It would be wiser to say that it gains by anything that may
add to its fruitfulness and instructiveness. In any case, and whether
it pleases us or no, this is one of the things that the historical
method has done for literature; and neither Carlyle, nor any other
thinker of the century, would have been minded to disavow it.
This brings us to the second point that calls for remark in the
foregoing quotation from Carlyle. Throughout he assumes that the matter
of the poet is no less important than his manner. And here again he
dwells on an aspect of literature that previous, and later, critics
have tended to throw into the shade. That Carlyle should have been led
to assert, and even at times to exaggerate, the claims of thought in
imaginative work was inevitable; and that, not only from his
temperament, but from those principles of his teaching that we have
already noticed. If the poetry of a nation be indeed the expression
of its spiritual aims, then it is clear that among those aims must be
numbered its craving to make the world intelligible to itself, and to
comprehend the working of God both within man and around him.
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