the man according to God's own heart?" David, the
Hebrew King, had fallen into sins enough--blackest crimes--there was no
want of sins. And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask: Is this your
man according to God's heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a
shallow one. What are faults? What are the outward details of a life, if
the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled,
never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten?... The deadliest sin, I say,
were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin: that is death....
David's life and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I
consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress
and warfare here below.'

This canon faithfully applied enabled Carlyle to invest with a new and
living interest large sections of literary criticism. Burns, Johnson,
Cromwell and others of like calibre, were rescued by Carlyle from the
hands of Pedants and Pharisees. To readers wearied with the facile
criticism of conventional reviewers, it was a revelation to come into
contact with a writer like Carlyle, who not only gave to the mind great
inspirational impetus, but also a larger critical outlook; it was like
stepping out of a museum, or a dissecting-room into the free, fresh,
breezy air of Nature.

Moreover, Carlyle's interest in the soul is not of an antiquarian
nature; he studies his heroes as if they were ancestors of the Carlyle
family. He broods over their letters as if they were the letters of his
own flesh and blood, and his comments resemble the soliloquisings of a
pathos stricken kinsman rather than the conscious reflections of a
literary man. It is noteworthy that Carlyle's critical powers are
limited by his sympathies. His method, though suggestive of scientific
criticism, is largely influenced by the personal equation. Face to face
with writers like Scott and Voltaire, he flounders in helpless
incompetency. He tries Scott, the writer of novels, by purely Puritan
standards. Because there is in Scott no signs of soul-struggles, no
conscious devotion to heroic ends, no introspective torturings, Carlyle
sets himself to a process of belittling. So with Voltaire. Carlyle's
failure in this sphere was due to the fact that he overdid the ethical
side of criticism and became a pulpiteer; he was false to his own
principle of endeavouring to seize the dominant idea. Because Scott and
Voltaire were not dominated by the Covenanting idea, Ca