It was Ruskin who said that he could never fit the two
sides of the puzzle together--on the one side the awful dejection
and despondency which Carlyle always claimed to feel in the
presence of his work, as a dredger in lakes of mud and as a sorter
of mountains of rubbish, and on the other side the endless relish
for salient traits, and the delighted apprehension of quality which
emerges so clearly in all he wrote.
But it is clear that Carlyle suffered ceaselessly, though never
unutterably. He was a matchless artist, with an unequalled gift of
putting into vivid words everything he experienced; but his sadness
was a disease of the imagination, a fear, not of anything definite--
for he never even saw the anxieties that were nearest to him--but
a nightmare dream of chaos and whirling forces all about him, a
dread of slipping off his own very fairly comfortable perch into
oceans of confusion and dismay.
XIII
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
I doubt if the records of intimate biography contain a finer
object-lesson against fear and all its obsessions than the life of
Charlotte Bronte.
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