THOMAS CARLYLE.

Otago Witness, Issue 1506, 25 September 1880, Page 27

THOMAS CARLYLE.

The conversation of Mr Carlyle, like that of Coleridge, as his visitors have frequently remarked, is principally monologue. This appears to arise not bo much from indifference to his guests as from absorption in his theme. He talks like one of Goethe's demoniac men who is taken possession of by some superior force, and speaks only as the spirit gives him utterance. You listen to him as to a wierd and mighty power of Nature, and would no more think of interrupting him than of staying the course of the whirlwind or of arresting the current of Niagara. He leaps from point to point, as the lightning on the Alps, nob winding at his "own sweet will," but hurled like lava from a volcano. His discourse presents a strange agglomeration of wisdom, humour, prejudice, kindly sentiments, bitter antipathies, pointed sayings, curious fantasies, prophetic announcements, indignant protests, oddly mingled in a many, coloured sparkling torrent of impetuous words. He seems to take a secret delight in bis own thoughts and fancies, as if they had struck him for the first time, and sometimes chuckles over them with a burat of unearthly laughter, as if he had juat heard them from some spirit of the air. His fits of glee are almost infantile in their vehemence, though usually sardonic in their character. The fine vein of irony which pervades his writings gives equal pungency to his conversation. It ia doubtless the natural expression of his intense earnestness of feeling, which can only find sufficient vent in persiflage and extravagance. Oa this account, Mr Carlyle is often misunderstood. In listening to his talk you must constantly keep in mind the intention of the speaker, without putting a too literal construction on his word?. Nor can you hold him to a rigid account, as you would a man who expresses himself with more deliberate purpose, and whose words are the symbols of his will. Mr Carlyle gives you little idea of a conscious personality, subject to the control of reason, and acting from choice and volition ; he seems rather some grand pantheistic force urged onward by its own laws, with which expression is identical with existence,