He admitted that
Wordsworth was "a genuine man, but intrinsically and extrinsically
a small one, let them sing or say what they will." In fact, Carlyle
despised his trade: one of the most vivid and voluble of writers,
he derided the desire of self-expression; one of the most
continuous and brilliant of talkers, he praised and upheld the
virtue of silence. He spoke and wrote of himself as a would-be man
of action condemned to twaddle; and Ruskin expressed very
trenchantly what will always be the puzzle of Carlyle's life--that,
as Ruskin said, he groaned and gasped and lamented over the
intolerable burden of his work, and that yet, when you came to read
it, you found it all alive, full of salient and vivid details, not
so much patiently collected, as obviously and patently enjoyed.
Again there is the mystery of his lectures. They seem to have been
fiery, eloquent, impressive harangues; and yet Carlyle describes
himself stumbling to the platform, sleepless, agitated, and
drugged, inclined to say that the best thing his audience could do
for him would be to cover him up with an inverted tub; while as he
left the platform among signs of visible emotion and torrents of
applause, he thought, he said, that the idea of being paid for such
stuff made him feel like a man who had been robbing hen-roosts.
There is an interesting story of how Tennyson once stayed with
Bradley, when Bradley was headmaster of Marlborough, and said
grimly one evening that he envied Bradley, with all his heart, his
life of hard, fruitful, necessary work, and owned that he sometimes
felt about his own poetry, what, after all, did all this elaborate
versifying amount to, and who was in any way the better or happier
for it?
The truth is that the man of letters forgets that this is exactly
the same thought as that which haunts the busy man after, let us
say, a day of looking over examination-papers or attending
committees.
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