resembled their master. But the truth is, they disgraced him. Seneca, it must be allowed, had many great and excellent qualities; a lively imagination; vast erudition, and extensive knowledge. He frequently employed others to make researches for him, and was often deceived. He embraced all subjects; in his philosophy, not always profound, but a keen censor of the manners, and on moraa subjects truly admirable. He has brilliant passages, and beautiful sentiments; but the expression is in a false taste, the more dangerous, as he abounds with delightful vices. You would have wished that he had written with his own imagination, and the judgment of others. To sum up his character: had he known how to rate little things; had he been above the petty ambition of always shining; had he not been fond of himself; had he not weakened his force by minute and dazzling sentences; he would have gained, not the admiration of boys, but the suffrage of the judicious. At present he may be read with safety by those, who have made acquaintance with better models. His works afford the fairest opportunity of distinguishing the beauties of fine writing from their opposite vices. He has much to be approved, and even admired: but a just selection is necessary, and it is to be regretted that he did not choose for himself. Such was the judgment of Quintilian . . .

See also: Between Seneca And Plutarch

Between Seneca And Plutarch

William Edward Lecky, History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. I. (New York: 3rd edt., 1897), ch. 2, The Pagan Empire, p. 243-4:

Plutarch, whose fame as a biographer has, I think, unduly eclipsed his reputation as a moralist, may be justly regarded as the leader of this movement, and his moral writings may be profitably compared with those of Seneca, the most ample exponent of the sterner school. Seneca is not unfrequently self-conscious, theatrical, and overstrained. His precepts have something of the affected ring of a popular preacher. The imperfect fusion of his short sentences gives his style a disjointed and, so to speak, granulated character, which the Emperor Caligula happily expressed when he compared it to sand without cement; yet he often rises to a majesty of eloquence, a grandeur both of thought and of expression, that few moralists have ever rivalled. Plutarch, though far less sublime, is more sustained, equable, and uniformly pleasing. The Montaigne of antiquity, his genius coruscates playfully and gracefully around his subject; he delights in illustrations which are often singularly vivid and original, but which, by their excessive multiplication, appear sometimes rather the texture than the ornament of his discourse. A gentle, tender spirit, and a judgment equally free from paradox, exaggeration, and excessive subtilty, are the characteristics of all he wrote. Plutarch excels most in collecting motives of consolation; Seneca in forming characters that need no consolation. There is something of the woman in Plutarch; Seneca is all a man. The writings of the first resemble the strains of the flute, to which the ancients attributed the power of calming the passions and charming away the clouds of sorrow, and drawing men by a gentle suasion into the paths of virtue; the writings of the other are like the trumpet-blast, which kindles the soul with an heroic courage. The first is most fitted to console a mother sorrowing over her dead child, the second to nerve a brave man, without flinching and without illusion, to grapple with an inevitable fate.

Photius On Lucian

La Rue van Hook, The Literary Criticism in the Bibliotheca of Photius, (in: Classical Philology Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Apr., 1909)), II., The Romancers, pp. 184-5:

In nearly all of his works Lucian is writing a comedy on Greek things; on their error in god-making, their ungovernable and intemperate licentiousness, the monstrous beliefs and fictions of even the poets and their consequent mistakes in government, and the irregular course and vicissitudes of their lives throughout, the boastful nature of their very philosophers who have naught save hypocrisy and empty pretense. In a word, as we have said, his aim is to produce a comedy, in prose, of Greek life. He seems to be one of those who worship nothing seriously; he makes fun of and ridicules the creeds of others and does not posit what he himself believes, unless one calls not having a creed, a creed. In style he is of the best (ἄριστος) employing a diction which is clear, current, and very striking (ἐμφατικός). He is a lover, if anyone is, of distinctness (εὐκρίνεια) and purity, with brilliancy and grandeur in due proportion. His composition is so arranged that the reader seems not to be reading prose but it is as if a certain delightful song without definite accompaniment of music were dropping into the ears of the listener. And in a word, as we have said, his style is of the best (ἄριστος) and not in keeping with his subjects under discussion at which he knew how to laugh.