We
know the life of Ruskin mainly from his own power of impassioned
autobiography, and because he had the same sort of power of
exhibiting both his charm and his weakness as Boswell had in
dealing with Johnson. But Ruskin was not at all a typical
Englishman; he had a very feminine side to his character, and
though he was saved from sentimentality by his extreme trenchancy,
and by his irritable temper, yet his whole temperament is
beautiful, winning, attractive, rather than salient and
picturesque. He had the qualities of a poet, a quixotic ideal, and
an exuberant fancy; but though his spell over those who understand
him is an almost magical one, his point of view is bound to be
misunderstood by the ordinary man.
Carlyle's case is a different one again. There the evidence is
mainly documentary. We know more about the Carlyle interior than we
know of the history of any married pair since the world began.
There is little doubt that if Carlyle could have had a Boswell, a
biographer who could have rendered the effect of his splendid power
of conversation, we might have had a book which could have been put
on the same level as the life of Johnson, because Carlyle again was
pre-eminently a "figure," a man made by nature to hold the
enraptured attention of a circle.
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