mining factors are the
inner vitalities, which, however, are susceptible to the environment.
The critic who would realise his ideal does not go about with literary
and ethical tape-lines: he seeks to understand the spirit which animated
the author as shewn in his works and his life, and then studies the
influence of his environment. That this is a correct description of
Carlyle's critical method is evidenced by his own remarks in his essay
on Burns. He says: 'If an individual is really of consequence enough to
have his life and character recorded for public remembrance, we have
always been of opinion that the public ought to be made acquainted with
all the springs and relations of his character. How did the world and
man's life from his particular position represent themselves to his
mind? How did co-existing circumstances modify him from without: how
did he modify these from within?'

This attention to the inner springs of character gives the key to
Carlyle's critical work. How fruitful this was is seen in his essay on
Burns. He steered an even course between the stern moralists, whose
indignation at the sins of Burns the man blinded them to the genius of
Burns the poet, and the flippant Bohemians, who thought that by bidding
defiance to the conventionalities and moralities Burns proved his title
to the name of genius, and whose voices are yet unduly with us in much
spirituous devotion and rhymeless doggerel at the return of each 25th of
January. While laying bare the springs of Burns' genius, Carlyle, with
unerring precision, also puts his finger on the weak point in the poet's
moral nature. So faithfully did Carlyle apply his critical method that
he may be considered to have said the final word about Burns.

When Goethe spoke of Carlyle as a great moral force he must have had in
his mind the ethical tone of Carlyle's critical writing--a tone which
had its roots in the idea that judgment upon a man should be determined,
not by isolated deviations from conventional or even ethical standards,
but by consideration of the deep springs of character from which flow
aspirations and ideals. In his _Heroes and Hero-Worship_ Carlyle
elaborates his critical theory thus: 'On the whole, we make too much of
faults; the details of the business hide the real centre of it. Faults?
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might know better. Who
is called there "